The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

The typical career of a Soviet orphanage graduate.
    We’re bound up together, Pavlo Ivanovych and I—and there’s no avoiding it. But beyond that, there’s something about him—although yes, he is second-generation, and yes he is Tenth Bureau, select and proven—something appealing in a very human way, something boyish, even vulnerable. It’s no picnic, of course—having to watch, in your mature years, what you spent your entire life serving collapse: watching people pilfer left and right from the archive where you spent umpteen years like a chained guard dog. And for what?—while some quicker-witted Major Mitrokhin was carefully copying and stuffing into his shoe soles all that “material evidence” that was supposed to be destroyed as “not constituting historical value,” and when the right moment came, sold it all to the Brits, and now sails his yacht on the Thames or somewhere like that, the bastard. And you sit, like a toad in a bog, in the dungeon on Zolotovoritska, guarding the stacks of gaping lacunae, and wait for your pension, which will be just enough to buy you a few fishing rods—and whose fault is that? There’s something moving about this, I’m telling you, as there is about any human defeat. (Aidy is sure to laugh at me; he’s already said I’m walking around all sentimental like it’s the first day of my period.... ) Or is it that I just have a soft spot for losers? At least for Soviet losers—in that system, losers were the only likeable people. And now, I still pick the people whom you could call the losers of the new 1991 vintage, from the ruins of the empire—I find them more appealing than their high-flying colleagues who, at the right time, found themselves closer to the Party’s coffers. Thusly is Boozerov so much more appealing than Major Mitrokhin. Even though Mitrokhin performed a historic act, and my Boozerov can’t even supply me with a meager couple of certificates in exchange for hourly pay.
    How are you not an idiot, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna?
    I pluck another cigarette from my purse and light up as I walk.
    I gave it one last shot, back in Pavlo Ivanovych’s office. There was still a small chance. A teensy-weensy little one, a rabbit’s tail of a chance. I grasped at it as I stared, in my dead-end desperation, at the picture with the five young people standing in a row, dressed in the uniforms of a forgotten army, four men and the woman in a column of light—the picture I thought I knew like a lover’s body, down to the tiniest mole, and yet I missed the most obvious thing: death! That’s where the key might be. I’ve always only thought about Gela’s death, separately from the others, but they had a
shared
death, one for all five, and it happened, if one could believe GB paperwork and dates at all, on November 6, 1947. And that, by the way, is a not just a regular day—that’s the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution’s 30th anniversary, “the 7th of November is the Red Day of the calendar” as the children’s poem went; they most certainly did not just pick that date at random—it all looks like a long-planned operation, primed for a big-occasion report to the higher-ups!
    I’m old enough to remember those ritual pre-holiday, nationwide convulsions: reports from the miners and the steelworkers, from the workers of the fields and the animal farms—this is how much we have mined, milked, melted, and harvested for the Great October’s 60th anniversary; and the workers of the jails and execution chambers must have also reported, correspondingly—this is how many we have arrested and eliminated, so this operation had been planned as a sure win in advance; the squad Gela’s unit encountered had come for a certain victory. They had come after easy prey—after medals, ranks, vacations, engraved watches, and cigarette cases with ruby-encrusted Kremlins on them. They knew where they were going: someone had shown them. I could feel the trail of treachery quivering within my grasp, like a rabbit’s tail.
    “What if you looked by date,” I asked Pavlo Ivanovych.
    “How do you mean?” he asked, on guard.
    “What if you just, you know, checked the Lviv GB archives for November of 1947? To see if there’s a report about the liquidation, on the Lviv Oblast territory, of a five-member bandit group, fourmen and one woman, timed for the Great October Revolution’s 30th anniversary—that’s not a needle in a haystack, is it?”
    Pavlo