The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

course, like I don’t know how it is,” he mutters on. “Sure, it’s a chore. Nothing to be done, though.” And, as if plucking up his courage, he exhales from somewhere very deep, all the way in his gut, “You’ve got to make your own buck, since your father left you no means!”
    And this bursts with such fierce, ancient bitterness—like the pain of defeat, for years unmentioned—that it cuts me to the quick, makes me draw in air sharply, through my teeth.
    “Dad, why would you say that? Did I ever ask you for any?”
    And how exactly did you pull off the trick, I want to ask him, of keeping that unwavering old Galician mandate buried inside you well into your old age: a man must provide for his family! Some people these are? You’d think they didn’t spend their best years in slavery to the “Union unbreakable,” but lived somewhere in Switzerland or at least in their old prewar Poland, where there was no shame in owning a townhouse one paid for, because one could, still, honestly earn enough to
pay
for a townhouse instead of stealing it. How could they keep the two together—spend fifty years waiting for the Union to fall apart, and yet somehow believe the entire time that a man could live in it according to Grandfather Ambroziy’s standards—a man must provide for his family!—and not go rotten?
    I could have also added that I know only too well who did manage (and how) to accumulate certain means for their children. I have to deal with these children of Soviet apparatchiks—the current politicians, government officials, and—less often—bank directors (few of them are smart enough to be in finance) much more often than he can imagine, because they are the ones whoconstitute the lion’s share of my clientele: they were the ones who, armed with their stolen capital, were the first to begin collecting what used to be my ancestors’ property. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve tried to remind myself that a collection, no matter who owns it, is always a collection—a way of preserving things that otherwise would have been destroyed, or the more valuable of them smuggled out of the country. And until the country, from which for centuries people have pilfered anything that wasn’t nailed down, learns to value its own inheritance, I can help to keep what has survived—twig by twig, crumb by crumb, like an ant—safe and at home. Despite all such self-comforting, this kind of clientele remains the most distasteful part of my job, and I try to separate, in my mind, the collections from their owners, and add to the collections for the collection’s sake, just so it’ll be there.
    Or does Dad think that I somehow begrudge him not crossing the line to cooperate with the KGB, not growing fat and stealing his own share, with which he could have secured for me the opportunity to be doing physics now instead of making my own buck? Well, I don’t recall many offspring of the Soviet elites among our physicists; the few that dabbled in science have long split to rake it in at gazproms and naftogazes.
    And God knows there is much else I could have said to him to make him stop feeling
guilty
for having honestly worked like a dog his whole life and not being able to provide for his son, because there is no fault of his in this—this is...it’s really beyond the pale. But a wall of my father’s deaf and stubborn silence rises in the receiver like a concrete dam—the kind of silence that deflects every possible argument well before it can be leveled; no words of mine can reach him. Any words I might say would be too small. It doesn’t matter that I never asked him for anything—he failed, in his own eyes, to fulfill the obligations he had taken upon himself. And I have no weapon or tool that could crack this petrified pain in him.
    So I retreat.
    “You ever think of cutting back on smoking, Dad?” is all I say.
    “No worries!” he responds, unexpectedly chipper, apparently happy to hear the topic change. “You can’t fell me with an ax!”
    “Yeah, that’s what you think...I can hear it all the way over here—‘the box of whistles playing,’ as Grandpa used to say.”
    We exchange a few more routine lines—fading fluctuations, an exponential process.... He’s right, it’s time to sleep. Now—I can feel it—I’ll go out cold as soon as I put my head on the pillow, just like Lolly did earlier. And will sleep like a log, without dreams.
    “Tell Daryna,” Dad reminds me before he