The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  That it was a mistake, she realized right away, by how obviously and instantly happy it made the captain—but the gravity of it took time to fully manifest itself, specifically the three days that would pass before their second, and final, interview. She realized she never got out, never stepped away from that terrible office—quite the opposite: it was as if she’d chosen to take on its burden, hefted it onto her own shoulders, the silly little caryatid, and schlepped it around the whole three days, more or less delirious—having the conversation with the mad nurses inside her head the whole time. And what if...no, like this...and I’ll say to him...and he’ll... (and the shortness of breath the whole time).

  Later she would recognize this infestation of mind in dissidents’ memoirs: people lived like that for years, wired, as if into an electric grid, trying to untangle something that by definition could not be untangled—drawn into a chess match with a schizoid. But at the time it felt like she was the only one left in the world. Her husband, Sergiy, couldn’t tell her anything helpful except recalling that his mother had also been approached by the KGB with something like this once, but who hadn’t been approached? Millions of people went through the same trials, and yet no collective experience emerged from it, and every rookie had to start from scratch as though he (or she) were the only one in the world—a metaphysical state, almost, like in love or in death when no other person’s experience is of any use to you, and no book has words for what is happening to you, the One and Only, with the sole difference that this whole thing was sealed under the massive lid of solid, shamed silence—this was not an experience people liked to share.

  Sergiy was left outside, behind the looking glass, and his inept efforts to cheer her up resembled the unnaturally lively gesticulations of people seeing someone off on a train, before it departs: those outside wave, come close to the windows, tap on the glass, make faces—and those inside are already thinking about which of their suitcases has their slippers and toothbrush in it. When the train pulls out, both sides breathe a sigh of relief.

  In a few more years, she and Sergiy pulled away from their shared platform never to return, but it was during those three days that she got on the train: the experience she lived through in isolation only added to her loneliness and put more distance between her and those she had considered to be her closest people—and about this the books also said nothing.

  She’s always told both herself and her friends that she learned not to trust collective experience then, none whatsoever, because it was all slop and bullshit meant to befuddle the working class, and the only thing one could rely on was individual people’s stories. She used her example with the captain so often—in smoking rooms at work, at populous parties (appreciating, with a secret satisfaction, the instantly soured mugs of ex-informants—although why necessarily “ex-”?: good help is always in demand)—that she wore it to the bone. Apparently, there was another thing she learned from that experience: when someone humiliates you, you must return the blow instantly and with force—it’s the only way to stay on your feet. Any hesitation, moping, or attempts to explain what a good girl you really are automatically turn you into your enemies’ accomplice, before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath.

  No, she could find no faults with her performance in yesterday’s conversation; she did everything right. Daryna turns onto her stomach and presses the receiver against her ear—like a gun to her head.

  “Mom.”

  The puddle standing still on the plank floor, the wet glare of the kitchen light like the eye of a giant fish. It was a neat snowman.

  “Mom, I’m quitting my job.”

  A quiet rustle of fright rises in the receiver, the sound of air leaving a punctured tire. Daryna begins to comprehend, as if for the first time and with utmost clarity, that her mother has lived her entire life in anticipation of bad news. That for Olga Fedorivna good news has always been a mere interlude, a postponement. When on September 11 the Twin Towers in New York collapsed on the TV screen, Olga Fedorivna was certain that the Third World War had begun—the one she’d expected forty years earlier, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And she wasn’t the only one: Ninél Ustýmivna was so sure that standoff fifty years ago was going to be it that she had an abortion (Because who has a child when war’s about to break out?), so Vlada actually wasn’t her first. The generation of being ready for the worst.

  What if they hadn’t been all that wrong, after all? What if that’s how you should live—always prepared to see the little world you painstakingly erected like a tiny industrious ant disintegrate before your eyes, ready to start from scratch again, just as painstakingly—pebble by pebble, twig by twig, scrap by scrap?

  “That’s what I figured,” rumbles Olga Fedorivna, already dragging the first twig to her construction site, “that something was wrong, because the whole morning’s been so gloomy, so queasy somehow, everything just falling out of my hands!”

  This touches Daryna, surprising her—“queasy” is an amazingly apt word. She does feel foul inside, poisoned.

  “So what happened, why, how?”

  “What’s been long time coming already. We’ve held out long enough anyway. They sold us, Ma.”

  “How?”

  “The usual way, like everyone else, packed us up and sold us. The whole village, our entire channel. With all its indentured souls, including my own. We’ve run free long enough—time to come in.”

  Olga Fedorivna, a consumer of finished televised product, only allowed to peek into the production kitchen every now and then when her daughter cracks the door open, wonders naïvely to whom they’d been sold, and whether it might be possible to arrange with the new owners for Diogenes’ Lantern to remain on air. “You might as well take a lantern if you’re looking for shows like that on TV. Soon there’ll be nothing to watch at all—if it’s not soap operas, it’s those stupid talk shows everywhere; honestly, how stupid do you have to be to watch those? One feels sorry for the hosts; and the rest—click all the channels you want—are elections, elections, elections. Let them all get elected to hell already!”

  Daryna can’t help but be amused by such fervent support and catches herself mentally calling, her boss, or rather, her ex-boss, as her witness: here you go, feedback from a common senior citizen! (And how long is it going to take, exactly—for her to leave yesterday’s office, to shake off the sticky coontails of their conversation?) And where, in the name of God’s grace, do they all—especially those who’d gotten to big money—get their unshakeable certainty that the audience is a herd of sheep that need only have the most insipid laboratory-protein chaff poured into its trough?

  Ratings, their boss used to say piously (in the old days, back when they were a team, when they stayed up into the wee hours, high on instant coffee and their own arguments—Lord, did it all really happen; it wasn’t a dream?), ratings are the objective indicator of what people want, and there you have it: entertainment, and more entertainment, and of the kind that doesn’t overload the circuits upstairs. Malarkey! she’d fire back (that’s when her opinion was still worth something, when it could, she thought, change something); people consume whatever they’re being fed, simply because they don’t have another choice. The same way you go to Big Pocket and buy those plastic-looking apples fit to hang on Christmas trees—they don’t rot, don’t dry up, and they’d still shine a year later—but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like a living, breathing, fresh-off-the-tree Simirenko, nice and juicy and with a real little worm inside, just that you wouldn’t find any in the supermarkets, only the tin Granny Smiths—eat all you want—and there you have your rating.

  Their arguments ended—a long time ago. What happened yesterday was just a line drawn under the emptiness, dead air that’s been running for who knows how long, rustling with the blank frames of the played-out film. No more movies for you. She, Daryna Goshchynska, has been discarded as, by the way, many before her. Decommissioned, my dear, decommissioned, your place can always be filled with fr
esh meat, more agreeable and always willing to please—with a moistly open little maw and ecstatic whimpering when it’s being had through every hole.

  Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, is busy spinning her own thread of thought—mother and daughter run their parallel courses like two rivers divided by the hilly terrain of incommensurate experience, making inept swerves toward confluence and missing each other time and again.

  “You’ve been sort of edgy for a while, Daryna. I even wondered if maybe things weren’t working with you and Adrian; I’ve been worried about you. I could see you were all nerves.... ”

  Of course, if it’s “all nerves,” then it must be men troubles. Mom’s logic is ironclad. But the funniest thing, Daryna thinks, is that they both guessed wrong. She, for one, has been blaming all her tension of the last year on the film about Dovganivna, like an ostrich with her head in the sand—nose and ears plugged to avoid paying any attention to the stupendous shitstorm that raged around her, muck first pooling around her ankles and then rising to her knees, making it harder and harder to move, never mind breathe: live debates were disappearing from prime time; news people complained about receiving daily thematic instructions from their channels’ owners, prescribing exactly how they were to present each piece of news and about which they were to keep mute as fishes. Original programming sank under the tidal surge of Russian imports, as if life were being replaced by slipshod alien simulacra slapped together on a desktop by a sophomoric nerd—the dusk of reason falling all around. But she thought she had found a niche where “it don’t flood,” as Yurko liked to say; they all thought so, everyone who stayed with the channel to the end, stubbornly refusing to notice that it does, in fact, flood. Until, that is, it flooded absolutely everything in sight, and it became clear that there were no more niches—only those who pay and those who deliver the goods. Meaning, that’s how those who were paying saw things, and to them it looked like the natural order of things. The unnatural part was that there appeared to be no one who would object to that view.

  “That’s what they offered me, Mommy, one of those imbecile talk shows.”

  “Instead of your Lantern!?”

  “If you can imagine that. A show for young people. The producer said ‘we’re revitalizing the channel’s brand.’ They’re betting on young audiences, and I’d get, as they saw it, a mega bonus: the youth talk show. You know the drill: Just say no to sex without a condom; we met in a karaoke bar, and so on,” she stumbles, swallows the lump that’s come up in her throat (assholes! assholes!) to finish. And then there’s the Miss New TV beauty pageant—but no, she’ll leave out that new part of the programming; it’s not fit for Mom’s ears—one shouldn’t tell such things to museum workers of advanced age.

  “What carry-oakie bar?” Olga Fedorivna asks, dejected.

  Once again, Daryna feels her eyes fill with tears. What’s the point of rubbing it in like this—for her mom, or for herself? Of all people to whine to.

  “Doesn’t matter, Mom, that’s just an example. They want me to wear braids. Revitalize my image, you know, make it easier for the target audience to relate. You’ve seen those commercials: generation jeans, everything and at once?”

  “Did they all lose their cotton-picking minds?”

  Olga Fedorivna’s voice prickles with sharp, rejuvenated notes that bring on, in a hazy fade-in, a vision in Daryna’s mind from more than thirty years ago: a trim brunette in a bright yellow dress marching across the kindergarten yard beside a flummoxed teacher to whom she is reading the riot act, while little Darynka looks on through the window of the dining room, where she’d been locked up after dinner to finish the hateful sour cream—a whole glass of goo that she, in desperation, forever abandoned by everyone, sits straining, with disgust, through her puckered lips, which does nothing to lower the level of the white gunk under her nose. She looks on and a blast of joy shoots through her both for the knowledge of her imminent liberation—Mom’s here!—and the shock of her first experience of seeing from outside: this is my mom—how beautiful she is! If only you could always remember your parents the way they were in their best years. But there’s never time for that, because you’ve got bigger fish to fry—your own best years, which, just like theirs, pass, damn it. They pass.

  The thing that really got her was that her producer never, not for a second, doubted that their offer would flatter her, that she’d be delighted by the mere fact she’d been deemed suitable for a youth talk show. And worse yet—she did, for an instant, feel flattered. Like when the driver of the car next to her at a stoplight sent her air kisses, like when men in foreign airports occasionally turn to look at her (and she could be completely sure that they didn’t recognize her, that the lit-up looks and the uncontrollably loose grins were meant not for a TV star but simply for a beautiful woman, because at home you could never tell the difference—men look at attractive women and celebrities in the same way), like when a black Lexus sped up and slammed on the brakes next to her in the street, sending a fan of water into the air, so she barely managed to jump out of the way, and from behind the rolled-down window appeared the mug of a boy umpteen years her junior to say, in a leisurely Russian, like a restaurant order: “Leave your phone number, miss.” (And only when she laughed into his face, could she see by his changed expression that he recognized her, fired up with a different, more preemptive interest—here it is, the power of the media: “Wait...don’t you...don’t you work on TV?”)

  Such things always pleased her, she won’t deny it; they gave her new zest. For a moment, she was almost hypnotized, listening to her boss tell her about herself: they’ll style your hair into braids, for a “frisky,” as he put it, look, and dress you more casually, youthfully, from Benetton, something informal, a little top, shorts and over-the-knee boots, a miniskirt. What paralyzed her was not so much his tone of an old seducer as her own eternally feminine eagerness—to submit, spellbound, to the hands of a designer, stylist, makeup artist...anyone who would make her different, better; and the audience, ready to appreciate their efforts, is right there. The salesgirl hands you a few more skirts that go, in her opinion, with the jacket you’re trying on in the fitting room, while the man sits with his newspaper in an armchair waiting for you to come out and sashay around the store, turning in front of the mirror and smoothing the skirt over your thighs and behind, as though molding your own body—you’re your own Pygmalion, the outfit your marble: What do you think? For that one moment, in yesterday’s entire conversation, she did feel ashamed, but she won’t tell her mother about it, no way, and her mom wouldn’t understand it anyway. She’s never set foot in an expensive boutique and, really, it’s not like Uncle Volodya could sit in that armchair waiting for the shape-shifting séance with the Sphinx smile of a man who will pay for everything in the end. No, their generation did not get to experience as many of life’s joys as ours, and isn’t this precisely what makes us, in our heart of hearts, look down on them?

  “That’s right, Mom, and that’s exactly what I told him—and that I won’t be made into a public spectacle.”

  That was not what she said, not what she said at all. She only knocked him off his tone—a bed-broker’s business tone in which he proceeded to wrap her up and tie her with a bow. She went to the edge of his desk and perched there like a stripteuse, jerked up her sweater, flashed him with her bare belly and asked him in that angrily ringing voice whose cracked shards can still—who knew—sometimes be heard in her mother’s voice, “And how about my navel—have it pierced, or are you chicken?”

  He broke off, forgetting to shut his mouth, dithered, and waved her off, meaning, stop it—but got back on track right away, regained his balance, glibbed with a chuckle, “Yum, I’d like a piece of that!” But from that moment on, spoke with her as with an equal, an accomplice. (How apt that old actress had been who told her once, after a session, when they were sitting in the old woman’s pauper kitchen drinking tea with biscuits that had obviously been diligently scrubbed clean of mold before bei
ng served: “When push comes to shove, sweetie, it is better to be a whore than a thing.”) All she did was shove him a step off the top of the mountain where he’d clambered and stood, triumphantly, engrossed in self-admiration, and then rolled, rambling, down all by himself, dragging her with him and scraping her bloody along the way; but that part—about her boss, about R.—was not for telling Mom either, that was for her to figure out on her own.

  “And what did he say to that?” Olga Fedorivna persists, apparently still clinging to something, something that looks to her like hope. Daryna feels a small stab of annoyance. When she was young, her mother’s insistence on using details to shield herself from reality, this clinging to small things (after Daryna’s father’s death she kept telling everyone how well he ate the day he died—porridge, carrot juice) used to drive her to distraction, made her want to slap her mother: Wake up, already! Youth has no idea yet of the effort the art of survival demands—it is an incredibly vacuous age. And we’re at such pains to stretch it out for as long as possible.

  “Mom, you’re like the sheriff in Natalka Poltavka: and what’d you say to that, and what’d she say to you?”

  It’s not like she could tell her how the boss went on to explain to her, as an intelligent woman, all the obvious advantages of the new course. First playing to her weakness (no one could say he didn’t know his personnel!)—her incurable need to be liked, the curse of the good girl (with, of course, what else, big bows in her braids) that’s been hanging around her neck her entire life; to have people applaud, to be praised, wow, Darynka’s such a smart girl, did such a nice job reciting that poem!—and then appealing to her ambitions, of which there are plenty. How else? Who would ever agree, if they had no ambition, to dunk their visually rounded mug like a goldfish into millions of living-room aquariums twice a week: This is Diogenes’ Lantern, and I am Daryna Goshchynska.... We’ll be back after a break...(The cosmic blackness on the other side of the studio floodlights aimed at her—effectively blinding her—seem to be populated, like a giant auditorium stretching out to infinity. It’s as if millions of eyes are looking at her from there, and every time, even after seven years on air, it seems people are sitting out there, very still, waiting, ready to creak their chairs, cough if she strikes a false note, even though there are no chairs in the studio except the one under her; she can feel that populous held breath in the space between her and the screen, the eyes of those to whom she speaks—they hold her up as water holds a swimmer.)