The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

of an MGB excuse you guys’ve been hanging on to since ’54; that’s one. And two—no one has really looked into it yet: after 1991, when you finally could, there wasn’t anyone left, was there? Grandma Apollinaria had passed already.... No, sweets, stop it. I’d never mean it like that—of course, there’s always something else; that’s life. It’s what always happens when there’s no immediate family left—the children, they care what actually happened to their parents, because it affects them directly, it ricochets into their lives, although even then, depends on the children.... And who’s she to you—Grandma’s sister, big deal, plenty of families don’t even remember kin like that. You should thank Granny Lina that she managed to pass it on at all! Oh absolutely, you don’t even have to mention it—of course Lina looked up to her since she was little; Gela was her icon, the older for the younger—sure thing. Gela’s brilliant, Gela’s beautiful, Gela joins the Plast, Gela joins the Youth Assembly, boys tail Gela in packs wherever she goes—that kind of stuff stays with you for the rest of your life; even if Gela had lived, and she became a hero and died heroically on top of all that.... Basically, you got lucky. No, not with her dying and all—with Granny Lina, she could’ve kept mum, you know. Secure a happy Communist childhood for her grandson. Many did, nothing wrong with that.
    So, Aidy. We’ve no other choice; we need intel. Not from the family, but from the twilight zone. The other side of the moon. From the underground, yep. From her last years. That’s where we gotta dig.
    We’ve got the lead, too. A tiny one, but enough to latch on—her death was recorded by the MGB; we know this from that ’54 epistle. I bet you anything a few folks earned themselves new stars for that operation. That’s where I want to start: where, when, under what circumstances did she die. Documented precisely. And then we’ll go from there. It’ll work.
    This, naturally, won’t be easy. Nothing’s easy in this ghetto country of ours. But at least it’s not 1954, and our own Ukrainian Security Bureau does give up their archives bit by bit at the rate of their honorable retirees’ relocation to the Lukyaniv Cemetery, or wherever it is they bury them these days.... Yep, to avoid traumatizing anyone.... You can scoff all you want; I think they must be really vulnerable right now. If you’re gonna break women’s fingers in the doors or, you know, crush testicles with your boots, you’ve got to be, among other things, a hundred percent sure that you would never
ever
be held responsible for it, and by the time you’re old, after you’ve lived all your life with that certainty—heck, the idea alone’d give you a heart attack!
    Okay, whatever, to hell with those—let their underworld colleagues take care of them, the ones with the pitchforks.... These archives, basically, have the same setup as the spetskhran storage in the good ol’ USSR, when you needed to read some pre-Brezhnev issue of
Pravda
“for work,” and you brought a note certifying that you were a PhD in history, and that was your topic, so this was something the government actually tasked you to do—go read
Pravda
from such-and-such year. (Wait, how do I know all this? Oh yeah, from Artem again.) Only here instead of
Pravda
, or some writings by Hrushevsky, or whoever, you’ve got the basic biographical data for the person you need: Dovgan Olena Ambroziivna, year of birth—1920, place of birth—Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv, year of death—1947, place of death—and that’s where we appealto you, our kind and valiant record keepers.... It’s like, you know, it’d be nice to find Grandma’s grave, do it all up neat and proper. I’ve heard they let the family have the case files without a fuss; Irka Mocherniuk’s mom made an inquiry about Irka’s gramps, what, five years ago maybe, and got to take it all home, with all the denunciations written about him bound neatly. Said she learned all kinds of interesting things about old family friends.
    Because if I try to go there with an official letter from my channel—all doe-eyed and innocent, I’m just looking to make a movie here, I won’t be any trouble at all, can I just take one little peek in there, please?—they’re sure to go all hot under the collar and turn vigilant on me like they’ve been taught in their KGB school. They’ll sift through the case and cut out