The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

whistles—to house the archives that, basically, do not exist. A new facility to store the black box with who knows what left in it. Unswept scraps, sacks from the 1930s arrests that never once got opened in the last seventy years. They sat on these sacks of stolen loot for seventy years—well done. Now that there are no living witnesses left, they can start opening them—slowly, one by one, without any rush. There is enough to keep all of them, those who work in this building, busy until they retire, and their successors too. Just imagine how the poor things had to hustle back then, in the fall of 1991, to pull out from this mess whatever had to be burned posthaste!
    “They are the Tenth Bureau,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “The archive service: select, proven cadres.”
    So, does this mean he was also once a select, proven cadre? And is still proud of that? And Aidy and I thought an archive appointment for a KGB officer was like a mission to Mongolia for a diplomat....
    I was all sincerity and openness. I nodded like a wound-up bunny; I chuckled like an extra at a Comedy Club broadcast. And all for naught: There wasn’t a case with that name, Pavlo Ivanovych asserted, they didn’t find any. They did look, he gave me his officer’s word (apparently, the word of a secret services officer, in his mind, is still worth more than a journalist’s or a businessman’s!)—they looked, but they did not find anything. Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, born in 1920, was not found among the operational-search case, or among the agents’ files. He is very sorry. He may well be genuinely sorry, and not simply because he’s just lost his chance to appear as a film consultant and to make a buck along the way. He did genuinely want to do something nice for me: I must be one of the very few good deeds in his life, in his entire select and proven service career. His one “onion,” like in Dostoyevsky. Although it’s not like that’s exactly what he was thinking; it must’ve just felt nice, as he looked at me, so pretty, lifted straight from the TV screen and placed into his office, to remember the young, and also so pretty, Olya Goshchynska, whom he had once saved from being blacklisted when it did not cost him anything. It’s nice to feel like a decent man—meaning, translated into the language of Soviet realities, one who, when required to do a despicable thing, did not take initiative.
    So I believe him, my Pavlo Ivanovych. I believe his officer’s word. They did really look and they did not, really, find anything. “But one should not lose hope,” Pavlo Ivanovych said. “It is still possible that the case will one day turn up somewhere.” I didn’t really understand what he meant by that—another perestroika in Russia, perhaps, after which the re-reformed FSB would again open its archives for a short time, or the possibility that the casemight be lying in a drawer in one of their senile veterans’ apartments, and would turn up on the black market after said veteran dies? Or on the antique market, why not—didn’t Aidy find Polish love letters from before WWI in a secretary desk once? Manuscripts don’t burn, as everyone knows. A wonderful slogan for the burners’ union.
    “And what does this mean?” I asked.
    “Agent cases were the ones opened for people who were arrested,” Pavlo Ivanovych explained. “Was your, e-er, relative arrested?”
    “No, she died in the resistance. In a battle with a team of”—I almost blurted out “your guys”—“MGB forces.”
    “Well, there you have it,” Pavlo Ivanovych said with satisfaction. “What do you expect?” Stunned by his logic (there’s formal logic, there is female logic, and then there’s the secret services logic—to confuse and befuddle until the opponent loses his or her mind), I couldn’t even react right away.
    “And that other thing, the one you mentioned before, the operational-and-something else, what is that?”
    An operational-search case, Pavlo Ivanovych explained to me as if to a proverbial blonde, is initiated for an object of an operational search.
    “So, there isn’t one of those, either?” I asked, now totally having a blonde moment.
    “No,” Pavlo Ivanovych shrugged. The aging, heart-sore Pavlo Ivanovych with the eyes of an Arab stallion. Or an Arab terrorist.
    You see, I kept at him, worrying him like a limp dick. I just can’t wrap my mind around this—how could a person, because of whom an entire family had been