The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

knives in sight, obviously; and for the napkins in the middle—plastic containers repurposed from the office-supply inventory loaded with hand-cut little squares of dense smooth paper, the kind that goes transparent under the lightest touch, catching your fingerprints better than the cops. On the menu, aside from my favorite Vitamin Salad, of course, we’d have mystery cutlets breaded with prickly stale crumbs, to be served with blue-hue mashed potatoes; fried hake with steel-colored, weapon-grade noodles; pelmeni with vinegar; borsch; and dried fruit compote, always with a dark-brown layer of silt, most likely of plant origin, on the bottom of the glass. Oh yes, and thechopped beet salad. Glasses of the thick-walled, octagonal variety, vodka with beer, and the puzzle of “a choice of desserts” for dessert, represented most often by a sizeable pile of sugar-dusted chopped dough appealingly called Finger-Licks—when I came to Kyiv, in my first year at the university, which, not to spoil anyone’s breakfast, also happened to be the Chernobyl year, I lived almost exclusively on these Finger-Licks until I figured out how to cook. For old times’ sake, I’d serve “eggs under mayonnaise” too, but only when I got really sentimental, as the spécialité du jour.
    Done right, with the walls painted shoulder-high in green oil paint, some vintage-scary posters, light bulbs in only half the lights, and a guaranteed half an hour before a waiter acknowledges your existence—basically, with a full immersion into the period atmosphere—a place like that couldn’t keep people out if it wanted! And not just Western tourists, although that’s a gold mine right there. I’ve got to sell it to someone. How about that character with the silver Mercedes, next door? I can’t believe no one has done it yet—boys must all be embarrassed about their valiant Komsomol youth; they all want new and foreign stuff, some weird fruits de mer and Château-de-Fleur, they’re all gourmands from Konotop—not much better, really, than the hillbillies in the old days, who all craved high-shine East German dressers and made room for them by getting rid of old hand-painted chests and Petrykiv step stools. The grandkids would now give anything to have those back, but tough luck, it’s all gone. Now we have to buy classic Kyiv china back from Europe, import our own stuff, and not just the china. And still every auction is packed with the French Empire; it sells like pancakes, and dudes bid each other out of sight, ’coz that’s how cool they are, and it makes me want to say—brother, be yourself, whenever did your granny ever lay her eyes on French Empire? Why are you buying someone else’s past? Now a genuine Shcherbytsky’s setup I could supply in a blink—heck, it’d be the hottest thing in town! It’s bound to come around sometime in the next twenty years anyway, so what are we waiting for?
    Anyway.
    To heck with historical authenticity, I dump about half a can of olives into my Vitamin Salad on a last-minute impulse, it’ll be a Greek Vitamin Salad, a post-Communist hybrid; too bad there’s no cheese, some feta would be nice, or, better still, some fresh Carpathian bryndza...alright, this’ll do. Now, bread into the toaster. Nothing like the smell of toasted bread. Finally, I’m fully plugged into the outside world—and drooling. Time to turn on the TV; it’s tuned to Lolly’s channel, but of course, inane slob that I am, I’ve slept straight through her segment and land into the latest news. Which will tell me that Americans are still bombing Baghdad. Fucking blitzkriegers.
    No sooner do I settle in front of the TV and stuff a heaping, steaming, awesome forkful of eggs and a bite of warm, crusty wheat toast into my mouth than the outside world mounts a surprise attack: the phone rings. Screams like it hurts. Should have set the answering machine to pick up.
    “Gud mornin, Adrian Ambrozich.”
    It’s Yulichka, my busy bee—already up and running the office, bless her heart. If only the sweet soul could find it in herself to speak Ukrainian, so I wouldn’t have to lose ten seconds of my life every time this Adrian Ambrozich comes up and I have to merge him with myself (which is, at the moment, chewing). Some clients, aware of my principled distaste for patronymics (“Oedipal complex,” I usually explain, kidding, of course, but many still get somber in the face, and go “Oh, sorry, sure thing...”) pitch