The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  “You know, for me it was enough to have known her matinka, he-he!”

  “Nina Ustýmivna?” I’m not being obtuse—I’m slamming on the brakes: something’s coming at me that I do not want to hear, and there’s no way to swerve around it.

  “Exactly, exactly. Ninél is her real name.”

  Ninél? Yes, indeed, that’s right, Ninél—a name once fashionable among the Soviet bureaucrats, “Lenin” spelled backwards.

  “I knew Matusevych Senior, too. He wasn’t actually without talent, as a painter, but that bitch, pardon my language, just drove him to the grave. We used to call her the praying mantis among ourselves, he-he...the spider female that turns the male into protein after the act.... She, by the way, was a beauty, a nuclear blonde; you know—you could bury her alive, and she’d dig herself out with her bare hands, he-he. God spare me from a woman like that.”

  Something in his voice, a grating note, tells me he is not married. Or long divorced. Could’ve figured it earlier, not rocket science: his dingy shirt, a general dusting of neglect—it happens when a person has long lived alone and doesn’t have anyone to look him over on his way out. His only consolation—how bad things can be for the married. Especially those who marry beautiful blondes. Vlada also always said that her mom had been a beauty, and I always kept politely quiet: I think the real beauties remain beautiful in old age, and I wouldn’t say that about N.U.

  “The fact that Matusevych never fulfilled his potential as an artist,” Baldy continues to gloat, “was all Ninél’s fault, much more so than the Soviets! She couldn’t get him the Government Award, that’s true, although she packed him off to the Central Committee more than once—to confess the mistakes of his youth, and he still didn’t make it to the special-rations ranks, he-he...I’ll finish the cognac, with your permission. No use leaving tears at the bottom—Your health!

  “About me, she wrote a denunciation in ’73—to the Union’s political committee and the Art publishing house, whence I was promptly expelled, after that report of hers—for ideological immaturity. And that was the beginning of all my trials and tribulations. Despite the fact that I was a young specialist and they had no right to expel me.” (He is talking as if this all happened just yesterday, the resentment raw in his voice.) “Right before that I published in...” (Bla-bla-bla—he names a periodical from back then, Socialist Painting or Swine Tending, I forget instantly) “my article...” (he rolls out a pretentious multiclause title that whizzes straight over my head and might as well have been in a foreign language) “they called it the generation’s manifesto, the debate in the Union was oh-so-stormy—the last, you could say, stir of freedom.”

  “You mentioned a denunciation.”

  “And the denunciation, he-he...” (he’s all but rubbing his hands together, so pleased is he to be opening my eyes to the bottomless pit of human depravity) “the denunciation was that beauty’s way of getting back at me for criticizing her husband, among other things. In that article of mine I wrote that he was more successful in his nonfigurative works than he was with the builders of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, and that was absolutely true. Except that he’d already been raked over the coals for his nonfiguratives, and it was time for him to distinguish himself. It was a critical year, you know: there’d been one wave of arrests already, Zalyvaha got time, Gorska was killed, a whole bunch of people got expelled from the Union, blacklisted—and Ninél, you know, she was used to comfort, to status; she wouldn’t have taken kindly to being the wife of a persecuted, starving abstractionist. So she packed him off to paint ‘men of labor’ at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Project.... ”

  “Good Lord, why to Chernobyl?”

  “Eh, you, young bucks!” Baldy is all but melting, blissfully, like a living block of butter. He is in his element—the guide to the past, where we are foreign tourists, mouths agape. “They just started building it, right then! All the papers blared about it; poets were falling over each other to sing the peaceful atom on the Pripyat’s shores. It was a win-win subject: it’s not the great leaders you’d be painting again, you know, but men of labor—just like Courbet did—and at the same time you’d be manifesting the correct understanding of the government’s and the party’s policies. Back then, you must remember, few knew—it only came to light after the accident—how dangerous a project it was, that nuclear plant. And that the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, no matter how deep in Moscow’s pocket it may have been, did not, in the end, give its approval to build the plant in such a densely populated area—only in Moscow, they didn’t give a shit, pardon my language, about some stupid Ukrainian hohlys’ permission.

  “It was so ordered—and off went the campaign, and everyone ran to get in line for a creative road assignment. And Matusevych Senior, too. He slapped together a whole series, painted in the realistic manner, of course; it was his first official show. He did have a few interesting uses of color here and there; color was his strength, and you can’t escape yourself at the drop of a hat, just like that—but overall it was a sloppy job, such blatant socialist realism. If they’d given him the award then, it would have been a giant leap for him...” (he spreads his arms, to make his point more visual) “clear to being crowned on the other side of the chessboard, straight into the establishment!” (The establishment seems to drop onto my untouched plate next to the veal filet that’s gone cold, and Baldy blinks at it in passing, with visible regret.)

  “That’s what Ninél counted on—and not without good reason. Many careers were made like that at the time—after the best and the most talented went underground, like I did...” (no, I didn’t really hear that last bit, that’s the alcohol finishing my thoughts for me) “the gaps had to be filled somehow. And, sure thing, all this rubbish pushed its way to the top, and the age of the talentless began. But, so that the difference would not be quite so obvious right away, they still mixed in a few of the old beaten-and-denounced; the ones who demonstrated contrition—as long as they were clean on the KGB count, of course.... And they were only too happy—Brecht was fashionable then, and he has Galileo say that it is better to have your hands stained than empty—remember? Many thought so, too: alright, let me get a little dirty, but in exchange I’ll have a chance to do something, in art, in science.... But it didn’t work that way, he-he! All of them, those who went from the underground to the officialdom, met Matusevych’s fate—and never created anything good again! They were left empty-handed, he-he.”

  So this, then, is the main justification for his life? And for his own empty hands, which, by his reckoning, are superior to the hands of those who ate better than he did back then, and he wants someone to recognize this. He must make a good professor, actually—he has a way of drawing you in. So much so, in fact, that I’ve sobered back up to that third-drink level: thought after another follows.

  And here I am, sitting across from him, some quarter of a century his junior, with my own clean hands, like Pontius Pilate’s—and feel my blouse sticking to my shoulder blades, and notice the stench of my own armpits very clearly; it’s not a hallucination. I, too, am beginning to sweat like him, beginning to ooze, his mirror image on the other side of the table, liquid from every pore. He also drips out of sorrow, I instantly realize and feel, for a moment, remarkably perceptive—a protracted sadness like that, over many years, can make one cry, or it can make one sweat. Looking at him, I see my own future. Myself—in another quarter century, when I, too, won’t have anything left except persuading the grown-up youths (those I manage to latch on to) that I am better than my colleagues because one time, long ago, I didn’t want to soil my hands, and disappeared from the screen. And I’ll have nothing in those hands of mine, either, when those grown-up youths ask: And who exactly are you, miss, and what have you accomplished? Not one more worthwhile thing—just like him.

  It all goes around in circles, I realize, horrified (and repulsed by my own indomitable smell)—in circles, over and over again, the same thing in every generation, only the costumes chang
e. It’s a special kind of trap: a whirligig of ruined lives. A Ferris wheel: you’ll get off where you got on. I can’t breathe; I’m going to be sick. Aidy, noticing or sensing something (my smell?), covers my hand with his comforting palm—thank you, love, yes, I understand, it’s time to go, but I have to hear this man out. Hear everything. To the end.

  “So Matusevych, then,” the professor carries on his tale, losing most of his oratorical flourish (apparently, he is immune to my smell) “had, at the time, a perfectly realistic chance of improving his lot, and Ninél spared neither time nor effort for this. Wore her own soles off making sure he’d get nominated—and why not, he was practically clean on the KGB count...” (How exactly, one wonders, does he know that?) “a few trifles here and there perhaps, a bit of this and that, dissident acquaintances in his past, but who didn’t have those? The important thing was not to keep them up, and at that, Matusevych was rather abundantly experienced! When he got married, he broke off all contact with his own family—lest someone remind him that his uncle fought in the insurgency. He didn’t even go to visit his mother—this, by the way, also upon Ninél’s insistence; she just couldn’t be too safe, that lady.”

  “Wait a minute.” I sober up all the way to the first-drink level. “What uncle in UIA? Wasn’t Matusevych’s family from somewhere around Khmelnitsk?”

  Khmelnitsk region—that’s where Vlada went when she was little to her grandmother’s, her father’s mother’s funeral, where she heard the wailing that she remembered for the rest of her life. And that was her only memory of that grandma, because she did not, in fact, ever see her alive, not once.

  Baldy magnanimously aims the shiny circles of his glasses at me (and now he reminds me of Beria). “And did you imagine there was no UIA in the Khmelnitsk region?”

  “Was there?” Aidy perks up.

  “Was there anywhere it wasn’t?” laughs Baldy, a downright homey laugh (his tie has slipped askew). “I come all the way from Sumy, and I remember how my mom hid partisans in the German days! And then when the Reds came, I was told to keep my mouth shut about it, not a peep, because it turned out that partisans they were, alright, but not the right kind...not the Soviet ones. And where Matusevych was from, in Podillya—that was basically Bandera’s backyard!

  “But they had to have forgiven him, that uncle of his, long before; Ninél was there at his side, a living, breathing proof of rectitude—she came from the privileged, an apparatchik family, her father started in Party work all the way back with Stalin.... So then, she had a clear plan—to push her husband to the top. And here I come, he-he, a greenhorn, truth-seeking idealist, and plain out declare that Matusevych is rubbish as a Socialist Realist, and that he’s wasting his time doing something his heart isn’t in.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of a denunciation, too?”

  This slips off my tongue before I can bite it—I’m not quite sober yet, after all. But now, in the pause my words abruptly throw open—this silence is bottomless, and so are Baldy’s eyes as he stares at me, rendered instantly speechless, as if I’d just hit him with a right hook to the chin—in this silence that rings in my ears as though the entire café has also been stunned, lights changed and sound turned off, I finally sober up completely, the daze gone without a trace, like it was never there. Hang on a second. Who was it that looked at me with just such frightened eyes not so long ago? And why did Baldy get so scared?

  Aidy is first to come back on line—with an amiable chuckle: he’s getting a kick out of this; he’s admiring me and doesn’t hide it—he can afford to admire me, how awesome I am, how quick my reflexes are. And, since Aidy is the one who is bankrolling the evening, Baldy reacts to Aidy’s signal—and engages again, although he has to force it, creaking and screeching like a rusty machine, flexing the muscles around his mouth: he-he-he. I already know who it was that looked at me exactly like that not so long ago—with the same dread, a cornered animal’s hatred: it was my boss. During our last conversation, when I accidentally, just like this time, reminded him about the dead body buried on his conscience. The reaction’s identical, down to a T; the facial expression’s exactly the same. C’mon, mister, you’re weaseling around, skirting something—you’ve got something to hide, haven’t you?

  “He-he...you, my dear, don’t quite grasp the times, do you?” he declares, choosing to resume his magnanimous tone, and partially succeeds, only a few dry sparks crackle under his glasses in the wake of his momentary short circuit. “People took my article as a breath of fresh air! The journal still dabbled then in freethinking, for old times’ sake; it was the last little island like that, but after Ninél’s denunciation the publishers had their air shut off too. Ninél, you see, reasoned somewhat along the same lines as you just did, he-he.... ” (Vindictive, aren’t we? Put the jab right back where it came from.) “Well, you can be forgiven on the grounds of ignorance, but you know this women’s logic of yours. Women always rush to defend their own, in this they’re much like Jews...”

  And anti-Semitic, too?

  “There are all kinds of women out there. And Jews, as far as I know.”

  Aidy grunts his approval again—resigned to the prospect of not getting out of here as quickly as he thought. He nods to the waiter to clear the dishes from our table, pulls out the cigarettes he already put away in his pocket, and lights one up.

  “Could I have one, too?” Baldy asks, suddenly, and unexpectedly.

  He hasn’t smoked all evening. Means I really got to him. Got him good, looks like. Ha! Am I Columbo, or what? Time to take the initiative: “So, if I understand you correctly, Nina Ustýmivna decided that your exposé could harm her husband’s career, and responded with a preemptive strike?”

  For a moment, he doesn’t say anything—as if he were experiencing that strike again.

  “A stab in my back,” he says after the pause, drawing on his cigarette with the greed of an old smoker, his Adam’s apple bobbing hungrily—and I see how worn he is. Soggy and worn. And old. “It was a stab in the back. She, essentially, ruined my life, your...” he mocks with a caustic smirk, “Nina Ustýmivna. Unlike her, an apparatchik offspring, I had no protection or patronage whatsoever. They wouldn’t think twice about giving me time—and not on political count, mind you, but for a criminal offense. Vagrancy or hooliganism—like they did with everyone who didn’t have a famous name—workers, students, all the political bottom-feeders...not a mouse would peep. Do you even realize what it was like...” (his voice swells with an altogether theatrical pathos, it appears he’s getting himself worked up again) “to be fired because of a political accusation, for ‘ideological mistakes’? Can you imagine at all how an art historian might survive in 1970s Kyiv if no one would give him a job? How he might feed his family?” (Here I could have pointed out that I myself had once been a child in a family like that, and that our family, after they locked my father up in the loony bin, was fed by my mom. But I doubt it would trip him up—he appears to persist in the conviction that he is the only man in the world ever to have survived something like that.) “What it means—to beg around for small jobs? To write reviews under other people’s names for twelve rubles a piece and consider yourself lucky when you could?” (Something similar may very well be in store for me in the near future, but I don’t want to bring that up.) “My wife left me. She couldn’t stand it after a while; she, too, wanted comfort—as Shakespeare said,” he twists his mouth as if for another he-he, but this time no sound comes out, “Frailty, thy name is woman.”

  Shakespeare, Brecht—all this is also a kind of nouveau-riche gilding, like in their McBathrooms, all these quotes he pulls. He is not lying—he’s just bizarrely off-key, as though he were playing his solo on an instrument in need of tuning. Or is it this iresome pathos of his that’s ringing flat in my ear? You can’t deny it: their generation used up our national stockpile of pathos for centuries to come, didn’t leave us anything that could sound natural. Like Vlada making fun of her mother: “Nous sommes les artistes, maman!”
Nina Ustýmivna, it’s you again, Nina Ustýmivna.

  “And you call it a preemptive strike! Perfidy’s what it was, my dear, common human perfidy! The instinctive response of a cannibal who bites off the head of anyone who dares stand in her way, and moves on without a second thought!” (I wince unwittingly under this verbal barrage—as if it were Vlada who had to listen to all this instead of me.) “She chomped down her own husband, too, and didn’t even blink! He never did get that award, not then, not later; they didn’t let him to the very top,” again he twists his mouth gleefully. “The competition was too stiff for Ninél, too tough for her to bite, and she broke her fangs, her resources were not immeasurable.... Bet my reputation—on that, the lady left her brand for many years to come. For a while there I was simply crossed out of life—in a dead end! Do you understand? Dead!”

  “And that’s when you were recruited by the KGB, wasn’t it?”

  He remains just like that, mouth not quite closed, halfway through an inhale: a freeze-frame. I can’t help it—it’s my professional proclivity for dramatic effects: as if I really lived inside a mystery series, where I’m also in charge of creating drama, and every time my trick works I get a small professional satisfaction. Aidy, my audience (the only one I have left)—also my view from outside, the director’s voice from outside the frame, the cameraman on the other side of the camera, and the makeup artist with the powder brush at the ready (how quickly did I invest him with the powers of all my old overseeing authorities!)—makes a short, glottal noise that could, if one were so inclined, be taken for applause. He’s so sharp, mind like a steel mathematical trap, that he’s instantly put together all parts of the equation, and even if either one of us still wondered whether I have, in fact, divined the correct solution or stuck my chalk, at random, straight past the blackboard, one glance at Baldy is enough to erase all doubt: he looked as though all his sweat had instantly dried up all over him. A sudden change of seasons: a night of frost—and everything’s stuck.