The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Ivanovych again blinked his protuberant eyes at me in that strange way of his, as if his eyelids twitched—and looked away immediately: “That wouldn’t be here, it would be in the Lviv archives.”
    “No, Pavlo Ivanovych,” I said, as kindly as I could, “it is here. It’s all here, in the central archives—all the plans for the liquidation of the postwar resistance are here, the entire ‘buried war,’ almost a hundred volumes, code name Bear Den. If you gave me access to these files, I’d be happy to look myself. But you won’t give me access, will you?”
    “I’ve no authority,” muttered Pavlo Ivanovych. My inside knowledge was clearly a surprise for him; he’s new to this territory—a journalistic investigation—he’s not used to it. He’s used to dealing with a different demographic—harmless scholars no one cares about, quiet academic historians, acne-ridden students, and bespectacled postdocs who submit their inquiries composed in compliance with form N-blah-blah-blah, who receive the answer “the document is not found,” and politely write it down as a research outcome—he is used to the absence of material strength. So I even felt a stab of professional pride: Don’t mess with us! He’d look, Pavlo Ivanovych promised. It was at that moment that it crystallized—the impression I got that for some reason he really would rather not look. And if I called him back in two weeks, like he told me to, he would again shrug regretfully and report, with his officer’s word, that he did not find anything.
    Daryna Anatoliivna, Daryna Anatoliivna...
    Actually, now that I think about it, I must have picked up that vibe a bit later—when he was escorting me back to the entrance and, no longer having anything to add, kept talking anyway, as if someone forgot to turn him off—talked on and on, like sand out of a gashed sack. He even reminded me, for the first time in our entire interaction, of that captain with shifty black eyes who had once “interviewed” me in the chancellor’s office before I beganmy pre-graduation field studies—they talk you to death, these people. Old schooling, done by the same old textbook, and what dickhead wrote those?
    Pavlo Ivanovych, for some reason, started on his father again—as if he were still trying to play in the same sandbox, make his father friends with my hero, with the old man’s former adversary, make it all nice; there was one thing in that whole verbal torrent that stuck out and stayed with me—it didn’t sound like something Pavlo Ivanovych made up on the fly—that his father told him, in moments of sincerity (When he was drunk?) that he, Boozerov Senior, had “a lot of respect” for the banderas (this did sound like a straight calque from Russian), because the way they, the banderas, “stood up for their cause” was something “we” (one would understand this to mean both Boozerovs’—father and son’s—colleagues) still had to “watch and learn.” How about that?
    Pavlo Ivanovych had said something similar about my mom, except not about the banderas but about her loyalty to her husband, that he would have liked it if his wife “stood up” for him like that—apparently he was having some trouble at work then, Pavlo Ivanovych was—and my poor mom was so proud of this KGB compliment that she remembered it for the rest of her life. I must confess, however, that I suspect this almost-dissident’s (Heaven help us, were they all dissidents back then?) respect for the banderas on behalf of Boozerov Senior stems exclusively from the fact that they were the ones who crippled him: all these “banditism fighters,” just like common bandits, respect only those who can kick their asses, and the harder their asses get kicked, the greater respect they feel for the one who did the kicking. But, so as not to ignore Pavlo Ivanovych’s aspirations to fulfill the official presidential policy of national reconciliation completely, I mumbled agreeably that it seemed like at some point, while working on the film, I came across this name—Captain Boozerov, could it have been his father? But this, for some reason, did not make Pavlo Ivanovych happy, as I had expected it would, and he only said that his father retired in the rank of the major—straight fromthe hospital. Captain Boozerov, then, had paid a steep price for his promotion.
    That’s what I’ll say to Aidy: I went after Gela, and got Captain Boozerov, damn it! (Really, though, where