The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

arrested and deported, just disappear from the National Security Bureau’s archives? Her family, after the deportation, was even issued by the MGB a certificate of her death, with the date—November 6, 1947—on it.
    “This means that when she died, the MGB must have at least identified the body and documented it accordingly, doesn’t it? So there must have been some kind of a case, no?”
    “You’re right, this does not add up,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed. “When did you say this was? Oh, in ’54—well, many things did not add up then. They made quite a mess.... ” And then he proceeded to tell me, asking me not to mention his name, how the archives were destroyed, in several planned waves, the last of them in the fall of 1991. And the first—in 1954, after Stalin’s death: they freaked out back then too, and rushed to burn “material evidence.” And an epidemic of suicides swept through the senior leadership back then, too, just like it did in 1991. Pavlo Ivanovych made it sound like a report about natural disasters.
    “So are you telling me that Olena Dovgan’s case may also have been destroyed in 1954, after it was used to produce the certificate of her death for the family?”
    “Anything is possible,” Pavlo Ivanovych agreed.
    “Then, how would you explain
this
?” I asked, pulling the photograph out of my purse and putting it down before him, as if before a psychic. Or a witch.
    “Is this she?”
    “This is she.”
    “Hm,” Pavlo Ivanovych said, studying the four men and the woman in the UIA uniform with a professional eye, “this is a good picture.” That was not a judgment he made about the aesthetic properties of the photo, its angles or composition—he was assessing its usefulness for operational purposes: the recognizability of the five search objects, lined up and photographed before Pavlo Ivanovych was even born. (Or had he been by then? He is the right age, about sixty, and Mom also said he was born after the war...)
    “Where did you get this photo?” Now, this sounded like an interrogation question.
    “From an archive,” I said honestly, “only not from yours—from an academic institute’s collection. How could it have made it there, how might it have, as you say, turned up?”
    “That’s a good photo,” Pavlo Ivanovych repeated and put it back down.
    “Yes,” I said, getting annoyed by this irrelevant demonstration of his GB professionalism, which includes, among other things, the ability to avoid inconvenient questions, and pointed with my finger at the man who loved Gela. “Look, this one, he even looks a bit like you, really, he does! Too bad this shadow got cast on his face here, but still, there’s something...”
    Pavlo Ivanovych gave me a strange, quick blink: like a condor, not lifting his eyelids—eyes like a pair of jet stones. I blurted out without thinking, “So someone looks like someone else, big deal, the world is full of people who look like each other.” (I’ve even heard this theory that every one of us has at least one living double somewhere else on the planet, a trick of genetics.) And, the weird thing is—under the immovable condor-like, or maybe snake-like gaze of his (the eyes of an Oriental beauty, he’s just a damn Shahrazad, isn’t he?)—something in my mind clicked and revved up: “I’ve seen him somewhere before,” Aidy had said after he went to see Pavlo Ivanovych at the archives that first time, and I laughed then and quoted from
The Lost Letter
, “Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?” It must be that such an exotic appearance provokes bizarre déjà vu in people all by itself. Mom also said he looked like Omar Sharif, or whatever that actor from back in her day was called, and I would’ve said—Clark Gable from
Gone with the Wind
, which was not a movie they showed people in Mom’s day, only a Clark Gable adopted for an Oriental taste, as if edited by a Muslim censor to fit a location with palm trees and minarets. Or what if that’s a whole separate type—The Man Whom Everyone Has Seen Somewhere Before, and they need people like that in the secret services too, better to confuse the public?
    In any case, I wasn’t taunting Pavlo Ivanovych, as he seemed to think—I simply pointed out an obvious thing that ought to have flattered him: his face does look a little like that sad-eyed handsome man’s in the picture—the man from my dream, the one Aidy suspects to be his mysterious namesake who passed through