The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

my exquisite ears, the rest of me packaged into a leather vest and a white musketeer blouse from Bianco (thanks to the sponsors mentioned in the final credits), with black—and, by the way, seriously tight—jeans. All the cameramen love getting shots of me entering the set from afar, full-length and legs in the frame. You can tell I fixed what I was wearing that day in my memory, forever—that unmistakable sign of all momentous events in our lives—although at that moment, my TV-star getup was strapped on tight like a bulletproof vest, in full combat mode.
    What is it you imagine you want, kid? And who the hell are you anyway, for me to be “looking for” you?
    “I was told you’re looking to make a film about Olena Dovganivna.”
    Aha.
    “And you care because?”
    “That was my granny. My great-aunt, actually,” you added with a quick apologetic smile.
    He does have a sweet smile, I thought then; it lights his face like the sun breaking through the clouds, though his lips move only a little. Something at first made me classify him as one of the Russian-speaking, bracing myself for the forced, just-learned Ukrainian, tight as a new shoe, with foreign phonemes rubbed raw like blisters—“lookedd,” “toldd” (for Christ’s sake, unclench your teeth already!)—and the cringe-inducing hobbling through phrases as they translate them, word for word. It’s like watching a drunk try to stay upright. Our producer talks like that, very deliberately, “I think calls into the air (meaning on-air calls) must be cut short.” Or, “We are in need of a stronger show, with unique countenance.” Unique what? Oh, content, unique content. Even the young man’s purely Galician, “That was my granny,” didn’t prove anything since the linguistic neophytes eagerly borrowed the Galicians’ colorful words—folksy phrases and even the trademark lilting intonations—only to deploy them in most unnatural ways, believing all the while that this is exactly what one ought to sound like when one speaks pure and authentic Ukrainian, which, to be fair, they may never have heard spoken by anyone other than a Galician. And it’s not like Galicians can’t speak Russian either. As soon as they land in Kyiv, they switch and chirp merrily along, as if they were keeping Ukrainian for their own secret use, behind layers of mysterious rites and seals of conspiracy.
    Nor did it matter much that this boy introduced himself as the grandnephew of the Insurgent Army warrior, the woman who has gripped my imagination from the instant I saw her image on a faded archival shot—so radically different from her peasant-faced fellow insurgents, so neat and refined (“smart,” as the locals would say), even in her guerrilla uniform, the army-issue belt wrappedaround her small waist with such flawless style it wasn’t as if she had just climbed out of an underground lair but was simply dressed for a hunt across her family’s lands (you could almost imagine a riding crop in hand behind her back and her pack of purebred hounds just outside the frame, straining their leashes and whimpering with excitement).
    No, the boy’s ostensibly intimate—blood!—bond to her (admittedly, one could glimpse a resemblance in his lips, his eyes) was not, in itself, a recommendation. Our old gang (Where are they now?) remembers all too well how in the early nineties the great-grandson of the legendary nationalist Mykola Mikhnovsky introduced himself as “a thoroughly Russian person” at “democratic” haunts along Khreshchatyk—all those long-defunct “Dips” and “Culinary Cafés”—and could even be prompted to read Russian monarchist poems of his own composition, which no doubt made his ancestors spin in their graves like chicken on a spit. And we won’t even say anything about the descendants of the less-notorious historical personages. Ukrainian families changed faiths, languages, and national flags in practically every generation—sometimes faster than fashion, like addicts going through needles: a shot in the arm and toss this one out the window, grab a new one, and so on, for the entire span of our recorded history, beginning, most likely, with Kostyantyn Ostroz’ky who founded the Ostrog Academy to counter the Polish expansion only to see his granddaughter convert to Catholicism and deliver the Academy—lock, stock, and barrel—to the very Jesuits her granddaddy had spent his entire life fighting. This would appear to be our only