The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

course ofhistory—remember how Kravchuk screamed at us back then, spit flew from his mouth, the day factories went on strike and hundreds of thousands of workers took to the street under our banners: “I’m not afraid of God or the Devil, and I won’t be scared of you!” Never mind that scaring him could not be further from our minds back then; we were just thrilled to see our little pebble start an avalanche—and now some fat-ass will tell me that it was all his oil that did it?
    I don’t know how Lolly managed to hold her tongue; she was there, too, in October of 1990. We were probably standing just feet apart from each other in the same crowd.
    “Darynka asleep already?” Dad asks, as if hearing my thoughts.
    “She is.”
    He’s never called her Darynka before.
    “Burning the midnight oil, are you?”
    “Yeah, a little bit. Had a lot of work today.”
    “That’s good,” he concludes, not paying attention. And adds, with a belated explosion of surprise, “But gosh darn it, how could people turn rotten so easily?”
    “Easier than you think,” I say, with great conviction thinking of Yulichka again (damn her!). “If it were only the politicians! Daryna says there’s no one left from their echelon—every colleague she could vouch for is no longer in business.”
    “Keep her safe,” Dad suddenly says. “You keep Daryna safe.”
    Whoa.
    I am mute as an ox suddenly. And completely lost; I don’t imagine he means that Lolly is in any kind of danger: Dad’s not one to panic and not an alarmist. He was the one who taught me, when I reached the age of street fights, never to threaten anyone, that only the losers threaten, but you must be ready to strike if someone messes with you, and if you can learn to keep this readiness turned on inside you at all times, no one will mess with you—lessons he carried with him out of his street-gang Karaganda childhood and for which I will be grateful as long as I live. And only after a moment or two, does it come to me, so simple it sends a chilldown my spine: it was Mom he was thinking about! The one he loved—and whom he, as he sees it, failed to keep safe.
    What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? The one who survived somehow didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip.
    You don’t understand squat about your own father until you meet the woman with whom you want to have children. It has never occurred to me before that he might feel guilty for Mom’s death. But right then, he said it as if he were asking forgiveness: keep her safe. Keep her, once you’ve found her, don’t let her slip away, because there’s nothing worse if you do...
    To hell with how late it is, this is a solemn moment—there aren’t many like this between us, and perhaps you don’t need many in your entire life—better to appreciate
the gold they bear
. And only now that Dad and I have become equals, now that he has finally put
my love
next to his own in a private hierarchy, do I feel a terrible sadness for Mom. Not that I miss her, but that I feel a sadness
for her
—for the mysterious girl who remained in the photographs and whom my memory, shredded into fragments, can no longer assemble into a whole: a funny biscuit-shaped chignon on her head, as was the fashion at the time, a headscarf tied coquettishly over it, in track pants, carrying a humongous—how did she ever manage it?—backpack (and she carried me, too, just like that, an extra twenty pounds attached to her only in the front like a backpack she couldn’t take off—we do put women through all kinds of hell). And everywhere, in every pose she had the same poignant gracefulness of
an accelerating
motion interrupted, the ominously unfinished elegance of a sharpened pencil or a flying arrow: when the precision of the lines determines the vanishing point without deviation, and if the vanishing point cannot be seen, the impression left is unsettling, anxious. Where was this girl always running, aimed so intently? (What did she come for, why did she leave so quickly—never having lived to her intended vanishing point?)
    And she was always running—she chased after something all her life, didn’t settle down even after she became a mother, as happens to most romantic girls. Well, at least it taught me at an early age that I’d never replace the entire world for any woman.... The Plast scouts were banned back then; Mom, being an alpinist, went hiking and took