The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

thoughts and feelings. Even when those people are our own family. Or rather, had been, once.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    “I don’t know. Us, I guess.”
    This is the difference between a marriage and all other (however volcanically eruptive) affairs and flings—this obligatory exchange of ghosts. Your dead become mine and vice versa. The list of names submitted for All Souls’ Mass grows longer: as always, there is Anatoly, Lyudmyla, Odarka, Oleksander, Fedir, and Tetyana, but after them come, like a new orchestra section joining a symphony in a drawn-out, lowering, celloed, and double-bassed andante, Apollinaria, Stefania, Ambroziy, Volodymyra—names that sound as if they belonged to a completely different nation, and maybe it was a different nation after all, the one wiped out in 1933 between Kyiv and Poltava—a tribe whose members have names like Thalimon or Lampia or Porf or Thekla, names that make one think of early Christians and not at all of relatives and kin just two or three generations removed. The Western, Galician, Catholic names from the same time sound alive in comparison,however vaguely—but still there are people who can say, that’s my uncle, that’s my grandpa, that one perished in Siberia, and this one emigrated to Canada.
    That’s when you recall, with an addled nostalgic smile that spreads on your face slowly, out-of-focus—like milk spilled on a table—how one day in the early eighties a box came for your family from Canada, from just such a brother-of-a-third-cousin-once-removed uncle. The KGB let it through somehow, either because it was already busy packing up or just plain and simple had lost its grip, like everything in this country that turned loose and flabby right before the finale. A real Canadian box containing no flower-rimmed, square shawl that the diaspora insisted on supplying in great numbers to the Old Country but
jeans
—sweet Jesus!—your very first Levi’s, and a denim shirt to go along, and then in the foreign-currency-only Beryozka store your parents bought you real Adidas sneakers and an Adidas backpack, and that’s how you arrived at school, every day.
    And for an instant I hurt again with a hot cramp in my stomach, with that retrospective, and therefore meaningless, teenage jealousy—as if this picture of yourself that you remember sends me tumbling twenty years back, right along with you, frozen at my school desk, unable to take my eyes off the most hopelessly unattainable boy in our class. You don’t even notice me—you wouldn’t notice the girl I was then, an acne-pocked, straight-A student with a wet-noodle braid on my shoulder—you never would, except maybe to politely open a door for me. Boys like you from good families, plied with early success, always have good manners because you have no need to draw attention to yourselves with stupid pranks; nothing better than positive life experience to engender friendliness—that superficial, tepid good-naturedness, like a constant body temperature, that is utterly impervious to aggression—or sympathy.
    “Incredible,” I say, shaking my head, but you don’t understand; you’re not on the same wavelength, and you continue surfing along on your own frequency, registering my comment as a quick burst ofapplause for your past triumphs with girls. You toss it, with a small clink, into that twenty-years-ago drawer in your mind; and so we stay, just as we were—each with our own drawers whose contents haven’t mixed, haven’t even been put out side by side and really compared. And that’s what I meant by incredible.
    How could we hope to conduct our dead-relatives exchange—to cross these ghostly bloodlines that stretch into the most impenetrable reaches of time—if we can’t even manage to marry our younger selves, that boy and that girl who used to fall in love with other girls and boys, who both lay awake at night in different cities without the slightest inkling of each other’s existence? And the worst of it is that they are still here—that boy and that girl. They must be if I am still capable of such idiotic jealousy toward your high-school sweetheart—never mind that I met her decidedly in the present tense, precisely so that I could get over it once and for all, because the comparison now was not at all in her favor. She turned out to be a rather dour, prickly, thick-boned, and lumpy-looking matron, like the former project engineers who now have to sell secondhand clothes off