VMOD-Film
Written by Daryna Goshchynska
EXT. CITY – NIGHT.
In the courtyard behind a city high-rise, on the playground, a girl sits—she’s squatting like a young child, but there’s already a frozen, unchildlike grace in her pose. The playground is empty: it’s getting dark; the little ones have all been taken home; the girl is already too old for the sandbox, but still too young to be part of the next shift, which will soon arrive with their glowing dots of cigarette tips in the dark, the strumming of their guitars, and the bursts of silly laughter or a girl’s squeal ripped from the hubbub, or the tink of rolling glass—the chaotic, Brownian splashes of puppy-like youthful sensuousness that will make a late passerby shy and hasten to reach his door.
Later still, in the short hours of night, when everything grows quiet, the couples will arrive, and some retiree, kept up by his insomnia and arthritis, will come out on his balcony for a smoke without turning on the lights, and will catch below a moon-glazed glimpse of flesh freed of clothes, a white stain—a breast, a hip—and will get angry because now he won’t be able to fall asleep until morning for sure. But all this will be later sometime—it’s all yet ahead for the girl who squats very still at the playground.
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.
AFTERWORD
This 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.