The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  This game was much more addictive than anything at a casino (where R. had also taken her), and in the early days she was pretty strung out—high on the ease of the power she had over this man, at her bidding to run after her, nose to her crotch like a dog, mowing down, like roadside markers, all the rules that had taken him to the top, and she thought she’d discovered for herself the same feeling that must have attached Vlada to Vadym—the joy of giving a man who used to think himself omnipotent a taste of freedom he had never known before. Only that was as far as any joy went for her with R.: she could never feel herself as just a woman, as one should in honest sex—just a woman, and just a man, the same thing for thousands of years, and new every time. R. never reached that level of freedom.

  In a sense, he remained for her as he had begun: a specimen of a different species. At first, their feverish coupling—in his jeep, at his dacha, once even at his friend’s house, in a dark room lit only by the porn flickering on the TV screen—dazed her like a kind of a perversion, like sex with King Kong or Bigfoot, although there wasn’t really anything perverted about it, unless one counted his habit of photographing her in various intimate poses. (She asked then, half-kidding, whom he intended to blackmail with those pictures—because she didn’t give a damn. She was free to sleep with whomever she wanted and didn’t plan to run for Parliament; R. answered, unsmiling, don’t be so sure, leaving her with an uncertain suspicion that he was not, in fact, just shooting his own porn, but planned to keep a file on her just in case, to give him control over her, and in this there was also something acutely arousing, sinfully titillating.)

  The turning point came in Holland, where she’d agreed to go with him on a two-week vacation and every morning, when she woke up next to him, felt like she was sticking her head into a bag—and neither the museums, nor the sea, nor the wonderful little seaside restaurant with lobsters, nor the low Rembrandtesque, phantasmagoric light of that country, reflected everywhere by water, could rescue her from that bag: R. loomed before it all—a heavy, dark mass without air holes.

  One morning, having climbed out of bed before dawn and smoked a cigarette, on an empty stomach, by the window open to the gentle glimmer of the wet, scaly tiled roofs in the fog, she realized very clearly that she needed to excise this man from her life immediately—like a rotten tooth or a malignant tumor. R. was simply emotionally obtuse—packed hard inside, like dry ground. You can’t tell such things by sight; they only really come to light in bed. This must be the fate of many of the nouveau riche, and generally anyone who spends too much time with the same kind of pressure applied on the same, very narrow range of emotions: it’s as if parts of their soul atrophy. Life had pressed R. into a total spiritual impermeability, a chronic constipation of sorts—and she, Daryna, was his laxative.

  He needed her because he needed the aerating, the breaking and turning of his petrified soil, both in sex and in his everyday life: that’s what casinos were for and racing his car, cutting lanes on the Zhytomir highway, and saunas with masseuses and sex-tourism to Thailand and a whole repertoire of other aids, all at the client’s disposal, that could stimulate the emotional peristalsis—having acquired estates, people now spend them on anything that makes them feel alive. She was for R. just such an aid, and that’s what she felt herself to be, after all their mechanical orgasms, she felt it in her ass, like she’d been screwed there.

  This was, give or take, what she yelled at him in the end in the middle of the street, seeing nothing around her, and she knew she hit the bull’s-eye, that he’d disappear after that, excise himself from her life like a cankered growth—men like him did not go back to the site of their defeat. The thing is, though, that they don’t ever forgive those who were there to witness it.

  And this was the fact she had overlooked: R. wasn’t simply her past, wasn’t simply a lover she’d left—much more brutally than she would’ve preferred. (She couldn’t stand violent breakups with sordid scenes and did, in fact, nurse at the bottom of her heart that idiotic notion of all her men somehow constituting something like a single extended family—she was, for instance, frightfully pleased to introduce Aidy to Sergiy and watch them shake hands; she loved them both at that moment.) He wasn’t someone with whom you could part and not see again for years in a city of three million, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a banker, or a journalist, for that matter (and they didn’t, fortunately, all frequent the same watering holes); R. was her enemy.

  And he took his revenge in the simplest way available: first by giving the channel money and then by cutting it off; goodbye, we regret to inform you that our priorities have changed. Read: If I can no longer fuck your anchor, I’ll fuck you. Did he think that perhaps the channel’s bosses would then deliver her to his doorstep rolled up into a rug like an Oriental slave girl, and he’d be able to walk all over her in some uber-cynical manner? No, that’s unlikely—it was probably just his good business sense at work: What’s the point of paying if you don’t get anything in return? Simple as that, and no need to, as Antosha (or Occam’s Razor) says, multiply redundant essences.

  “And don’t you pretend,” the boss hollered—much more confident now that he’d spotted her confusion, with decidedly more spiteful indignation—“don’t you even try to pretend like you didn’t know anything!”

  But she did not; she knew nothing—that was the rub; there were lots of things she didn’t know and wished to continue not knowing: she shut her eyes and pinched her nose, just like everyone else. Silly little Daryna, little Red Riding Hood, climbing into bed to play with the wolf thinking him her grandma. There’s your sex with King Kong.

  Out loud she laughed at him—because what else could she do—eww, how disgusting! The primitive, dumb as a tank, logical force of this whole edifice crushed her; how easily these two, the boss and R., had robbed her of her private life behind her back—what she used to consider her private life (as she said to R., oh so lightly: I sleep with whomever I please—and he did warn her, didn’t he—don’t be so sure)—converting it into dollars and cents, like they’d translated her into a hard, solid language they could understand. Knocked off her accuser’s high ground, she finally saw the anchorwoman Goshchynska through their eyes: an expensive woman, to be sure (and with a price tag attached!), what a bitch, a sexy cunt, a walking ad for contact lenses—I use them and toss them without regret. (What if that’s what R. thought—that she’d used him to get money for the channel?) “Unshakeoffable” as the boss had once complimented her comically, not knowing how to say “irresistable” in Ukrainian, and thus capable of being useful on screen: braids, a little top, welcome to our whorehouse; that was how they saw her, and that was the version they admired—that was the version they were willing to pay for, even to “take her in on the profits,” whether from the election carousel or the slave trade, whatever’s in season.

  They saw her as one of them, and she had nothing with which to shield herself. Her work, all her professional accomplishments by themselves meant nothing to them but instead lay beyond the reach of their assessment scale, in the “blind spot.” They were just fun and games on the margins of the big business—aspirations for television with an intellectual gloss, celebration of heroes no one’s ever heard of—well, that’s nice, fit for an international contest somewhere, where it can fetch an award to hang under glass on the wall in the boss’s office, but essentially no one gives a flying fuck.

  R., when she talked about her work (told him about her heroes, the idiot!), would smile a Buddha smile and say that her enthusiasm made him insanely horny (and would pull her hand into his pants, so she could see for herself). The same effect was produced in him by the enthusiasm with which she sucked delicious shreds of lobster flesh out of the shell in the little Dutch restaurant: an erection was another hard (doesn’t get much harder) language, tangible like money, into which they translated what they didn’t understand. And she had nothing else to show them as proof of her identity; she worked with them, she liv
ed on the money they paid her, even—and she couldn’t strike this from her résumé either—occasionally slept with them (a woman’s curiosity can lead all kinds of places!). She was inside the system and felt quite at home there. Had she told her boss that after seven years on air she still felt the darkness in the studio of an audience extending to infinity on the other side of the screen—full of people to whom she was accountable, could even feel their breath—this confession, most likely, wouldn’t elicit even an erection from him: he’d just laugh and counsel her to spend more time outdoors. He had also become a different biological species—she’d been refusing to see it for too long.

  It occurred to her that he really wanted her to stay with the channel. He wanted her to be the way they saw her; he was willing to fight for that. Not just for the profits, or for the “face of the channel.” This mattered to him: that they become equals, two of a kind, professionals, and he no less (better even—because he’s the one paid more) than she—to erase between them any gap that could not be translated into clear, hard language. The gap irked him.

  And, exactly as with R., only without the screaming (on the contrary, dreadfully slowly and quietly because rage was choking her and made it hard for her to speak, even the room grew darker around her, as if dusk fell suddenly), she said things to him that she hadn’t intended to say and that would’ve probably been better left unsaid, because it’s not wise to be so old-fashioned as to declare war—like Prince Oleg to the Khazars—right in the face of the person you intend to war with (she knew she would do everything imaginable to kill their dastardly show). But, just as with R., telling the truth to the eyes of the person facing her was, in that moment, the only thing she could do to separate, to shield herself from their sticky grasp, like lowering the manhole cover on the cloacae below.

  “Do you realize,” she said to the boss, “that you’re contagious? You’re like the guy with TB who goes around spitting into other people’s soup. Like in vampire movies: you’ve been bitten, and now you must bite everyone else so they become like you. And that sucks, brother. Big time.”

  Amazingly enough, he kept silent. Then muttered in Russian, obviously working over something in his mind, “You’re insane.”

  “Aha,” she said, rising to go, straightening to her full height in front of him on her high heels (he was short, a small man with a Napoleon complex), stepping like a hot-blooded racehorse—unshakeoffable. “That’s right, insane. It runs in the family, don’t you know?”

  * * *

  She only tells her mother the triumphant part, in an edited version, without too many details. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chimes in. She remembers that fifteen-year-old film that propelled the boss into big journalism—sure, sure, it was on TV—children in Chernivtsi struck down by a mysterious illness, terrible shots: a hospital room full of little girls and all of them bald as old men. You bet, a picture like that stays with you: science fiction, banshee purgatory. The kids would wake up one morning, get out of bed, and all their hair would stay on the pillow. Soft baby hair, a tiny silky scalp.

  “That was right after Chernobyl, wasn’t it,” says Olga Fedorivna, delighting in her good memory.

  “No, Mom, that was later. And it’s got nothing to do with Chernobyl.”

  A typical merging effect: the greater horror subsumes the smaller one. Chernobyl, Chernivtsi—they even sound similar, both start with Ch, easy to mix them up. Mix them up and then forget. Do they teach this in the Journalism Institute now: How to present information in the manner that makes it easiest to forget? And then paste over the poignant image in people’s minds with something from Star Wars—plenty of bald-headed little monsters in that story, all over the place really.

  Boss had made his name with that horror clip about bald children, but no one remembers this fact anymore, and he himself never brings up his early days. Another man died then, his body the roadblock to any further independent investigations. Another man paid for the boss’s career.

  But she didn’t even remember this, wasn’t thinking about that story at all during their conversation! The precision of her aim was something akin to what a body does in a moment of danger, when it knows which way to duck, all by itself. You just poke with your finger, not looking—and lose the whole arm to the gooey mess with the requisite dose of someone’s blood in it.

  That time in Chernivtsi, Daryna explains to her mother, it was, presumably, an accident at a military plant to which the authorities never granted access. Moscow managed to close the case just before the Union fell apart. A rocket fuel spill, most likely. Who knows whose security services were involved—Moscow’s or ours—the fact remains that someone badly needed to have the whole story hushed up, whatever it took.

  “So what you are saying,” Mom says, straining to digest the information, “is that the gentleman who was investigating the case was, in fact, murdered? And that your producer knew about it—and kept quiet?”

  Why is it, exactly, that she finds this so hard to believe? Daryna feels something like her old filial exasperation.

  “Mom, you’re like from Mars, or Venus, or something! What, Father’s colleagues didn’t quietly make their careers on someone else’s blood? When they’d driven the architect to killing himself—and then made him the scapegoat—and they all, except Father, signed the denunciation like good boys.” Now, wouldn’t it be interesting, flashes through her mind, to meet with those people now, whoever’s still alive, and see who they’d become. Do they also moonlight in human trafficking when business is slow? And while we’re at it, let’s see how their kids turned out, an instructive little show indeed—and suddenly she sees what she could’ve done with her father’s plot in which she could never find the story. Now, when she can’t make anything, barn door closed and no horse in sight, as Aidy says. “You’ve lived your life with all that, and now you’re surprised?”

  “Yes, but that was then!” Olga Fedorivna protests. “Times have changed!”

  It’s like generational egoism in reverse. Everything bad has already happened to us, and our children start from a clean slate. And the children cheerfully trot off into the world convinced that that’s exactly how things’ll turn out, and the parents egg them on: go on, kiddo, we’ve done our time, but you’ll have the good life now—lots and lots of it, all you want. And the kids, aside from this blessing, are armed with nothing, go bare as a bone. Stripped naked, that’s the thing.

  “We all thought so too, Ma.”

  If only one could know where “then” ends and where “now” begins. And how stubbornly blind this self-preserving human faith is—the faith that a clear watershed divides them. That it’s enough to turn the page—start a new calendar; change your name, passport, seal, and flag; meet and fall in love with a new man; forget everything that had once been and never (even alone with yourself) remember the dead—and the past will be made null and void. But there is no watershed, and the past pushes at you from every pore and crack, mixing with the present into dense inseparable dough—and you have very little chance of flailing your way out of it. Only we keep on consoling ourselves with our childish illusion that we can control the past because we can forget it. As if our forgetting would make it vanish, go away. Like Irka Mocherniuk’s rug rat when he got angry at her for slapping him and threatened, “I’m gonna make it all dalk for you now!” squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could.

  Still, Mom can be forgiven, Daryna thinks—she did spend her working life in a museum, after all, got used to a cataloged kind of past, ordered and pinned to the corresponding dates, like a collection of dead butterflies: here’s “then,” and beginning from this point it is “now,” all nice and tidy. When Daryna was little, she loved visiting her mother at work. Back then, all the exhibits in the museum’s halls were above her head, glassy glimmers up there, mysterious and unattainable, and one of the adults would always pick her up so she could peek at the pictures under the glass—there were many, immeasurably more than in any book, she couldn’t dream of ge
tting a good long look at all of them, and the incredible riches the adults possessed made her swoon delightfully—and that’s what it meant to be an adult: to have access to all the pictures in the world, like Ali Baba’s treasure caves, and she wished to grow up sooner, faster. And, well, it all came true just the way she wished, didn’t it? Of all things, she’s always had plenty of pictures.

  And again, a wave of scorching pain swallows her, so hot she has to bite into her lip so as not to moan out loud: rot it all to pieces; she really was good at television! What happened, that it was no longer important—being good? Young journalists don’t even use this word anymore; they don’t say that someone is good at what he or she does; they say successful. A thief—if he has millions in offshore accounts—is a successful entrepreneur; a hopeless talentless putz—if his face is on every channel—is a successful journalist. And it’s us they learn from, Daryna thinks dully. Boss talks like that too, and not just about shows, but about people too. And he also says professional—that’s the highest compliment from him. Alright, let’s say so-and-so is a professional—and what about everyone else? Who are they? Amateurs? Then why the hell do they still have their jobs?

  They had been a team once—when was that? So long ago. That was her real youth, first and foremost because of its sense of unlimited possibility: the wild nineties, free-sailing—just show initiative and money took care of itself; suburban mansions popped up and burst as merrily as bubbles on the puddles under a spring downpour, but the air was thick with ideas, the air swirled and roiled with them! In their old studio, their very first one, set up in a rented factory warehouse (the factory had shut down, let them have the space for a song), they’d pull up their chairs and sit up into the wee hours of the night, drafting the program grid, arguing and yelling at each other; the crumpled stubs of unfinished cigarettes spilled from overflowing ashtrays onto the table, and when the smoke got so bad their eyes watered, someone, most often Vasyl’ko in his nerdy bug-eyed, fogged-over glasses, would finally get up to open the window, throwing a jacket over her shoulders on his way back. Where are you now, Vasyl’ko? On what meager Canadian pasture do you nibble your bitter grass?