The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

him...wait, let me finish! I understand, he played a very meaningful role in your life. Your mother’s life. But you cannot forget that it was an exchange and not just an act of charity for which you must forever hang on to his every word. You don’t need to be a genius to see that your mom made something big click in his head, too—it’s obvious. A gear without which he may not have survived at all. He’s pretty hung up on the suicide theme, did you notice?”
    “I did, sure. I actually think that’s his greatest fear as far as Nika goes. Lest she find out that her grandmother killed herself, I mean.... He let something slip about a curse, remember?”
    “Of course, and Nika’s another thing.... He is making her your responsibility, no? Didn’t you see—passing her on to you, so to speak, as your inheritance! For you to take her as your friend, or who knows what...your charge. By the same old curatorial logic, from the KGB. So basically, he and you have your own story. And I’m just sitting there, pouring vodka into plastic cups. Meanwhile, it was his old man who carried out my great-aunt’s death sentence—and Boozerov has been aware of this ever since I first submitted my inquiry to the archives, last fall. But if it weren’t for his daughter, the concert—like hell he would’ve told us this. Or that Gela was pregnant.”
    “You know, I can’t shake that off—this must have been done in some office of theirs, right? The examination, the analysis of the remains.... It was someone’s job to do that, can you imagine?Collect the mangled bodies, sort them: ours over here, the other side’s—over there...the mother here, the fetus—separately, over there.... ”
    “Hang on, you’ll make me lose my point. It’s not the different pieces, as you said, that are patched together—it’s as if there were three different processes, and all of them nonlinear, oscillatory, a wave system—the Schrödinger equation. That’s why he’s out of focus, you know, that’s why he sort of...flickers—there are more dimensions than you or I can each individually perceive. Do you understand?”
    “Honestly, no.”
    “Okay, did you take advanced geometry in school? Do you remember how to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plain?”
    “Draw three different views, from three sides?”
    “Something like that. So what I’m saying, it’s the same here. The world I—we—live in has fewer dimensions than we need to get an accurate representation of the process, so all we get is a set of random views, and not even a complete set. And the views you get don’t match the ones I get—like, say, if you had the front view, and I got the plane view...and I don’t fall into your dimension, I’m not inside that field.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “I’m just a go-between, Lolly. Like a semiconductor, you see? And occasionally, a catalyst. And that’s how it’s been for me the whole time, from the beginning: I function as an add-on to your project.
Your
project that involves
my
family and for which you needed a guide. A go-between...”
    “Weird...”
    “No shit.”
    “No, it’s weird because sometimes I feel precisely the opposite. That it’s my project that functions as a go-between—between you and me.”
    “And I’ve had enough of this going between. I want there to be the two of us, together, and no one else. I want to be your man,period. Your husband, not a go-between. Do you see the difference, or do I have to explain that too?”
    “You goof...that’s who you are.”
    “I’m not sure, baby. I’m not sure.”
    “I am. You cover me. You have my back, all the time; you don’t even notice it because it comes so naturally to you. This is why you got so worked up, too—because you took the whole Pavlo Ivanovych, the brunt of him, and now the aftershock of it is rattling you.”
    “Hm. You think?”
    “Can’t you feel it yourself?”
    “I don’t know.... He really got under my skin, that’s for sure. Like I got some virus from him and it went running through my bones—smashing everything in its way...bowling. And on top of that, I had to swallow it all as I listened. Just think: I’ve been working like a fucking ox for seven years, kissing up to God-knows-who, fighting for every little old tchotchke tooth and nail, trying to save at least a bit of our past, and underwriting the SBU’s fucking budget with my hard-earned coin on top of that; and there he sits, paid,