The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  There was a moment in the conversation yesterday when she felt that same mucid disorientation. For as long as her boss kept trying to appeal to her ambition, the only emotion she felt boiling inside her was rage. Her ambitions were on a completely different plane, and the boss, while he may have been using the same word, had something completely different in mind. It was as if he stubbornly insisted on calling, say, a table a glass (like the one into which he kept pouring himself cognac, while she barely tasted hers, only felt a headache coming on) and expected her to do the same. He tempted her with access to a humongous—at least thirty percent!—audience, bragged about the channel already buying meters to measure ratings in cities of a half a million people and up—and that’s just to start with, the one hundreds were next—and all she wanted to spit back was: What the heck for? Ukraine’s Got Talent?

  He was burying all her professional aspirations alive and had not the slightest inkling of what he was doing. He never felt the studio darkness expand into infinity on the other side of the cam-eras; there was no one sitting in fear for him, ready to cough and creak their chairs in response to any falsity; he couldn’t care less about what he put on the air. Professionalism, for him, meant how, not what, and if the Insurgent Army theme was better left alone for the time being, then it wasn’t worth bothering with at all, and anyway, entertainment programming was the safest niche—he said it exactly like that, using that word, and it made her cringe, and then laugh with all the spite she had in her: ah, the niche again!

  Nose already twitching with the nonexistent roach whiskers, he assured her she would be protected from politics, all that dirt, he gave his word. Sure, she’s “the face of the channel,” and it was never her business to care about the provenance of substances that bubble in its guts, so why should it start being her business now? That’s only logical. And then he told her—intimately, a little wearily almost like he’d had enough of her tetchy jibes, her crooked half-grins, and her little bitten-down lips, all of which had the singular purpose, as any idiot could see, of drumming up her price, a pretty woman’s usual ritual resistance before she gives in and takes the hardened dick into her mouth—how much she would be paid. Cash, of course, in an envelope, off the books.

  She gasped silently, unsure of what face to make so he wouldn’t notice anything: she felt naked—no one had heard of such salaries in Ukrainian television before; the ceiling was five grand a month, unless, of course, you count those who got their kickbacks in envelopes, directly from their political clients, and their channel was never among the wealthy ones. She’d been getting two, and was fine with that. That’s when it went to her head, spinning, dizzying, for an instant: they could buy an apartment downtown if they sold Aidy’s digs—and better still—oh the impossible dream!—a small house in the country, in some near-Kyiv quaint alpine hamlet; it’s all “Alps” around Kyiv, everywhere you turn—hills, meadows, lakes, ponds, and not everything’s sold yet, although the prices are stratospheric indeed, but all they need is a little patch of land, like in Roslavychi, where Vlada had been planning to live with Vadym. And right away, with dazzling, sobering clarity, it occurred to her that Vlada’s death was also connected to this hidden churn of financial flows—with the invisible gigantic intestine where blood and oil mixed in the same pipe: Vadym was into oil, and Vlada was into Vadym, and she got the blood. What was it she said in that dream—“too many deaths”?

  Frozen, Daryna felt the breath of the subterranean bog—its invisible vapors rose against her skin, fogged her mind. Bank accounts’ credit columns endowed with cell-like, self-replicating ability, the flickering of mysterious numbers on computer screens and stock-market monitors: all this was alive—it rose, throbbed, grew, moved. “I’d be curious,” she said to the boss, “I’d be really curious to know—where’s the mother lode?” Boss took it as an expression of admiration and winked, with bravado, just like that time at his housewarming party. “I mean,” she said, not yet aware of how close she’d come to lifting the manhole cover and seeing the blind acidly greenish glimmer below with her own eyes, “don’t get me wrong; I know I’m an expensive woman,…” (he gave her a sleazy snigger) “but I’m also aware that free cheese is only found in the mousetrap—braids don’t fetch that kind of dough!”

  That was her swerving off road and cutting straight through the rough—she no longer cared; she knew her cause had already been lost and wanted to have one last satisfaction: to know the mechanism that was behind this, let it be her last journalistic investigation; she’s a professional after all, isn’t she? (For the fall, the anniversary of her friend’s death, she’d planned to make a separate film about Vlada, for Lantern—and for Vlada, too. Yep, and apparently Vlada’s no longer in touch with the times, and Vadym’s been showing up on TV more often, generally looking like he’s got his act together and is doing pretty well; why should we mess with the dead if we’ve got living people lining up, cash in hand?) The Donets’k surgeon, Vlada, Gela Dovganivna, whom she kept postponing, unable to find the key to her story—Lord, how proud she was of her show; how much she loved her heroes, always had butterflies in her stomach when she went to the website to read the viewers’ comments the morning after a new episode had aired. What’s happening to us, how low can we fall, what are we letting them do to us?

  No, she did not burst into tears right there, in the boss’s office; she’d held her face screen-proof—like a cream puff, because fury was boiling inside her, and fury demanded action, immediate action. She interrogated; she went on the offensive; she cornered him; she didn’t know she had such breathless pace in her; she rode it like a witch on a broomstick, and he did not realize that this was merely a doomed man’s attempt to extract from his executioner the law that had sent him to the gallows—no, he looked at her with growing respect, as at a woman who was expertly, professionally raising her price. Good job. (She’s run so many times into this astonishing shortsightedness in otherwise intelligent people that she long stopped marveling at it: it was like a virus, increasingly widespread, that affected not only politicians, businesspeople, and members of her own journalistic tribe, but also artists of whom one commonly expects a more complex spiritual organization. Instead of living, people were scheming, playing out their combinations, and anything that was not part of their scheme was simply blocked in their consciousness, as if they had a blind spot.)

  Boss really valued her, even the tip of his nose was all sweaty with tension she noted gleefully—she wasn’t the only one on whom the conversation was taking its toll! Alright, he sighed, about to slap his last ace, the joker up his sleeve, onto the table in a grand, bighearted sweep—cards down! He might be able to negotiate a bigger sum for her, he said, he’d do his best—if it works, they’ll “take her in” (he said this in Russian, when the talk turned to money, he switched completely into Russian) on the profits from the Miss New TV show. Is that so? It’s a very serious project, he warned, nervously twitching his sweaty nose (and Diogenes’ Lantern was NOT serious, she dictated mentally to her invisible attorney—the boss’s every word scorched her like a flame), only this must remain strictly between the two of them, okay? (This reminded her of someone else—oh yes, her captain from that office with fake leather doors of 1987 vintage: he also asked with the same sepulchral import for the conversation to remain between them.)

  This was in her own interest, by the way, because he had Yurko pegged to host the Miss New TV pageant (Yurko!—she yelped inside—and Yurko will agree?), but only on an official salary—Yurko’s not in on the profits. How about that? They do value her!

  “And what kind of show is that?”

  “The usual kind, just another show, the main thing’s to select and sort the girls who applied, and then they’d be passed on to a different agency.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, only a few finalists will appear on the show, you know,” he explained.

  And where would the money come from?, she almost asked like the last idiot—and that’s
when it finally dawned on her.

  “Motherfucker,” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  She thought she was smiling as it sometimes happens to people in shock. Boss’s face hung still before her in close-up, as if someone had hit the pause button (he’d never heard her utter such profanity; the words popped out by themselves, as if they were the last pieces needed to complete the puzzle). And under her gaze, this face, confirming her guess, was collapsing, slipping like a wall in earthquake coverage—from his eyes, where the inquiry (Is something wrong?) was replaced by the flash of realization (She won’t be his accomplice!) to the fright (What has he done?!), a moving shadow, to the deathly bleached wings of his nose, and then to the chin that somehow instantly lost shape and dropped like a clump of wet spackle. In the fraction of a second that she experienced as endlessly long minutes, this man seemed to have disintegrated right before her eyes, and she saw clearly what he would look like in his old age—if, of course, he lived that long. She could smell his fear as one smells the odor of a long-unwashed body. No, this is not a mistake, there’s been no mistake; she understood everything correctly—what kind of “a different agency” it was, and from where the profits were planned to come.

  “So, we’re retraining into slave traders?”

  “What are you talking about?” Eyes skittering, gathering his face back into a fist, “I haven’t told you anything.”

  “And will you tell the girls? Will you tell them what kind of show they’re being invited to?”

  “Oh please, give me a break,” he snarled, happy to find himself on solid ground again, on well-trodden territory. “What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms…”

  She didn’t listen after that, something clicked in her ears like when the reel gets chewed up in a tape recorder. He sounded as if he’d memorized this text in advance and had only been waiting for a chance to unload it on someone—after all, one always needs to justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victim is always the murderer’s simplest excuse.

  Yurko once managed to interview a professional hit man; they ran the footage with the man’s face hidden, but the killer was unexpectedly articulate, and when Yurko asked what it was like to murder people—what it feels like in action—the man responded with the same memorized preparedness, took it straight out of the gate: “I am not a killer; I am a weapon; I am simply a gun in other people’s hands.” She was astonished, then, to learn that a killer, too, could have his own brand of morality. Did Yurko know what role he’d been assigned? Or, would he repeat, when he found out, his usual joke about “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four”?

  They say this legendary Petrenko does, in fact, exist, and appears every so often, like a ghost, on the Boryspil highway where he actually introduces himself that way to the drivers he pulls over: “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four!” Looking on, expectantly, as his victim opens his wallet.

  Yurko actually has four kids from three (Isn’t it?) previous marriages, and supports all of them as a decent man should—always looking for side gigs. So does she really have the right to pin him against the wall and force him to choose by revealing the origins of the windfall that’s about to drench him? She tried to remember how many of Yurko’s kids were girls—three, or all four—but for some reason could only recall one of them, the fifteen-year old Nadiyka, who once came to the studio—perfect age for the sex trade, and also with braids, a blonde little thing… a sweet child.

  Easy for you to say, Daryna, Yurko might reply, and if he didn’t say it, he’d still think it: you’ve got nothing tying you down; you do with your life as you please; you can slam those doors behind you whenever and wherever you want—and he’d have a point, of course; they’re far from being in the same boat. Still, something has to be done—not police, perhaps, but she’s got to find some resources to publicize this information—to make sure that the fifteen-year-old twits who’ll rush in herds from Zhmerinka and Konotop tomorrow to send their bikini shots into the contest on TV will know what kind of show, damn it, is planned for them!

  The boss repeated again that their conversation had to stay inside the office. “And that is something I cannot promise you,” she said—still compelled by her team instinct, her atavistic reflexes, a recurrence of a partner’s duty: cards down, fair play.

  “I would not advise you to make a fuss,” the boss answered, with unconcealed hostility. “I rather strongly would advise you not to. Trust me at my word.”

  “Or else what?” she said cheerfully. (Looking him straight in the eye, straight in the eye just like dog trainers tell you not to do—as if for seventeen years she’d been spurred on by that captain’s elusive look, which hemmed her in, stitch by quick stitch, in another office, the look she never managed to crack, no matter how much she wanted to peek inside it, see, touch whatever it was that stirred in there, underneath.) “You’ll whack me, too?”

  He recoiled as if she’d struck him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, flashed in her mind. She herself would not have been able to explain why she blurted it out—like a line from a long-accumulated case built for the prosecution. At that moment, she was not thinking at all—forgot all about—that old case in Chernivtsi that had launched the boss’s career, about the uninvestigated death of someone or another. She just flipped open, automatically, in response to his threat, her own hidden blade: pure bluff, improvisation in a fit of inspiration. Her advantage lay in the fact that during the entire conversation she’d felt surreally fearless—as if all this were happening to someone else, as if she’d landed inside a sci-fi movie, no, a Russian gangster miniseries, where she moved with dreamlike lightness.

  And that’s when the boss began to scream, as is the custom of all weak and frightened people when they are defending themselves. In the first instant, she wondered if he, perchance, had lost his mind, raving that she ought to know better than to come here and lecture him all Mother Theresa–like… as if they’re all in shit and she’s the only one white and pure, as if she doesn’t sell the goods just like everyone else… when all it took for her was to bang someone like R. and voila, she’d won the channel a lump-sum loan that went, to the last penny, to underwriting her show, so that she could fuck it all up and leave them to clean up the mess… aha, and don’t look at him like that, fucking princess, some star she is… the nation’s conscience, is it?… cunt… he’ll have her know he’s just as good a professional as she!

  Have some water, she counseled through her teeth. The sight of a man’s hysteria prompted in her nothing but a cold repulsion, and the drivel he was sputtering at her appeared at that moment so outrageous that it didn’t affect her at all. She had long ago relegated her short, wild affair with R. (who at the time had a seat on their sponsoring bank’s board of directors) to the archives and wished to recall none of it—neither their heavy, dark lovemaking that filled her body with a dull and joyless, bovine satiety (like the feeling one got sometimes after anal sex, only with R. it was every time), nor its worst final chapter when she was doing everything in her power to get away from him, and it was proving to be not at all as easy as she’d thought.

  As soon as R. caught a whiff of her intention to desert, he turned aggressive like a bulldog with a bone. Once, he caught her arm and, with a lupine grin, squeezed it hard with two fingers, leaving a bruise that she had to cover with a tennis sweatband for a week afterward.

  He hunted her, caught up with her in the worst possible places, brandishing his owner’s right to her to everyone around (he knew this infuriated her the most and hit where she was most vulnerable), ambushed her after work, took her “home” from receptions, where he arrived with the resolute look of a husband who’d come to make a scene
(and she tottered out after him, choking on her hatred, like an obedient heron in her high heels, to assault him in the car, later—with her fuming tirade, breathlessly gulping her cigarette, the classic domestic horror).

  Weeks after, exhausted and edgy, she finally yelled at him, in a kind of a haze, right in the middle of the street, everything she thought about him and ran in tears into the subway (for some reason the subway seemed the safest place to her—it was impossible to picture R. there). For months she was afraid, when she came home at night that she’d see his Grand Cherokee with its headlights turned off, like a sleeping brontosaurus in the darkness, next to her apartment building’s door.

  Her initial infatuation, short-lived and addling like a jinx, took root in her acute curiosity about a breed of men she’d never encountered before: the ones who turn over big money and for that reason radiate an unassailable certainty that they’re also the ones who make the world itself turn on its axis—men of Vadym’s type; she thought she’d finally understood Vlada then.

  She probably wouldn’t have fallen for R. so hard if it weren’t for Vlada. As though by doing so, she was walking in her tracks, following her, posthumously. Vlada lay in the overcrowded Baikov Cemetery, where one had to squeeze between graves to get to her like on the subway at rush hour—and Daryna, heart pounding and no underwear in sight, sped in the studio car to the meeting at the bank (back then, the boss always took her to these meetings with him), took a seat next to R., found his hand under the table and pushed it discreetly under her skirt, and listened, giggles and arousal swelling inside her, to his breath change as he fought to control himself so that no one would notice. (Once, finding a moment, he ran after her, shoved her almost brutally into the bathroom, threw her, breasts down onto the sink, and, entering her from behind, roared out like a sea lion in heat, “What a bitch!”)