The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

forbid.
    This fear...I don’t fear for myself anymore, I don’t want you to think that...but it’s inside me somewhere—since then, sitting there. In my gut. Thank God Nika doesn’t know everything. She’s got her own life. A clean slate, so to speak...let it be....
    I think Father didn’t know everything either. But it cut him down. Finished him off, it did, that he had to go explain things—because of me. He had to go all the way up to Moscow, because here in Kyiv, people just looked at him like he was nuts. No one wanted to take responsibility for the decision, they were all too scared for their own hides...and, well, they wouldn’t miss a chance to bite off a chunk of someone else’s. He was a stranger here. An outsider to the very organization he’d given his life to. Old fart who had no more influence anymore. So what, he was a distinguished pensioner? If all his service, everything he’d given his life to, just think—blew up like...like feathers—from a single fabricated denunciation. How he yelled when he’d had a drink: Cursed...Rats!—he yelled. He said that thing about the banderas once, I won’t forget it as long as I live—that he envied them the way they stood up for what was theirs! For thirty years he hadn’t spoken a word of it—and now it came back. I looked at him with new eyes then. That was before the ’91 coup, you must remember, before all the changes....
    It’s all very complicated, you know. And you want things to be just cut-and-dried, nice and tidy! Like now—you must be sitting there, listening to me talk and wondering, what’s all this about. Yes? I can tell...everyone’s in such rush, can’t wait.... You want the archives opened, want your documents brought out to you on a silver tray, want them declassified before the fifty-year term runs out.... Do you know how many waves like this I’ve lived through already? And you with your film are just the same. And the consequences—have you thought about that? People’s children, grandchildren. What have they done to deserve that?
    Eh, Daryna Anatoliivna...I very much would have preferred it that way—not to know everything. Sometimes, you think—here I am, I survived.... But for what?
    Only Nikushka...my girl. She’ll always need me.
    You’re cold now? Well, that means we need to drink some more. My father-in-law used to say—“Let’s save ourselves...we’re getting sober!” Come on, don’t be shy.... Your health!
Uff
.
    He was the one who rescued my family...saved it, I mean. My father-in-law. Nika was born later. If it hadn’t been for him, who knows how it all would have turned out. Such emptiness there was...like a black hole...such a dark stretch. At work—gloom, and at home—gloom. What’s the way out? What could there be? Once you’re in the system, you, my dear, have only two options—up or down! You don’t get a third choice. Those are the rules. Until then, things were going up for me, but when they head down—you whole life goes down the drain. And I was only thirty! And not a glimmer of light at home, I had nowhere to go. My better half was pissed at me. She was afraid they’d pack us off to the middle of nowhere, where she wouldn’t be able to buy the shearling coat she wanted...from our chancery—she’d just put her name on the waiting list for one. My father-in-law later shipped in a whole container of those shearlings from Afghanistan, but those weren’t the right kind for her, either, because everyone already had one like that—llama fur they were called, with those white tails like snot. Eh, why am I telling you this! All women are stupid. Sorry. That’s what I thought at the time. Meaning—that that’s what everyone’s life was like. I’d never met a different kind of woman. And they only showed the Decembrist wives in movies....
    So that was when I met your mom. That was a first for me...in my experience. And, well, the last. After Stalin, they no longer used this method, but right at that time we got instructions to start again—“if the husband, then the wife”...one woman got time that way—her husband was sentenced for anti-Soviet agitation, and she went to visit him...to the camps. But—that was Fifth Department’s turf; I never touched anything like that. Our job was to prepare the soil for them, so to speak, yes, I knewwhich way the wind was blowing; I read the instructions, too. All such methods were first tried out with us in Ukraine, and only then