The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Read Online Free PDF

that could not be bequeathed or recycled, forged or refashioned to match new ideologies, publicized in newspapers and on TV until the last modicum of the departed person’s presence was stomped out, unraveled, lost under a thousand footprints?
    After the death of Vlada Matusevych—Vlada whose dear little face with its pointy, birdlike features was posthumously rebranded by glossy women’s magazines until after a while even I could look at one of her mass-reproduced portraits without having my heart cramp—I had ample opportunity to learn that it is only such useless trifles of memory that have a chance to remain solidly present, and I kept one for myself: Vlada, the very definition of petite, had the habit of almost touching whomever she was talking to, of insinuating herself into their space with one smooth balletic pas—her back slightly bent and her head held high, looking like an unwinding lasso, or a cat about to leap into a tree—which unsettled even the most recalcitrant political gorillas. And for me, everything that used to be called Vlada Matusevych is contained—like an ocean in a drop of its water—in this one movement.
    How could you show this on film? Even if you could, if you found it somewhere, on a friend’s cell-phone video or a clip from a birthday, a party, someone’s wedding—she was a fashionable artist; she was everywhere all the time, and there had been so much of her that in the first months after her death, Kyiv seemed deserted—even if you had it on film, what would it mean to anyone?
    I have come to think that a person’s life is not so much, or rather is
not just
, the dramatically arched story with a handful of characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, and colleagues—anyone else?) that we pass on more or less in one piece to our descendants. It’s only from the outside that life looks like a narrative, or when viewed backwards through a pair of mental binoculars we put on when we have to fit ourselves into the small oculars of résumés, late-night kitchen confessions, and home-spun myths, trimming and shaping life into orderly eyefuls. When seen from the inside, life is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces, utterly useless for anyone other than its owner. A suitcase carried, irredeemably and forever, to the grave. Maybe a handful of odds and ends fall out along the way (a request for pear compote, a sinuous balletic pas like that of a cat about to pounce) and remain to rot in the minds of witnesses and mourners, so whenever I stumbled into one of those lost, disowned scraps I was filled with a vague but insistent shame of my inadequacy, as if this piece, this accidental survivor, contained the key—the lost secret code to the deep, subterranean core of the other person’s life—and now I have it, but I don’t know which door it unlocks or if such a door even exists.
    ***
    I didn’t get this from TV, from the stories and people in front of the camera.
    There was the day when, for some reason leafing through an old pulpy book from my father’s library, I ran into a note in the margin of a yellowed coarse page (Soviet newspaper stock) in Dad’s characteristically dense, thorny script (sometime in the seventh or eighth grade my own handwriting aspired to imitate his, but eventually mellowed out, untangled, and came to resemble Mom’s) written next to the apparently innocuous, idiotic critique, “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness. ” (God, the language! Still struggling to find its way out fromunder the debris of Stalin’s pogroms, limping and dragging on broken-splintered bones.)
    He underlined this critique with an impulsive, nearly straight line, and scrawled an equally triumphing
this!!!
with three exclamation marks in the margin. It struck me like a divinely inspired epiphany. In that instant I realized I didn’t know my father. He died when I was barely seventeen. I only