The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

risk of having the roused man tumble to his death. No, let it all be; let it go as it goes. I’m not the one to take a wrench to someone else’s brain. And really shouldn’t I be flattered? Or at least reassured? What more reliable proof of his undying love can a man give a woman than to plug her (to borrow from electrical engineering) into the network of the first female images set into the concrete foundation of his imagination: his mother, his sister, the girl next door? (And women do this, too: all of us plug each other into one thing or the other, ready to replace breakers, find missing wires, and wrap it all thickly with insulation tape until—boom!—the circuit shorts with a jolt.)
    Dear sisterhood: Let us all love our mother-in-laws, for they are our future; they are the women we will become in thirty years (otherwise, your beloved would never have noticed you, would never have recognized you). Let us love our rivals, past and present,for each one of those women has something of ours, something that we ourselves fail to notice and prize and that, for him, is sure to be most important. Shit, does this mean I have something in common with that droopy-faced hag with eyes like burnt holes in a blanket!?
    And this is just the beginning, Lord. Just the beginning.
    Apollinaria, Stefania, Ambroziy, Volodymyra. (How comical these cloche hats from the Jazz Age of the already-past century: these tightly fitted little felt pots, pulled down to just above the eyebrows and banded with silk—you know it’s silk because it glistens even in the prints—with tiny brims and round tops; and the women’s legs, always in stockings, even in summer. Just think how they must’ve sweated, poor things.) To shuffle the photos is to greet each one of them silently with my eyes, despite the fact that they’re all long dead. I’m the one poorer for it.
    It’s not just me looking at them—they
do
look back. I realize this in an instant (I couldn’t possibly explain this, even to you!) with the same precise and inexplicable certainty as I did one day, many years ago, at St. Sophia Cathedral when I had wandered in, lathered after a half-sleepless night, agitated not so much by any real events but by the much more deeply disturbing premonition of fundamental changes in my life—changes whose advance I could feel from all sides at once and which I knew portended the end of my youth.
    The ticket office had just opened and I was the first visitor, all alone in the echoing and alert silence of the temple, where every step on the terrifying cast-iron floors rang all the way through the choir lofts. I stood at the bottom of the honey-thick twilight suspended in half-consciousness by a swirling, tilting pillar of sunlit dust until I suddenly felt a thrust at my chest: from a fresco on the opposite wall of a side nave, a white-bearded man in a blue, richly draped, floor-length cloak looked at me, his dry, walnut-colored palms pressed together. I felt faint—a soft, furry paw brushed me from inside—a shaky shard of a vision slashed through the air. Something stirred. I stepped closerbut the man—this monk or statesman with the time-darkened face and those clearly drawn, typically Ukrainian contours that are also soft like the lines of aging mountains and that one still recognizes, so easily, in the faces of the men at the Besarabsky Market—was already looking at something else. Only the eyes—implacably dark and swollen with knowledge—burdened his face, as if not given quite enough room, and it seemed they would turn upon me again at any moment. I couldn’t stand it and looked away first, and it was then that I saw what I had never noticed before, as if helped by a sudden shift of light: the cathedral was alive, it teemed with people—every wall and arch was inhabited with dimly silent, time-smudged women and men, and every one of them had the same otherworldly eyes, pregnant with the ecclesiastical pall of all-knowing.
    All these eyes
saw
me. I stood there in view of a crowd, only it was not a crowd of strangers. They took me in with such kindness and understanding, as if they knew everything about me, so much more than I could ever know myself, and as I slowly dissolved—like a pat of butter in warm water—in their encircling gaze (I couldn’t tell how long this lasted, time had stopped), it was suddenly revealed to me as the most obvious thing in the world that these people did not just live a thousand years
ago
; they