The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

of Yulichka’s scheme, with my mind trapped under the pile of lost dollars—an intellectual activity that neither adds to one’s common sense nor makes the world more comprehensible. It’s like my system’s been reloaded: I feel like myself again. Meaning, I feel like the same moron I was before.
    And on this wave, as though slightly dumbstruck by relief, I blurt it out in one breath—everything I had no intention of telling him whatsoever, and probably would not have told him in daylight, when things change their proportions—how they tried to recruit my girl today. Without naming names, of course—I’m not that stupid—but most certainly with numbers: twenty-five grand a month; that’s the kind of rates they run these days, Dad.
    The TV set in the living room grows quiet, and I can hear in the receiver my father’s heavy breath. Very close, with a slight wheeze: he, too, must be smoking too much.
    I don’t often share things like this with him. Back in the day, he was so proud of my accomplishments in physics, so openly glowed with joy when I came home during breaks and sat down in the kitchen to draw for him the scheme of a thermionic generator. And now there’s nothing I could ever do to give him back that fatherly pride. We have both been long and reciprocally silent on the topic of my research career: he no longer asks about the progress of my dissertation—he stopped after the one time I lost it (because his questioning was beginning to sting) and snapped at him in that same kitchen, that I don’t live
my
life to pay him back for what was taken from
his
. He did not say anything to that then, shuffled away to smoke, and I noticed, for the first time, how he shuffled when he walked—like an old man. There are, indeed, things that are better left unsaid. Because Dad would have probably made a good scientist—had he gotten the proper education in his day.
    His cognitive apparatus was very much in order—enough for me to get some of it, too. It’s not his fault that when he graduated from high school, he fell into the just-instituted quota for admission of the locals to Lviv’s universities—the notorious “twenty-five percent.” It was the sixties; Khrushchev liberalism was over, and admission committees, especially those at universities “with clearance,” were beginning to take a closer look at the applicants’ bios. No one would open a door into fundamental physics—military research, basically—for a “Bandera spawn.” Dad’s single chance was to go to study in Russia—many did exactly that, and that waspart of the authorities’ plan: that “the Westerners” not admitted at home would leave, dissolve into the mass of the Soviet people, somewhere out there on that sixth of the world’s landmass that made up the geographical Soviet Union. And that was how, little by little, “the fire of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” would be dispersed.
    But Dad did not leave. I think Grandma must have exercised her influence. For her, Russia was exile, the waterless echelon, the drunken guards, the rail line you rode for three days without seeing a single village—she and Gramps learned firsthand how such lines were laid: a dead man for every tie. She left her own unborn son somewhere among those dead, and she would not, having come back from there alive herself, hear of sending her oldest child back voluntarily—her son who lived. That’s the way it must have been, I believe, and I never asked about the details.
    When it was my turn to take the entrance exams for physics, it was somehow understood that I had to go to Kyiv—as long as it wasn’t Moscow. Only recently, at Lolly’s prompting, have I begun to see our family—first the Dovgans, and then the Vatamanyuks—not as discrete portraits in a family album, as I did before, but as a connected network of links, like the Internet; only recently has it occurred to me that it was actually Dad who drew the lot of paying with his life for the life his parents had had stolen from them. Except that Dad never spoke of it like that, and may never even have thought of it like that—until I ripped into him that time (and I could’ve kept my mouth shut. I’m such a moron; I knew better already!)—and certainly would never stick me with the bill for all of it.
    He eventually graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic, where Gramps had also gone—as a distance student, when he was already working at the factory—but a research career was