The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

heard all this before—and more than once. About the Carpathian forests, cut down by “those goons,” and that the catastrophic floods that wreak havoc on Transcarpathia every year are nothing but a natural consequence of their criminal lumbering, and how the current mayor, who was determined to reel “those goons” in a bit, was prevented from even running in these elections by having hispaperwork stolen, and now the quiet resort town of Mukachevo is suddenly swarming with packs of homicidal-looking men in leather jackets—they’re being brought in by busloads, from who knows where, they stroll around the town like they own it, make trouble in its bars and restaurants, and intimidate the locals, so that folks are too scared to go out after dark anymore; it’s terrorism, pure terrorism, and the indignity makes my dad younger, as if in the course of speaking to me he’s lost about thirty years.
    “What do they think they’re doing, bringing back the Stalin days? That’s plain the way the Soviets used to run their elections in ’48! Bring a garrison to every village, herd folks to the ballot box with Kalashnikovs. Some folks still thought it’d work the way it did with the Poles: if we boycott the elections, they won’t be legitimate. That was before they figured how this new power does business.”
    The kettle, as if heated with the fire of Dad’s speech, bubbles up indignantly. I can’t help smiling. He doesn’t know this, of course, but Dad is mimicking me—an hour ago I was raising hell just like that in front of Lolly. She’s right when she says that when I grow old I’ll be “a carbon copy of Ambroziy Ivanovych.” Been a while since I last called. I’ve been busy. Been even longer since I last went to Lviv...
    “This, Dad, is what they now call electoral technologies.”
    I pour boiling water into my mug.
    There will come a day when I can no longer just dial a number like this, day or night, and hear my father’s voice. For a moment, this future void gapes before me, as if someone snatched away my blanket while I was sleeping, and left me exposed to the cold. I get up to shut the window, while Dad—alive and well for now, thank God—continues to expose the 1948 vintage of Russian electoral technologies.
    “You know what else they did? As your gramps used to tell it, they’d bore a little hole in the booth’s ceiling right above the spot where the chemical pencil lay tied, and let a stream of chalk dust pour from that hole the entire time. When a man came into a booth and bent to lick the pencil to put whatever in the ballot,that little stream of white dust would land right atop his head. And it’s winter, February, everyone’s wearing hats...stepped into the booths with their hats on, too. The booths are private, as they’re supposed to be—no one can see anything, vote however you please! Cross that one candidate out if you please, or put a clean ballot into the box: It’s a free country! Guaranteed by Comrade Stalin’s constitution. And on the way out, everyone who had white on their hats—the ones who put the pencils to use—got snatched onto a truck that stood ready in the backyard, and went to build Communism in the tundra. That’s the kind of elections we used to have, kid.”
    “Cool,” I admit.
    Really, that’s quite a technological trick. I think Conan Doyle has a story kind of like that: a locked room, a fixed spot for the victim, and a hole above it where a poisonous snake comes out. Dad doesn’t remember it, but offers to look it up: he’s got Conan Doyle on those shelves, an old Soviet edition.
    “Do look it up,” I agree, because now I’m curious, too. I’ll have to tell Lolly tomorrow where these political technologies of the information age take their root. He didn’t have anything to boast about, that Vadym of hers, it’s not like his boys have come up with anything new. Maybe they just can’t come up with anything new period—and that’s why they’re hunting for people like her? Then the Church is right: evil by itself is impotent; its power comes when it co-opts the weak into its service....
    Not a groundbreaking insight by any stretch, and, correspondingly, it’s not especially valuable, but for some reason it gives me the same boost of consolation as the smell of the awakened earth from the window a minute ago: I
can think
again! Can think—and not just shuffle endlessly, like a bug in a trash heap, through the causes and consequences