The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

out of his reach at that point. In my own career’s rocket-propelled launch, amidst the ruins of the Soviet system, he must have seen a triumph of historical justice—our family’s conclusive victory over the powerwhose mission, for all these years, had been to reduce us to dust, of the gulag or any other variety. He was reborn then, for the first time since Mom died—he was full of plans, even became more tolerant politically, justifying the economic chaos of the early post-independence years, first by the Soviet legacy and then by the lack of any national experience, in the business of self-governance. And even though he found many things about which to boil and rage then also, he generally believed that the country was headed in the right direction. The main thing was—we were free!
    My exit into business must’ve come as a serious reality check for him. I don’t know how he learned to live with that, and do not intend to ask him. Ultimately, one learns to live with anything. And if I happen to be bent right now, at three o’clock in the morning, on giving him a synopsis of the lecture on current politics delivered to a famous journalist in a restaurant by an elected member of parliament, it’s not in order to make my old man see the shit around us more clearly or to have him console himself with the fact that his son is not the worst of it. That’s not the thing.
    I just like telling him this. I like saying out loud “Daryna says,” like a secret we now share, a family secret: as if with those words, I was drawing a circle of light around all of us together, the three of us (and a golden rectangle falls from our window onto the darkness outside). As if by doing so, I was entrusting Lolly to him—for him to love. For him to be proud of. To be proud, not of the fact that his son in Kyiv lives with a famous journalist but of her, in her own right.
    “And that, Dad, is how things are.”
    He does have a wheeze in his chest...
    “You’ve got to make this public somehow,” he finally responds. “So people will know...”
    “How could I make it public? Who’d publish it?” I’m a bit upset to see his thoughts turn elsewhere. “Somewhere on the Internet is all I can think of. But even there, there are already ways to have information buried, with that same money, and you don’t evenneed to deal with censorship—just hire a spam brigade and in an hour they’ll pile so much junk over what you posted that it’ll just disappear like a needle in a haystack!”
    “If you don’t want anyone to find a letter, put it with all the other letters?” Dad replies. “Wait, that’s from Conan Doyle too! Or Poe?”
    “There you go. They haven’t come up with anything new.”
    “Then you have to print leaflets!” he determines, as businesslike as if he’d spent his entire life doing just that. “And give them out where there are people—in squares, at stations...”
    Actually that’s a thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Of all things, leaflets I can still do. And if I got my boys involved...I could talk to Igor, to Modzalevsky, and Friedman...call Vasylenko, for old times’ sake. They’ve all had it with tax inspection, everyone’s had it with all this shit; the elections were our one hope that things would change, and if they’re wanting to cut off our oxygen on that front too and roll the whole country into concrete...
    “We’ll be doing something, Dad.”
    For a moment, I feel uplifted. As if the clock were turned back to the days of the Student Brotherhood, the fall of 1990—the university deserted, a note on a classroom door—“Everyone’s gone to the revolution!” our tents on Independence Square—hard to believe, but back then it was still called The October Revolution Square, the self-published leaflets I used to give out at the metro entrance, the run-ins with the cops—the whole of that scorchingly magnificent autumn, like a blast of hot air into my face. Why do we so rarely remember it? For the single reason that our then ringleaders wasted no time selling out to the then Communists and now sit together in the Supreme
Con
-sel?
    But we did rouse Kyiv then—we did
put fear into them
, at least enough to make our Communists sign the declaration of secession from the Soviet Union in August of 1991—like hell the Union would’ve fallen apart anyway, even if Ukraine hadn’t split off! We rocked the boat. And in ten months, the sum of the forces we applied worked, broke the