The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

I didn’t want this, thought Adrian Ortynsky as he collapsed with inaudible din, shattered into pieces, into myriad slivers of his own life, all visible at once and up close like lit windows at night through a field glasses, like a snowstorm splintered into myriad snowflakes—he didn’t want this. But his will was no longer there—Not what I will but what you will. Get up, let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand. The choir of angels reverberated, the ringing in his ears grew—somewhere far ahead, on the other side of the impossibly dark wall they were to scale, rang St. Sophia’s bells, the bells of Heavenly Ukraine for which they were setting out. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Yes, he thought. Yes. She was right.

  He nodded. Very slowly—everything around him instantly became very slow so that no trifle escaped his attention, not one snowflake that swirled before his eyes—he could see them all; he could hold everything at once somehow: the ribbed ebony handle of Raven’s SMG, the convex gleam of buttons on their jackets, the crimson remnants of the fire like an ashen bruise over a wound, and the rounded snouts of grenades, sitting dark, alive in their hands. Six grenades between the four of them. Not bad at all.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  And then he felt it stir in the bunker—the breeze of tension that always comes before battle.

  Geltsia made the sign of the cross over him, and he also saw the gesture distinctly, like a snowflake under a magnifying glass: his mother made the cross over him like that, when he left home for the last time. He wanted to smile to his bride in death—this was, in a way, their wedding, and the chorus of tiny voices that made the invisible glass sphere of his life crack with a slow ringing sang the wedding hymn for them—but he could no longer smile. Instead, with a senseless, bear-like lurch he suddenly pulled them all by the shoulders together as though he were about to dance the arkán with them here in this tomb—the ancient dance, the warriors’ dance in which a single, many-headed body spins in a locked circle, and feet stomp the ground with a single force, faster and faster, and the chain gathers speed, arms on shoulders, shoulder to shoulder, the eternal male dance of their people that’s been holding the circle together on this land with an inhuman effort, ever since the days of the Horde, holds the circle that others keep breaking with blood and torment, and it takes more torment and blood to renew it, to find the strength and stomp your ground. It’s mine! I won’t give it!—here’s our circle, we are together at last, my girl, this is it, this is our wedding dance; it was once interrupted, but everything’s now set right. We are together again; we’ve found our music; we’ve only the finale to play—play it cleanly, without a single fault, because it can’t ever be played again…

  The last twitch of the hand counting seconds—and the clock stopped.

  “We surrender!” Kyi called out from underground. “You win!”

  He still heard the noise of movement above—when they skittered, ran up there, barking orders—but he was already thinking with his body alone, wrapping his grenade with the wedding shirt: She will walk two steps ahead; I will pull the safety pin out of the grenade. Those above shouted for them to come out with arms in the air, and he pictured their fear—gray, as if a pack of excited rats swirled around the bunker, not entirely sure of its prey, and the rats had to be soothed, so he spoke—or rather someone else spoke from him while he listened—“There’s a woman here who requires medical assistance…”—and these words were as right, mindless, and singularly precise as his movements, and were received by the others as a command. Because he, Kyi, had taken command over them in this moment. He roused them onto their feet, already happier, already weaker; their minds’ focus shifted from the imminent order “Fire!” to a new hole in their shoulder-straps: Ha, we win, the pussy talked them into it!

  This was something they understood, something that accorded with what sent them out trudging through snow and muck in other people’s lands and putting to the torch the cities and villages they’d come to hate: some pussy, a fat ration, and everyone afraid of you—they already believed their luck, they were straining their necks and rubbing their hands together, these simple organisms, lower vertebrates that know only the most primitive instincts and destroy anything they can’t understand. Although created in God’s image, they never did become people, and he felt no hatred for them—hatred had already left him like all other emotions that used to constitute his being—but among them was the man whose heart he felt inside his own like proud flesh, like a second, black heart that continued to beat in this hour, and he had to cut it off, tear it out by the root, excise it. Through the lifted lid flooded the white blaze of military searchlights, blinding them with steam and cold, trained on the bunker and the black female shape rose in his sight, endlessly slowly, in stopped time dammed like a lake with the invisible dark wall before them, and stepped into the light—the cold, devilish light meant not to brighten but to blind—with her arms up in the air, to give him a few extra seconds to regain his scorched-out sight.

  His hand squeezed its death grip on the grenade.

  What illumination. What quiet.

  He was looking from above, from aside, from the night sky—and saw himself: his body stepped out of the bunker holding the white bundle in his hand raised high above his head—and a noise came from nowhere, from the firs as if the forest sighed its farewell, and the cloth wing opened above him in the searchlights like a beating sail as tens of eyes boiled to it.

  The world stopped breathing, the Earth held its spin.

  He saw the muzzles of machine guns aimed at him from the dark and the figures behind them—below, by the stream, to the sides, among the trees—saw the face of the shepherd dog barking his head off, straining his leash, and Geltsia’s profile two steps before him, and the trajectory of her gaze clear as on a ballistic graph—a hyperbola reaching down and behind the firs from where the light beat on them and where a cape stood stiff like a monument, and shapes clustered together. There!—and saw the stillness that came over the scene and lasted for a single endless moment melded into the pause of creation—when only he and Geltsia moved among all the figures frozen in the forest with the lightness of somnambulists on the edge of a roof, turned inward to listen to a musical rhythm audible to them alone—this was enough for him to gain his advantage, exactly as he wanted.

  “Him! That’s him!”

  They no longer paid any attention to the woman.

  “Throw down your weapon!”

  He dropped his submachine gun.

  And that’s when they ran to him. Came into motion just as slowly, incomparably more slowly than his consciousness, transported outside his body, commanded—like a pile of black fallen leaves whirling into his eyes. The back of his head felt the burn of hot breath and the dog collar’s clang, the hand that was holding the sheaf of light separated from the cape, and the light was coming closer, splitting, along the way, into several distinct figures, and the face that pounded inside him as his second heart—the living, real face with the hooked ax of a nose pulling it forward, the wolfish face with close-set holes for eyes—swam into focus, blocking the light before him: it was coming straight at him, contorted with a wild spasm of terror and joy, and it took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t coming at him; no, it was coming at her—at the woman who stood beside him, who, in the rhythm of their inaudible wedding dance, already took her decisive step back before the storm of black fallen leaves.

  “Glory to Ukraine!” he said to Stodólya. And relaxed his fingers curled around the grenade’s handle. The world, deafened, clicked drily, and a white veil flit as it fell—his wedding shirt’s wing.

  “Grenade! He’s got a grena—!”

  “Motherfu—”

  “Oh God!”

  “Down!”

  He did not hear the explosion. Or the two that followed, almost in sync. He only saw the flash, the terrible flash, dazzling beyond what a human brain can endure—as if a thousand suns exploded at once, and the Earth flew up in a single sky-high black
wave. He had time to lean forward after his hand offered his enemies the released grenade like a heavy ripe fruit on its open palm. His muscles filled out with the weight of their burden—but everything ahead was already cut off by the blast, and it was only his body that moved for that split second that a body already vacated can propel itself forward before it collapses obeying the force of gravity, while the film, overexposed by the flash, continues to rustle its blank frames inside his skull.

  “Gela,” he wanted to call.

  But he was no more.

  Room 7. The Road to Zolotonosha

  The Last Interview by Reporter Goshchynska

  Who is he, really—Vadym?

  He sits across the table from me, heavy and immovable. He always sits like that, wherever he is, as if he were at home where he owns everything—things, and people, even this unsettlingly empty restaurant, like the setting in a Hollywood horror flick, where he has brought me, after he called, in the middle of the night. It actually looks very much like he owns it, because when we came the doors were locked; he pushed a button I hadn’t seen and as soon as the doors opened, went straight in, not waiting (and not letting me go first, how rude!), pulling the scarf off his neck (Armani, 100 percent cashmere), saying to his door-opening lackey over the shoulder, as he walked, “Valera, have Mashenka lay the table for us.” He didn’t ask for the menu, nor did he ask me what I would like, or whether I would like anything at all, and now here he sits, across the table from me, in the large empty room, like Ali Baba in the thieves’ cave (it is a cave: black lacquer, black leather, backlit surfaces—the all-too-familiar mix of ostentation and grim industrialism that lacks charm but passes for glamour in our latitude). He is capacious and amiable like a shaved, whiskerless walrus, and his breathing is a bit heavy and irregular, as happens to well-nourished men past their prime: an early shortness of breath that, if you’re not used to it, might be taken for erotic arousal. Did Vlada like it perhaps? Or maybe he didn’t breathe like this back then, with Vlada?

  “Stay out of it,” he says, looking at me without expression in his eyes, vacant like this restaurant of his (when’d he have time to buy it?). “There are serious people involved. You don’t want any part of it.”

  Serious people. Meaning—those who, should you get in the way of their financial interests, might just whack you, another Ukrainian journalist disappeared without a trace. Or you might end up dead in a car accident, or found dead in your own apartment, a suicide. A woman who could not, for instance, get over being fired, why not? A single woman (the boyfriend is not mentioned in the police protocol), without children, all her life in her work, got a pink slip—and that’s it, she couldn’t take it, lost her will to live. And the best thing—no one would even think twice about it: a childless woman is a perfect target, keels over without a thump.

  How nice of Vadym to warn me. And I, truth be told, after that ill-advised conversation we had, started to think nothing would get to him. And he, in the meantime, did some legwork, took the time to ask around—how kind of him. There are serious people behind the Miss New TV show, people whose names no one will ever read in the credits. Like the names of the girls who will come to Kyiv for the contest’s preliminary rounds and never make it to the screen, girls who will make it to a completely different place. Not necessarily to foreign brothels even—but right here at home. Someone has to welcome the EU sex tourists and thereby raise the country’s attractiveness-to-foreign-investment ratings; someone has to give a donor a blow job while he is speeding home in his SUV from the meeting at campaign headquarters. Serious people, serious business.

  Crying’s the last thing I need right now, but my nose tickles treacherously, and I begin to breathe hard, like Vadym, hard and fast. We sit facing each other, the two of us, and snuffle like hedgehogs on a narrow path. We must be quite a sight. But, dear God, what a nasty feeling this is—to know a crime is about to happen, and not be able to stop it.

  How much does it cost—one girl? Those who trade in people—how much do they charge for a soul? Why do I not, after ten years of hard-boiled journalism, know these figures? And why can’t I now bring myself to ask Vadym, who must know?

  Who in the hell is he—Vadym?

  All I know is that in his previous life, before he became a serious person himself, he graduated with a degree in history, from Kyiv State U. A useful department it was, history: full of country boys straight from army service who paraded around in double-breasted navy suits with Komsomol pins in their lapels and signed up to rat for the KGB for the love of the game. Now the boys are all well past forty and have a new and improved uniform—an Armani suit and a Rolex on the wrist, a real one. And chauffeur Vasya in the SUV—a distant relative from the native village. Who are all these people, and how did they come to manipulate the lives of millions of others—including mine?

  “Have some sausage,” Vadym says, nodding at the plate of cold cuts. The slices—beet-red, blood-black, rusty-brown with whitish curlicues of fat—look in the glamorous light like Gothic porn—an installation of vulvas post-coitus. I think I’m going to throw up. Wordlessly I shake my head. Vadym, oblivious, hooks a forkful; a parsley sprig drops from the folded red flesh and remains against the backlit tabletop like an exhibit in a natural history museum. Vadym’s always had a good appetite—a sure sign that the man knows how to enjoy life.

  I taste the wine: a 2002 Pinot Noir from an Italian winery with an unpronounceable name. A sunny year, Vadym assured me when his lackey brought out the bottle swaddled in a napkin and, following a commanding motion of Vadym’s eyebrows, proudly presented it to me, like he was a midwife holding up a newborn for the mother to see. Vadym, as is his custom, is drinking cognac, but he knows his wines. People like him know many inessential things that nevertheless make life undeniably more pleasant. Would their life be utterly intolerable without this pleasantness—like a petrified turd under the milk-chocolate cover of a Snickers bar? The long-forgotten face of R., the way he looked after sex, pops up before my eyes, and I take another sip. Indeed, the wine is superb.

  “The opposition won’t do anything about this,” Vadym explains, moving more food to his plate. “This show won’t make a loud case, and it’s not good enough for an attack-ad campaign—not much there to work with. This close to elections they want heavy artillery. And your show’s just games, small potatoes.”

  “Human lives, actually,” I remind him.

  Vadym grows momentarily surly, as if I’d said something tactless, and sets to work on his salmon. I’ve noticed this habit of his before: not responding to an unpleasant remark as if he hasn’t heard it at all. As if the other person farted in public. This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you find distasteful.

  “And if that’s how things are,” I go on farting, “then what’s the difference between your opposition and the goons that are running this country?”

  Vadym sizes me up with a quick, short squint over his plate. (Where did I recently see this triumphant look—like a card player dealt a good hand?)

  “And what, in your opinion, should it be?”

  “It’s only in Jewish jokes that you answer a question with a question. I thought we were serious.”

  Vadym smiles mysteriously, then says, “The same difference, Daryna, as always separates people: some have more money and others have less.”

  “And you think there are no other differences that separate people?”

  “In politics—no,” he says firmly.

  I can see he is not joking.

  “I’m sorry, but what about ideas? Views? Convictions?”

  “That was good in the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first—been there, done that.”

  “That’s how it is, huh?”

  “And you thought?” he retorts, mimicking my intonation in jest—he’s got quick reflexes, like a boxer—and dabs his lips with his napkin: he has large, sensuous lips, almost cartoonish, and they make it hard to notice, at first, what a strong, willful fa
ce Vadym has. “All those ideologies that in the nineteenth century set the course for politics for a hundred years ahead have given up the ghost by now. Nationalism is the only one that has survived. And that’s only because it relies not on convictions but on emotions.”

  “So did Communism! It relied on one of the most trivial human emotions of them all—envy. Class hatred, in their parlance. Because you can’t make everyone rich, let’s make everyone poor so there isn’t anyone to be jealous of! Isn’t that the way it worked?”

  Vadym does not like being contradicted.

  “That’s the way, but it ain’t. Remember Marx? Ideas only become a material force when they’ve gripped the masses—remember that?”

  “Let’s say I do, so then what?”

  “So, no one ever said what came next. And that was the most interesting part, and the Bolsheviks were the first to catch on to it—Lenin really was a genius…. How do you get an idea to grip the masses? The masses never did, and never will, give a flying fuck about ideas, pardon my language—the masses don’t want ideas, they want bread and circuses. Like in ancient Rome, and that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it will always be. It’s just that, until now, no society has ever been able to give the masses a steady supply of what they want, the economics weren’t there. Developed Western nations today are the first to have come within reach of the ideal: a well-fed citizen sitting down in front of his TV after work with a beer. The running of the country is conducted entirely behind his back; he is only shown talking heads on TV, the floor of the parliament—where people are making speeches, debating, working hard to sway his opinion—and he develops a sense of his own significance, a sense that he matters, that he has a say. So every now and then he goes to vote, casts his ballot, persisting in the illusion that he was the one who elected all those people into office, hired them, that he rules the country. And he is quite pleased with himself—and a person who is pleased with himself will never rebel. That he only cast his ballot for those he saw on TV most often, and at the best angles, never occurs to him. And if it ever does, he’ll dismiss the idea on the spot, because it threatens to topple his comfortably ordered world. Do you follow? You don’t seem to be eating anything…”