The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

it been, by some bizarre set of circumstances, the American and not the German army that invaded the Soviet Union back then, these men would’ve gone to serve the American democracy—and the American democracy would’ve been just as happy to have them. Because there are things that do not change.
    Alright, now I can finally have a smoke myself. Draw in, as they say, life deeply. Catch my breath.
    No dictaphone, Pavlo Ivanovych told me, no records. And never a mention of him as a source, under any circumstances. That’s what he was taught, back in KGB school, and secret services do not change. It doesn’t matter that this ban makes not a grain of sense—except that it creates extra obstacles for me. I have to find a place to sit—around this corner on Reitarska there’s a cozy little café—and write down, before I forget, the most important parts of what he was so kind as to tell me. Although, the thing of it is, Pavlo Ivanovych cannot tell me what is most important, the thing that’s burning me the most, and where I had most hoped for hishelp, because he does not know what he is guarding. And none of them who work in that building know—and it doesn’t look like they ever will. No one will ever learn exactly which portions of the Ukrainian archives were taken to Moscow in 1990, and which were burned later, after the declaration of independence—in those fall days of 1991 when we, young and stupid, marched happily along Volodymyrska in front of the no-longer-scary, dark-gray ziggurat and chanted “Shame!” And inside, in the courtyard, people were hard at work—they were burning “material evidence,” covering up their tracks. During the months of September and October, Pavlo Ivanovych said. My dear Pavlo Ivanovych. An old friend of the family. He, dear soul, was one of those who did the burning.
    Who was that clown who once quipped “manuscripts don’t burn”? And somebody else picked it up and now people keep repeating it like they’ve all drunk the purple Kool-Aid—as if precisely to cover up for the burning brigades.
    My legs, of their own volition, carry me toward St. Sophia. Alright, I’ll take a walk; I’ll take a detour—exactly a cigarette’s worth, and then I’ll take Striletska back to Reitarska and come back from the other side. And while I’m at it, I’ll see if the lilacs next to Metropolitan’s Palace have opened already.
    It’s not like I didn’t know that archives were destroyed—no, I’ve known that for a long time, since back when Artem told me. But I had no concept of the scale of this destruction. And all these years, until today, somewhere inside me there lived—of course it lived, how could it not?—a comforting certainty that one of the iron-coated safes on Volodymyrska held
the source
of those four fat folders knotted with strings that sit in Mom’s attic, like secret minutes from the Molotov-Ribbentrop meetings. And that someday it would all “surface,” as my Pavlo Ivanovych puts it, it would all come to light—the storm in government offices, the criminal renovation of the just-opened Palace Ukraina, the head architect’s suicide, and among all that—the fate of one common fighter for the slaughtered project: engineer Goshchynsky.
    I did really believe this—that it was all out there somewhere, kept safe, sealed, waiting for a volunteer to come one day and dig it up. Doesn’t matter when, even twenty years later. Or thirty, or fifty. I knew I could not become that volunteer—it would hurt too much to read all that. It would be too hard to turn the origins of my life over again—like working wet clay with a shovel...I don’t want to, I do not. Seems like digs like that do require a kind of historical smoke break—to catch one’s breath, to take a one-generation-long detour. Children aren’t much use for this, but grandkids are perfect: Two generations is exactly the right distance, a systole-diastole, a rhythmic breathing, the pulse of progress. It’s enough to know that it’s all basically out there somewhere, waiting for its time. That’s what we’ve been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture—this firm belief that there are no secrets that won’t sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was...so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don’t burn. An ontological faith in the