The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

bursting with all the way over there—could talk about
his
mother until broad daylight: even now, thirteen years after her death, Granny Lina remains inexhaustible. She is the ever-present fourth member of our family circle in the middle of the night—here, where the emptied tea mug glows white in the lamp’s circle of light and the woman I love sleeps behind this wall: she, too, was brought to me by Granny Lina. Reached over from the other side and got her. Reeled her in with the same bait, Great-Aunt Gela...
    And that, by the way, is exactly how things worked.
    She is in charge here. She made it all happen. Made all of us happen. She, Granny Lina. Ms. Lina, as the neighbors used to call her. Polina, Polyenka—as the Moscow women she met in exile called her. My own grandmother, Apollinaria Ambroziivna Dovgan, may the good Lord rest her soul. Put everyone where they belong. What a woman.
    I have reached that stage when you don’t feel tired because you’ve lost the sense of your own body altogether (except that raising it off the chair requires an effort beyond anything imaginable—you’d sooner just fall asleep right on the spot!) and your mind is operating on an oscillating, revved-up frequency, andthoughts and impressions, mixed together, rush through it in a single fiery current you have no hope of quantizing. But this incredible sensation, intoxicating and effervescent—like what a marathon runner feels at the eighteenth mile, when you get a second wind and endorphins come gushing from who-knows-what secret reservoirs in your brain; when everything that had been so obvious that it blended right into the wallpaper—suddenly flares up, all at once, as if at sunrise, and all you can do is wonder: how did I not see this before, how all of us, our entire family, the way we are, have been shaped by Granny Lina—and her alone? Like the Easter paska breads, big and small, that she didn’t allow anyone to touch—always kneading the dough by herself in the kitchen, shaping them and settling them into the oven herself, and all we were required to do was step around the apartment lightly and refrain from jumping or stomping, lest the paskas cave.
    From somewhere else, somehow I remember this sense of awe (pride, admiration) upon seeing a person so close to you (a woman! a weak creature, as you’d gotten used to believing...) suddenly rise before you into a magnificent, grand figure, while you just stand there like a tree stump (woods, snow, fir branches...) and reel with wonder: How did she manage that? She is so small. (Grandma’s head barely reached my chest.)
    “That brown notebook,” Dad’s voice scrapes its way into my awareness, “in which she made notes for her memoirs...”
    The slight cognitive dissonance finally shakes me awake.
    “The brown notebook?” I ask, surprised and almost conscious. “Granny’s? The one with the cryptograms? I thought it was dark green, wasn’t it?”
    I would have sworn it was green. I can see it as if it were in front of me: the dark-green cover and a couple dozen pages inside, laced with mysterious acronyms—like the code of a compromised intelligence service.
    “You clear forgot!” Dad bristles. “I showed it to you the time you came filming—a brown notebook, a thick one, with a calico cover. I’ve got it right here on my desk!”
    Maybe when moving from one time to another there’s something like the refraction of light when it enters a different medium—and that’s why old objects change their shape and color in our memories. (Then what about sound? What would happen to sound, to voices sounded long ago?)
    “Speaking of which,” Dad says into the receiver from his small corner of the world, still illuminated by Granny Lina like the light of a dead star, “would you happen to recall a comrade of hers who had the initials A.O.?”
    “You’re asking me?”
    Jeez, how does he think this works—that we’re the same age? I couldn’t remember a single of those old guys’ first names, forget the initials. Although, wait, maybe if I think really hard...
    “A-O,” Dad spells out clearly as if to someone deaf. “Or also, Ad. Or.”
    “Ad. Or.?” I echo stupidly.
    “I’m certain it’s a name,” Dad says proudly. “I’ve already deciphered two names from her notebook: Krychevsky—he is that friend of Grandpa’s that died in Norilsk, during the uprising—and old Banakh, the doctor, do you remember him? He visited when you were little, came