The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Thank you, Yulichka,” I say, leaning her away from me like a tin soldier, but not letting go of her nether regions. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you—would you mind buying yourself a suit? An English one, you know, a traditional cut, a bit conservative—just the thing for the antiques business. Remember that old man who’d promised us a cuckoo clock? Where’d he disappear to—did you, by chance, scare him off with your, mmm, glamorous outfit?”

  “I’ll call him back,” Yulichka mutters as if hypnotized, throat caught, voice softened.

  “That’d be great,” I say just as nicely, and let her go. The whole interaction holds about as much eroticism as if I’d held on to a doorknob for a while, but it still makes me feel a tiny bit better: nothing improves one’s mood like a spot-check of female deployability, even if you’ve no use for it whatsoever. Well, at least now my secretary’ll remember that it’s not all gold that’s wet. Staff development, that’s it. It appears I’m also a petty tyrant, who’d have thought.

  “That’s the only comment I have—otherwise, you’re doing a wonderful job,” I grin, friendly as a crocodile, as she disappears behind the door—not to cry in the bathroom, I hope. I don’t want girls crying because of me. And I shouldn’t be taking it out on my subordinates. It’s no one’s fault I took a left turn at Albuquerque, as the cartoon goes.

  And at “haf past faiv” I do, in fact, have a meeting—with my, generously speaking, expert. Half past five, both hands drooped down—a moment when time is impotent. Half past five, Adrian Ambrozievich, half past five. Fie on you, bite your tongue!—Granny Lina used to say. Am I turning superstitious or something?

  In fact, the difference between me and Sashko Krasnokutsky was not that great: we were both moving further away from ourselves, from whatever was the best in us—meaning, we were both heading for the bottom. Because the bottom is not scavenging in trashcans—the bottom is precisely this: rejecting whatever’s best in you. The arc of my descent was more comfortable and smelled better, that’s all. And if you want to talk about signs from Providence—that was one, without a doubt, manifested as clear as could be, short only of a statue talking. Or a burning bush. Only I, self-satisfied moron that I was, was liable to blow off a direct fiery warning from a thorn bush too. The dumbest thing is I did not recognize myself in Sashko—did not see that I lived a lie I told myself, just as he did. Did not see that we were both sick with the same illness, only in him it had reached the symptomatic stage and in me it had not. Something shoved it straight into my face, and I blew it. I should’ve seen Sashko as a magnified projection of myself, and instead I fanned my tail and turned up my nose like a snob: I ain’t my brother’s keeper. And he’s my brother, milk-brother, isn’t he—we held on to the same tit. Whose keeper am I?

  Every man’s natural need—to be a keeper, to protect that with which God trusted you, to hold your place in this universe—with arms, if need be, and to the end. Oleksiy, the security guard, once told me that when his child was born he understood, for the first time, a line he’d remembered since school, from some classic author—I’ll shoot if they come. That author had some scoundrel landlord saying this when his land was being taken away from him, or something like that, or maybe that’s just the way it worked in the Soviet textbook—that the landlord was a scoundrel, and maybe in fact he was a good guy. At any rate, the way Oleksiy said it sent shivers down my spine. The last thing I’d expect of the guy was such artfully crystallized philosophy. The man’s plain as a door, younger than me, a former cop—left his post after he and his bosses locked horns over something—loves his wife beyond belief, glows all over when he talks about her, quit smoking when she got pregnant. And built them a house in his Obuhov, where his parents live—everything like in that song. His own house: wife and child. And the dad who keeps a Kalashnikov under a bench somewhere—in case “they come.” I shake his hand now every time I see him now, something I didn’t use to do. I could count on the fingers of one hand the people I’ve met who have the courage to live their own lives. Their own, and not just whatever came their way.

  “I’ll shoot if they come”—it’s perfectly lucid; it has the beauty and clarity of a simple solution. And I didn’t shoot because no one came for me—I came for myself. And now I’m “shooting” to keep the tax rats away. Fucking hero. From, shame to say, a whole line of soldiers, as the song goes, keep the shrapnel coming down the line; Ukrainian rebels don’t retreat in a fight.

  Lolly did gasp with such delight that first time we met: “You’re Olena Dovganivna’s grandnephew?” The way she looked at me—I went faint (from that first glance—in sickness and in health, till death do us part): She looked at me with the same thrill of recognition as Strutynsky once had when he said to me, “Vatamanyuk, you have a unique cognitive apparatus.” You are the only two people—Lolly, don’t take offense for my lumping you in with the old gnome; he was a great man and a great scientist, God rest his soul—who saw in me something greater than myself. Something, entrusted to me by fate, that demanded effort: the unrelenting assault, the stretching of my neck till sweat ran down my back to grow tall enough to measure up to that greatness inside me. You saw something I had to reach for. You and no one else.

  We met right about the time when I stank of self-satisfaction like a whole duty-free store at an international airport. Thought myself a heck of a cool cat. Riding that same wave, less than a month after my run-in with Sashko outside of Pantagruel. Since then, Lolly and I have gone to that little park on Zolotovoritska a million times, to the café across from that casino-bar with the machines where Sashko trundled off to hoping to win his life back with the twenty I’d given him, and we go to the opposite side, too—to the Cosmopolitan, and the pub on the corner: we’ve stomped all over that spot, spun our presence like spider webs around it, but I’ve never taken her to Pantagruel. The woman of your life—what a cheesy banality you’d think, straight out of a cabaret repertoire, a bad restaurant chanson—you’d never say it out loud unless you were a total moron. But whoever originally thought this up was no moron. Every banality, it seems, is just a truth that’s been too often repeated—like a mantra, until it lost all meaning. It doesn’t stop being a truth—it’s just that now everyone has to discover its original meaning, worn off from frequent use, anew. The woman of your life—the one who gives you back your life. Your own, the way it was supposed to be—if you, asshole, hadn’t flushed it down the toilet. If you hadn’t split, refusing to maintain the effort.

  Denga, altyn—I go back to the same line, read it and do not understand what I’ve just read. Nope, I’m no use at work today.

  How old is she? Dad asked about Lolly, when we came to record his memories (and all that footage, the entire archive, almost two years of Lolly’s work is now just going to rot because the channel owns it!). I told him she was five years older than me. (Actually, six and a bit—I don’t know why I felt compelled to understate the gap.) I waited for the old man to bring up Mom—maybe not up front, as in, she reminds me of your mom (although Lolly does resemble Mom a little; she, too, has something of an alpinist in her, knock on wood), but for him to recall the story of his own life’s biggest love because that would’ve meant that he accepted Lolly and understood how serious this relationship is for me. Instead, he went all soft and sentimental, though somehow missing the point: oh, he responded, delighted, “You’ve always liked older girls, remember you were three and the neighbors’ little girl was four and a half and you went around telling everyone you guys were getting married? Tailed her everywhere she went, gave her your teddy bear—remember?” I remembered neither the girl nor the teddy bear, but still got all sentimental myself: it’s always nice to confirm that time is a relative value, that a person does not change in any fundamental way over the years, and that blondish rug rat in the old photo with pieces of string tied around his plump little wrists and the current knuckle-dragger of six foot six, two hundred and five, are one and the same, after all.

  When I la
ter told Lolly about the girl with the teddy bear, she had a good laugh, and then said, once again astounding me by giving voice, unerringly, to my own unspoken thought, “Do you think it’s possible your dad was actually thinking about himself—about something he himself remembered from when he was three years old, from that night when they roused him to kiss Aunt Gela goodbye—that’s what I was asking him about. What if his mind had just stayed on that track?” She’s so smart, my little Dr. Freud. The woman who enters your life and pierces it through, literally, like a threaded needle—gathering, threading the bits and pieces scattered through time into a complete picture that had begun to stringing itself together long before you came to this world. The woman who can reach deeper than your own memory—and that’s why, with her, you always know who you are.

  The first sign she was The One: Lolly gave me back my dreams. Turned on the lights in the unused rooms. Doesn’t matter if some of those dreams turned out not to be my own, as if during my absence, while I was obtusely stuffing my mind with tax reports and client co-optation strategies, looking first for an intelligent accountant, then for a good lawyer, followed by reliable experts and reliable bribe-takers in the city government, and other shit, of which there was so much that the mind could not keep up and suffered from chronic constipation—while I was doing all that, someone else had moved into the unused rooms. Someone I don’t have a clue about, have no idea why he’s wandering around in there with his flashlight like in an old-timey picture show, showing me pieces of some unknown old movie, or what this has to do with me and my family. That it does have something to do with us I can guess by the fact that the family, too, has been frequenting my dreams—but in a bizarre way, as if in passing: Great-Aunt Gela walks through me as if I weren’t there and speaks to Lolly directly, like I’m no longer their go-between—alright, that’s fine, I’m not jealous, but it’s upsetting a bit, you know, who’s whose blood? Whose dad got pulled out of his bed at the tender age of three for a goodbye kiss, and then taken to Kazakhstan in the cattle car, on dry rations alone, so that when the convoy gave Granny Lina her half cup of water at stations, she held each sip in her mouth and had the child suck it out along with her spit? (Dad himself does not remember that journey, but he talked about it as though he were reading from notes—the way he heard it from Granny.)

  “So one could say,” Lolly said to Dad kindly, sympathetically, in the tiny living room, where he sat before the cameras stiffly as if in a plaster corset, afraid to shift his pose, between the Hutsul rug crucified on the wall and the hutch with the few unshattered remains of the old Korets china set (under the camera lights I was suddenly blinded by the pitiful squalor of these trappings of a Soviet home where I grew up, pieced together painstakingly from the splintered-off fragments of the old world), “that you were, essentially, persecuted as a child solely for the fact that your aunt fought in the nationalist resistance?”

  Dad made a small embarrassed sound: he didn’t find the designation of a “persecuted child” especially appealing—he would’ve preferred to cut a decidedly manlier figure before his daughter-in-law-to-be, and he surprised me by telling the story—I almost wondered if he weren’t making it up on the spot, at least I’d never heard it before—of how when they were already in Kazakhstan, in the settlement, he, a five-year-old runt, rushed to defend his mom against a guard, sinking his teeth into the man’s arm until he drew blood. “He got all mad, ‘You,’ he spat, ‘Bandera spawn, we’d do better to shoot all you fuckers’—but he let Mom go!” Then Dad laughed, pulling together the dense (so much denser now, I thought) wrinkles from his entire face, glowing just like his five-year-old self—thrilled anew with his first display of masculine valiance—and I saw he was telling the truth.

  “You never told me this,” I said later, to which he, still elated, responded cheerfully, “Forgot all about it myself, don’t even know how it came back right then!” That’s how I discovered that I am not the only one for whom Lolly can turn on lights in unused rooms. It’s her gift—drawing out hidden information from people, like pushing a button: Click!—and the light goes on. (“You should’ve been a detective,” I joked—“Yep, like Columbo!” she played along. We’ve already developed our own repertoire of set phrases and words whose only purpose is to replace touch because you can’t really live your life in each other’s arms—that’s what loving words are for, to hold each other with them—and now we’ll have to strike some things out of this repertoire, so as not to put salt into her wounds—my Lolly’s no longer Columbo.)

  Incredible how much of this kind of stuff, long forgotten in our family, she’s brought back into the light in this way of hers. And it was all gradually coming together—all the disconnected facts I remembered from what Granny and Grandpa told me, fragments of recollections, episodes unattached to dates, people who had died long ago or were scattered around the world—all this was settling, piece by piece, into a chronological order, into bins sequentially ordered by year. (I was thrilled, of course—I never had the time to organize the family history, but now I’ve come to regard the fact that Lolly was delivering it to me for free as an inextricable part of our life together, as a family. And now the foundation’s sliding under this life, too, the thing that had made us first accomplices and later lovers was being taken away.)

  And still for Lolly all that wasn’t enough. There were times I’d say, listen, don’t you think you could call it good already—you’ve got four generations of the Dovgans down pat, good as your own kin—and she’d just shake her head: all this I’ve put together so far may not even get used, for a thirty-minute film—if it’s to be any good—you need a good thirty hours of footage, and twenty-nine of that will end up on the floor, and I’m still missing—she’d be snapping her fingers in the air—the main twist, the answer, that! The answer—to what? In those moments I felt myself to be the go-between. As if Lolly, by some mysterious trick, had leapfrogged over me in time, had jumped over my back and landed in the place of Granny Lina, the main keeper of all our family’s stories.

  Only Granny Lina ran out of time. After Grandpa’s death, she’d been meaning for years to write down her memoirs, even got a special thick notebook bound in dark-green, fake leather. Dad and I encouraged her every way we could, but nothing ever came of it: after Granny was gone, all we found in her special notebook were a few pages illegibly laced with columns of dates and initials that looked like an alphabet of a dead language or a cipher of a wiped-out spy ring—like all Dovgans, Granny Lina did not like writing; even her letters, always short, reminded me of doctors’ prescriptions.

  One thing I did always like about them though was her unchanging form of address—“Beloved Adrian”—which once allowed me to pass them off in a summer camp as letters from a fantasy girlfriend. In psychology, Lolly says, this is called transfer-ence—or maybe sublimation if I’m not mixing them up again. But I really loved Granny Lina, and I believe she loved me, too. It was she who sang to me before sleep when I was little; she could sing just as well as Mom, only all her songs were unlullaby-like, tragic—I recognized one of them later, when Zhdankin sang it in 1989 at the Chervona Ruta Festival (“black furrows plowed, and the bullets sprout, sprout, hey, hey…”)—as if Granny, sitting next to my little bed, were mourning someone. It was only later that I learned that Adrian was supposed to be the name of her second son—my uncle, due to be born in exile, but who was born prematurely and laid down in an unmarked mass grave on the steppe where Temirtau now stands, next to the banished adults, camp prisoners, and Japanese POWs.

  The city they were building was later called a Komsomol project, like all Soviet cities built by prisoners, and it’s still burning up the sky somewhere in the middle of the Kazakh steppe with its forest of yellow smoke plumes—“foxtails.” Temirtau, the city of metallurgists, with the highest cancer mortality rate in the world. “Some get medals, some get proud, some get the city Temirtau,” Grandpa often repeated the local saying, and might as well been reading his obit, because
thirty years later Temirtau cancer caught up with him, too—but at least in his own bed, and not in a ditch on a foreign steppe.

  I don’t even know how Granny had come up with this name, Adrian. It wasn’t in the family—in the whole last century I don’t know anyone who was called that. Dad was named Ambroziy in honor of Grandfather Dovgan, Granny’s father and my great-grandfather, who in the Polish days was a rather famous doctor in Lviv—one of the few Ukrainian doctors whom the Poles, like the Russians, otherwise big fans of the “blending of the people,” never did kick out of the city and into some ethnically Polish lands—he must’ve really known his doctoring stuff, that gramps. Accordingly, the second son should have been named after the grandfather from the other side, Iosyp. Iosyp Vatamanyuk—sounds fine to me. Or, did Granny think that was too plain, too country? On the Vatamanyuk side, all men for generations have been Mykhailos, and Grytskos, and Vasyls, like Grandfather’s younger brother, the one who perished in Kolyma.

  Grandfather was the first in his family to go to Gymnasium; he passed his exit exams, the matura as it was called—“done turned a gentleman” by the standards of the day—ironically, the same year the Soviets came. He was a good student, but did not receive a distinction because of this one Polish professor, he said, who couldn’t stand the sight of Ukrainian students, and humiliated them every chance he got. And Grandpa, on top of that, once openly refused to sing, at some official occasion, the Polish military march from 1918—and at this point in the story he’d always whine, incredibly off-key, “We-e-e the first briga-a-de, ri-i-flemen campa-aign,” making the march sound like goats bleating to illustrate his point more convincingly.

  Were I in that Pole’s shoes, I’d get mad, too, when I heard that. Although the thing that stunned me most when I was little was how one could just declare to the teacher, out loud, “I won’t sing the occupier’s songs!”—and only pay for it by losing a stupid A somewhere on your atestat. (In second or third grade, I spent some time seriously contemplating repeating this experiment on our choir teacher, who called us up one by one to squeal without accompaniment before the whole class, “Vast is my Native Land,” but I ultimately decided not to venture beyond shooting spitballs through tubes—really disemboweled ballpoint pens—during her lessons, all the rage at the time.) And when in ’39 the Soviets came, that very first autumn in Grandpa’s town they put to the wall everyone who graduated with distinction, line by line according to the Gymnasium’s rosters—Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, not sorting who was “genteel” and who was “peasant,” everyone whose atestats had that summa cum laude that Grandpa, thanks to his Ukrainophobe professor (I wonder if they shot him, too) never got.