The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  It seemed, then, that Vlada, as countryfolk say, found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was caught on the track laid by earlier deaths precisely at a time when her own life juices were sucked almost dry—she did have a very hard year, but what do I really know about that? What does Vadym really know about that, despite being territorially, at least, the closest person to her? How stunned he was—with a brief flash of a childlike delight, as if at a message relayed from her from a distant land, a sign of a persisting connection—when I told him about Vlada’s midnight terror of dying if she fell asleep. “You must be kidding?” Was it because he would’ve ignored it, would’ve told her to take some pills—so you’re stressed out, no big deal—or because she didn’t share with him anything he might have indulgently interpreted as silliness? After all, Vadym belonged to the class of people who were used to dealing with Problems That Had to Be Solved and not with Misfortunes That Had to Be Endured, and this, as they say in Odessa, is a big difference. It is the demarcation line that divides us into the strong and the weak of the world, and the reason why it is the strong who, at the end of the day, are the least equipped to deal with tragedy and therefore collapse dramatically when one befalls them: Vadym coped by drinking himself into a mute stupor and then climbing into his Land Cruiser and driving off into the night, toward Boryspil, as if he hoped to see Vlada somewhere along the way, so he had to be watched and fought nightly into bed, first by his friends, and later by some provincial relatives summoned to Kyiv for this purpose; but, for reasons that defy understanding, nothing ever happened to him on these nocturnal sojourns, except the money he lost paying the traffic cops, or, rather, whatever US dollar bills he grabbed and blindly thrust at them when they stopped him. What followed usually depended on the cops’ benevolence: one time they towed him to their station and kept him there for the night, pouring him strong tea from their thermoses and calling every single number in his address book until they roused a friend to come take him home—the ticket must have been especially impressive that night, or maybe he just ran into some really kind cops (Why not? Things happen.), some good folks who listened to him pour his soul out and tell them, over and over, how his Vlada perished, until he fell asleep on a cot, or they finally knocked him out, instantly and professionally, and who would blame them if they did?

  It had never occurred to me before that, of the two of them, Vlada was the stronger one. The ancient mythical notion (branded into me since infancy by my mother) that the husband—the Man!—unless he was in jail or in hospital, must be “the leader” and “take care of everything” was apparently more persistent than I had suspected, outliving hell, high water, a ruined marriage, and a broken (multiple times) heart, providing the dusty peephole through which I viewed (without really seeing much) Vlada’s marriage as a fulfillment of our poor mothers’ ideal: here—finally!—a strongman shielding you from all worldly mishaps with his mighty shoulders, both physical and financial; all you have to do is bloom, look pretty, and pursue spiritual improvement, without a care in the world, other than scheduling your interviews on national TV. The funniest thing is that women like that still existed in our mothers’ generation: the ladies who stayed home, cooked borsches, studied esoteric literature, patronized persecuted and unrecognized artists, occasionally penned or crafted something, and were held in high regard as impressive activists by their communities; but the fact that some humble hardworking husbands bankrolled all their activism—their artists, their books, and whatever went into their borsches, too—was never mentioned in polite society, just like it wasn’t proper to point out that a person has to piss and shit; the knack these ladies had for arranging their lives so comfortably belongs to the ancient feminine arts that were irretrievably lost by the end of the twentieth century, like weaving on an upright loom or treating hives with herb smoke. By the time we came around, the ladies were in their decline, widowed—their humble hardworking husbands, naturally, having all died first—we found them not grandmotherly even, but as a tribe of mothballed ancient girls who didn’t know how to go out alone or where the phone and electricity bills were; they responded to an innocent “How are you?” with a two-hour-long lecture on their existential condition, and generally seemed slightly batty, an impression that could not be alleviated even by the glow of their former glory and that was made all the stronger by how laughable they were, which, in turn, cast retroactive doubt on that much-publicized glory, the times that made it possible, and the incredible persistence of the ideals they embodied.

  Only when Vadym collapsed without Vlada, like a sack dropped in the middle of the room, did I see how things really were between the two of them—but it didn’t make me feel any better. I remembered her the way she was when she first fell in love with him—it seemed like yesterday, but no, ’tis twice two years, my lord—how suddenly charming she was, as if her face, posture, and gestures were lit with a soft low light, and the lumbering Vadym melted in her presence like butter in the sun, clearly not having eyes for much of anything else, and it was all so darn nice that often, after I’d said goodbye and was alone, I’d catch myself still smiling and feel silly, like I had jam on my chin and no one told me. True love always becomes a source of warmth for the people around it, a small hearth, and I was also happy for Vlada in a purely woman’s way—happy that she got so lucky, and juiced, like on an essential vitamin, on the fact that her new affair, no less intense at thirty-eight than it would’ve been at eighteen, showed me, just as Vlada did back in 1990, during the student hunger strike, that, no matter our age, the possibilities continued to be endless, the future was open and would remain so for the rest of our lives—that it would forever beckon like a gate through which one glimpsed the misty-gold horizon.

  No one could give me this feeling like she did, except men, for a very short time during the same period of being acutely in love—before the gates slowly screeched closed again. Where could a feeling like this come from in this eternally despoiled country that still lives according to the kolkhoz-era dictum, that one exhausts one’s entire stock of possibilities when young, and once that’s done, all one has left to do is live through one’s children? Something in me always revolted violently against this massively psychotic urge to hurry up and settle, make a tight nest out of life and curl up in it as if for a good night’s sleep; it must have been the memory of mom’s swift and sudden descent, after she got married for the second time, into a stolid, shapeless, middle-aged womanhood—so radical for the woman who, with Dad, remained trim and elegant, even through the worst of times, someone men turned to look at in the street. Being a clueless teenager at the time, I promptly blamed her transformation on my stepfather: Uncle Volodya may have be a hero and a saint in his surgery, and I didn’t doubt my mom’s assertion that he went above and beyond to make Father’s last months tolerable—although I doubted that it was necessary to extend her gratitude all the way to marrying the man—but, at home, this knight of scalpel and catgut lived like an absolute slob in old bubble-kneed sweatpants, that inescapable domestic uniform of Soviet men. He shocked me with hospital jokes that came in just above barracks humor on the idiocy scale—he’d say to someone on the phone, “Cunt you slick up?” and that was supposed to be funny. And he was acutely disgusting in every bodily function: he could be shaving in the bathroom with the door open and break wind like he was blowing out rusty valves, could keep on talking loudly from the bathroom over the unmistakable sound of his indomitable peeing, made me blush at the dinner table with his comments about the laxative or constipating properties of the meal; he approached eating very seriously, loved “grub,” and after a meal of rabbit stew at a friends’ house, while picking his teeth, would offer the insightful eulogy of “Yeah, this rabbit did not die for naught”—and everyone laughed, and Mom laughed, and didn’t even look awkward! After my sophomore year, after I took my very first camping trip, with guitars, fires, and sex on a windbreaker spread on the ground as an excuse to hightail it from a home ruled by this,
as I dubbed him, “Odessa louse” into a marriage, I still hung on to my belligerent belief that it was he who pulled the plug on Mom; he cut the power, turned off the lights, dragged her down, and debased her to the endless, pointless culinary clucking, “Darynka, dear, I’ve canned some tomatoes for you and a couple of jars of eggplant, and the jam didn’t come out right, must’ve overcooked it, I’ll try again while the strawberries are in…”—she, who wrote poems when she was young, good ones!

  I earnestly believed she was the innocent victim who could no longer be rescued, and that belief hurled me into my own life as if riding a rocket-powered broomstick, armed with the determination not to let anyone, ever drag me down; every hint of settling down threatened to do precisely that, tied my hands and loaded rocks into my shoes, and I needed more than one year, and a whole bunch of bumps and bruises, to come to the realization that a woman is never a victim in cases like Mom’s, even when that’s what she wants you to believe—that my mother, after she settled down, thank goodness, so solidly and conclusively, had nothing more to look forward to, except Uncle Volodya coming home to dinner, and must have pulled the plug, without much regret, herself—she had no use for it anymore.

  All my peers were wired, more or less, for the same purpose: to settle down, soon and forever, as if someone were chasing after them and their lives depended on jumping into a bunker and sealing the doors—all except Vlada. She alone lived without the least concern for what her environment and upbringing dictated—and they dictated a comfortable bunker, and a father for Katrusya, because how could the child grow up without a father, and family friendships, and group vacations that could later be talked about on social occasions, and so on and so forth; an entire carefully knotted net that, by virtue of its own gravity, shapes your life without your participation, and it is only after the net is filled and the life’s minimum passing score is achieved that a woman can allow herself to let her hair down a little—have a solo show of her paintings in a trendy gallery, say, with the requisite presentation of a custom-suited husband who gallantly refills ladies’ drinks at the reception. Vlada, however, behaved as if she’d gone to a different school where they didn’t cover such things: She came and went mercurially, as she pleased, with whomever she pleased and where she pleased, looked fantastic doing so, and painted better and better, so that people began to feel intimidated, especially after she came into money, and it got harder to wave her off, dismissively—“Who, Matusevych? Give me a break! You call that a genius?”—because money, no matter how you slice it, has a way of validating its owner’s way of doing things.

  For some reason, people had the hardest time recognizing the obvious: Vlada was born with the gift of inner freedom that usually comes packaged with talent and without which talent has no prayer—without it, you’ll waste yourself chasing applause—and this surplus freedom, like a topped-off tank of gas, let her rev through any external rules that were put in her way without a second thought; Vadym, once he entered her life, could get into the backseat or could man the pit stops and time her laps, but she never thought of their union as settling down, and was irked when her girlfriends insisted on implying precisely the opposite when they congratulated her on, among other things, making such a rich catch—“I’m no pauper myself,” she’d snarl back, incensed. Already then I could see what would be crudely and unattractively revealed after she died: that she was not the only one to whom her inborn surplus of freedom and confidence gave the strength to keep her own council—it nourished everyone around her, all of us, including Vadym. Vadym first and foremost.

  Things I wouldn’t have noticed before now ached like fresh abrasions—such as the time when Vadym, drunk, sobbed, “How am I going to live now?” like a spoiled little boy who’s used to having his every wish instantly granted, rolling in a tantrum on the floor without his pants because there’s no one to jerk him back to his feet. “She set the bar for me!” and my mind went on adding businesslike entries to its spreadsheet: Is that so, then? You too, huh? At the funeral he also said, no longer hysterical and instead with measured manly grief, “She was the best thing in my life”—as if this confession could make our good Lord suddenly ashamed of what a great personal harm he’d done to the poor man, and again the ache grated through me: What about her, how are we to make meaning of her life now, isn’t that the most important thing? I could, of course, just blame his nonsense on shock: people are liable to blurt utter insanities in a state like that, and men especially—nothing to do about that, they know neither how to birth nor how to bury; life’s hardest, dirtiest jobs are reserved for women—and no one would expect perfect style from the grief-stricken man.

  I guess I was still storing my perceptions for later, by virtue of habit—collecting and rehearsing them so I could share with Vlada, something I would catch myself doing for months—because at that moment, I recalled, as an animate voice in my internal dialogue, Vlada telling me, way back when, about the time when she was little and her father took her to the village to attend the funeral of his mother, the grandmother Vlada had never met. Vlada remembered waking up in the middle of the night and seeing through the open door the flickering candlelight in the other room: there, people were sitting vigil with the newly departed and the candles appeared to little Vlada to be growing into the darkness of their own accord, like fiery flowers, and she thought these were the fern blooms of the fairytales she’d heard, and even made a wish, only she couldn’t remember it; that night she heard the lamentation—“Real lamentation, Daryna, you don’t hear it like that anymore, not even in the country!”—she said it was like singing, a single musical phrase repeating itself, rising, sweeping up, as if running uphill, then sliding back down, helplessly, worn out like the van that took her and her father to the village through late autumn mud, wheels spinning on every hill, and this monotony contained a kind of all-embracing uncanny clarity, as if only this, the monotony, could truly express the beauty, and the agony, and the vanity of human effort on this earth. Little Vlada sat spellbound under her massive sheep’s wool blanket, afraid to breathe, her every bone gripped by the universal mourn that knew no consolation, and the female voice went on singing-wailing that one phrase, brimming with words, spilling out all deeds and affairs of the departed, listing them to someone intangible who was not in that room, as if it washed over them, one by one, and by doing so transformed them into noble regalia that shone brighter than gold, so that Vlada didn’t grasp right away that the song talked about her own grandma, whom she’d never met and who now lay there under the fiery dome of candlelight and would not rise again, no matter how she was implored, with the terrifying urgency of futile pleading that is known to men as despair, “Oh, rise, rise again, my dear, my bosom friend, my sister….” Vlada didn’t remember any other words—and they were not meant to be remembered, the lament an improvisation that is only sounded once and is not repeated or recalled—but she did remember a man’s low, slightly coarse voice murmuring from just outside her door in approval, “That’s some fine lamenting,” and that’s how the city child learned that the song was a lamentation and that it had witnesses other than herself, that there was an audience that had gathered to appreciate it. In that instant, Vlada said, the magic was gone: the mourner turned into a kind of an actor, and soon after she finished, Vlada caught her voice out of the general low hum of women’s voices—very businesslike, common, as if changed into dry clothes; it was answering someone or giving someone instructions about where to drape the embroidered rushnyky and how many. “I went back to sleep with this bitter feeling,” Vlada remembered, “as if I’d been cheated.”

  Now that it was she who lay there, pillowed in a heap of flowers, her name struck me anew every time it was said during the liturgy, as if jolting me out of sleep—Lord, receive the soul of Thy servant Vladyslava, and pardon her her sins, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether witting or through ignorance—Vladyslava? This is about her? Lord, Vlada! Vladusya, no!—and tears burst from my eyes like from bus
ted pipes, as I watched them lift her coffin, the one that cost “a fortune” and looked small as a child’s—you didn’t really notice how tiny Vlada was while she was alive; there was so incredibly much of her while she talked, moved, and laughed, and maybe that is why she looked held down by force in her coffin, not just dead but really killed, beaten in, and held up to be ogled, to expose how really defenseless she was. As she lay there like that and we stood around her and tried to utter something (I did, too!), and all our words were so small and pathetic—who could possibly give a damn about who she was to you, mister?—so ill-fitted, even if you put them all together, to measure the thing that was her interrupted life, the same words people would use to talk about other things, after they got home from the funeral and sat drinking tea in their kitchens, that’s when I could tell Vlada I’d have given anything to have someone do “some fine lamenting” over her as they once did over her grandma. I could have told her what we didn’t know before: how your throat swells with your enormous, tumorous muteness, when you don’t know this forgotten ancient ritual, the only one, as it became clear, fit for minutes like these, the one meant to wash a person’s life just as someone washes her body, as common words could never do, to wash—and raise it above the crowd’s heads to be seen above the coffin, to make it fine. This is not cheating, I said into the silence of my dead line; this was art, Vlada, only no one knew it anymore, and I didn’t either, and the only thing that would come out of me, had I dared to give my soul shape with singing, would be the half-choked mooing of a wounded cow.