The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Since then, the sensation became my own, and every so often I feel its short mournful pang: I am standing at the top of the mountain and you are looking at me, and there’s nowhere for me to go if I wanted to leave.

  “You’ll work it all out,” you say, and your certainty sounds unshakeable.

  I only now figured out why I felt so ambushed by your Ukrainian when we first met: you move through life with too much confidence. You’re too calm and composed, as if you have not the slightest inkling that one could be otherwise. Among those of us over thirty, who grew up with the constant awareness of our Ukrainian-ness, such natural, unconstrained dignity is rare: composure like yours, even posture like yours, requires three to four generations of ancestors unfamiliar with any kind of internalized social humiliation—not something possible yet in post-twentieth-century Ukraine.

  Give me your hand. So hot.

  You have wonderful hands; the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen on a man—strong, finely sculpted, with long, well-bred fingers. Why am I not Rodin, or at least someone in marketing? I’d put your hand on a woman’s knee and hold the shot. Buy Hanes hosiery. This must be the limit of my imagination, the best I can do—commercials.

  Don’t let me go, you hear me? I know nothing—I don’t even know if this is what people call love, or if I’m possessed again by someone else’s will. Sometimes I think I am. I don’t know what to want from the future and whether we even have a future. I don’t know anything. Just hold me, okay? Don’t let me go. Just like this.

  Room 2. From the Cycle Secrets: Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident

  Daryna Goshchynska’s Interview with Vladyslava Matusevych

  [The scene is picture perfect, as intended: Two women, a blonde and a brunette, are sitting at a café table in the Passage on Khreshchatyk. Both are stylishly dressed and well groomed, both sport bare tan shoulders. It’s the end of August, when everyone returns from summer vacations. In the background, a waiter appears every so often, dressed in a white jacket and wearing the mysterious smile of unspoken understanding that is the trademark of all Kyiv waiters and the reason they all look like low-rank Hindu deities, while the truth is that few of them really know what they’re doing and most are deathly afraid of running into an unusual client—say, someone accompanied by a TV camera that’s currently installed between the tables. One notices the lovely play of light as it filters through the blonde woman’s hair, making it golden and translucent; in fact, it is darker than it appears but streaked with highlights the shade of ripe wheat to give her pale face, with its masculine cleft chin and small birdlike features, a brighter frame, without which it would certainly disappear in a crowd, despite her wide-set eyes. The colors have been chosen perfectly, and no wonder—she’s a painter. In the foreground, more colors contrast with the white of the tablecloth: a glass of dark-ruby wine, a voluminous tankard of Obolon lager with its bridal-veil cap of froth, an ornate pack of Eve Slims—the white-jacketed deity brings an ashtray as big as a soup bowl, but it’s black, better to move it out of the shot, take it off the table altogether, it draws the eye too much.] “Does anyone mind? Okay, this looks good; let’s roll.”

  “Vladyslava, we’ve known each other long enough that I can address you in informal terms even in front of the camera—and take great pride in that.” [Both laugh the conspiratorial laugh of women who take pride in their age and are connected by something utterly inaccessible to men, which always inspires a vague unease in the latter.] “First of all, let me congratulate you on your remarkable accomplishment, especially uncommon for a Ukrainian artist—the Nestlé Art Foundation Award for your solo show in, correct me if I’m wrong, Zurich?”

  “Zurich, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne,” lists the blonde. [She has the businesslike intonation of someone long and well used to remarkable accomplishments.]

  “You must forgive me; you know what it’s like for Ukrainian journalists: any foreign cultural coverage comes to us secondhand.”

  “If not third,” the blonde interjects.

  “Exactly!” the interviewer agrees. [She’s a little too eager, and both women laugh again, this time with a tinge of unanimous menace that suggests a history of shared grudges against various things national.] “There’s nothing we can do about that, so you have to tell your story yourself if you want motherland to be informed.”

  “Remember the old Soviet joke,” the blonde says. [She leans over the table, so that her whole upper body faces her interviewer, and she resembles a cat about to leap into a tree. Now the cameraman can appreciate the resolve of her small, sharply featured face with its cleft chin, and he zooms in for a close-up.] “Why is there no meat in the stores?” [The reporter raises her eyebrows in exaggerated curiosity, bursting with a barely contained giggle.] “Because we’re making leaps and bounds toward Communism, and the cattle can’t keep up. It’s the same with artists who gain international recognition—the country can’t keep up.”

  “And not just artists,” the reporter agrees, after she stops chuckling. “The same is true for our scientists who get hired into Western universities when their ideas don’t interest anyone at home, and for our intellectuals who follow grant money abroad because they’ve got nothing here. The country’s best minds are leaving in droves, and I’m afraid if this goes on at the same rate for another ten or fifteen years, we’ll all be running around on all fours by then. Still, Vlada, you and I are optimists, aren’t we?”

  [The blonde narrows her eyes skeptically, taking aim at the next statement, which will determine whether she will, in fact, remain an optimist. This causes tiny creases to shoot across her temples, and for an instant, her face gains the heartbreaking sculpted perfection that will become fully hers in a few more years—the perfection of character manifest, which makes some women more striking in middle age than they ever were in youth—another two, three years and the blonde, if she remains a blonde will grow into her own and become perfectly, dramatically beautiful.]

  “So what if the recognition you’ve achieved in the West today translates into little more than envy at home? Objectively,” [The brunette’s poppy-red, Guerlain-lipstick-stained mouth enunciates the last word with a sexy air-kiss, draws it out as if in bold italics—she is addressing an imaginary TV audience, not just her friend.] “you still work for the benefit of this nation, even when it can’t, as you put it, keep up, and in particular, loses track of its own rapidly changing ideas of itself which, to me, is an important issue.” [The blonde murmurs something affirmative; she must find the didacticism boring.] “Ukrainians are known to suffer from chronically low self-esteem, so every time one of ‘us’ is recognized by ‘them,’ it’s salve for our long-cherished national wounds. So, let’s talk about this thing, your show. First, could you explain the title, Secrets?”

  “Well, the whole idea grew out of a game we played as kids: remember, back when we were little, in the sixties and seventies, all girls made ‘secrets’?”

  “Of course I do! And here’s something—only girls did, no boys allowed, right?”

  “Nope, strictly no boys, not even friends, I remember that.” [The blonde pushes away a strand of hair that’s fallen into her face and with it, it seems, thirty years worth of memories.] “I had a friend like that; we played house. I was Mom; he was Dad, but even he was not privy to secrets…”

  “Not to change the subject, but I’d like to ask—when you were little, did you play more with boys or with girls? Because there’s this theory that all socially successful women are products of what’s called masculine socialization, meaning they were raised more like boys.”

  “I don’t know…. No, I wouldn’t say so. No, we girls played like we were supposed to, dolls, clothes for them—I was the prime seamstress in our yard, I liked that a lot…. No, I think something else is important.” [She thrusts up her chin resolutely; her eyes flash, cat-like, and change color: a minute ago, as she was searching her memory, they were infant-like, watery-gray, but now, powered by a ful
ly formed, ready-to-roll idea, they oscillate with a piercing steel-blue current—the cameraman must be in heaven. It’s not often that you find a face as expressive as this one, whose surface, like clear water, shimmers with light reflected off every motion beneath.] “You know what really made a difference? Being a Daddy’s girl. Dad was the key figure for me. He was the one who taught me to draw, you know, then took me to art school every morning; his word was law for me, for a very long time. I still consider him a much-underappreciated artist; some of his pieces are terribly interesting, especially his non-figurative works, but you know what the official take on abstraction was in Soviet times. Actually, this is insanely interesting when you think about it—I think you’re onto something here, with what makes women successful. All the girls I know, the ones who got somewhere, they’re all Daddy’s girls, and you are, too, aren’t you, Dar?” [The brunette nods silently.] “ You can find this even in folktales: it’s always the wife’s daughter, Mommy’s girl, who loses out, and the man’s daughter brings home a treasure—ostensibly because she works hard and the other girl is lazy, but what if the wife’s daughter just doesn’t know any better? Hasn’t been properly socialized, you know? She’s got no clue how to behave among strangers, what to do to gain their confidence, how to work behind the scenes toward her goals—she just blurts it all out, like to that sorceress…”

  “The Snake Queen,” prompts the brunette.

  “Yep, the Snake Queen. The chick turns up in the palace and rattles off her list of wants, as if to her own mommy. She’s like a domestic savage, isn’t she? It’s like, for generations our women didn’t have the skills to teach their girls how to behave outside the home—you needed a man for such advanced politics.” [Forgetting herself, the painter bites her nails in concentration, but realizes what she’s doing and stops; her hand, in contrast to her petite figure, is substantial and strong, with a wide palm and unmanicured nails—an expressive hand, an honest craftsman hand. The nail-biting will get cut when the footage is edited.]

  “And if we consider,” picks up the interviewer, [She works the idea like a thread, smoothing it out, reeling it around the spool.] “that the nineties gave us our first, for all intents and purposes, generation of single mothers, a generation of women who were no longer…” [She rounds her mouth again and leans into the word as if pushing against a locked door.] “afraid of raising a child by themselves, what kind of future, do you think, will their—our—daughters experience? Will you be able to ensure that your Katrusya is properly socialized? Enough so,” [A professional half-smile, caught in the corners of her mouth, puts the next phrase in invisible quotes.] “that she won’t lose her bearings in front of any snake queens?”

  “I think so,” the painter answers after a moment’s hesitation, firmly and without a smile. [It is clear that this was the question she was trying to answer earlier with her fairytale ideas.] “I very much hope so.”

  “Back to secrets—does Katrusya make them, like we did?”

  “Are you kidding?” [The painter waves the reporter off, and laughs, with the shy pride of a parent outrun by her child.] “Kids only play computer games now. And, I must add, I think they do get worn out by being constantly bombarded with visual information—it’s like there’s this chromatic noise around them, all the time. Think of the world we grew up in—how much grayer it was…”

  “Oh, yeah.” [The reporter groans from outside the frame.]

  “How hungry we were for color. Remember our collecting craze—and for what? Colorful candy wrappers—the brighter the rarer!”

  “And the more precious,” adds the journalist [with full professional competence, intent on getting all the facts straight]. “I remember how I envied a girl next door, whose father was one of the few people who got sent abroad every so often and brought her foreign candy—she had the most extravagant collection on our block; you didn’t know what to look at first.”

  “Sure, I have stories like that too. And now, think how you made a secret. First you dug a little hole in the ground and lined it with something shiny, like a foil wrapper from a chocolate bar—and actually, such glimmering backgrounds that provide a deeper perspective are common for folk-art icons, the late ones, from the end of the nineteenth century, when they were being made by factory co-ops. You can still find some out in the country.”

  “I never thought of that,” the reporter perks up. [She is like a bird dog that caught a whiff of game.] “But I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising: children’s games always retain rudiments of a vanished adult culture. Did you read this somewhere, or is this something that just occurred to you?”

  “Give me a break, Daryna, where would I read this? We’re still waiting for a complete history of the Ukrainian icon and you want someone to take on little girls and their tchotchkes? But wait, the similarities don’t end there. So you have this shiny silver or gold background, and you lay out your design—with leaves, pebbles, whatever junk you could find, as long as it’s brightly colored: Candy wrappers, pieces of glass, beads, buttons—there were lots of fun buttons back then, everyone sewed, knitted, crocheted, you had to be crafty. You could add flowers—marigolds, phlox, daisies—usually to make a kind of a decorative frame, a border, which is also a common practice in Ukrainian folk art. So you had a little collage piece of sorts, whatever struck your fancy, and then you took a bigger piece of glass, like the bottom of a bottle—remember that those factory-made icons also came framed and under glass—and set it on top of the hole and buried everything again. Then, when you came back later and brushed the dirt off that spot, you’d see a tiny magical window into the ground, like a peephole into Aladdin’s cave.”

  [The interviewer, who has been enthusiastically nodding like an A+ student at a favorite professor’s lecture, opens her poppy-red mouth to offer a suitably insightful comment, but the painter continues to talk, sending the reporter into another fit of vigorously affirmative miming.]

  “Of course, this cannot be considered a purely artistic activity, nothing like when children draw or make up verses just because they can.”

  “That’s it,” mumbles the interviewer, “that’s what I wanted to…”

  “A secret’s main purpose was not to be beautiful but to be something that no one, except its creators, had the right to see. When you made one, with another friend or two, you couldn’t even brag to anyone else about how pretty it was; it was to be strictly private. The next day you’d come to the same spot—which you’d have marked with a broken branch or a rock—and check if your secret was intact. This was a ritual of the girly friendship, a sisterhood rite, something like that.”

  “I remember how much drama there was around the thing.” [The journalist finally interrupts, her voice ringing dreamily with elegiac notes. She shakes her head in amazement as if she is just now appreciating the scale of a past disaster she’s survived by sheer luck.] “‘Gal’ka showed our secret to Darka!’ and for the next three days everyone’s miffed and tiffed, and it’s such a betrayal that no one speaks to anyone.”

  “And the worrying,” continues the painter [with a sentimental gleam in her eyes], “when someone had come and moved the rock that marked the spot! A pack of little girls becomes wildly preoccupied: counting steps and trying to figure out if some trespasser really went after their secret.”

  “And if, God forbid, someone did dig it up—well, that was a mystery better than on TV!” [Both women laugh a moist feminine laugh, low and deeply felt, as if they’d forgotten why they’d come together in front of the camera.]

  [Two ladies in full bloom, well-kept, Mediterranean-tanned, and boutique-dressed (Morgan and Laura Ashley tops, silk Versace scarves, and Armani skirts, nothing showy, heavens no—not a speck of conspicuous consumption, none of the Moscow-edition Cosmopolitan brand of fashion that makes one look like an expensive whore—just pure class and apparent simplicity, the understated style of working women who know their worth and don’t need to advertise anything) with instantly younger, clearer
faces and that radiant reticence in their eyes, the inwardness that women can preserve even when their souls find the most intimate concord, so that they resemble two young mothers adoring their offspring—as if watching, from the distance of many years, their children rather than themselves, or, even more than that, two suddenly ageless friends who just entered a pact over a secret, enacting an unspoken rite of sisterhood to which boys are not privy. This gives the boys at the scene—the director and the cameraman—an instant and suspiciously unanimous urge to take a break, smoke a cigarette, change the tape, do something to turn down the heat and announce their existence, to restore order to the world—as one does at home when one’s wife is too engrossed in a phone conversation with a friend, and one feels the need to let the wife know, in sign language, that she’s not the only one who gets to use the phone or, more desperately, by letting a plate crash to the kitchen floor. Take a break, girls, take a break.

  After the break, which, like it or not, does drain some of the passion from the women’s inopportune lyrical exaltation, the interviewer—like a trotter that broke stride, loped off, and had to be brought back into the race—regains form, returns to her businesslike tone, and unleashes a compensatory flood of erudition to make up for lost ground, like the straight-A student suspected of not having done her homework (although no teachers are found in the picture) and determined to restore her sterling reputation.]

  “Vladyslava, what you said makes me re-evaluate the European reception of your show Secrets—and we remind our viewers that, before coming to Switzerland, the show was mounted in Germany, at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, as well as at a private gallery in Copenhagen… more on that later…. I’ve read the reviews in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and I was surprised to find that the writers hailed, as they put it, your ‘innovative use of Byzantine icon-painting techniques,’ as if it were the most remarkable thing about your work. I’m no art historian, of course, but I know enough to know that any really innovative uses of icon-painting techniques ended with Boychuk—when he and his students were executed and their works destroyed—and it’s difficult to classify you as a new-Boychukist. Your works can be said to trace their origins to Dubuffet, with whom you’ve also been compared, but your collages on silver and gold, in my opinion, are more interesting.”