The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  In response to all that, Vadym just huffs like a Gypsy bear, and not without pleasure, and N.U., misty-eyed, beholds the idyll. Vadym, if you think about it, got himself a pretty cushy gig—for one lost woman he gained three, a full set: Katrusya for emotional attachment, Nina Ustýmivna for spiritual understanding, and, of course, there’s Svetochka with her permanently engaged massage organ, where it is always so nice to stick his worked-up dick. Especially if it makes itself known at an inopportune moment—say, when Katrusya, the innocent child, climbs onto her Vaddy’s lap…. Although I highly doubt that a thing like childhood innocence even exists in this post-sexual-revolution generation.

  Irka Mocherniuk’s kid has already enlightened his mom about sex—it’s when a mister and miss kiss each other where they “go wee-wee”—and suggested he and his mom do the same, right there in the bathtub, when Irka was giving him a bath before bed. Irka said the thing that shocked her most was the way he looked at her at the moment: wily, askance—like a man, “exactly like a man, Daryna, you wouldn’t believe it!” Grandpa Freud, wherever he is now, is rubbing his dirty hands together in satisfaction, and Katrusya’s already, what, thirteen—high time to, as the national bard did, herd her lambs beyond the village on the lea.

  Gosh, now I’m feeling like I can’t breathe—wasn’t there water on the table somewhere? Aha, I see—the water’s been appropriated by the bald weasel; he’s moved it close, to keep it handy. That’s fair: I take something he wanted (butter), he takes something I want (water), and in such manner a balance is maintained in the world, and it (the world) continues to spin. Spins, God damn it, so fast I’m seeing black.

  “Excuse me… may I have some water?”

  The sound of my voice makes the glass wall between us crack, and noises spill over me from the general hubbub of the café like knives from a sack, discrete and separate: the clatter of plates in the kitchen, the desperate creak of the front door, the sharp soprano, like a car alarm, at the next table; the bald weasel, in an unexpectedly theatrical, self-regarding baritone, accustomed to people taking notes (Is he a professor or something?) cuts in, too. “Of course, of course, right here, with great pleasure.” He’ll even pour it himself. He’s making a fuss, reaching across the table (revealing the moistly darkened armpits of his already dingy shirt—it’s obvious he’s worn it before today); how solicitous of him! Aidy’s sitting next to him in his elegantly unbuttoned sport coat, calm and sharp like a snow leopard; it makes my heart flutter just to look at him—this ability of his to maintain an utterly natural benevolence in the most artificial, contrived situations. Who would ever think that he’s the conductor of this show? It always puts me in a state of mute awe: Is this possibly the same man with whom I made love the night before? Whose cells are probably still swirling somewhere inside me like tonic bubbles? “Oh, I see, it’s Perrier…. Thank you very much, that’s enough…. Pardon?… No, you’re not mistaken…. Yes, on television, quite right, Diogenes’ Lantern.” (Oh God, do I have to go through this now, too?)

  Baldy oozes grease (And why did he want to eat more butter?) from every pore like a miracle-working icon dripping myrrh, and suggests, with subtle didactic superiority (He’s got to be a professor!) that I consider featuring a unique subject, unfortunately not yet popularized by the media: the heroes of Kyiv’s artistic underground of the 1960s and ’70s, a whole little-known stratum of our culture, and what a rich stratum indeed! The professorial baritone assumes an elegiacally restrained tempo, as if preparing to launch into a popular lecture right here and now. (Oh, please, I couldn’t possibly take that; it’s too much to suffer in my unemployment: to listen, especially to something interesting, and not have a way of retelling what I hear. To know that I won’t be telling people about this from the screen anymore—that I’ll just swallow it all right here and here it will stay, sitting in my stomach, an undigested boulder. And instead, they’ll have the Miss New TV show steamrolling across their screens.)

  “You’re right, Grytsiuk alone is worth a show,” I nonetheless acquiesce meekly: Vlada considered Grytsiuk a genius; she used to say he was one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century.

  My sage gentleman darkens for a moment, unpleasantly ambushed by my omniscience—what if it’s his dearest hobbyhorse and he wishes to possess the secret knowledge alone? But he instantly regains his composure and grins indulgently, “Myshko, he-he, Myshko Grytsiuk, poor thing…. It was harder for him than for all the rest of us—he was a repatriate, after all; he was used to the free world, although he’d grown up in poverty back there in Argentina…. One had to teach him so much, and he still never got accustomed to many of our realia.”

  I see, so it wasn’t so much a lecture he aimed to bestow upon us as a monument to himself, with Grytsiuk and all the other dead rolled into the pedestal. Only the TV cameras are missing (and I’m supposed to supply those). The expression on his myrrhoozing countenance, meanwhile, makes it clear without any doubt that even if one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Grytsiuk—or for my interlocutor, simply Myshko—was still predominantly a sum of endearing weaknesses (his socks stank perhaps), his weaknesses were utterly forgivable, especially among friends; don’t take it personally, bro, we’re all family….

  A “generation,” sure—as that excessively fidgety painter kept saying at Vlada’s show, arranging his fingers into a teepee—only he looked more like a rat. Why is it they all look like animals to me—rats, roaches, weasels—am I going off my rocker here? A hallucination à la Goya: packs of creatures with animal heads root around, twitching their noses, peering into butter dishes—first they mauled the ones who were worth anything and now they feast on their bones.

  The old poetess’s mug surfaces in my mind, the one I once had to listen to as she put curses on the terrible Soviet regime—which failed to arrange her jubilee reading the year Stus was sentenced to the ten years that would kill him. She had the same mouth—bitterly insulted, talking with slurps of spit; they passed up her bowl, too, at feeding time, only the old woman wanted no mere spotlight for her bowl, like our art historian here, but a crown of thorns, and she twisted my arm to get one woven for her. Back then I also got fiercely depressed and drank to get drunk just like this, and not very far from here, either—at Baraban, the favorite watering hole of journalists, where I won’t go again because I don’t want to run into people I used to work with and watch them hide their eyes. And see what animals they begin to resemble.

  And then a very strange thing happens. Maybe I am really already drunk, but for some reason it rattles me, literally, with a shiver, this coincidence—like the repetition of the same figure in a dance: of the place, the time (back then it was also winter, there was snow on the ground), and the characters, that old hag and this bald weasel, the oppressive sorrow for the waste of my father’s life I felt then—and the sorrow for Vlada’s life I feel now. Then, as now, I carried a death for a life that no longer really mattered to anyone but me, and now, as then, I am drawn, as though by a magnet, to the same spot, the same downtown crossing, into a café where I sit at a table just as I did then, and drink in an effort to dissolve, if only a little, that indigestible sorrow (like a swallowed boulder) in a scorching torrent of alcohol—because this sorrow demands it, not for nothing do our folk songs always speak of drowning our sorrows, if not in mead and wine, then deeper, in a river or a sea—because if you don’t thin it with something, it will, by its own solid weight, squeeze liquid out of you like whey from cheese, in a quiet tear-drip without end, like an autumn mist, until it squeezes out all your life juices and you petrify, becoming one with it, becoming it—this insupportable sorrow, a boulder, a pillar of salt.

  I have seen women like that—among the mothers who lost their children, the ones who got them back from Afghanistan as “Cargo 200,” in coffins welded shut and who fell against the zinc boxes, scratched them with their fingers and begged to know, “Baby, baby, are you in there?” They are the women who, twenty years later, rememb
er their vigil at their sons’ faceless coffins and their urge to throw themselves atop them as they were lowered into the ground as their last hour of being alive.

  Nina Ustýmivna, it appears, is at no risk for anything like this; she said she’d cried out all her tears already, but she still drips periodically, still has to put a hankie to her reddening eyes every now and then when you’re talking to her—so she mustn’t have cried herself dry yet. She’s still got plenty of liquid, even her Zodiac sign is Aquarius, the life-giving element. And Vadym’s not even worth mentioning—he is not the keeper to something that’s gone to the ground. But Goddammit, shouldn’t someone make it her work to find a story in Vlada’s life? You can’t just let it break and scatter like a string of pearls from a torn thread, can you? No human life should scatter like that, because it would mean that no life was worth anything, not anyone’s; if that’s the way it is, then why are we all still taking up space on the planet?

  Again, this taste of insoluble sorrow on my lips—the same as three years ago—and tomorrow the hungover heartburn will parch my lips just like it did then—soda and salt. And this recasting, three years later, of the same plot with different actors in the original roles, strikes me, for some reason, as something incredibly significant, filled with an all but mystical meaning. Lord, what if our whole lives are made up, without us ever noticing, of precisely such repetitions, like a geometric pattern, and that’s where the answer is—the main secret locked in every human life?

  Two brightly lit episodes, like windows at night, three years apart, as though placed on a twist of one invisible spiral that links the “then” and the “now” with a single, pervasive meaning. Throngs of other encounters and episodes huddle in the time between the episodes, and maybe some of these will also repeat someday just like this, and pushed by the invisible coil to the top, will flash with the same searing intensity of memory revealing their, as yet indiscernible, meaning—the way a dark shard of bottle glass flashes when you hold it up to the sun: the effect Vlada sought to achieve in her Secrets—amber, thick as buckwheat honey, stitched through with a pulsating golden thread. The world, after you’ve seen it like that, appears at first gray and faded like in an X-ray room. Now I could tell Vlada what she’d spent ten years searching for: not a technique, not a color—but this unseen coil that threads through time.

  But Vlada is gone, and there is no one to tell. In that gray and faded X-ray–room light, Aidy and Baldy, cowled in bluish drifts of smoke, nod their heads like puppets in an animated film and pursue their incredibly boring, hiccup-inducing, vacuous game—rolling words to each other like balls on a pool table.

  “You, Mykola Semenovych, absolutely must write about this.”

  “My dear boy, I’ve long had all the preliminary research completed, all that’s left to do is sit down and write. But you know how busy I am….”

  “Uh-huh, and here I am taking up your precious time! But I must, and you must forgive me—where else would I find an expert like you? And, actually, that’s all I’ve come with, I won’t delay you any longer—I’ll just leave you the documentation so you can take a proper look at it later, and just write your conclusions whenever you have a spare minute.”

  “You’re leading the old man astray, you realize that?”

  “Why astray, Mykola Semenovych? You’ve said it yourself—the possibility of Novakivsky’s authorship is fifty-fifty, the experts’ opinions may very well conflict, some will say yes, and others will say no. What’s so wrong if saying yes, in this case, happens to benefit you and me directly?”

  “Oh, I’ve long known you as the demon of temptation; ladies must find you irresistible…. Speaking of which, why haven’t we toasted the fair lady at our own table yet?”

  The fair lady—that would be me. That’s my role in their little movie. I smile and nod, my head on a hinge, while Baldy (standing up, how else, officers and gentlemen, and Aidy rises too—reluctantly, like a teen forced to entertain a small child, shooting me a look that’s both conspiratorial and indulgent), with unexpected thirst, as if he’d been kept away from it for ages and then finally set free, drains half a glass of cognac in a single gulp, displaying again the wet underarms of his unfortunate shirt; and it’s obvious that he doesn’t actually want to go anywhere—that he has none of this hyper-important business to attend to, has nothing, in fact, more important and dearer to his heart than sitting like this in the populous warmth of a café, enjoying the good food and drink someone else is buying—and having an audience to boot.

  To talk and talk, that’s the most important thing. To knead his life with words, to give it shape like a thinly filled pillow. The Ukrainian underground, the little-known stratum of our culture, Myshko Grytsiuk and I. Pound, pack—stuff—his life with the meaning he’s talked into it: as long as he’s talking, and for some time afterward, the shape holds—even if eventually, inevitably, it all crumbles back into its original form. So he has to keep talking. And that old poetess hag who tossed her dyed curls at me like a starlet in front of a sugar daddy—she also wanted to talk up some other life for herself, different from the one she’d already lived, which was happy and worthless. To install in it, retroactively, the coil that it didn’t have.

  Fuck, it’s not my job to be forever feeling sorry for everyone! I grab my glass again, because what else can I do? Especially since the two of them just drank to the ladies, so it’s like they drank to me and now I should respond in kind. I can’t just sit here like a log—I should drink to them, return the favor: to your health, and all the very best to you too, jolly good fellow. Shit, what jolly good fellow? This is no birthday—more like a wake. My wake for Vadym, that’s right. For Vadym who can do nothing, because he’s got the elections. No, worse: for Vadym who turned out to be Vlada’s defeat—the pothole that caught the spinning wheel of her life, a Harley Davidson speeding along the highway.

  “No, no, I don’t want any cognac, thank you.”

  Aidy says that he has one more little favor to ask, on the fair ladies’ topic, of this Semenovych, a matter in which he could be of great help, not to Aidy himself, but to one young woman—and Baldy pricks up eagerly, ears and nose, like a weasel smelling a chicken house. “Aha, and what is the favor?” That he is not being gotten rid of just yet, that the feast goes on, is enough to make him happy. Instead, it is me who stiffens up unpleasantly: What young woman?

  Aidy’s always taking care of something for someone, always helping someone, and all these young girls who’re running loose out there, throwing themselves under every more-or-less financially secure dude, like Anna Karenina under the train, they’ve no decency, no decency or shame whatsoever; I can easily imagine a Barbie doll like that, fresh and tight, just out of the box—oh no, I’d better not! This is also new; I don’t remember having such textbook jealousy fits before, and tonight I’ve already caught myself several times being irritated by that exceedingly vociferous look-at-me soprano at the next table—with her jungle of luxurious hair that makes you want to put your hands in it—it’s a chestnut Niagara like in a shampoo commercial; at least Aidy’s seated with his back to this Niagara—but here we go, this is full-blown paranoia already.

  I see—the young woman Aidy is talking about is his secretary. Sure, of course I remember her, met her once (forget princess, she’s a pavement queen, brash and wily, not his type). Secretaries, masseuses, interns, assistants—come to think of it, what a wide choice a solvent man has of young women thirsting for a better life! And what a kick I got at first from being assigned to that same market category on sight by waiters, hotel clerks, or stewardesses (I saw the way one of them looked at me when R. stroked my thighs under the tray table on that Amsterdam flight) when I appeared in public with R. somewhere people didn’t know us—how bewitchingly fun it was, God, what a turn-on! A constantly giggly, champagne-bubbly arousal: a queen at a masquerade, dressed as a shepherdess. Yes, boss, as you wish, boss—a wildly sexy game. I want you right here and right now. The silence of his driver
who took us to the airport—a professional silence, impenetrable like the Mottled Hen’s golden egg that no one could break—you pay a premium for such silence, such folks don’t give interviews (and, oh, how I wish they did, and wished back then, too, the journalist in me never quit doing her job!).

  When the world takes you for a whore but keeps its mouth shut, or grins politely, like that hotel clerk who presented R. with the room keys (although it was I who did the talking, while R. just breathed noisily at my side because his English is nonexistent, and there’s one more category I could be placed into—an interpreter), it sort of gives you the social sanction to do exactly what, as they believe, this breathing character is paying you to do. Your sexual act, thus, begins, essentially, at the check-in desk, and by the time you reach your room in the impatient, pulsing-like-a-bulging-vein silence of the elevator (where a Russian or a Turk, infected with the atmosphere, nails you with a fiery look as he steps out on his floor, letting it be known that he could take care of you no worse than your companion—it spreads like electricity, men always flare up like lights on a string when they see a woman being led to a good fuck, and this erotic illumination is also part of the show), you quite simply must, as soon as the door closes, drop onto the bed and get to business. So, you’re an interpreter now, let’s see you interpret this.

  There’s something of an orgy in this almost-public sex that is being watched through the walls by dozens of eyes—the sex of the information age, sex without privacy, as if at a stadium with crowds of fans: floodlights on, olé-olé-olé-olé, go-go-go, and sco-o-ore! And the result: a couple of vacant, mechanical orgasms and the inevitable popping up of the same postcoital question in your mind. Why the hell am I doing this, exactly?

  And on the flight back—already knowing, after that morning with the hotel-window view of the wet roofs below, that I urgently need to break things off with R.—I just had to spot one of those tight Barbie dolls, not long out of the box but already not quite fresh, slightly spoiled by a touch of second-handedness, turned out as unambiguously as if she were wearing a uniform: loose, tar-black hair down to her buttocks, gold chains, silver stiletto heels that made her a head taller than her companion, who looked like he could be thrice her senior. They took the seats immediately behind us, and the man—also, I figured, a big wheel that flies everywhere with his own masseuse (the doll didn’t quite have the goods for an interpreter)—instantly dove into some Russian pulp, some Hitler-Stalin-Zhukov potboiler with a hot-red cover. (Bright, they like everything bright, pop-your-eyes-out bright; they are forever hungry for bling, these children of gray factory developments and mining towns.)