The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Keep her safe,” Dad suddenly says. “You keep Daryna safe.”

  Whoa.

  I am mute as an ox suddenly. And completely lost; I don’t imagine he means that Lolly is in any kind of danger: Dad’s not one to panic and not an alarmist. He was the one who taught me, when I reached the age of street fights, never to threaten anyone, that only the losers threaten, but you must be ready to strike if someone messes with you, and if you can learn to keep this readiness turned on inside you at all times, no one will mess with you—lessons he carried with him out of his street-gang Karaganda childhood and for which I will be grateful as long as I live. And only after a moment or two, does it come to me, so simple it sends a chill down my spine: it was Mom he was thinking about! The one he loved—and whom he, as he sees it, failed to keep safe.

  What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? The one who survived somehow didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip.

  You don’t understand squat about your own father until you meet the woman with whom you want to have children. It has never occurred to me before that he might feel guilty for Mom’s death. But right then, he said it as if he were asking forgiveness: keep her safe. Keep her, once you’ve found her, don’t let her slip away, because there’s nothing worse if you do…

  To hell with how late it is, this is a solemn moment—there aren’t many like this between us, and perhaps you don’t need many in your entire life—better to appreciate the gold they bear. And only now that Dad and I have become equals, now that he has finally put my love next to his own in a private hierarchy, do I feel a terrible sadness for Mom. Not that I miss her, but that I feel a sadness for her—for the mysterious girl who remained in the photographs and whom my memory, shredded into fragments, can no longer assemble into a whole: a funny biscuit-shaped chignon on her head, as was the fashion at the time, a headscarf tied coquettishly over it, in track pants, carrying a humongous—how did she ever manage it?—backpack (and she carried me, too, just like that, an extra twenty pounds attached to her only in the front like a backpack she couldn’t take off—we do put women through all kinds of hell). And everywhere, in every pose she had the same poignant gracefulness of an accelerating motion interrupted, the ominously unfinished elegance of a sharpened pencil or a flying arrow: when the precision of the lines determines the vanishing point without deviation, and if the vanishing point cannot be seen, the impression left is unsettling, anxious. Where was this girl always running, aimed so intently? (What did she come for, why did she leave so quickly—never having lived to her intended vanishing point?)

  And she was always running—she chased after something all her life, didn’t settle down even after she became a mother, as happens to most romantic girls. Well, at least it taught me at an early age that I’d never replace the entire world for any woman…. The Plast scouts were banned back then; Mom, being an alpinist, went hiking and took climbing groups to the mountains for sport. She used to say to Granny Lina that in the mountains one is closer to God, and that before every expedition she’d dream the exact position of stars above her future campsite. She also sang in a choir that eventually got disbanded for “religious propaganda”—they sang carols—and knew by heart what seemed like everything Lesya Ukrainka ever wrote, “Oh, for that body do not sigh.” How was she supposed to live with all that in the hopelessness of the Soviet seventies? A heartrending, incomprehensible life dropped, as if from a cliff into an abyss, into an utterly inanimate time—like a bird that’d flown in through the wrong window.

  I am sorry for the incompleteness of Mom’s life, and in comparison, seen from afar, our lives—my own and my dad’s—appear regular, like everyone else’s. And they are like everyone else’s, that’s the thing: it’s the same—for everyone. I don’t see a single complete life around me: they’re all somehow off, crooked, whenever you take a closer look. The only difference is that on this incompletion scale Dad and I are somewhere in the middle, and Mom is closer to the starting point. Much, much closer.

  And someone has to pay for everyone’s incompletion. The law of equilibrium, no?

  I always knew I could never hurt a woman. Never, in no way, not one. I always felt sorry for them: I saw all girls as ethereal, ever-vanishing creatures marked on their foreheads with a secret touch of death. The fact that boys are also mortal, and with, actually, a much greater statistical probability of mortality, I only came to appreciate later, in adulthood, empirically—yet it did not affect the way I perceived the world. I was so sorry for Yulichka, too, the poor little slut. And—I can’t help it—in my heart of hearts, albeit infinitesimally—I still feel sorry for her.

  And that, Dad, is the rub.

  Except that I don’t tell him this, of course.

  “Consider it done, Dad,” is all I say, like that mafioso in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. I could’ve added, as the security guard at my building puts it, “I’ll shoot if they come”—and I wouldn’t have been lying, but it would’ve been too much, a whiff of that teenage boasting that, as he had once warned me, was the last resort of losers.

  “You’ve changed, you know,” Dad says unexpectedly, startling me.

  “Me? Meaning what?”

  “You’ve matured… gotten more serious, like. And thank God because I was afraid you’d turn out a flake. You were a bit spacey, you know. Grandma, God rest her soul, kept worrying you took after Stefania—she kept thinking you were too delicate for a boy.”

  “But I thought Grandma loved Mom…”

  “Of course she did, how couldn’t she?” he replies, taking offense at my obtuseness. “But one has nothing to do with the other. Boys are one thing, girls another… Grandma did not have a daughter, so she delighted in Stefania as if she were her own. But a boy is a different matter entirely.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean.”

  Things are getting a bit foggy in my head (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and I don’t grasp right away that Dad is talking about me from the perspective of his own time, speaking from the apartment where virtually nothing has changed since I was little—except maybe there’s more dust and the upholstery is more worn. And that reality of his is also a part of me—and likely not the worst, and to keep it safely attached to my mental file, all I have to do is let Dad set the course for our conversation and just go with the flow, picking up the cutoff ends of his thoughts: he chops them short because they are obvious to him, and he thinks they’re obvious to me as well. As he sees it, I still inhabit the same reality he does, one which contains a set of quite specific, commonly known requirements for a boy. And the most amazing thing is—I do understand what he has in mind.

  “Well, we all know Granny had her own standards.”

  “Our lads”—that was her standard. Whenever Granny Lina said that, it was clear she did not mean my dad and me but totally different lads who were light-years ahead of me, and possibly even of him. The same impression was left on me by the silver-toothed old men, all with identically unbending, stiff military bearing, who used to gather occasionally at our apartment while Gramps was alive—to argue about Kim Philby, the Cambridge Four, and other things I did not understand. All of them had been through prisons and camps, but did not seem to mention that much around me, did not seem to talk much about the past in general—they were more interested in current politics and in when the Soviet Union might fall apart, while I, at the time, was mostly interested in girls, Depeche Mode, Formula I, radio circuits from the Young Technician magazine, and other earthly delights, and only came to appreciate the precision of the old men’s forecasts when the Soviet Union did fall apart.

  Strangely, the old troops did not speak out even after that. It was only from Lolly’s digging that I managed to put some of the pieces together—and eventually figured out that Granny and Gramps must have been working for the underground right up to their arrest, in 1947, only the KGB never found out: they were deported as family members, “for aiding and abetting,�
�� “for Gela,” and they both had all their own teeth—they never had any knocked out during interrogations. The old Areopagus that came to visit them, just as it must have come at nights to the townhouse on Krupyarska decades earlier, had to have known more, but the men, all of them with the silver replacement teeth that Granny and Gramps miraculously never needed, went to the grave, one by one, never having betrayed their secrets. And when they said our lads, they had the dead in mind—the ones who had fallen and whom they held in their mind at all times as if standing at attention before them—and that’s how they carried their unbendable, military bearing through until the end.

  And I was growing up surrounded by dead women—I throbbed with a lasting, ever-present caution: What would Mom say if she could see me right now? Great-Aunt Gela, too, somehow imperceptibly resembling Mom (the two of them, with time, have melded for me into a single entity), wearing a large round, white, lace collar, a bit like a bib, watched me from atop Grandma’s writing desk. Out of a 1941 filigreed frame: the picture was taken the day that Gela, wearing this very bib, arrived from Switzerland, where she had been studying to become an engineer back in Nazi-occupied Lviv—“to gain Ukraine.” In October of 1990, at the height of our strike, Granny Lina (she was in the hospital already) sent me that photo from Lviv, along with the one of Gramps. She took it out of the frame, sealed it in a plastic bag, and sent it with some man on the train. And was gone herself before the year’s end.

  Granny may not have drilled me into a soldier with unbendable bearing, but she did accomplish something else: gradually, without me noticing, she pushed Mom, the way she had been in real life, out of my memory and replaced her with the image of another woman, shrouding even Mom’s death in an aura of heroism that was borrowed, as I understood only later, from another life—and another time. Whenever the name Stefania was spoken in our home, everyone would fall reverently silent for a moment—as if we were remembering a great heroic act. Or at least that’s how I always thought of it when I was little. I even made up a story for myself, which I came to believe and told my friends in perfectly good conscience: that my mom had died on Hoverla saving beginners who only survived thanks to her. This sounded heroic, almost from the same department as our lads, and that there was nothing especially heroic about a mountaineer’s death in the mountains, that it only proved that a person couldn’t very well stand her bland and slow life down in the valley, were things no one ever said out loud.

  Granny did with her daughter-in-law’s life as she saw fit—as she saw necessary. And it was as if Granny’s own dead sucked Mom into their fold, vacuumed her in, and dissolved her within them. Made her for me, forever, indiscernible, leaving me only that piercing pity for all the girls—like small birds, who’d accidentally flown through the wrong window into this world and at any moment would flit through the smallest available opening.

  And dreams—they left me those, too. The dreams. This is mine, no one can take it away from me: the ability to see in my dreams what’s invisible during the day, it’s from my mom; it’s my legacy from her—the girl “not of this world” about whom I have no more stories to tell.

  Dad, on the other hand, fresh and chirpy at three in the morning—invigorated by the chance to fill a sleepless hour with all the memories he’s bursting with all the way over there—could talk about his mother until broad daylight: even now, thirteen years after her death, Granny Lina remains inexhaustible. She is the ever-present fourth member of our family circle in the middle of the night—here, where the emptied tea mug glows white in the lamp’s circle of light and the woman I love sleeps behind this wall: she, too, was brought to me by Granny Lina. Reached over from the other side and got her. Reeled her in with the same bait, Great-Aunt Gela…

  And that, by the way, is exactly how things worked.

  She is in charge here. She made it all happen. Made all of us happen. She, Granny Lina. Ms. Lina, as the neighbors used to call her. Polina, Polyenka—as the Moscow women she met in exile called her. My own grandmother, Apollinaria Ambroziivna Dovgan, may the good Lord rest her soul. Put everyone where they belong. What a woman.

  I have reached that stage when you don’t feel tired because you’ve lost the sense of your own body altogether (except that raising it off the chair requires an effort beyond anything imaginable—you’d sooner just fall asleep right on the spot!) and your mind is operating on an oscillating, revved-up frequency, and thoughts and impressions, mixed together, rush through it in a single fiery current you have no hope of quantizing. But this incredible sensation, intoxicating and effervescent—like what a marathon runner feels at the eighteenth mile, when you get a second wind and endorphins come gushing from who-knows-what secret reservoirs in your brain; when everything that had been so obvious that it blended right into the wallpaper—suddenly flares up, all at once, as if at sunrise, and all you can do is wonder: how did I not see this before, how all of us, our entire family, the way we are, have been shaped by Granny Lina—and her alone? Like the Easter paska breads, big and small, that she didn’t allow anyone to touch—always kneading the dough by herself in the kitchen, shaping them and settling them into the oven herself, and all we were required to do was step around the apartment lightly and refrain from jumping or stomping, lest the paskas cave.

  From somewhere else, somehow I remember this sense of awe (pride, admiration) upon seeing a person so close to you (a woman! a weak creature, as you’d gotten used to believing…) suddenly rise before you into a magnificent, grand figure, while you just stand there like a tree stump (woods, snow, fir branches…) and reel with wonder: How did she manage that? She is so small. (Grandma’s head barely reached my chest.)

  “That brown notebook,” Dad’s voice scrapes its way into my awareness, “in which she made notes for her memoirs…”

  The slight cognitive dissonance finally shakes me awake.

  “The brown notebook?” I ask, surprised and almost conscious. “Granny’s? The one with the cryptograms? I thought it was dark green, wasn’t it?”

  I would have sworn it was green. I can see it as if it were in front of me: the dark-green cover and a couple dozen pages inside, laced with mysterious acronyms—like the code of a compromised intelligence service.

  “You clear forgot!” Dad bristles. “I showed it to you the time you came filming—a brown notebook, a thick one, with a calico cover. I’ve got it right here on my desk!”

  Maybe when moving from one time to another there’s something like the refraction of light when it enters a different medium—and that’s why old objects change their shape and color in our memories. (Then what about sound? What would happen to sound, to voices sounded long ago?)

  “Speaking of which,” Dad says into the receiver from his small corner of the world, still illuminated by Granny Lina like the light of a dead star, “would you happen to recall a comrade of hers who had the initials A.O.?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  Jeez, how does he think this works—that we’re the same age? I couldn’t remember a single of those old guys’ first names, forget the initials. Although, wait, maybe if I think really hard…

  “A-O,” Dad spells out clearly as if to someone deaf. “Or also, Ad. Or.”

  “Ad. Or.?” I echo stupidly.

  “I’m certain it’s a name,” Dad says proudly. “I’ve already deciphered two names from her notebook: Krychevsky—he is that friend of Grandpa’s that died in Norilsk, during the uprising—and old Banakh, the doctor, do you remember him? He visited when you were little, came all the way from around Sambir—they wouldn’t let him live in Lviv after the war.”

  “I am just a Sambir lad, Mother’s sick and Father’s dead. I’ll go sing, and I’ll go dance. I am here to raise hell…” my mind fires off a couple of lines from an old street song, instantly swallowed by a blast of machine-gun fire—ha, missed me, didn’t you, dog your mother?

  “No, Dad, I don’t remember.”

  “Neither do I!” he says, interpreting my answe
r his own way. “And it comes up quite a few times in Grandma’s notes—sometimes A.O. and sometimes Ad. Or. And the Ad. Or. is sometimes spelled without periods, as one word, Ador, so it’s like in French—je vous adore, I adore you. Same root as adoration. Doesn’t look like it’s an alias; I do think these are someone’s real initials, but I can’t remember any of their circle who’d fit. Whom could she possibly have coded this way?”

  “What if you’re thinking of the wrong people? This could have been an admirer of hers back when she was a young girl, and you’re just fixated on the war; you want to keep the shrapnel coming…”

  “Nonsense! She’s got whole chains of events spelled out with these initials! Like formulas. You just listen. I’ll read it to you… hang on; let me grab the notebook…”

  Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—he shuffles off away from the phone, the heels of his loafers slapping against the floor, before I have a chance to say anything. If I end up not getting any shut-eye, Lolly will have to take the wheel in the morning. We’re having some serious fun with this night, the old man and I—catching up on all our unspent hours worth of talk at once. Or, to be more precise, it’s Granny Lina who’s having fun with us. How much longer does she have in her?

  “Here.” Dad reappears noisily in the receiver, fumbling with something. I hear the rustle of pages being turned. “Here, found it! 1944—Grandma had a separate page for each year and, looks like, filled each page in gradually, as she recalled what happened that year. Here you go: Meeting Iv.—she means Ivan, your grandpa; she has him as Iv. throughout… then, capital B, Briefcase. That’s how they met, during a Nazi raid…”

  “I know. Grandpa dropped his briefcase with leaflets into her arms, and she then carried them all the way home, right under the Germans’ noses, through the streets.”