The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (99 page)

It is growing dark, the apartments’ windows light up one by one, and the girl can barely see what she’s got in front of her: in
a hole dug into the ground (it rained the day before, the earth is moist and sticky, and easy to dig with a toy plastic scoop someone left behind in the sandbox); in a white frame made of apple-tree blossoms barely visible in the dark, a piece of silver foil, spread flat, catches what little light is left. What she is to do next, the girl doesn’t know. And she doesn’t have anyone she could ask, either. But she remembers her mother doing it, like this. She remembers, from when she was very little, that this is how her mother used to begin. The paintings came later.

Somewhere above, a window clatters open—the sound sends a pack of crows tumbling out of a nearby chestnut tree where they had already settled for the night.

“Ka-tya! Kat-ru-sya!” a woman’s voice calls, echoing over the yard.

The girl startles, shielding the little hole she’s dug up. Then she looks back at the building (in the lemony-green patch of open sky between roofs, an inaudible shadow glides by: a bat).

“Coming, Gran!”

Glass! This shard, right here. To cover the hole. And then you bury it, and stamp the dirt flat, smooth it over with the scoop so that no trace remains: no one must see what she was making here; God forbid, someone should find out.... Not now. Not ever.

The girl stands up and dusts the dirt off her knees.

T
his book was conceived in the fall of 1999 and begun in the spring of 2002; over the next seven years, the book and I grew and developed together guided by the will of the truth that lay hidden in this story and that I, exactly like Daryna and Adrian in the novel, had to “dig up.” This is why the traditional legal formula of the publishing world whereby “all characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or events are purely coincidental” does not fit: Only the characters in this book are purely fictitious. Everything that happens to them has actually happened to various people at different points in time. And could still happen. This, actually, is what we call reality.

Reconstructing the wartime and postwar events—the ones that are reflected in Adrian’s dreams—was the most difficult and crucial task. Ukrainian, as well as European, literature is yet to develop a more or less satisfactory, adequate, and coherent narrative from that period; one is hard-pressed to find another time in the history of the twentieth century that has been buried under such veritable Himalayas of mental rubbish, packed over the last sixty years almost into concrete—the layers upon layers of lies, half-lies, innuendo, falsifications, and so on. Historical excavations of this period have begun only in the first decade of the new millennium, and in the course of working on
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
, I was often delighted to receive another new message from fellow “expeditionists” spread all over Europe, from the British Islands to Ukraine, groups that, coming from different angles (different traditions, fields, and genres), have set to clearing
up this logjam, Europe’s largest and most difficult—the so-called “truth of the Eastern Front.”

As I read, on the plane, Norman Davies’s
Europe at War
, which I bought at Heathrow; watched Andrzej Wajda’s
Katyn
, Edvins Snore’s
The Soviet Story
, Ihor Kobryn’s
Unity on Blood
(the first systematic attempt at presenting the thirty-year-long Ukrainian catastrophe of the twentieth century); as I encountered for the first time the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin, published finally in 2007 after decades of “underground” existence, and those of a nameless woman in 1945 Berlin (
Eine Frau in Berlin
), and dozens upon dozens of new books finally giving voice to those whose truth had never been heard, I experienced every time something akin to the thrill of a volunteer who, as she works over an earthquake site, hears the same methodical chipping of pickax against rock all around her. The more of us who are here, the faster the rubble will be cleared—and the less poison from the bodies of those crushed underneath will seep into new generations.

When I began working on
The Museum
, purely Ukrainian publications that could provide the basis for clothing the skeleton of Gela Dovgan and Adrian Ortynsky’s story were few and far between. The main documentary source I relied upon was the so-called oral history—the one preserved by being told. Thus, my first and deepest thanks are to the veterans—the witnesses and heroes of the tragedy that was the 1940s, who agreed to meet with me and be interviewed; each to his or her own degree has given pieces of their own lives to my characters. Some of these people are no longer with us, and I am deeply grateful for having had the chance to know them. Without them, this book could never have been written:

Bohdan and Daria Gablevych, Lyuba Komar-Prokop, and Ivan Shtul’ re-created for me Lviv in the time of the Nazi occupation and the Ukrainian underground of the time; Oleksiy Zeleniuk (Pastor) and Romana Simkiv (Roma) gave me a tour of the resistance field hospitals; Vasyl Kuk (Lemish), Marichka Savchyn (Marichka), and Ivan Kryvutskyi (Arkadij) filled in dozens of gaps
in the historical landscape. Irena Savytska-Kozak’s (Bystra) help was nothing but priceless—it was precisely the three days I spent recording our conversations in her welcoming Munich home that finally “decided” Gela’s fate; so was the assistance of Orest-Metodiy Dychkovsky (Kryvonis), with whom I consulted about the combat operations in “Adrian’s Last Dream” (his analysis of that chapter is one of the greatest authorial joys of my life).

Archives were the other important source of historical information. As fatally disorganized as the Ukrainian archives are, they remain, for a writer, a gold mine of vintage details—things you could never make up on your own. My deepest thanks to Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of the SBU State Archive; the indefatigable “guardian” of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US collection in New York, Oksana RadyshMiyakovska; the staff of the National Museum of History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 (Kyiv); the Liberation Struggle of Prykarpattya Museum (Ivano-Frankivsk); and the library of the Lviv Academic Gymnasium, in affiliation with the Lviv Polytechnic National University (Lviv). I also thank my permanent field-expert consultants: Oleksandr Bondarchuk in physics, Dmytro Finkelstein in mathematics, Yevgen Karas’ in the antique trade, and Bohdan Yuzvyshyn in forensics. A separate thanks to Vasyl’ Ivanovych (Ivano-Frankivsk) for the gift of a field trip to the bunker “Groma” and the hideout “Boyeslava” when I needed the wintertime locations for Room 6. And, finally, I owe special gratitude to my first readers and critics, who supported me over the entire distance, and without whom it may not have been conquered at all—Rostyslav Luzhetsky and Leonid and Tetyana Plyushch.

In the course of working on
The Museum
, I wrote another book,
Notre Dame d’Ukraine
, which took more than two years; a variety of small routine projects took up, altogether, almost another entire year; and if it were not for writers’ residencies which kindly accommodated me (God bless them!) I would probably still be working on
The Museum
now. Here is the list of the places where almost two-thirds of the novel was written—I owe each
individual recognition: Ledig House (Omi, NY), Cerrini-Schloessl (Graz, Austria), Villa dei Pini (Boglasco, Italy), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (Germany), Literaturhaus Krems (Austria), Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Visby, Sweden), Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Villa Sträuli (Winterthur, Switzerland), Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen (Germany), and Villa Decius (Krakow, Poland).

I would like to give special thanks to the Baltic Center’s director, Lena Pasternak, who found a room for me every time I, gone off the schedule again, called her with a desperate cry for help, and Ilke Froyen from Het Beschrijf in Brussels, to whose attention and understanding I owe my rescue in the eleventh hour of my novelistic odyssey (when there were already production deadlines I was about to miss). My heartfelt thanks also goes to my agent, Galina Dursthoff, who through all these years did everything possible to ensure I could work without disruption.

And finally I thank everyone who has patiently waited for this book, whether I’ve met you or not: you have also helped me write it.

F
or those who need a bit of extra help navigating the historical context of the novel’s episodes from 1943 to 2004, and after reading
The Museum
would like to expand their knowledge, I am providing here a list of widely available books (not archival materials or government publications intended for very small expert audiences) that I have found helpful.

Alekseeva, Liudmila.
Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR: noveishii period.
Vilnius, Moscow: Vest’, 1992.

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.
The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West.
London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Andrusyak, Mykhailo.
Braty hromu.
Kolomyia: Vydavnychopolihrafichne tovarystvo ‘Vik’, 2001.

Blan, Elen.
Rodom iz KGB: sistema putina.
Kyiv: Tempora, 2009.

Davies, Norman.
Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory
. London: Macmillan, 2006.

Eco, Umberto.
Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism.
Translated by Alastair McEwen. Orlando: Vintage, 2008.

Kosyk, Volodymyr.
The Third Reich and Ukraine.
New York: P. Lang, 1993.

Lanckoronska, Karolina.
Wspomnienia wojenne
. Krakow: Znak, 2002.

Nakonechnyi, Ievhen.
‘Shoa’ u L’vovi.
Lviv: Piramida, 2006.

Onyshko, Lesia.
Kateryna Zarytska: molytva do syna.
Lviv: Svit, 2002.

Poliuha, Liubomyr.
Shliakhamy spohadiv, 1944–1956.
Lviv: Piramida, 2003.

Pliushch, Leonyd.
History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s Autobiography.
New York: Harcourt, 1979.

Savchyn Pyskir, Maria.
Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II.
Translated by Tatyana Plyushch. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Sannikov, Georgij.
Bol’saa ohota: razgrom vooruzhennogo podpolia v Zapadnoj Ukraine.
Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002.

Shingariov, Vladimir.
Moskal’ i banderovtsy.
Full-length manuscript published on
Gulyai-Pole
, December 2009.
http://www.politua.su/moskalibanderovcy
.

Viatrovych, Volodymyr.
Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv: formuvannia pozytsii na tli katastrofy.
Lviv: Ms, 2006.

Photograph © Ivan Put, 2008

Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut in 1972, but her parents’ blacklisting during the Soviet purges prevented her first book from being published until the 1980s. She earned her PhD in philosophy from Kyiv Shevchenko University and has taught as a Fulbright Fellow and writer-in-residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages and have garnered numerous awards. Her novel
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex
was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the fifteen years of independence.” She lives today in Kyiv, where she works as a freelance writer.

Photograph © Nina Shevchuk-Murray

Nina Shevchuk-Murray was born and raised in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv and holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Lviv National University. In 2006, she completed her graduate work in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Since then, Nina has been working as a translator of Russian and Ukrainian literature. Her translations of Ukrainian poetry have appeared in
AGNI Online
and
Prairie Schooner
; she is a regular contributor to
Chtenia
, a quarterly journal of Russian literature. In 2010, she translated from Russian a novel by Peter Aleshkovsky,
Fish: A History of One Migration
.