The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

what did it look like from the MGB offices where the operational plans were developed, and where the records of interrogations were kept and bound (They had to have been!) into someone’s as-yet unlocated folder with the label “Agent case” (That would be the one, yes?)? Without this factual dimension—even if it’s only five percent of the material, it is essential as yeast is to dough—Gela’s story cannot become a bona fide document, but will remain as it is—a story that belongs to the one telling it. My own story—lame-assed docu-fiction.
    And I can’t put it together only as I see it; I can’t turn my own life inside out, make it into a movie for wide release. I can’t show how Gela summoned me to tell about her death: how she tossed it to me from her photograph, like ball lightning—a white flash, the blast of hundreds of spotlights in the instant of an accidental orgasm in an uncomfortable position, on a rickety desk, in a basement of a certain academic institute—how she connected her life to mine like a torn-off wire and, like a skillful radio operator, cleaned the terminals. I can’t put Aidy’s dreams into the film—or even that last one that we dreamt together (even though I told Pavlo Ivanovych the name of the last man on the right, as it came to me in that dream—Mykhailo—without, of course, revealing my source; it was a gesture of pure desperation on my part—a name without the last name wouldn’t get you anywhere even in the British archives, never mind ours).
I know
that the story of Olena Dovganivna’s love and death that I have recovered is true because my own life vouches for it—but I can’t bind my life to her case. Without a few critical pieces of documentation, which, let’s face it, can only be supplied by the very country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war, her story, in other people’s eyes, would be no different from the movies my mom used to play in her mind after her conversations with Pavlo Ivanovych so as not to go mad. Facts, facts, Miss Goshchynska. Facts for the editing table, be so kind as to oblige. Names, passwords, safe houses, everything as it’s supposed to be....
    I manage to jump into an alcove just in time—a black BMW speeds up from behind me, from Zolotovoritska, tears past me like a tornado, splashing water from a fetid puddle upwards in a grimy arc that’s as tall as me. Had I been on the sidewalk—I’d have been drenched head to toe. Jackasses! Rich jerks.
    My having counted on Pavlo Ivanovych’s assistance (and to know how little I need—damn it, I could fit it into a cigarette pack!) came from the same mythical certainty that everything hidden is really out there somewhere, just waiting for its digger. Essentially, I was counting on finding precisely the same kind of original source whose absence prevents the four string-bound folders in Mom’s attic from yielding engineer Goshchynsky’s buried truth. I had been certain that I only needed to recover Gela’s case from the archives to have everything fall instantly into place—to have the last empty boxes filled. That the case simply
would not be there
—that the country against which Olena Dovgan had waged her war would manage, after its own demise, to outmaneuver both her and me by pretending that Olena Dovgan never even existed—for this I, the naïve cow, was utterly unprepared. I had been taught that manuscripts did not burn, hadn’t I, and I was always a straight-A student. And now what? What am I supposed to do? Where am I to look?
    A bricked-up gate. No Exit.
    Daryna Goshchynska, you are an idiot. People have been screwing you over in a particularly cynical manner your entire life, and you did not even notice it.
    And the funniest thing is—I can’t help it that I do find something about Pavlo Ivanovych irresistibly likeable. Is this a variety of Stockholm Syndrome, or common gratitude? Because he is, really, my benefactor—it was he who, a quarter of a century ago, held my life in his hands: had he decided to score himself another star with my mom’s case, I would’ve ended up in some godforsaken home for orphaned children. I’d be making my living at a beltway truck stop now. Or in the subway. I once went on a news assignment about what went on there at night, saw a peroxideblonde the cops pulled out from a storage room: she looked sixty and turned out to be younger than me—thirty-four. A black eye and arms poked with more needle holes than a sieve.