The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  * * *

  The same day, around noon, while Daryna is still on the Internet (she’s had an idea for a new column in a women’s magazine—why the topic of pregnancy is so unpopular in our culture?), her cell phone rings.

  “Hullo, honey.”

  It’s Antosha, her former cameraman. A voice from her previous life, no longer a stab of pain but of quiet sadness that sooner or later smoothes over the anguish of any loss: that was a nice life she had….

  “Hi, Antosha. Glad to hear from you.”

  “You’re lyin’. What’s the joy hearin’ from an old knuckle-dragger like me? Yurko says he saw you the other day on Davydov Boulevard with some mensch—he still can’t get over it. Went off his feed.”

  Kyiv—always a small town. On Davydov Boulevard—that must have been when they went to visit Ruslana, to see Vlada’s remaining paintings. Nina Ustýmivna’s lawyer came a bit later, so Yurko must have seen them when they were getting out of the car—why didn’t he call out to her? Still, it feels nice to hear Antosha’s words, nice to know she’s been seen with Aidy and the studio is now buzzing with gossip—she used to love that sophomorically careless, permanently simmering, as if on low heat, atmosphere of studio banter, jokes, flirting, “follies,” and parties people spent weeks planning and then months remembering. Kids, she thinks. Grown, sometimes aging kids whose job is a serious game of virtual reality.

  “Don’t be jealous, Antosha,” she says, surprising herself with the maternal notes in her voice. “I still love you.”

  “Alright, let’s say I believe you. What are you up to these days?”

  “Oh, you know… odds and ends. Whatever comes my way…”

  “A decent living?”

  “Still better than the nation’s average. What’s new on your end?”

  “Good for you. Our chickens came home to roost. Whole flocks of them.”

  “Must be a chore to clean up after them?”

  “You’ve no idea, Sis. Knee-deep in guano doesn’t begin to describe it. Censorship’s worse than in the Soviet days. I’ve got the same ol’ feeling of eating shit again—got twenty years younger!”

  “You’re not that old yet, Antosha,” she says, realizing that Antosha has called her to vent. “Don’t write yourself off before your time.” (I should really shut down the computer and focus on the conversation, she thinks, regretfully—but make sure to bookmark this site for future moms first.)

  “Heck, I’m not the one doing it; I’ve got help. But I’m getting too old for brown-nosin’, Dara. You know what ol’ Lukash, may he rest in peace, used to say, the one who wanted to go to jail in Dziuba’s place, except Dziuba then confessed, and Lukash just got fired from everywhere…”

  “Of course I know who Lukash was—what do you think I am, a total idiot?”

  “Well, this was back when you were still walking under tables and I was already working, and I remember how every word he spoke became urban legend…. So when people asked him how things were going, he’d say, ‘I might be flat on the floor, but I’m not kissing any boots.’”

  “Nice. I’ll have to remember that.”

  “Yep. I’m feeling a little like that myself—not kissing any boots; I’m not a boy anymore to be getting bent over like that. Let their new snot-crop do it, they’ve hired a bunch from the boonies—give them three hots and a cot and they’ll suck on anyone’s dick.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Worse than bad, I’m telling you. Total beck in ze Yu-Es-Es-Arr. For the news, we get instructions sent down every day: what to cover, and what words to use, and about what to pretend didn’t happen. If you’d just insert ‘our dear Comrade Brezhnev’ here and there, you could recycle your calendars…. In addition to yours, they shut down three more shows.”

  He lists them and Daryna gasps—all were original programming, the kind that used to make their channel different from others, so what’s left? “Did they close Yurko’s show too?”

  “They changed the format. No more live air. For anyone, wholesale, even talk shows will broadcast in recording lest someone blurt something undesirable. They’re gearing up for the elections. Instead, they bought Russian programming—cop shows, soap operas, you can imagine.”

  “Are they launching the new show then? They had plans for some grand contest for young viewers—Miss New TV or something…”

  “Oh, the whore school? I didn’t know you’d been apprised. No, they decided to hold off in the run-up to the elections, wait until after. Rumor has it, someone leaked to the opposition that it’s bankrolled by the porn-industry sharks, and the money trail goes all the way to the top, and the administration has no interest in another scandal; they know they’ll have enough egg on their face as it is. Did you catch the Mukachevo story?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  So, Daryna thinks, Vadym drew his own conclusions from their conversation. The opposition—of course, he is a member of the opposition, isn’t he? Probably made a pretty penny on the whole thing, too: the new owners of the channel would pay for his silence regardless of whether this came to them as a friendly warning or a piece of light blackmail. The important thing is that they’ve held off with the show: stepped on the brakes, didn’t pursue it any further—Pavlo Ivanovych’s voice surfaces in her mind (file deleted)—and the hook was already cast.

  Now she, too, has saved someone. Some nameless girls—the way Pavlo Ivanovych once saved her. Only, unlike herself, these girls will never find out what danger they were in. But that doesn’t matter—she’s done her job. In the run-up to the elections. Everything is now being done in the run-up to the elections, as if the end of the world has been scheduled for this one particular country, a plan for its final and irreversible subjugation by some dark forces. But it’s impossible, something in her protests: it’s absolutely impossible, how can anyone think this’ll happen, have they all gone insane—she’s having a child, for God’s sake!

  “And you won’t hear a peep of it from our broadcast,” Antosha drones on. “Not a word about Mukachevo, everything’s hunkydory everywhere, the percentage of fat in butter is growing daily. Long story short, Dara, tell you what: you done good to cut out when you did. You, old witch, always had a nose better than a bloodhound—for people, for situations… we were just talking about it with the boys yesterday.”

  That’s a compliment: she can almost see this conversation as it occurred in the smoking room. When you work with men, you don’t get to hope for any word of appreciation spoken to your face—they’re always watching you, waiting for you to make a misstep or just to lash out in irritation, something they can write off, among themselves, to your PMS or, better still, to your not getting any (and how would you know, she always wanted to ask these self-appointed he-men—have you fucked me?), and to restore, in that manner, their male dignity, which is chronically compromised by the presence of an independent, beautiful woman in any role other than that of an office girl. Over the years of working with them, Daryna has mastered a system of signals that must be constantly deployed, as though on a highway in hazardous conditions, to show that she is not crossing the white lines, not aiming to cut into “their” space, and depends, time after time, on their aid, being the weaker sex that she is, and only rarely, oh how rarely—she could count those occasions on the fingers of one hand—did she hear them give voice to what every last one of them must have secretly known: that she was the brains of the channel, its soul, and not merely its showy face, which could, with appropriate promotion, be just as easily replaced with someone else’s. And here it is—she’s lived to see it—belated, almost posthumous recognition sent in her wake. Nose better than a bloodhound’s—that’s their way of appreciating her now that they’ve had a chance to regret not quitting with her, the whole team together, when they could (and they could have, they had their chance—and it would have set precedent for their whole guild, and it would’ve been easier to get funding for VMOD-Film now!). Nose better than a bloodhound’s. That’s what it’s n
ow called. Well, guys, I won’t turn it down.

  No point belaboring this—no sense multiplying essences, as old Occam taught, and as Antosha likes repeating; Antosha, who always defends the basest among all likely motivations for anyone’s actions, maintaining that his chance of being wrong lies within the range of statistical error—and Daryna swipes Occam’s razor at him.

  “Is that proper language? Mind your discourse, Antosha!”

  “Well, I didn’t go to discoursing school, hon. You know, I’m a humble man—a shooter, as we used to say in school… but, fuck me, I’ve had enough. I’ve eaten so much shit in my Soviet days that when the same Komsomol-GB rats throw me back into it and go ‘give me ten!’ it makes me want to hurl, and booze don’t cure it anymore. Plus, one can’t be drunk his whole life!”

  This is somewhat surprising, coming as it is from Antosha who always and everywhere had been the first to inquire whether drinks were included.

  “So what, you looking for a job?”

  “Yep. That, by the way, is why I’m calling you. Come on, out with it, is it true that you’ve bought out all the footage we got on Olena Dovganivna?”

  Not I, she thinks. Vadym simply solved that problem too, while he was at it. He chatted with the guys, did them a favor, looked out for himself, and, well, didn’t forget her consult. Plus, threw her a bone to make sure she’d shut up, would never again drag Vlada’s skeleton out of his closet. No wonder he turned it all around so quickly, and without her having to remind him.

  “Where’d you hear that, Antosha?”

  “Not like it’s rocket science. Who other than you would want that stuff? It’s obvious whose little fingerprints are all over this. Spit it out, Sis. You got it?”

  “I do.”

  “You witch,” Antosha drops his second compliment in a row, with genuine pleasure, like a dollop of cream into her coffee. “And what are you going to do with it?”

  That’s a good question, Daryna Goshchynska thinks. A very good question indeed. She would love to know the answer. Now that the life, passed on to her down the line from Gela Dovgan, smolders somewhere inside her, a not-yet-visible spark, and at this thought a smile rolls out, by itself, onto her lips: what if she went ahead and said into the phone, as she did to Adrian about an hour earlier, “You know, I’m pregnant”?

  (No, that’s not how I told Adrian. I said, “You were right, you know,” and he knew it instantly from my voice, from the way it strained to contain the triumphant bulk of the secret knowledge that cannot really be shared with anyone, even with you, my most precious, my love, you whose touch I yearn for, while you, on the other end of the city, are choking on the uncontainable shock of this new joy, while I long for it like for a drink of water on a scorching day. It would be wonderful to have you by my side the whole time, holding my hand, but what I would like best right now is to fall asleep—sink into long, translucent daytime sleep, blissfully unhurried like rapid filming, like smoke rising from a fire in a summer orchard—languor-sleep, doze-sleep, the sweet stillness of the body stripped of will, with the mind dimmed like a lamp not quite turned off—sleep through which I could still sense your presence—you working in the kitchen, you out on the balcony, carrying something from one place to another, nailing, moving things—making a place for the baby, perhaps? Noises that blend with the lisping of rain outside and the whoosh of tires on wet asphalt, with flashes of sunlight that swim around the room from the balcony door when it opens, then closes—and then you dive in with me, under my blanket, hugging me from behind, and purr in a low voice so that even asleep I can feel how hot I am, how your penis instantly hardens pressing against my buttocks—my dreams will be here cut short and will later resume at the same point; the mechanic from the ancient club of my youth will glue the film back together, and on this parallel reel that has been running before my eyes the whole time, without ever obscuring the room around me, with its shifting light, the breath of the man I love and the rain outside, there will be Gela—it is with her I most want to share this; she is the one I want to call and say: come—

  and now she finally will come to me—by herself, without any go-betweens: now, that I can finally understand her, now that it’s not only she who needs me, but also I who need her—need her more than my mom, more than a sister or friend, more than any other woman in the world—

  I will tell her she carries no blame. That she is now free. And also will tell her the war goes on, that the war never stops—now it is our war and we haven’t yet lost it—

  and will ask her: Gela, you see things better from where you are, tell me—it is a girl, isn’t it? Will she be happy?)

  “You know,” Daryna says into the phone, “she was pregnant.”

  “Who?” Antosha’s voice asks, startled.

  “Olena Dovganivna. She was pregnant when she died.”

  “For real?”

  “Uhu.”

  “Get out. How’d you find out?”

  “From the son of the old GB man who was in charge of the raid.”

  “Fuck me. Pardon the discourse. His old man told him? I thought they’d signed papers like in Afghanistan—not a peep about combat operations, if anyone asks—you brought candy for the kids…”

  “No, you’re right. It is the same with the GB, but his kid dug it up on his own. As an adult already.”

  “Wow. Where did you find this guy?”

  “Right here in Kyiv.”

  “Mind-blowing,” Antosha says. She can hear him light a cigarette; his excitement spreads through the network. “Awesome. Shit… listen, Sis, so I was right? You’re gonna finish this film? By yourself?”

  “Already got incorporated. As my own—don’t laugh at me—film agency. Am now hunting for cash.”

  “I knew it! I knew it. I know you, you old witch… you! I’d smother you. In my arms. Tenderly. No. Hats off. Kiss the fair lady’s hand, my respect, my total respect. Goshchynska, you sly wench, take me in, will ya?”

  “I…”

  “You know you’ll have to shoot more footage! You got that offspring on record yet?”

  “No, he refused. It was a private conversation.”

  “All the more so!” Antosha exclaims, delighted: he is comforted to hear that she hasn’t recruited a new shooter. “D’you think those twenty-four hours we shot are gonna do it? Fat chance!”

  “Twenty-three forty,” Daryna corrects automatically, not yet believing her own ears.

  “All the more so! Doesn’t matter. How much of that is rough, come on, turn on your brain now, how much of that will end up on the floor? And now that you’ve dug up how it all ended, with that firefight in which she died, you can’t do without that scene—with or without the dude, you’ve got to show that somehow. Never mind all the other stuff…. How are you going to patch it all together, without a cameraman, who are you kidding? Meaning without me, the magnificent; it’s basically my film as much as yours! Come on, Dara, what do you say?”

  “Antuan, have you not heard me? I’ve got no money to pay you!”

  “You mean, like, at all?” he sounds unapologetically sarcastic: the fact that she was able to get twenty-four hours of footage back from the channel appears to have instilled in Antosha a rock-solid faith in her omnipotence, the financial kind included. “Hon, you just think, how much do I really need? It’s not like you’re starting from scratch. I’ve got my own camera, and for editing I’ll talk to the boys at Science and Nature, they’re living on bread and water there and would make us a great deal. You do have to cover travel, to shoot on location, somehow, but that’s not much…. You’ve bought the footage out of there—that’s the thing, and you did it!”

  This is precisely what she’s been missing—words of support from someone who knows how it’s done from the inside out, first-hand—professional support, the guild behind her, the brotherhood. Their company. Their community.

  I’m gonna bawl, Daryna thinks. How deeply, it turns out, this got wedged inside her—the resentment from last fall,
the insult of the boys all plugging their ears and covering their eyes at her departure, each of them already burrowing deeper into his own hole. Antosha, who would have guessed? Antosha—Occam’s Razor—the old wino with his eye eternally askance at any show of uncompensated enthusiasm, like a countryman looking at a political agitator—is he really with her? It’s true, they’ve always had an ambient sort of bond, of that easy, unforced kind that emerges when two people feel good working together—and laughing together. That’s not an afterthought (at meetings and on location they always sat together, exchanging comments and snickering); it’s important, it keeps you warm. Antosha—despite all the cynicism of his act—is a warm person, but for him to give up a sure meal on the table and follow her, on a whim, into the wild blue yonder, it is not enough to be warm; it’s biblical—either hot, or cold, and she feels almost as ashamed, as if he’d suddenly proclaimed his love for her: he’s broken the stereotype. So this film means something for him, too? Something more than the number of shooting hours, remunerated according to a contract?

  “I can still manage the travel, Antosha.”

  This, actually, was what she and Aidy decided—so that if she didn’t find a sponsor, she could finish the film by herself, out of pocket, only they didn’t count on having a cameraman. But this was before she learned about Gela. She needs a cameraman, oh yes she does, and it would make her happy beyond words to have Antosha do it; he’s a wiz at his job—one of those last Mohicans, old enough to have witnessed the glory of filmmaking in the Kyiv-school tradition….