The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  We did, Vlada, we did, that was it—our youth, and our country’s youth that was being born out of the tidal roar of the Independence Square, of the boys with seraphic faces and white hunger-strikers’ headbands, not one of whom, back then, had yet thought of paying for being prepared to die. And they were really prepared to die, and those who haven’t died, only got themselves to blame.

  Yes, my Vlada had that fear, of course she did, however deep it sat—a genetic fear, inherited from her mother, from Nina Ustýmivna. Or perhaps even older than that—from those grandparents of hers, the Komsomol activists who, in 1933, lit out for the city from the famished country and became teachers at a workers’ night school, and thus did not die together with everyone else in their village—and who knows at what price. And it was because of this fear, which did not allow her, in her own eyes or in the eyes of her jealous community, any right to err, that she got stuck with Vadym for so dangerously long in that stage when you work through your days as if they were wet dirt on a shovel, because in place of your extinguished love, or whatever it was that appeared to have been love, comes emptiness—and into emptiness, always and inevitably, like black water, seeps death: I’m afraid to sleep. I’ll fall asleep—and die.

  Shit, now I remember! She even told me, sometime that summer, before our interview, a dream she had—told it to me in detail. The dream was about Vadym, but I only remembered one image from it. (You generally don’t remember other people’s dreams very well; they’re like the plots of movies someone has retold you but that you haven’t seen yourself.) In the dream, Vadym took her somewhere, to a hill, gray as the surface of the moon, and the hill began to slide from under her feet, and she saw it was a pile of concrete sand—really, what could be deader? I think there were even crows in that dream—black, fat, and glossy.

  Why couldn’t I have told her then: Vladusya, my dear, cut the cord and run as fast as your legs will carry you—exactly like you did ten years ago; follow your own design, that same mind-boggling pattern of yours. I know you can, you’ve done it before, and you know when it’s time to go under the knife—and to hell with him, this husband of yours, and with his—actually your—penthouse, with its glassed-in floating clouds, mirror surfaces, and white leather ottomans; all that, literally heavenly beauty, with the eternal view of the sky, you could charge admission to that place, that was a heck of a job you did, but to hell with it, tear it from your heart and run. Run because this man, whose one other woman has already gone round the bend, alarmingly, in the loony-bin direction, is clearly dangerous; there are men like that—packed hard inside into an unassailable mass of self-satisfaction that we mistake for strength, and everything they touch, they kill, even sex. Such men like power, and it comes to them easily, because when someone’s plowing ahead with such unassailable confidence, it is very hard not to think that he is the one who has seen the light and will, if you follow him, show it to you, too—hard to believe that such a juggernaut carries with it nothing but itself. But it’s now that I’m all wised up—I knew nothing back then; it was all before I met R., and I was as stupid and naïve as a bunch of parsley. Dara—Dolly—Folly.

  Why is the word death of feminine gender in our language; where’d this nonsense come from? Death should be a man; a woman’s death, at least. That’s the way the Germanic people have it, I think, they’ve always been better mystics than we. Spoken by a man, “I killed her”—it even sounds better, more convincing, than when a woman says, “I killed him.” When a man says it, it doesn’t admit any levity of interpretation. I killed him with that one phrase—men don’t talk like that. Or, I killed him with my silent disdain—you’re kidding, right? He doesn’t give a hoot about your disdain, if he even noticed it. What does he notice, really?

  I know nothing about the war that may have been raging between them her last autumn, when Vlada was so rapidly withdrawing from us all, cloaked in the cold, otherworldly glint of estrangement, like an acolyte soon to take her vows—I know nothing, and will never know anything more. And Vadym doesn’t know either—I doubt he suspected even then what role he’d been destined to play in her life. (He did get rattled a bit with a chilly draft of recognition when she died—in those first weeks, when he drowned his grief in drink and, like a buffalo, stampeded at nights down the Boryspil highway as if he wanted to catch the runaway and bring her back—but he did not let that recognition rattle him any looser, and no more drafts from the other side will ever get to him again.)

  No one, except the dead person herself, can see her death in its entirety. See how it evolved, how it ripened, day by day, like a fruit. The living can only observe, from their side, the result: how the overripe fruit drops from the branch under its own weight. And only the dead, herself, knows how things got that far.

  * * *

  “Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna. I’ve always wanted to.”

  The bathroom—impeccably stylish rather than luxurious, without any nouveau-riche bells and whistles, all those Roman therms and gold leaf—still smelled of recent renovation, of paint and varnish, and the smell resembled the air of Vlada’s studio a little. Perhaps that’s what put her in the working mode, made her hands itch to pick up her tools (painting, she loved saying, is first and foremost manual labor, a craft!). She worked differently from the way makeup artists usually did: seated me facing her instead of the mirror, did not talk to me, did not comment on anything she was doing, but instead brought in a tape deck and put on Queen, “The Show Must Go On.”

  The longer I sat there, offering my face to her with my eyes closed, the stronger chills that ran through my body. Brushes, multiplying against my skin like a swarm of butterflies, tickled my mouth, temples, cheeks, eyelids; I was being transported to a different place, disappearing, changing form like a sculpture in the artist’s hands. The music blared inside me, and from there, from the darkness of roaring halls, broken glass poured down my veins, a battle call breaking to the surface—like a challenge to life itself—it thundered: the show must go on! And Vlada’s breath on my face froze like the breath of a tightrope walker hovering above the abyss of a great dark hall: this was no game, no innocent playing at dress-up and do-over, but something as ominously desperate as what Freddie Mercury must have felt in the flight of his own voice—she wanted to bring something important out of me, show me something that mattered a great deal to her; and when that scorchingly bright face finally hit me from the mirror, with the long Egyptian brows, the blood-dark lips (the face of a pagan goddess of war, a priestess of a bloody cult, something about it threatening, witchy, something that made you want to stomp it out, right away, like a fire, go back to the ranks, to the polished TV-screen picture that can reassuringly tell you the brand of the anchorwoman’s suit), I recoiled, terrified. But at the same time I couldn’t take my spellbound eyes off this strange mask, marveling at how, aided merely by the masterly blended colors, it grew out of my own features. Incredible. Perhaps only in dark, low-lit windowpanes, with the texture of the details smoothed away, can human faces be as magnificent as this, and afterward it was in dark windowpanes that I’d glimpse this strange face on myself—and shudder every time. By then the emotional overload was making my whole body shake, all but teeth clattering, and all I could manage was to hide behind a nervous chuckle, like a village girl behind her sleeve: “Matusevych, what have you done to me? I am not like this!”

  “Then you were like this in a previous life,” she answered, very serious, “you just forgot.”

  “You think?”

  In response, she stepped in closer, with that balletic move of hers, upward from below—and kissed me on the lips, running her tongue between them, which brought them, with a gasp, right back to life under the rolled-on lipstick, the feeling back in them again: her little tongue, in comparison to a man’s, turned out to be incredibly soft, tender, like an oyster pried out of its shell. I forgot how long it had been since I was kissed by a woman—at school, at summer camp?—and thought to myself, stunned: so t
hat’s what we girls feel and taste like, some lucky bastards those men! Vlada withdrew and stood in the mirror beside me—a bloody smudge stained her lips like the hand mirror in that famous painting of hers, Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident. “Now wait, I’ll take a picture of you.”

  And I stayed there waiting, trembling a little—had she told me to slice my wrists at that moment, I would probably have done as she said. But she only brought back her camera—and casually, without aiming, shot off, like a good machine-gunner from the elbow-grip, a whole clip, click-click-click. “And now, the hard-est”—and she stood next to me again, with that bloody smudge across her mouth, holding the camera aimed at the two us in her stretched-out arms, click-click-click. A double portrait: the artist and her (nibbled) model. Or, perhaps, not the model, but the work? No, it wasn’t the model, or the work either. For her, I was something else in that incarnation, a bizarre impersonation of female strength, which she no longer felt in herself. And I remember well the strange alarm that stirred in me when she was aiming at us like that, with both hands, at face level, as if it were a gun muzzle and not a camera lens.

  Those pictures remain in her digital archive—Vadym hasn’t destroyed that yet. That’s what he says, at least. I don’t know if I would like to see them now. “Doesn’t matter,” Vlada said, when we looked at the pictures together—“no photograph can ever give you what you get when you look at the thing in flesh, and color photography especially is all smoke and mirrors, bull and opium for the people.” And she was right: The pictures were very impressive but something crept into them that wasn’t there in the mirror—theatricality. We looked like a pair of masqueraders, and my witchy mask no longer mesmerized as powerfully—some magic had gone out of it. This is why, Vlada professed contemplatively, painting can never be replaced, not ever, not with anything. “That’s okay. I’ll use this. I’ll do something with these. I just don’t know what yet…”

  And I did not tell her that she’d already done something—to me, only I also didn’t know yet what it was. Washing my face in the bathroom later—with dull regret, as if an unfulfilled promise had breathed so near and passed me by, only brushing me with that one touch on the lips, and then slipping between my fingers (only living beauty can evoke such an aching sense of loss—never the one on canvas)—I felt my knees buckle under me. Just like that, literally, as if the tendons suddenly turned to mush and lost their grip—and up till then I thought “straw legs” was just a figure of speech. Had there been a male artist in Vlada’s stead, everything between us would’ve discharged into clarity by means of immediate sex, and that sex probably would’ve been divine. One of those few times, count them on your fingers, that you remember for the rest of your life—with a complete release from the body such as one experiences in the midst of religious ecstasy, when, as I seem to remember Papa Hemingway wrote, the ground swam, although that was nonsense, too, because there’s no ground left in sex like that, neither ground nor sky, neither up nor down, and love has nothing to do with it. Although I did have one time like that with Aidy, but then I’ve also had one with Artem—that time in the archive, when I first saw the photo of Dovganivna with her comrades and it came over me right on the spot, and that’s when it all started, my life changed.

  But Vlada was not a man, and the two of us could not rely on such simple resolutions, programmed into us by Mother Nature herself. Something else, then, was between us, something more unsettling, something akin to the link between a new mother and the fruit of her womb—she gave birth to something in me that night. She set something free, like a large dark bird.

  And this remained our secret, one for the two of us—we never talked about it again, didn’t have a chance. Until the day there was no longer anyone to talk to.

  How could I have given her the strength I myself did not know was in me?

  * * *

  “B-beg pardon, I didn’t hear you—what was t-that?”

  Baldy asked me a question or something. And I tuned him out. Coz I’m drunk. Drink-dong-drunk… I hear bells ringing somewhere, a tinny-tiny little sound. No kidding, I’m drunk, good and drunk, who’d have thunk. Somewhere there was a stage at which I should’ve stopped and lingered, and I didn’t notice how I rolled straight through it. Overdid it. And butter won’t help no mo’.

  Baldy was asking whether I am bored. Oh, sure, he needs an audience; he wanted to preen before me, too. And I just tuned him out; how uncivil—did not hear a thing, nada, of what they were talking about.

  “I’m n-never bored.”

  “Oh, then you are a very special woman. One of a kind—your health!”

  But I am bored looking at you, mister. Do you have any idea how boring you are to look at? You’re all so boring, like someone’d just pulled you out of a washer. That’s exactly what you’re like: soggy and wrung out. And you probably imagine yourself all clean and squeaky, right?

  “It’s time we got going,” Aidy says. The big sweetie, he’s a bit tipsy, too. And all that alcohol has clarified some things in his head, too: that the only way to get rid of this character is exactly this—to get up and leave altogether. He won’t go by himself, unless someone throws him out. And Aidy can’t throw anyone out for anything. Aidy doesn’t like humiliating people. And thank God for that. Thank God.

  Baldy shoots hungry looks all around him, as though he wants to swallow the whole place in one gulp before he leaves, and take it with him, in his gut, like a smuggler carrying diamonds. And sighs sorrowfully, woman-like: oho-ho!

  “As old Taras once wrote—”

  Who? Baldy quotes with great pathos—although he talks all the time as if he were quoting someone anyway. His generation still uses quotes like scholastics use the Holy Scriptures, sat out their whole lifetimes behind other people’s backs.

  “First drink down—makes you spry / second—worry on your mind / third one—now your eyes glow / thought after another follows!”

  “Taras Shevchenko wrote that?”

  Aidy and I ask him to repeat it, and he does. I love it—like it was written about me. The clinical picture spread out, plain and simple. If only I’d stopped at that third drink—while the eyes still glowed. Aidy hands his credit card to the waiter, and Baldy pretends he is too engaged in the conversation to have noticed this delicate moment. (He’ll ask insincerely later: How much do I owe?—and pretend to be surprised, just as insincerely, that the bill’s already been settled; these old suckers always do that.) He tells me the great bard wrote this on a wall somewhere while he was carousing in a tavern. You know those poets maudits. Although it’s still better than “les saglots longs des violons.” For some reason, this conclusion prompts a surge of patriotic pride in me. (How did I ever get so drunk?)

  “It would be good to write it on the wall here somewhere, too,” Aidy contributes, as he always does, a dose of constructive pragmatism. That’s right, this is supposed to be a literary café; no less, they even have some moldy hardbacks huddling on the shelves over there—what idiot would ever want to read in this light? Thought after another follows, that’s very well said indeed.

  And, out of some deeply sentimental gratitude to this old art-worm for the aptly supplied quote—as if this quote, for reasons past comprehension, took us to some deeper level of mutual understanding in this place and at this moment, before we got up from the table and parted ways (Will our paths ever cross again, or have they separated forever already?), as if the quote sent us into the throes of an intimacy so urgent we needed to fall into each other’s arms at the feet of Myshko Grytsiuk, whom Vlada considered a genius—in a word, that drunken daze that makes the proletariat, after the umpteenth, by the great bard unforeseen, drink, grab whatever’s handy and crush it on the tablemate’s skull, I open my mouth and blurt, “Did you, by chance, know Vladyslava Matusevych?”

  Done, it’s out, can’t take it back. And instantly the face I see before me is no longer weaselly—it’s a hyena’s maw. He-he.

  “You know, fo
r me it was enough to have known her matinka, he-he!”

  “Nina Ustýmivna?” I’m not being obtuse—I’m slamming on the brakes: something’s coming at me that I do not want to hear, and there’s no way to swerve around it.

  “Exactly, exactly. Ninél is her real name.”

  Ninél? Yes, indeed, that’s right, Ninél—a name once fashionable among the Soviet bureaucrats, “Lenin” spelled backwards.

  “I knew Matusevych Senior, too. He wasn’t actually without talent, as a painter, but that bitch, pardon my language, just drove him to the grave. We used to call her the praying mantis among ourselves, he-he… the spider female that turns the male into protein after the act…. She, by the way, was a beauty, a nuclear blonde; you know—you could bury her alive, and she’d dig herself out with her bare hands, he-he. God spare me from a woman like that.”

  Something in his voice, a grating note, tells me he is not married. Or long divorced. Could’ve figured it earlier, not rocket science: his dingy shirt, a general dusting of neglect—it happens when a person has long lived alone and doesn’t have anyone to look him over on his way out. His only consolation—how bad things can be for the married. Especially those who marry beautiful blondes. Vlada also always said that her mom had been a beauty, and I always kept politely quiet: I think the real beauties remain beautiful in old age, and I wouldn’t say that about N.U.

  “The fact that Matusevych never fulfilled his potential as an artist,” Baldy continues to gloat, “was all Ninél’s fault, much more so than the Soviets! She couldn’t get him the Government Award, that’s true, although she packed him off to the Central Committee more than once—to confess the mistakes of his youth, and he still didn’t make it to the special-rations ranks, he-he… I’ll finish the cognac, with your permission. No use leaving tears at the bottom—Your health!