The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet.
    As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences’ Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section—our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, andthen was sent to work in Moldova’s State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with “manuscripts don’t burn.”
    Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.
    Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taught is nothing but the clamor—increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle—of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that—and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids—over the silence of those who’ve been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don’t know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.
    Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.
    A clump of winos with beer at a kiosk, foreign cars parked right on the sidewalk...I turn off onto Georgiiv Lane, which will take me past the baroque Zaborovsky Gate—there’s never anyone going this way.
    In the fall of 1991, they burned “fresh kill”—that is, recent cases, Pavlo Ivanovych said, from the 1970s and ’80s. So there isn’t much left from that period. He told me this as if in anticipation of my unspoken question—even though I came for something completely different and wouldn’t have had the guts to raise this topic anyway: after all, it was Aidy’s, not my, family, that had brought me to Pavlo Ivanovych. I talked about the film, and asked Pavlo Ivanovych to be my expert consultant. With an acknowledgement in the credits and everything. The compensation is modest, but I pay by the hour—just like in Hollywood, yes, sir. I already filed for incorporation—VMOD-Film (VMOD is Vlada-Matusevych-Olena-Dovgan, but no one needs to know that) and sent grant applications to a dozen foundations; I brought the paperwork with me, and was ready to show it to him. I am assembling my team, yes, sir. Starting with him (but he doesn’t need to know this, either). And all for nothing: Aidy’s query went nowhere, Pavlo Ivanovych said.Nothing, they have nothing in their archives. Nothing but their clean hands. And, of course, flaming hearts, as their founder Comrade Dzerzhinsky bequeathed them.
    They don’t even have a complete catalog of their holdings. And how could it be created now, after the black-market trade in archive materials became, in the 1990s, SB employees’ all but main business?
    “One could take practically anything. It’s still not especially hard,” Pavlo Ivanovych added modestly.
    “Yes, I know.” (I’ve taken my share out of certain archives, why should the SBU one be any different?) And, naturally, there were individuals interested in acquiring certain documents. Oh yes, of course. And they were prepared to pay. Yes, of course, I understand. I just kept nodding with an intelligent expression on my face. My long-standing conviction that one day everything would come to light and Tolya Goshchynsky’s truth would not disappear from human memory when I am gone was collapsing noiselessly under the attack of his words, like the Twin Towers on a TV with the sound turned off.
    Nothing, there is nothing. I can go ahead and reassure Aidy: there will never be lustration in this country—there’s nothing left to lustrate. But they built a new facility, well done. A wonderful facility, with high-tech storage areas—climate- and humidity-controlled and full of all kinds of other bells and