The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

climbing groups to the mountains for sport. She used to say to Granny Lina that in the mountains one is closer to God, and that before every expedition she’d dream the exact position of stars above her future campsite. She also sang in a choir that eventually got disbanded for “religious propaganda”—they sang carols—and knew by heart what seemed like everything Lesya Ukrainka ever wrote, “Oh, for that body do not sigh.” How was she supposed to live with all that in the hopelessness of the Soviet seventies? A heartrending, incomprehensible life dropped, as if from a cliff into an abyss, into an utterly inanimate time—like a bird that’d flown in through the wrong window.
    I am sorry for the
incompleteness
of Mom’s life, and in comparison, seen from afar, our lives—my own and my dad’s—appear regular, like everyone else’s. And they
are
like everyone else’s, that’s the thing: it’s the same—for everyone. I don’t see a single complete life around me: they’re all somehow off, crooked, whenever you take a closer look. The only difference is that on this incompletion scale Dad and I are somewhere in the middle, and Mom is closer to the starting point. Much, much closer.
    And someone has to pay for everyone’s incompletion. The law of equilibrium, no?
    I always knew I could never hurt a woman. Never, in no way, not one. I always felt sorry for them: I saw all girls as ethereal, ever-vanishing creatures marked on their foreheads with a secret touch of death. The fact that boys are also mortal, and with, actually, a much greater statistical probability of mortality, I only came to appreciate later, in adulthood, empirically—yet it did not affect the way I perceived the world. I was so sorry for Yulichka, too, thepoor little slut. And—I can’t help it—in my heart of hearts, albeit infinitesimally—I still feel sorry for her.
    And that, Dad, is the rub.
    Except that I don’t tell him this, of course.
    “Consider it done, Dad,” is all I say, like that mafioso in Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
. I could’ve added, as the security guard at my building puts it, “I’ll shoot if they come”—and I wouldn’t have been lying, but it would’ve been too much, a whiff of that teenage boasting that, as he had once warned me, was the last resort of losers.
    “You’ve changed, you know,” Dad says unexpectedly, startling me.
    “Me? Meaning what?”
    “You’ve matured...gotten more serious, like. And thank God because I was afraid you’d turn out a flake. You were a bit spacey, you know. Grandma, God rest her soul, kept worrying you took after Stefania—she kept thinking you were too delicate for a boy.”
    “But I thought Grandma loved Mom...”
    “Of course she did, how couldn’t she?” he replies, taking offense at my obtuseness. “But one has nothing to do with the other. Boys are one thing, girls another...Grandma did not have a daughter, so she delighted in Stefania as if she were her own. But a boy is a different matter entirely.”
    “Oh, I see what you mean.”
    Things are getting a bit foggy in my head (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and I don’t grasp right away that Dad is talking about me from the perspective of
his own time
, speaking from the apartment where virtually nothing has changed since I was little—except maybe there’s more dust and the upholstery is more worn. And that reality of his is also a part of me—and likely not the worst, and to keep it safely attached to my mental file, all I have to do is let Dad set the course for our conversation and just go with the flow, picking up the cutoff ends of his thoughts: he chops them short because they are obvious to him, and he thinks they’re obvious to me as well. As he sees it, I still inhabit the samereality he does, one which contains a set of quite specific, commonly known requirements for a boy. And the most amazing thing is—I do understand what he has in mind.
    “Well, we all know Granny had her own standards.”
    “Our lads”—that was her standard. Whenever Granny Lina said that, it was clear she did not mean my dad and me but totally different lads who were light-years ahead of me, and possibly even of him. The same impression was left on me by the silver-toothed old men, all with identically unbending, stiff military bearing, who used to gather occasionally at our apartment while Gramps was alive—to argue about Kim Philby, the Cambridge Four, and other things I did not