The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

doesn’t have anyone she could ask, either. But she remembers her mother doing it, like this. She remembers, from when she was very little, that this is how her mother used to begin. The paintings came later.
    Somewhere above, a window clatters open—the sound sends a pack of crows tumbling out of a nearby chestnut tree where they had already settled for the night.
    “Ka-tya! Kat-ru-sya!” a woman’s voice calls, echoing over the yard.
    The girl startles, shielding the little hole she’s dug up. Then she looks back at the building (in the lemony-green patch of open sky between roofs, an inaudible shadow glides by: a bat).
    “Coming, Gran!”
    Glass! This shard, right here. To cover the hole. And then you bury it, and stamp the dirt flat, smooth it over with the scoop so that no trace remains: no one must see what she was making here; God forbid, someone should find out.... Not now. Not ever.
    The girl stands up and dusts the dirt off her knees.

AFTERWORD
    T his book was conceived in the fall of 1999 and begun in the spring of 2002; over the next seven years, the book and I grew and developed together guided by the will of the truth that lay hidden in this story and that I, exactly like Daryna and Adrian in the novel, had to “dig up.” This is why the traditional legal formula of the publishing world whereby “all characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or events are purely coincidental” does not fit: Only the characters in this book are purely fictitious. Everything that happens to them has actually happened to various people at different points in time. And could still happen. This, actually, is what we call reality.
    Reconstructing the wartime and postwar events—the ones that are reflected in Adrian’s dreams—was the most difficult and crucial task. Ukrainian, as well as European, literature is yet to develop a more or less satisfactory, adequate, and coherent narrative from that period; one is hard-pressed to find another time in the history of the twentieth century that has been buried under such veritable Himalayas of mental rubbish, packed over the last sixty years almost into concrete—the layers upon layers of lies, half-lies, innuendo, falsifications, and so on. Historical excavations of this period have begun only in the first decade of the new millennium, and in the course of working on
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
, I was often delighted to receive another new message from fellow “expeditionists” spread all over Europe, from the British Islands to Ukraine, groups that, coming from different angles (different traditions, fields, and genres), have set to clearingup this logjam, Europe’s largest and most difficult—the so-called “truth of the Eastern Front.”
    As I read, on the plane, Norman Davies’s
Europe at War
, which I bought at Heathrow; watched Andrzej Wajda’s
Katyn
, Edvins Snore’s
The Soviet Story
, Ihor Kobryn’s
Unity on Blood
(the first systematic attempt at presenting the thirty-year-long Ukrainian catastrophe of the twentieth century); as I encountered for the first time the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin, published finally in 2007 after decades of “underground” existence, and those of a nameless woman in 1945 Berlin (
Eine Frau in Berlin
), and dozens upon dozens of new books finally giving voice to those whose truth had never been heard, I experienced every time something akin to the thrill of a volunteer who, as she works over an earthquake site, hears the same methodical chipping of pickax against rock all around her. The more of us who are here, the faster the rubble will be cleared—and the less poison from the bodies of those crushed underneath will seep into new generations.
    When I began working on
The Museum
, purely Ukrainian publications that could provide the basis for clothing the skeleton of Gela Dovgan and Adrian Ortynsky’s story were few and far between. The main documentary source I relied upon was the so-called oral history—the one preserved by being told. Thus, my first and deepest thanks are to the veterans—the witnesses and heroes of the tragedy that was the 1940s, who agreed to meet with me and be interviewed; each to his or her own degree has given pieces of their own lives to my characters. Some of these people are no longer with us, and I am deeply grateful for having had the chance to know them. Without them, this book could never have been written:
    Bohdan and Daria