Read Online The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko - Free Book Online Page A

and gobbled them down, raw. To get bread—the blessed, salvific bread—both his Odessa and his mom’s Poltava communities outfitted expeditions to Western Ukraine (“in Western,” Uncle Volodya stubbornly kept saying, as if this illiterate patch on his generally very proper, for someone from Odessa, Ukrainian was inseparable from the events of the past and had to remain uncorrected; “in Western” was his, and “to Western Ukraine” belonged to a different generation). These hunting parties stuffed themselves, like sardines in a tin, into the deranged freight train #500-J that chugged from one station to the next with no order or timetable. Its ghoulish nickname was 500-Joy because it was liable to stop without warning somewhere in the middle of a field and stay there for five hours, or five minutes, and start again just as suddenly, leaving behind a shedding of the unlucky ones who jumped off to relieve themselves. So they learned not to look for cover, and just rolled off the train’s platforms and roofs—head over heels, men and women—all in a rush to bare their behinds with a single feverish thought: to make it, and to claw back into one’s spot before someone else had taken it. This constant fear of losing the spot was branded in Uncle Volodya’s memory, and his spot on that train must’ve been especially hard to win—a starved teenager shoving and elbowing grown men—but I was captivated by the vision of that sexless orgy of the hurried mass expulsion of bodily fluids and solids along the train, the ease with which people could be transformed into a herd.
    Those treks after bread were no safer than the ones undertaken in the name of breadwinning today—migrations after work, to Western
er
Europe, the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe, aboard a sooty Icarus across Poland and Slovakia, where every clump of trees might conceal an eager Russian gang, quick to block the road with their Kalashnikovs aimed at the bus. Uncle Volodya, who made the rooftop journey on the 500-Joy in the spring of 1947,remembered a flashlight blinding him in the middle of the night and the icy needle of steel against his throat. “Got money, boy?”
    Incredibly, he thought to fold back both sides of his threadbare jacket exposing its empty inside pockets and to squeal the first thing that came to mind, “Going to my brother’s,” and they left him alone, didn’t frisk him; though he did have money—carefully sewn by his mother into his boxer shorts—he could not say the same about a brother. (What he must’ve had was a dream, a boy’s secret dream, an orphan’s dream of a brother, an older one for sure, who would come back from the front, beat down every offender, would protect and defend—and the dream did protect him.) In their eyes—the eyes of dirty, famished people who hurriedly washed the railroad embankments with steaming urine—the then newly annexed Galicia—in its eighth year of being whipped, along and across, by frontlines and now a guerilla war—still retained the glow of “Europe,” an oasis of unimaginable luxuries. It beckoned much as the new, Schengen Europe beckons today’s Ukrainian migrant workers—and to those who were lucky enough to make it, it bestowed generously of its riches: a sack of dried biscuits for some, two bags of buckwheat and a bag of dried peas for others, and for the luckiest ones—a packed, shaken-down, and leveled sack of flour. Mom’s older sister, Lyusya, may she rest in peace, managed somehow to carry precisely such a marvel on her back all the way back, with a change of trains in Zdolbuniv, and that’s how 1947 did not become, despite the Ukrainian plans of the mustachioed Generalissimo, a conclusive repeat of 1933, so the UIA can be credited with winning at least
this
war, one that’s not mentioned in a single history textbook. Not a single food-rationing crew in the late forties would risk going into a Western Ukrainian village to “shake down grain”; if it