The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  The fountain splashes, drops of water fly out and land on us, the sun crawls out, adding color to the world, and the people around the other tables become somehow instantly more glamorous. Aidy finishes his story about the cultured cop, then reaches out and carefully extracts a miniscule shriveled leaf out of my hair. The weevil brings our beers, places the mugs on the dark-green rounds labeled Obolon, and timidly offers, “Nice and sunny, ain’t it?”

  We unanimously decide to consider Adrian Vatamanyuk’s first raid on the SB archives a success and its unplanned finale especially remarkable. Spontaneity, Aidy declares with feeling, that’s what one needs to appreciate more in life—a deflection of an electron that determines the fate of a universe. The deflected electron—is that supposed to be Pavlo Ivanovych? The comical Pavlo Ivanovych, the middle-aged squid drilled into military shape, with the eagle’s profile, eyes of a harem prima donna, and the name of a hereditary Ryazan boozer, a twelfth-generation wino.

  “You know,” Aidy says, “I can’t shake off the feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before. Something about his face looks familiar…”

  “With a face like that—you couldn’t forget the man if you wanted to!”

  “It’s really something, isn’t it? Extraordinary. The eyes especially.”

  “Do you think that’s why they stuck him in the archives? Couldn’t be an operative with a mug like that—they were all supposed to be plain nobodies… unrecognizable.”

  May Pavlo Ivanovych hiccup gently over his lunch.

  A pigeon lands, shakes himself, businesslike, and scampers between the tables looking for something to eat. Must be local, this is his spot. Them pigeons, they must have the place divvied up like the mob—who gets the park, the square, the café. You could make a separate map—the pigeon Kyiv—with flight trajectories, high points where a decent pigeon can take five, and, of course, the places where they can always find some grub. Plus the warning signs: cars, cats—you see so many dead pigeons in the streets, so lazy they can’t even bother to lift their butts from under the wheels.

  “Still,” Aidy says, shaking his head stubbornly as if trying to chase off a fly that’s buzzing inside, “I’ve seen him somewhere before, I swear.”

  “You’re just like Mykolaichuk’s Vasyl in The Lost Letter: ‘Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?’”

  All of a sudden Aidy slaps himself on the forehead, and his eyes light up with mischievous little sparks.

  “And what did we forget, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Des-sert!” He makes horrified eyes. “We forgot about dessert!” And, twisting, he waves at the waitress. “What’s on the tray today?”

  * * *

  The phone rings. (Not a bad opening for a script, Daryna thinks, half-asleep, anchorwoman at a still-independent TV channel—wait, nope, no longer independent, two days already not “in-”—and here a hot twist, a turn of the corkscrew in the pit of her stomach wakes her up completely. The previous day’s conversation with her boss rises in her mind. She didn’t dream it—but her train of thought keeps rolling, automatically, on its no-longer-necessary filmmaking track, not a bad opening for a script: it’s dark on screen, and in this darkness, the phone is ringing, an antique, prewar sound, tiling-tiling-tiling, like Alpine cowbells—you’re the cow, stupid, what antique sound? Those are the bells from the Milka commercial. Shit, brain’s stuffed so full of rubbish she can’t dig up what she’s really thinking from under all that. And why, in the name of grace, would anyone rouse a person at this ungodly hour—crap, it’s not early at all, ten o’clock already!)

  The phone is ringing, and she slowly forces her foggy head to face it with a sense of deep hatred for the whole world—whatever that world may have contrived for her during the night, she does not expect it to be anything good: it hurts everywhere her thoughts turn. Like she’s been beaten. Well, isn’t that what they did? Stripped and pummeled her like a no-good, truck-stop whore and tossed the body under the trees in the windbreak. Only there isn’t a dog out there who’d call the police if he saw it.

  The number comes up: it’s Mom. Oh no. Please, not this, not now. With Mom it’s even worse than with strangers: she has to parade in full splendor of your success the same as for everyone else, but somehow feel vulnerable as a cornered rabbit the whole time. And it doesn’t get more vulnerable than this, now.

  Nonetheless, she picks up obediently and presses the answer button: filial duty, nothing to be done about it. Hasn’t called her mother for three days—pay up.

  “Hi, Ma.” (God, just listen her voice—she sounds like a crow!) “How are you?”

  This question always elicits the same response: her mother starts talking about her husband’s complaints—Uncle Volodya is slowing down, little by little. He’s got arthritis, can’t really bend his knee anymore; he’ll need surgery; his sugar is elevated, needs another round of IVs—aging has recently become an all-consuming topic for the elder Goshchynska, and the younger treats it with the sympathy of a devoted sports fan, albeit one currently following a different league. It is really not unlike a match—only drawn out in time, with its own rules, which no one explains ahead of time, and, unfortunately, with a predetermined outcome: you’re being shoved, at first with small, and then increasingly more debilitating blows, off the highway and into that same windbreak. Your withering body, as it prepares to become earth, rehearses its decomposition through a collection of infirmities, sore spots, and affected organs; breathing and moving become tasks that demand undivided attention; the morning evacuation is an event that sets the tone for the rest of the day; and all this makes the participants of the process members of a closed club, with its own champions and underdogs. And Uncle Volodya, by design, should’ve belonged among the former, should’ve proven a professional of aging—what else did he spend his life training for digging around in people’s innards, in the gaping flesh of rotten and damaged meaty fruits, where there should be no surprises left for him?

  But it didn’t work out like that: Uncle Volodya whines like a child, resenting the slightest physical discomfort; the disloyalty of his own body, which is turning into an enemy minefield—one wrong step and you’re in the ditch—is experienced by him as a personal affront, an injustice that he, of all people, most certainly does not deserve, and in which his wife appears to be somehow complicit. He hasn’t given up enough to trust that she is on his side; he still believes he can go it alone; he is still kicking, creaking along, the old stump.

  What Daryna fears and expects, with subconscious dread, to hear every time her mother calls is the news that Uncle Volodya hustled up an affair with some young nurse or assistant, his last mad love—with the packing of suitcases and, God forbid, division of property, and her mother’s tumble into the prospect of lonely old age. These things happen more often than you think; every fading man’s battle with his own body unfolds according to the same unchanging plan, and the appearance of a woman thirty or forty years his junior in it is as inevitable as menopause is for women. And when this stage of events is late in coming, you begin to worry, against your better nature—come on, already, you bastard, go ahead and do it, and get it over with! But the bastard seems to be taking his sweet time, and for today, it appears, red alert shall also be postponed. At least that’s one piece of good news in the last twenty-four hours (if one considers no news to be good news).

  Mom is babbling cheerfully as usual, rattling off drugs she’s planning to buy, and also, it seems, something’s grieving their cat (a varmit that entertains himself by leaping onto guests from the top of a wardrobe or lurching from under a couch and sinking his teeth into your leg, but Mom and Uncle Volodya fawn over him like proud parents over their firstborn). “Go have him fixed already,” Daryna drones flatly as if uttering someone else’s lines, as she always does—a certain set of phrases is repeated in every conversation with her mother as if on a recording. (Or does this also belong to the rules of aging—same words, same things, same scratchy records: avoi
d all changes in the environment because the ones going on inside your body are enough to drive you nuts alone?) “Cut ’im and live in peace.” Who does she have in mind when she says that: the cat, or Uncle Volodya? Or, perchance, R. and their sordid story, as a delayed reaction to what she’d heard from her boss yesterday?

  The mere memory of it is like a burn in her brain—she almost moans out loud again, you bitches!—but stops herself. She’s got it under control already; she’s awake, good morning, Ukraine. Lord, she used to be so proud to say those words on air. The last thing she needs now is to start bawling, so Daryna, teeth clenched, breathes hard through her nose, short and quick, in-out, in-out—until the stifling wave ebbs, retreats, and her eyes blink off a pair of tears that tickle her cheeks as they run down her skin. Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, says she can’t do it—feels sorry for the living thing, meaning Barsik, the cat, what’s he done to be crippled like that?

  But she must be sensing something uncertain on the other end of the line—or maybe she’s unnerved by the pause that’s stretching too long. The boundary of acceptance—the line of demarcation plowed between mother and daughter once and forever a long time ago, the flagged strip of no-man’s-land along which they stroll, each on her side, smiling to one another from afar like border guards of friendly nations—is not something Olga Fedorivna has ever dared cross. Generally, she is not a woman who crosses lines, clinging instinctively to every chilling interaction protocol instead, as if she feared that left to her own devices she’d melt into a little puddle on the floor. Like a snowman brought indoors.

  Once when she was little, Daryna did bring one of those in—a small, doll-sized, and very dapper (as it seemed to her) snowman she made herself—and wanted to show off to her mom, and what stayed in her memory—the next frame stamped into her mind—was her mom wiping away the puddle on the kitchen floor, wringing out the rag into the sink and crying. That was the first time she’d seen her mom cry, and she didn’t grasp right away what was happening—at first it looked like she was laughing, only somehow not her usual way. What happened there, in the interval between those two frames—why was she crying?

  Mom—Retired Snow Maiden. The long-established script dictates that it is she, the daughter, who must supply prompts in their conversation—lines like ready-made molds that the mother eagerly fills, scooping up snow with both hands. And this pause that is now spreading in the receiver like the puddle on the floor (Daryna even remembers the floor: plank, painted brown with oil paint, with pale crescents of scratches where a table had been moved), while the daughter hurries to swallow her tears and mentally wring herself out into an invisible sink, regaining her ability to pretend, this pause is like a flood, rising quickly, quickly, ever quicker under the neutral strip they’d constructed between them. Another moment and the whole pile will shift, slip, and slide, and the daughter won’t be able to babble that everything’s fine (couldn’t be crappier, really—meaning, it could, of course, but someone’d be calling an ambulance then). It’s just that she was still asleep, and she hasn’t called because she’s been busy, tons of work, barely keeping her head above the water. (No worries, she’ll soon be unemployed and free as a bird—actually, what is she going to do then? Hang out online for twelve hours a day? Have Mom teach her all her recipes and wait, dinner on the table, for Aidy to come home? Aidy told her not to worry, that he could support them both—said it with a proud note in his voice even, or at least that’s what she heard, and she got upset, because she saw the typical male egotism in it: Couldn’t find another time to boast your financial potency? Boasting probably couldn’t have been further from his mind; it’s just she, oozing her wounded suspiciousness of everything and everyone, like toothpaste squeezed from a tube—the defining characteristic of all the defenseless and humiliated. How quickly she takes on this role!)

  All of a sudden, Daryna becomes truly scared: she sees herself in the emptiness of a moonlit landscape, in the zone of absolute loneliness, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis—your misfortune isolates you, and afterward you have to learn to live anew, and with the people closest to you as well. How will she manage that?

  In 1987, during Daryna’s pre-graduation field studies, she was suddenly summoned into the chancellor’s office, and from there taken to the First Department where a shortish KGB captain with shifty black eyes (swoosh—the red ID fold-up card opened under your nose; slap—closed, no time to see a damn thing, except maybe the captain) prattled about who-knows-what for two hours straight, like wind blowing sand at her from all sides at once, and then offered her an opportunity to “cooperate.” By that time she was so worn out by her futile attempts to pin down the direction of their schizophrenic conversation—no sooner did she feel she’d almost grasp it than it slipped through her fingers again—which jumped from vague mentions of her departed father, who, it was never quite clear, was either “not guilty of anything before our government” and all but paved the way for perestroika, or somehow posthumously obliged her, Daryna, to correct his mistakes (Which ones would those be exactly?), to heavily loaded, ratty hints about her classmates, the friends with whom she hung out at Yama Café on Khreshchatyk, and then abruptly to a completely fantastical “underground organization” that the captain’s institution, ostensibly, had uncovered at the university. The captain himself didn’t even pretend that he believed any of what he was saying; it seemed his only goal was to determine how much and what kind of hogwash he could dump on her.

  In the whole two hours, she never once managed to catch his eye, as though the little black orbs moved by their own logic, different from that of regular people—the way, they say, you shouldn’t look shepherds in the eye because the dogs take it as a challenge and might just lunge for your throat. All in all, it was like having a conversation with a lunatic, when you don’t dare call the nurses because you know the head doctor is mad himself—and as she fought through the quicksand of shaken reality, half-hints, and half-lies into which she sank deeper the more she tried to clear them up, she thought, with sickening horror, that this was exactly how they once talked to her father before handing him off to their mad nurses. And the fact that times had since changed (Did they really?), that it was spring of ’87 outside the window and anti-communist protests whirled across the city, did not mean anything in this distorted world; and even if it did, then only inasmuch as it supplied this other side of the looking glass with new material for new schizophrenic distortions.

  All of it wore her down so much that when the captain finally concluded his soliloquy (because he’d talked almost nonstop the entire time) and suggested she write some monthly reports for him, she, instead of telling him to eff off right there and then, agreed to “think about it”—compelled either by the student habit of not turning things in until the last possible moment (to win time to prepare, time to dress her refusal into an impeccably worded formula, although that was something they most certainly wouldn’t give a damn about!) or by the instinctive impulse to step away from the scene of an accident first, like when you break a heel walking, and only then catch your breath and assess the situation.

  That it was a mistake, she realized right away, by how obviously and instantly happy it made the captain—but the gravity of it took time to fully manifest itself, specifically the three days that would pass before their second, and final, interview. She realized she never got out, never stepped away from that terrible office—quite the opposite: it was as if she’d chosen to take on its burden, hefted it onto her own shoulders, the silly little caryatid, and schlepped it around the whole three days, more or less delirious—having the conversation with the mad nurses inside her head the whole time. And what if… no, like this… and I’ll say to him… and he’ll… (and the shortness of breath the whole time).

  Later she would recognize this infestation of mind in dissidents’ memoirs: people lived like that for years, wired, as if into an electric grid, trying to untangle something that by definition could not be untangled—drawn into
a chess match with a schizoid. But at the time it felt like she was the only one left in the world. Her husband, Sergiy, couldn’t tell her anything helpful except recalling that his mother had also been approached by the KGB with something like this once, but who hadn’t been approached? Millions of people went through the same trials, and yet no collective experience emerged from it, and every rookie had to start from scratch as though he (or she) were the only one in the world—a metaphysical state, almost, like in love or in death when no other person’s experience is of any use to you, and no book has words for what is happening to you, the One and Only, with the sole difference that this whole thing was sealed under the massive lid of solid, shamed silence—this was not an experience people liked to share.

  Sergiy was left outside, behind the looking glass, and his inept efforts to cheer her up resembled the unnaturally lively gesticulations of people seeing someone off on a train, before it departs: those outside wave, come close to the windows, tap on the glass, make faces—and those inside are already thinking about which of their suitcases has their slippers and toothbrush in it. When the train pulls out, both sides breathe a sigh of relief.