The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Where did you get this?” Daryna repeats.

  “What?”

  “This,” Daryna says, rising from her chair, and walking, like a sleepwalker, across the room with one hand outstretched in front of her.

  Seeing the change in her face, Adrian springs to his feet, too, as if she really were a sleepwalker stepping along a ledge and could slip to her death at any second; the yokel rises after him, drawn inexorably into the same flow of motion, as though they were all in a wind tunnel. And this is how the procession presents itself to an ample-bodied wife, in a stretch T-shirt and a bra one size too small, who appears at this very instant in the doors between the room and the kitchen: the three of them, spellbound, moving in the same direction, one after another, as if in a slow-motion game of tag—and what are they all after, it’s just a wall?

  “This,” says Daryna, coming to a halt against the wall and pressing her fingers to “this” like a blind man who’s just recognized a dear face under his fingers.

  Adrian can’t see what it is—Daryna is standing between him and whatever object has arrested her, her hand in place, not moving. Before he got up, he was sitting with his back to that wall, and did not get a good look at what was pasted over it—a deep colorful blob, a poster or something…. As soon as he’d stepped inside the house, he quickly and professionally sized up the decor and the furnishings, and his spirits lifted: this may not be a gold mine, but there was wool to be shorn off this yokel yet.

  One is surrounded in this home by such a noxiously packed and savagely motley mix of bric-a-brac from the last two generations that Adrian would not be surprised to spot an antique gramophone from a Stakhanovite grandfather or some other marvel like that. And while there is no gramophone in evidence, and neither are there any of the oilcloth wallrugs with swans on them that have recently become such a hot item, most of what is here is 1970s junk—the peak of this rural boss’s prosperity no doubt.

  Displayed, museum-like, behind glass in a monumentally cumbersome hutch is a gilded Madonna dinnerset; also present are the most impractical Bohemian crystal ashtrays in the world, chaste as virgins and heavy as icebergs, and right next to them (Adrian could barely keep from smiling)—a painstakingly cross-stitched picture of hunters at camp from Perov’s painting. The hunters are draped over a Samsung TV, on top of which—now we’re getting somewhere!—stands an old stone clock, a splendid piece, a German Manteluhr with a carved oak facade, likely by W. Haid (make sure to check the back), Third Reich, 1930s or ’40s, definitely a trophy. The yokel’s ancestors must’ve done well for themselves in that war if that’s what they managed to sneak back home—as Daryna’s mother says, one man’s war is another man’s bonanza.

  Experience has taught Adrian that such rural honchos (those who in the Brezhnev era had clawed their way to where they could steal)—kolkhoz administrators, farm managers, warehouse managers, machine- and motor-pool directors—did not hold on to things that were actually old and instead rushed to replace them with whatever was new and “city,” naming their daughters Ilona and Angela rather than Katrya or Mariyka. He figures the yokel had daughters by the heap of Cosmopolitans and Teens on the bookshelf and the glam advertising posters that are plastered, it seems, over every inch of bare wall, hitting one, like ammonia, with the acrid whiff of the present.

  Apparently, the family isn’t doing well enough to replace all their furniture with the newest set from an Otto catalog in one fell swoop, and the most current symbols of material comfort were fit into the Gypsy-caravan density of their home bit by bit, patch over patch: a monstrous multitiered chandelier of several hundred crystals, a faux leopard skin on the floor in front of the couch. It isn’t hard to understand why the yokel decided to part with the old clock and the credenza (How on earth did it fit anywhere in here, you can barely turn as it is?), but there can be only one reason why it took him until now to do so, the one Adrian chose instinctively as he formulates the best strategy for negotiating with the man: he is loath to part with his stuff.

  All these things, accumulated in his home over decades, must be, for this man, the “goods” that he would be very sorry to see go, evidence of his former special status in the village. He probably thinks that all his stuff is still worth astronomical amounts of money—the kind that, in his day, neither a dairymaid nor a tractor driver had, and still do not have today. Puckered up tighter than a snare drum, the yokel sits on his pile of junk like a gnome, imagining himself the master of treasures uncounted. A type like that would actually sooner refuse to sell anything than give an inch on the price. So in a certain sense, Yulichka did not lie, or, rather, like all competent liars, she built her lies on half-truths: the yokel really did turn her away at some point, didn’t let her strip him of everything that had any market value—he let her have only the most valuable objects, because at the end of the day, a few tens of thousands of US dollars, a few suitcases full of crisp new Benjamin Franklins present a temptation no gnome can resist (and afterward he probably whined that he let it go too cheap…).

  Focused on the business at hand, Adrian missed the colorful picture in the far corner of the room, so packed with ads and posters that it looked like an iconostasis—deciding instead to ignore it and intentionally sat with his back to it. The blob held no antiquarian interest and would only distract him from the conversation, because (now, looking at Daryna’s stiffened back, he remembers this clearly) there was something about it that did draw one’s eye, much more so than an airbrushed poster. It’s not a poster at all, in fact. What is there?

  “What about it?” the yokel answers cheerily. The woman’s tone got him a bit scared—she’s gone all nervous, and he’s got no desire to get mixed up in any stories or anything. “You like it?”

  She turns to face him, her lip bitten down hard, and the way she looks at him scares the man for real.

  “Where did you get this painting?”

  “And is dat, ’scuse me, any business of yours?”

  “It is, very much so,” Daryna says, hearing her own voice return to her as if from a great distance: it is calm, but quiet, and very, very slow, as if spun at a lower rpm, like on an old turntable—the last time she heard this voice was in her boss’s office.

  “The author of this work is a friend of mine. The police are looking for this painting. They’ve been searching for four years.”

  “It’s Vlada’s?” Adrian gasps.

  Daryna nods. Her lips are trembling. “Her signature’s even on it. Only it’s been cut off…”

  The movement continues: now all three of them are huddling in front of the painting, like seals caught in one net, in a narrow gap between the couch and a massive mirror-faced mahogany wardrobe, which, apparently, replaced the old walnut credenza (most likely Art Deco, but possibly even older than that; in any case, that trophy was locally sourced from a landlord’s estate and redistributed by the Bolsheviks). Each tries to push the other away or peek over their shoulder at the painting—and the yokel is the most enthusiastic of them all, as if he’s never seen the painting before and it wasn’t in his own house that it hung. Pinned to the wall the same way rural folk used to pin up their oilcloth rugs with swans on them—unframed and unmounted, a snakeskin, the Frog Princess’s pelt shed and splattered with colorful blood, used here to cover a hole in this improvised iconostasis, between the dazzle of a glossy blue seascape from a 2001 calendar and a silicone blonde, smiling a pearly toothed smile and holding, in her hand, as triumphantly as if it were the Russian flag, a toothbrush with a dollop of Aquafresh on it. That’s quite a sizeable hole, and a nonstandard one, too—the canvas is cut to size to fit over the whole gap, at once.

  Daryna holds her fingers to the sliced-off edges of the canvas like a surgeon to the edges of a wound. It’s a collage, she thinks, feeling sensation drain from the tips of her fingers—they just went ahead and made themselves a collage, the best they could. In the past, rural families used to compose these using family photographs—framed them and hung them up i
n the main room in between the icons; she’s seen this in the abandoned homes in the Chernobyl zone: grandfather, grandmother, a group shot from a high-school graduation, wedding pictures with the maid of honor and best man in red sashes, a boy in a Soviet Army sergeant’s uniform, a whole iconostasis of the many-sized and many-colored (from black-and-white to Kodachrome) kin; and in the gaps between the pictures—which must grate on a rural eye like patches of untilled land—they would carefully paste in strips of colored paper, sometimes even decorative cutouts. That was the place Vlada’s work took here. What was left of her painting, to be exact. A piece that had once been a collage, composed according to the very same principles of this primitive aesthetic—and now returned to its source. Collage to collage. Ashes to ashes.

  “Dis here?” the yokel fumes. “Come on! I can drawr better dan dat myself!”

  Any idiot could, he boils genuinely, in his mind, irked that he let himself be intimidated so easily—big deal, splatter up some paint so it gets all wrinkled up on itself. Lioshka-the-tile guy, the one who did the loo, could do a better job of it—he puts his heart to it, never was dat he didn’t line it all up nice and tidy, smooth as a baby’s bottom! Dis stuff here’s all puckered, what’s dere to stare at? What’s dere to be going searching for it? Wanna play chicken? Well, I ain’t one to let anyone piss on my parade; I ain’t born yesterday, thank the good Lord!

  “Hang on just a minute, sir,” Aidy interrupts, having some-how—the yokel can’t tell when—edged him away from the subject of the discussion and ceased to address him directly; were he not so consumed at this instant by going from defense to offense, the yokel would very well begin to doubt whether this character is indeed the worthless good-for-nothing the antiques-Yulka had told him he was: the yokel knows how bosses talk and ought to have recognized in Yulka’s “boozer ex’s” calm ease a boss’s professional habit of moving people around without resistance, like pawns on a board, in order to achieve a result important to all, that is demonstrated in the army by ranking officers from platoon commanders on up—but the yokel hasn’t yet caught on to what, exactly, result these two are shooting for, and this man’s question, asked of the woman, fails to sound important to him.

  “Where did you say you saw the signature?” Aidy asks.

  “Right here,” Daryna points. “She always signed this way—VlMatusevych, without a dot.”

  “I see, yes… it’s cut off in the middle—you can see the ‘u’ but the ‘s’ is questionable…”

  “This is hers beyond any doubt, even without the signature, Aidy. No need for an examination—this is one of the works that was flown in from Frankfurt. From the Secrets series. I saw them all, remember, at her workshop, before they went to Germany for the show. And there are slides; it can be identified.”

  “Who has the slides? Vadym?”

  “Nina Ustýmivna. She is the legal heir, until Katrusya comes of age.”

  “Splendid.”

  “I just can’t remember the title right now. It should have been on the other edge, there on the left, but that part has all been cut off… this used to be about this wide,” she spreads her arms like a fisherman showing off the size of his catch, “and it was taller too, I remember the composition well.”

  “I cut it to size,” pipes up the wife.

  Her appearance in the kitchen door has gone unnoticed, and at the sound of her voice all three turn and stare at her with various degrees of shock; before speaking, just in case, she’s crossed her arms defensively under her breasts, which are already spilling out from her overburdened bra; and her thusly proffered bust, taken together with her powerful neck and arms, looks magnificent in its way (rolls of fatty dough around the edges of her undergarment are thrown into high relief under her Lycra T-shirt). She puts this bust before her like a shield—evidently picking up on her husband’s alarm—and is rushing to his rescue before the old fool can screw everything up from here to Tuesday.

  She’ll do the cutting alright, Adrian thinks, contemplating, not without interest, this menopausal socialist-realist milkmaid in front of him. She’ll cut all sort of things. He quickly exchanges glances with Daryna, and pulls out his business card.

  “And you must be the lady of the house? Pleased to meet you.”

  The shield is shattered—the wife takes the business card, but does not know what to do with it, and walks over to the shelf where her eyeglasses sit—to read it over. Daryna gets the chills—it’s the familiar shiver that runs through the body in the presence of death, like a short circuit—and she keeps silent, afraid that her voice will fail her.

  “So where did you say you got this painting from?” Adrian casually inquires of the wife, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

  “Found it downa track!” she cries out, almost pained that such a trifle could cause such a ruckus. “It just laid there in the mud, so we took it—why waste? And the spots that got mudded up—I cut those off. It just laid there downa track, ina rain. Been a while now, four years since—right, Vasya?”

  “Could be more,” Vasya confirms with gravity, happy to have reinforcements. Might all blow over yet, and dey won’t ask too much questions.

  Where?—Daryna starts to ask, but figures it out before she speaks: “Downa track” is down the road, meaning on the dirt road that runs from the main highway to the village.

  “You mean, on the highway?” Adrian asks—he didn’t understand the woman either.

  “Yeah… I mean, no,” the wife stumbles. “Ona turn,” she waves a mighty discus-thrower’s arm in the direction of the mirror-faced wardrobe, “dere, where you go from track to asphalt. I mean the highway,” she corrects herself quickly and solicitously, demonstrating the traditional strategy of Ukrainian rural politeness: adopting the language of one’s interlocutor. “Wherea tree-line ends, ona knoll, ona very turn… that’s where it all got skittered around.”

  And as soon as the last words leave her mouth, she panics, and her honest blue eyes for an instant go all glassy, like a celluloid doll’s. But it’s too late: the word’s been spoken, and it can’t be put back.

  “All? So what else was there?”

  Now it’s the husband’s turn to rush to the rescue. “A bunch of stuff. A car must of crashed dere, looked like.” He does, just in case, hide his eyes.

  “There’s accidents there alla time!” the wife picks up his line cheerfully. “Would you believe it, no more’n three months passes before someone gone crashed there again! And thank goodness when it’s not to death.” Judging by her intonation, she finds those accidents far less satisfying than the ones that actually are “to death.” “And this year, there’d beena crash already, not long since, a month, right, Vasya? Showed it in TV, you didn’t see it? A whole family slammed to death in a Honda, ana baby, too!” This sounds all-out triumphant, like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “Ana woman, they say, she was ’specting, too, just think… coming from Pereyaslav—and hit a Mercedes…”

  “Not a Mercedes,” her husband corrects her, “a Bee-Em-Doubya!”

  “Same difference!” the wife laughs, flushing with excitement. No, sir, Adrian thinks, she’s not in menopause yet, she’s got all her hormones alive and raging, just look at her go! “I don’t tell them apart, Mercedeses or Bee-Em-Doubyas, I just know was some big cheese driving!”

  “Big cheese, phew!” the yokel snorts with scorn. “Sure… teenage punk more like it, one of dose that bought hisself a driver’s license but Daddy couldn’t pay for a brain to go with it. Dem, when dey drive, think dey god and king, and don’t need rules, ’coz all the right lawryers sittin’ in his pocket. Part, sea, let shit pass! He went to pass on the double and jumped into incoming traffic. Must of been in a great hurry—well, he ain’t hurrying now.”

  He reports this without any glee, only with the legitimate satisfaction of a man who likes things to be fair. The woman, on the other hand, delights in the topic and can’t wait to savor more details of this reality show—it is, after all, much more interesting
than any soap opera, and these visitors know nothing of it, “And two years since we had a real big crash, a whole rig flipped over! Five cars slammed to pieces, right, Vasya? Took them two days to wash alla blood off the asphalt.”

  A ripple of cold shiver shoots through Daryna again. Blood, she didn’t think about blood. She didn’t go to the site of the accident, did not see Vlada’s blood….

  “Dat’s a special spot over dere,” Vasya nods. “Chornovil died here at our corner, too.”

  “Oh yeah,” the wife echoes, proud as if she’d personally contributed to the event. “Folks put wreaths round that cross over there, alla time—d’you see it? You came from Kyiv, didn’t you? That was a bit over that way, toward Kyiv, after a turnoff to the Kharkiv bypass.”

  Time to put a memorial here, Daryna thinks. This place is like Checkpoint Charlie was in Berlin. Only this one’ll give you a real thrill—it’s still operating. And these two could be the tour guides as living eyewitnesses—they’d do a heck of a job. Again she sees, as if in rewind, the highway stretching away from her—only not the dry one she and Adrian drove earlier in the day, but the other, from four years ago, with the lonely Beetle speeding along: the road is silky-black, flashing with the nebulae of puddles, the cloud of water kicked up by the car falls onto the windshield and the hood, streaks of rain meander down the glass. The road is empty, not a soul in sight, the signs float by—Pereyaslav-Khmel’nytsky 43, Zolotonosha 104, Dnipropetrovs’k 453, Thank you for keeping the shoulder clean—rain, rain, and tears streaming openly and freely, and the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, and back and forth again, like two scythes over a hayfield.

  Adrian’s voice reaches her as though through water. “Couldn’t they put rails along that turn, at least, if that’s how things are?”

  “It won’t help.” The yokel shakes his head.

  “It would make it safer than it is now!”

  “Won’t help,” the yokel repeats with unshakeable fatalism. “Dat’s a special spot.”