The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  She is lucky: she is “insane,” and it’s hereditary.

  She really had no inkling, before yesterday, of how powerful the instinct of resistance to evil would prove to be in her—more powerful than any desire or longing, than any possible temptation. And it wouldn’t have been this strong if her father hadn’t died because of it. And if her mother hadn’t approved of his choice.

  Incredible, but that’s how it was.

  Daryna feels a new, detached kind of respect, as if they were strangers, for this couple, Olya and Tolya. Otollya. Erased, shattered, destroyed—like the fairytale palace clad in gentle dove-gray shades of the interior, adorned by ornate shadows, the parquetry, the lamps…. Everything’s gone, nothing remains—nothing you can touch, show on TV, price out in hard currency. Utterly incomprehensible how this force could have passed into her. They didn’t even tell her anything explicitly when she was little, her parents; they didn’t exhort or admonish, just as all her classmates’ parents rarely dared confide to their children anything that did not fit with the commonly accepted modus vivendi. (Irka was only told in 1990 that her grandfather actually died in the Gulag and not at the front; and Vlada remembered, not without irony, how Matusevych Senior very secretly whispered to her, in the eighth grade sometime, that he was actually for socialism, but without Russia, but she had to keep mum about it, or else—this was enough to pack you off to the camps, people got seven years for less!) Daryna’s parents were no dissidents by any stretch either, and no textbooks would ever mention their names. They merely had the strength to do what they thought was right—and take the full measure of what one had to take in that country in return for doing so, death included.

  And somehow (How?) this strength of theirs—the one that seemed so wasted because it hadn’t translated into anything tangible—turned out great enough to confer upon their child her own margin of safety. So that in a different era, in a different country, packed with deaths like a can with sardines this child would remain alive.

  That much was true: she was alive, and no one could take it away from her.

  What was it Grandpa Nietzsche said? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger? Okay, maybe not everything. But sometimes, the thing that does kill us makes our children stronger.

  Still, she never wanted to have children of her own.

  And that’s when she suddenly remembers—all but slaps herself on the forehead, a habit of Aidy’s she’s adopted—breaking the flow of her mother’s consolatory monologue (which she hadn’t been listening to anyway, tuned it out, something about how “now” is not the same as “then,” and that things have a way of figuring themselves out). She remembers from whose lips she recently, this fall, heard that abrading, inappropriately official Anatoliivna. Amazing, actually, that she’d forgotten to ask her mom, totally crossed her out of that story with the Security Bureau archives where Aidy had gone a few more times, and all for naught: they kept saying they couldn’t locate Great-Aunt Gela’s case, and now what, no more movies for her, so what’s the point anyway? She remembers clearly, painfully, as if from a previous life, the sun-drenched corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska, their first assault on the newly built archives, her own single-minded focus on her quest and feels astounded by how happy she had been so recently—and how many unnoticed details she let scatter away from her sight in her happy single-mindedness, like pebbles from under the hooves of a racehorse barreling around the track—but there it is, the tiny rock, wedged into the cracked hoof, never would’ve thought of it if they hadn’t reined her in.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, can I interrupt you?”

  Olga Fedorivna obediently stops talking.

  “I keep forgetting to ask you about this one thing. Does the name Boozerov mean anything to you?”

  Silence.

  “Mom? Hello? Can you hear me?”

  Did they get disconnected or something?

  “Boozerov?” Mom finally responds—in a very surprised, young alto, the voice that had once belonged to a brunette in a bright-yellow dress. “That was our curator’s name. How do you know him?”

  “What curator?” Daryna thinks she must’ve missed something: The job didn’t exist back in Mom’s day, did it? What was there to curate if there weren’t any independent art shows or private galleries, none of it?

  “The KGB curator, who else? Every Soviet institution had its own KGB curator, it was a special job they had.”

  “Oh.”

  So in some way times have changed a little—if the meaning of the word has changed.

  “Boozerov, what do you know,” Mom mutters. “What was his name? Gimme a second, I’ll remember…”

  “Not Pavlo Ivanovych by chance?”

  “That’s it! Pavlo Ivanovych, Pashenka we called him. He was young, younger than me, he couldn’t have been thirty then; he was born after the war already…. Such a hottie!” Mom’s voice takes on a refreshed but clearly vintage tart disapproval as if being a “hottie” was an aggravating circumstance for a GB man. “He had that dark complexion, you know, and those big eyes like olives…. He should’ve gone into movies instead of the KGB; he looked like Omar Sharif. How do you know him?”

  “Met him at the Security Bureau’s archives, when we went looking for Adrian’s great-aunt’s case. He’s still got those eyes—like an Arabian stallion’s. He sends his regards.”

  “Fancy that, he hasn’t forgotten me!” Olga Fedorivna marvels tartly again. “So he’s at the archives now? No more tracking people for him?” She’s regained her composure already, like she’s fixed up, with both hands, her still-lush hair, fluffing it up with her fingers—a mannerism of hers, and Daryna can almost see her do it at this instant. “He used to have these long interviews with me, back before they took your father in for the psychiatric assessment—wanted me to, you know, influence your father. Latched on to me like a leech. We had a small staff at the museum, nothing really for a curator to do, so he worked me to pieces trying to earn his star.

  “Once, I remember, I got really pissed at him; I was at the end of my rope already. What’s the point of your meetings? I asked him. What do you want from me? It’s not enough that you ran my husband to the ground; now because of you my boss is giving me three kinds of hell—our directress then, we used to call her Ilse Koch among ourselves, was on a tear, ran my life like in a concentration camp: anytime I all but dashed out for ten minutes to buy a pretzel on the corner, I had to write an explanatory report! I just couldn’t do right by her. She wanted me out of there—must’ve freaked at a black sheep in her flock. Well, he sort of looked a bit ashamed then. Swore he thought very highly of me, and wrote a very good report about me. And maybe he wasn’t lying, because just after that the directress relaxed a little, left me alone. And he disappeared after that—they transferred him somewhere and I heard our museum had a different curator, but he never contacted me and I didn’t see him. I figured our Pashenka made a slip somewhere, because he was all sort of droopy and mopey in those last days. Said to me then that he wished he had a wife who’d stand up for him like I did for Tolya.”

  In her mother’s voice, as if plumped up from inside, Daryna clearly hears notes of pride. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s what kept her going all that time when she was alone? The sign, sent to her through Pavlo Ivanovych, that she was also doing everything right?

  “Whatever did they want from you? They only wanted to pin mismanagement on him, not subterfuge.”

  “Like you could ever tell with them, Daryna! They just had to get into everything, and spoil it all. Kept asking me if my husband had an irritable temper—he must’ve been collecting material for their psychiatrists, but I didn’t think of that until later… and wanted me to make Father take back all his petitions. ‘Don’t you want to live in peace?’ he asked. I told him of course I do, but I also want to respect my husband, and my husband would never agree to such abomination—libel an innocent person, and posthumously! I remember he blinked at me in this stunned way and said, ‘So that’s th
e kind of woman you are!’ I wondered, a little,” Mom adds sheepishly, “if he’d taken a bit of a shine to me.”

  “Hey, that’s violation of procedure! The valiant Soviet CheKa men were strictly prohibited from having any sentiments toward their charges. There were special instructions about that, I’ve read those.”

  “Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Daryna feels herself blush at this memory, the way she snorted, snapped, stomped her foot like a little Billy Goat Gruff. And what do you know, Pavlo Ivanovych is basically family! Somewhere in the same archive where Olena Dovganivna’s case is buried, sit Pavlo Ivanovych’s reports about Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna, year of birth 1939, Ukrainian, unaffiliated, married, husband—no, that’s no longer relevant, it’s best to skip that field.

  “A pleasure to know that she’s raised such a famous daughter”—with the Russian stress. Because what—she might not have raised one? The retired terrorist, doe-eyed Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov with his substantial behind and liver crusts in the corners of his mouth, loving father of a Conservatory student wrote, thirty years ago, when he didn’t yet have those crusts and was making his career in the so-called field operations, a good report about her mother. Are we to understand that if he had written a bad one, Mom would’ve been, just like Dad, thrown out on the street, or, worse, would’ve gotten a prison sentence? And what would’ve happened then to her? God knows, but nothing good, that’s for sure—political prisoners’ children didn’t even get access to higher education until after the Soviet Union collapsed. She’d have landed in some horrible children’s home, most likely. Or maybe Aunt Lyusya would’ve stepped in, taken her to live with her in Poltavshchyna? Even then, her chances of growing up to be famous would’ve been zero; that’s probably why he said what he did. She’s not going to stay famous for long, though, and, generally speaking, it is not at all clear what she’s supposed to do with herself from now on—but that’s not Pavlo Ivanovych’s fault.

  And at once she’s overtaken again by that same, vestibular-like, short-circuit dizziness that happened to her once before, in the spring, the day she stayed late at the studio watching her interview with Vlada and Adrian called to tell her about his dream. For a fraction of a second—this can’t last longer, a living human being can’t take this for much longer—she is carried upwards by the speeding elevator or a giant Ferris wheel—not above space as in Vlada’s painting, but above time, above yesterday’s office with the boss’s gesticulating little shape inside it, and reflected from it, in direct retreating perspective, the other, 1987 office with fake, leather-padded doors, above the wet highlights of the Dutch tile roofs behind the hotel window, and still further, through an enfilade of rooms opening into each other, where a seventies’ kitchen boils with the pot of bubble-swelling laundry on the stove and the puddle that had been the snowman spreads on the rust-colored painted plank floor, and her young father stands on the landing with his head tossed back; from above, in bird’s-eye view, for a slipping tail of an instant, she sees it all pulse together, set into motion like cracked-off hummocks in the world ocean, plugged into some giant, boundless power field, and sees the thin—flickering and countless—dazzling threads running through it all, piercing her life—and stretching beyond it, beyond the horizon of the visible to compose a deliberate, no, deliberating, living design, Dovganivna—Adrian—Boozerov—Mom—herself—Vlada—R.—boss—captain…. Another moment, whose very imminence fills her with knee-buckling awe, and it seems they all, living and dead, will push their times together like chairs to a table, will take their places in the plugged-in map of the stars and everything will become clear—what, everything?—but nothing.

  The moment passes, the whole picture, without ever having come together, scatters into pieces, into flat shards of memories with which you could never erect the Tower of Babel, and Daryna is left sitting on her messy, crumpled bed, blinking at the curtain brightened by the sunlight to egg-yolk yellow with the shadow of the window frame on it like a cross distorted in a magnifying glass…. Threads, her mind turns over belated like a hard, sticky piece of candy that won’t crack. Threads, thready threads. Mom—herself—Boozerov. No, that’s not right: Dovganivna—herself—Aidy—Boozerov. No, she can’t bring it back; it’s all gone. Again, like that time in the spring—it flared and died.

  But she does retain one thing from this flare: the being above—in relation to what happened the night before as well. She’s broken free of the boss’s yesterday office; it doesn’t oppress her anymore. She does, in fact, feel better.

  “Thanks, Ma,” Daryna says into the receiver she is still clutching in her hand; her knuckles stand out as if made from mother-of-pearl. “I know now what I have to do.”

  She’ll go to Boozerov herself. And she will bring Gela’s case to light—to heck with the film, if that’s how things turned out, it’s not about the film—she needs to find out where these threads that run through her life come from, whence this capillary lace of human destinies. And she’ll also meet with Vadym: he’s the only elected representative with whom she could be considered almost friends—they have Vlada in common. He is her only immediate chance of undercutting those bastards’ show with which they plan to cover up someone else’s slave trade. This is what’s really important.

  And what she’s to do with herself, where she’s to look for work, and whether she’s to look for a job at all—that’s all like scree underfoot, the common rubbish of life’s prose, in the same department as what to make for dinner tonight. That’s how she is seeing it at the moment—in big, clear terms, with her vision corrected—and she knows it’s the right way of seeing.

  “See, I know you’re my smart girl!” her mom brightens up. “You’ll see; it’ll all turn out okay.”

  “How else, Ma?”

  “Only do be careful!” Of course, Mom is Mom.

  Daryna barely contains herself before she responds the same way as to her boss last night, and can’t help but smile, “I’ll do my best, Ma.”

  “Alright, you take care of yourself now!”

  “You too, Ma. Call if you need anything.”

  That’s a ritual phrase between them, and it means if you need money. This time, for the first time it doesn’t sound completely heartfelt: her savings, Daryna hopes, will last her a while, but how long can they actually last if she also needs to help the old folks? Aidy, after all, also has a dad on an engineer’s salary—it’s enough for the food, but not for the medication he needs. That’s how it all begins, that’s how they leak and flood, our little cardboard houses. Nah, to hell with it, she doesn’t want to go slopping around in all that again.

  After she puts down the receiver, Daryna rises and, just as she is, in her flimsy nightshirt, goes to the window, throws the curtains open, and gasps with surprise. So that’s where her clarity came from, that’s what lit the curtain with the yellow light that she barely noticed for the entire hour she was on the phone: It’s the snow! The first snow came in the night!

  Spellbound, she looks at the instantly lightened street, at the heavy white lashes of trees in the park next door and the roofs turned white, turned Christmas-y, like a picture in a children’s book: smoke is rising from one chimney, and the whole view looks as though the city had drawn a deep breath and stayed still in the blissful smile of relief. Her city—they can’t take that away from her, either.

  “So,” Daryna says out loud, addressing no one in particular. “Let’s fight back, shall we?”

  Room 5. An Evening for Two

  Half Past Five

  ACQUIRED THIS MONTH:

  1. Polish military cross for Monte Cassino (inscription on the medallion “Monte Cassino Maj 1944”), bronze, with suspension ring, no ribbon, award document missing.

  Could send out a feeler to our military collectors about this. Be better to find a Polish contact, though—for them, it’s got historical value, too.

  2. Commemorative badge issued on the 150th anniversary of Skovoroda’s death
, made from tank-grade steel, with the philosopher’s portrait and inscription on the medallion (“Grigory Skovoroda 1794-1944”).

  More from ’44, huh? Bulk supply. Must be a sixty-year cycle or something. I’d read something once about the cyclic model of the universe—not much of a scientific hypothesis, but it does make you wonder sometimes how history makes itself known in roundabout ways.

  3. Tin-glazed earthenware ocarina, Kyiv region, mid-20th C.

  I don’t remember this. Where’zd it come from? What does it even look like, this ocarina?

  I’ll leave my office, go sit in the subway, and play my ocarina… make this pitiful sound—there was a little old dude I saw in the subway once, playing a sopilka fife on the escalator landing. Never heard anything sadder in my life. Our folk music is not especially happy to begin with, and underground, laid bare by that frightful resonance, it cut like a knife, like the wail of an abandoned child. The voice of people that cryeth in the wildernesse. An abandoned sound—exactly what I feel like right now. Where the heck is that ocarina?

  Let’s get married, I said to her. I’m thirty-four already, and I’ve never said this to any woman before. My dad, in his day, took Mom out to a restaurant expressly for this purpose, and Mom got so emotional she splashed wine on herself. But on Lolly it made no impression at all. Meaning, she snorted, the way she does, like a filly, and tossed her head just like that and said, “So that what? There’ll be the stamp in the passport? So I’d be officially a home-maker instead of unemployed?”