The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

his family’s lives like a stunt-double in a movie, never having identified himself (an “Ad. Or.” Aidy says, although I counteredright away that he can’t be his namesake because “Or.” has got to mean “Orest,” and only later wondered if perhaps I said that because of the movie
White Bird Marked with Black
, in which the young Bogdan Stupka, for the first time in the history of Soviet cinematography, played a Bandera follower who was not a caricature, and was named Orest).
    But Pavlo Ivanovych, apparently, was not in the least bit flattered by this comparison because he informed me, rather sternly, that his father served in that area—and precisely in the “anti-banditism” department, how about that? I felt my jaw drop. And his father was even severely wounded in battle; it was a miracle he survived. “Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “He remained an invalid for the rest of his life,” Pavlo Ivanovych lamented. I went ahead and made a sorrowful face, too, feeling like it was now he who was taunting me: it was
my
father who had been made an invalid, and not without the help of the very agency in which the Boozerov dynasty so distinguished itself. And since we’re on the subject of fighting “banditism”—it was
my
father who went to war against it barehanded and never came back—against banditism without quotation marks, the one that had taken over half the world: enthroned, institutionalized, ruling. And here was Pavlo Ivanovych seemingly stacking our parents’ fates in the same file, seemingly saying we should be friends: the two invalid-father orphans, hello, Mowgli, we be of one blood, ye and I....
    I asked if Boozerov Senior still lived. “No, he died in ’81.” And again I felt as if Pavlo Ivanovych expected me to say back to him, oh, and my father passed in ’98. As if he were purposefully challenging me to turn the conversation to my father, something he didn’t dare do himself, challenging me to a game with incomprehensible rules, like the Easter Day knocking of one painted egg against another, to see whose father is stronger...but I said nothing. My exploded faith in the ontological indestructibility of every truth stuck out of me in all directions, charred steel, and the site of destruction was cordoned off with yellow police tape: Ground Zero, do not cross. And afterward, for some reason, Ifelt sorry for him—my self-appointed Mowgli, Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov. The invalid-father orphan.
    I toss the cigarette stub into a puddle, to the great ire of a flock of sparrows (such tiny little nuggets—and what a ruckus!). I come up on the Zaborovsky Gate, to which they don’t bring the tourists, bricked shut for three centuries already—with its wildly curled baroque frieze and a colonnade sunk into the surrounding wall. Across the street is an oncology hospital; its patients enjoy a view that’s perfect for the contemplation of the eternal: a sealed gate, No Exit. Abandon hope.
    I do wish Aidy weren’t in a meeting right now.
    Should I call my mother, perhaps? No, it’ll take forever to tell her everything, and it’s not the kind of conversation one has on the street anyway. Pavlo Ivanovych did not neglect to send his greetings this time either, even asked me if she still worked in the Lavra, the Museum of Cinematography. “No, she is retired.” “Really?”—Pavlo Ivanovych was surprised: in his mind, he must have fixed Mom as a younger woman. Must have fixed her the way she looked, and not by her date of birth, from the file. He must have really liked her. She got lucky. And, by extension, so did I.
    It’s only Dad who didn’t have any luck. That’s just how it worked—he didn’t get lucky, and that’s that. Actually, if you think about it, Pavlo Ivanovych’s telling me about his invalid father was a sort of underhanded apology—peace, what can you do, that’s how the cookie crumbles. Some get lucky, others don’t. Let bygones be bygones, and we’ll now be like peas and carrots. I really have no complaints about Pavlo Ivanovych personally—quite the opposite. There’s something likeable about him. Something even vulnerable, in its way.
    But the thing is that there was another person who did not get lucky that time—the one of whose posthumous truth my father became the keeper, until he perished himself: the man who created the magical palace of my childhood fairytales, and then hung himself—right in time not to see his creation crippled.