The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

He, then,he is the one with the worst luck of all, although this really has nothing to do with Pavlo Ivanovych; this, in relation to him, is a pure and simple natural disaster. And Pavlo Ivanovych probably never thought about that man at all, and forgot how that whole story began, so isn’t it better just to erase it from your sight, so as not to complicate your already complicated life? Delete, delete.
    It is at this point that something ursine inside me rears up on its back legs and growls: Hands off! I won’t let go! I wonder why it never occurred to me before that I, basically, spent my entire journalistic career doing what my father gave his life for—defending someone else’s essentially deleted truths? I gave voice to the lacunae of intentionally created silences. We are of different blood, Pavlo Ivanovych and I.
    A KGB dynasty, that just blows your mind. Our family’s second-generation KGB man—just like the family doctors people have in Victorian novels: from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter.
    It’s a profession: creating silences. Forging voices, layering the fake ones over the ones that have been stifled—so that no one could ever discern the muted truth. We have different professions, too, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—with directly opposite goals. No wonder we couldn’t reach an understanding. No matter how hard he tried.
    It’s like when a bruised spot regains feeling after the immediate shock of the impact, only to fire up with pain later, when you think everything has turned out okay: with every step along the peeling, not-for-tourists St. Sofia wall, stained with damp patches and indelible graffiti, I succumb to an increasingly corrosive sense of disappointment. A feeling that I’ve erred in something, like I screwed up, missed something important, let it out of sight.... And lost a truly invaluable consultant for VMOD-Film, the single person, perhaps, from the entire KGB corps whom I needed, who was—literally—written in my stars, as one’s most important friendships and loves are written. How many things of the kind you’d never read anywhere must he have learned from his latefather, the “banditism fighter”! Things you’d never dig up from the archives, either: the most toxic “material evidence” of the Stalinist era, the evidence that might very well make the slaughter sprees of the Khmer Rouge and of Comrade Mao’s cannibals look like training exercises for a volunteer militia—that kind of evidence, no doubt, flew into the fire back in that first wave of panic, in 1954, following The Leader of the People’s death. How did he say these were marked in their registries? “Document destroyed as one not constituting historical value”? Crap, I’ve gotten so used to being recorded, I can’t be sure I remembered everything right. Those fighters did not leave memoirs behind, either, for perfectly understandable reasons—but they may have told their children some things, and Pavlo Ivanovych is certain to know a lot more about that era than he wishes to reveal to me. Even if he is not aware of anything specific concerning Olena Dovgan who died on November 6, 1947. Or the man who was the cause of her death: I pointed him out in the picture, too—the last one on the right.
    I came at it from the wrong angle. I counted on being able to see, finally, once I got my hands on Gela’s case (which, for some reason, I had also imagined to be a fat folder with strings tied around it), a clearly and precisely documented,
factual
skeleton of her death, with the first and last names of everyone involved, that would give me the springboard from which I, without much trouble, could edit my footage (Vadym did get it for me from the studio) and show on the screen, as if turned inside out, the whole story as I know it—know it anyway, without the SBU archives, but by feel, through my own life; through Artem’s basement and its rickety desk; through Aidy, Vlada, love, dreams; by the same blind and unerring method through which I know the truth about my father’s death.
    Except that, no matter how certain this knowing-for-oneself is, it must be firmly attached to the commonly known—facts, dates, and names—if it is to become public knowledge. When did she get married; who was he, the man standing next to her in the picture—an undeniably married couple; and most importantly,how did it come to the betrayal that poor Aidy spent an entire night hunting for in his dreams? And