The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

this time, gulping down eyeful after eyeful?), I can find something of yours in many of these faces, something imperceptibly altered but shared nonetheless, as if an errant beam of an invisible torchlight, dancing over them, flashed you out of an accidental fold of another’s features or in a turn of another’s head. Here, here it is; it almost coheres but again merely almost, and the dream of unrecognition goes on, growing slowly more nightmarish, as if now I am chasing a fleeing ghost.
    “Here’s my paternal great-uncle,” you introduce with a note of involuntary solemnity, or perhaps it just sounds solemn to me, and I define silently: Paternal great-uncle means the brother of your paternal grandfather. My lips stretch idiotically in the smile of a well-brought-up girl who is working hard to be liked by theseadults—pleasure to meet you—and suddenly a blinding, shimmering veil of tears slips across my sight, and I hurry to swallow them, blinking them away before you notice because, like all mama’s boys, you automatically interpret a woman’s tears as a personal reproach, instantly growing sullen, as if you’ve been struck, as if, except for you, there is nothing for a woman to cry about in this world. I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t have it in me to resist the numbing spread of this insane, universal tenderness that pools under my skin like blood from a thousand wounds—this visceral, glandular, animal pity for these dead, for their youth, their speech, their laughter no longer audible from where we are, their piercingly pitiful, childlike innocence to the impenetrable gloom that awaits them. Or, perhaps, it is the pity I feel for you and me, for the two orphans abandoned to fend for themselves—like Hansel and Gretel in the dark, dark forest—two lonely shipwrecks washed up onto the shore of the new century by the last, life-draining effort of so many ruined generations of men and women whose only achievement in the long run was to bring us into this world. And on this we ought to congratulate them posthumously, because most of their peers didn’t even manage that.
    “Don’t cry.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Please, what is it?” (with your brooding, almost injured face and your immediate impulse to hold me against your chest, to stroke my hair, to shush).
    “It’s okay. It’s over now, I’m sorry.” Let’s go on. To the 1960s chignons and nylon raincoats, to the things that already pop up in our own childhood memories, things that are no longer photographic but fully corporeal, with a feel and a smell: I remember how loudly one of these raincoats rustled when we hid under it in the wardrobe. And, oh, I had a toy bunny just like that, in short pants and a lace ruff! I just can’t remember what it did when you wound it up. Beat on its drum?
    Looks like I’m still playing the little girl’s role; and you’ve got the adult part this time: You are the ambassador for all your dead.You do look like you’ve grown older just in the time spent with them, grown out of the lankiness, the floppy-eared-ness of that loose-limbed boy who walked as if scooping up some extra space, and whom I followed with my eyes from behind my window, until he disappeared around the corner, a thread unspooling, only the thread came out of myself—my own body—like a silkworm’s.
    Sometimes I am overcome by an almost maternal pride—as if I were the one who brought you into this world, so well put-together, with such relaxed grace in every gesture. The previous generation of “exemplary boys”—those Soviet ones who were destined to be “pioneers,” “Komsomol men,” and then “Communists” (and turned out exactly so)—moved differently, more stiffly, with the implacable military uniformity of the future pyzhyk hat wearers, still so easy to spot in any international airport that one doesn’t have to think twice about coming right up and chatting with them in Russian. And perhaps that’s why I couldn’t ever stand them—those exemplary ones—and why I—the straight-A student with big bows in her hair—gravitated inexorably to the punks, although, of course, you are no punk, and there is no one to whom you could be compared—there were no such boys in the days of my youth; they hadn’t been bred yet. This must be whence my fits of maternal pride, this feeling never known with any man before. Not the “look what I’ve got” feeling on those mornings when I wake up first and, pulling back the