The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  “Take another example,” Vadym pours out more of his sand. “The White House announced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and everyone believed it. And never mind that they still haven’t found those weapons—and, most likely, won’t. They’ll be morons, of course, if they don’t; if it were the Russians, they would’ve planted some right away, and then no one would ever dig up what actually happened. There you have your reality. And you say—bad governors. No, my dear, the effectiveness of a government must be judged according to the tasks that the government sets for itself. The stuff that goes out to the public—that’s not an indicator, you can’t pay attention to that.”

  He lied to her, I suddenly realize. He lied to Vlada. I don’t know how, I don’t know what about, but I know it as clearly as if the right switch finally flipped in my mind and the light came on: he lied. And was perfectly effective at it—Vlada lived with this simulacrum for three years and did not notice it. Only close to the end did she begin to suspect something—all her works from the last year of her life were full of a growing premonition of a catastrophe. Her best works, the ones that triggered such a fit of anger in Aidy’s art-worm (I still blush at the recollection of that ugly scene). And not in him alone—few in Ukraine appreciated Vlada’s Secrets, something about the series transgressed the boundaries of the acceptable.

  An intimate knowledge of darkness—that’s what they contained. Her Secrets—of darkness made home, warmed by a feminine hand—adorned with flowers and decoupage, like a wolf’s lair hung about with elaborate patchwork quilts, her own darkness. Mixed media, the mysteriously shimmering collages by the girl who stood at the edge of the abyss and looked down with a child’s thrill—until she got dizzy. As I am getting right now.

  He is shrouding me in his language, this Vadym—it’s like a cloud of marijuana smoke. I can’t contradict him: I do not, in fact, know anything, let alone have any of the intimate familiarity, about all that hidden machinery of big politics that he keeps hinting at—with passing, shifty references I can’t quite grip; I have no logical crutch I could lean on to help myself scatter this verbal fog—I am only sensing a fundamental untruth hidden in it, and this hypnotic cocoon in which he is ensnaring me is paralyzing my will, as though taking away my command of my own body. The bifurcation point, a phrase from Aidy’s vocabulary, shoots through my mind: this is the point at which women undress for Vadym. Or tell him to fuck off.

  And, pretending that Aidy is watching me (and I am savoring, in advance, the story I’ll have to tell him when I get home), I improvise a husky, deep chuckle—in the big, empty dining room, it sounds more defiant than conspiratorial—“Why are you telling me all this, Vadym?”

  Oh, what a look he gives me! A man’s look, sizing me up, taking direct aim—a look that’ll make your knees buckle!

  “Are you bored?” he changes tack abruptly.

  “No, but it’s late already.”

  Music begins to play, low. “Hotel California,” an instrumental version. Mashenka must’ve put it on. Must be the way they do things here: put on music for dessert. It triggers the necessary complex emotions in the current object of wooing. Like in one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  “Have you got someplace to be?”

  “Just tired you know.”

  “You’ll sleep in tomorrow. You’re not getting up for work, are you?”

  Such a lovely place, such a lovely place, such a lovely face...

  “Pardon?”

  “Didn’t you resign? You don’t work in TV anymore. You don’t work anywhere, do you?”

  God! It’s like my plane drops into an air pocket. Uncontrollably, my jaw drops: what a brilliant tactician he is! One could see what got Vlada, especially in contrast to Katrusya’s father, the newly minted Australian kangaroophile who’d spent the entire span of their marriage on a couch in front of the TV.

  “You are well informed indeed. So you weren’t making your inquiries only about the beauty pageant?”

  “Does it bother you?” he glows modestly: it’s always nice to knock your neighbor down a rung or two, lest she think too highly of herself.

  “You could’ve just asked me—I’m not making a secret out of it. Or do you perhaps think that I could have gone on working there? In full knowledge of what they were doing?”

  I hear how weak that sounds—like I’m making excuses. In this game, as in any kind of business, the what is not important, and neither is the how—the important thing is who got there first. A lead automatically means a better position. Vadym got ahead of me when he found out about my resignation behind my back—and now I’m forced to justify myself, and my obsession with that despicable beauty pageant begins to look not entirely unimpeachable (Could it be retaliation by a disgruntled employee perhaps, instead of simple righteous indignation?)—and he is looking at me like that Dnipropetrovsk nut, as if he knows something about me that’s so dirty I’ll never be clean again. As they say in American movies, anything you say or do can and will be held against you.

  From this moment on, Vadym owes me nothing; the moral advantage is on his side. And all I’m left to do is applaud his brilliantly calculated timing—and prepare to hear what else he’s got in store for me: this is no longer my interview, I’m not the one asking questions, our roles have reversed.

  “What are you thinking of doing next? Have anything in mind yet?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

  “You better start. The clock’s ticking. The reshuffling of the media market is in full swing, the cushiest gigs are up for grabs right now. Closer to the elections you’ll be looking at leftovers and rejects.”

  “Somehow, I don’t feel compelled to get reshuffled to accommodate the elections.”

  “What else do you want?” he asks, surprised. “An election cycle is an injection of money! Good money, Daryna. It’s like in the ocean where at different depths different currents begin to form, some stronger, some weaker. This is your chance to ride the one that’ll take you to the top. Later will be too late. And you, I’m sorry, won’t be getting any younger either.”

  Knocking the last stool from under me. Bingo.

  “So, do think about it. I, by the way, might be able to put someone with your experience to good use.”

  So this is what we’ve taken our sweet time getting to. All this was mere exposition for the main plot, and the plot comes now—plain as nails: I am being bought. I am unemployed: naked and available. On the block.

  And for some reason, I’m terrified. Inside, a sickening chill blasts just below my breasts—as if they have come for me. (Who? The human figures with wolf heads I imagined were behind the door of my bedroom when I was little, Goya’s monsters, mad paramedics, machine-gunners with dogs?) As if all my fears that until this instant had been scattered across my life like shadows on a sunny day rose at once and stood to their full height, leaned all together against an invisible divider and flipped my life to the other side—and now it seems there has never been anything in it, except these fears, not a glimmer of sunshine. Catacombs, dungeons. An artificially lit cave. (Someone will throw the switch now—and it will turn dark, and I’ll never find my way out of this darkness; I will remain here forever, for Vadym to do with as he pleases.)

  “I mean that show of yours, about unknown heroes,” he says suavely. “Diogenes’ something...”

  “Diogenes’ Lantern.”

  “Oh yes, lantern. Was he the guy who went around with a lantern looking for a man? Not bad, only you got too clever there; you gotta keep it simple for the common folks. But the way you created those heroes out of nothing—that was awesome! Super professional work.”

  “Thank you. Only I wasn’t making anything out of nothing. They were all amazing people—every person I ever made a show about.”

  “Whatever. You know how to package a person—how to turn some Joe Schmo into a cult figure. You’ve got, as they say, the sales pitch. I still remember your show about that priest who keeps an orphanage and
how those retarded kids call him Daddy...”

  “Not retarded. There was only one kid with Down syndrome.”

  (The boy with Down syndrome was already a grown, stout, wide-shouldered youth with the cognitive development of a two-year-old—he laughed, pushed to grab on to the shiny eye of the camera, and hooted, again and again, the same line from a VV song, “Spring comes! Spring comes! Spring comes!”—and somehow was not in the least bit repulsive to look at, made so, perhaps, by the presence of the priest who adored his charge with a real fatherly tenderness, as though he could see in him something invisible to the rest of us. “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord,” the priest said, and it came out sounding especially beautiful somehow, so that I, the sentimental cow that I am, got all teary-eyed: every creature born to this world has the right to live and be happy praising the Lord, and what ever made us think that some of us are better, and others are worse? And then I remember that Vadym has a son from his first marriage—from that woman who lost her mind, and he sent the boy to study in England: to an orphanage, one could say, only of a different kind, a five-star one. Whom does that boy call Daddy there?)

  “And are you aware of the fact that later, when the local elections came around, three parties fought each other for that priest’s endorsement?”

  “Can’t be! I’d never...”

  “Exactly. You’d never. You made him a public figure, a moral authority. Who was he before you discovered him? Just another ragtag village priest, without voice or power. And then you made your show—and he’s a spiritual shepherd! Pilgrims from the whole region mob his church; bigwigs roll up in SUVs, bringing their children. We’ll do as Father says! And you say it wasn’t out of nothing!”

  “You have a strange way of looking at things, Vadym. My role was not at all as critical as you see it.”

  “Oh, stop it. Modesty, as a friend of mine says, is the shortest path to anonymity.” Vadym pauses to give me the opportunity to appreciate the joke and when he doesn’t get a reaction (my head’s humming like a power substation), winks at me: “And you were a star! And could remain one.”

  “You want me to help you create heroes, is that it?”

  He looks at me almost gratefully—did I save him from further verbal exertion?

  “Precisely.”

  Another pause. A kind of very slow approach—millimeter by millimeter, so as not to startle his prey, except that his breathing gets louder. (I heard a man breathe like this once, the two of us were in the same train compartment: I woke up in the middle of the night because he, breathing like a horse, was very carefully, so as not to wake me, pulling the covers off me before dashing back to his berth, the instant I, scared to death, stirred and mumbled something as if still half asleep.)

  “A political project. Image focused. We’ll put together a strong team, with first-class foreign experts; you’ll love it. Naturally, they will all work behind the scenes. What’s needed is a public face, sort of like a press secretary. But it can’t be just a pretty face; it has to be someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone from inside the kitchen, so to speak.”

  “And what will that kitchen be cooking?”

  He nods in approval: we’ve finally gotten to the heart of the matter.

  “This information cannot be made public yet. In the elections, besides the two main contenders—from the establishment and the opposition—there will be a number of technical candidates.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “What—the usual. Candidates who are there to divert votes from the front-runner.”

  “From Yushchenko?!”

  Now I really don’t understand anything. Isn’t Vadym a member of Yushchenko’s coalition?

  “Give me a break, Daryna!” he cringes, and I shudder: it’s Vlada’s phrase, part of her vocabulary, that’s where he got it! “Yushchenko, while we’re on the subject, is also, you could say, a technical candidate. In a way...”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I am talking about the fact that things are much more complicated than they appear to you. Than what they look like from the outside. And even if Yushchenko wins, although that’s more than doubtful, his victory won’t be the end of the game that’s going on, you can be sure of that. Yushchenko got propelled to the top by a whole series of favorable circumstances, he’s always had luck; you might say he’s charmed.” At this last word, Vadym’s voice twangs with a barely audible note of envy, like the ding of chipped glass. “But there’s no corporation behind him. The ones backing him as a viable candidate today are all the disgruntled ones, the ones Kuchma left standing with nothing when he divvied up the property. And a coalition like that, as you can surely see yourself, cannot last. If Yushchenko does manage, by some miracle, to win, all hell will break loose—the ones who ride his coattails to parliament will waste no time wresting the steering wheel away from him.”

  “And you decided not to wait until after the elections?”

  Lord, my head hurts!

  “And I,” Vadym doesn’t take offense, only swirls the cognac in his glass unnecessarily fast—with a short, slightly nervous circular motion. “I attempt to take a broader view. And to benefit from any outcome. And I would advise you to do the same. What does it ultimately matter if it’s Kuchma, or Yushchenko, or someone else, or the next guy? You can’t teach a pig to sing. Think about it, who are we, really? A former colony, with no statehood tradition of our own, knee-deep in shit. A transit zone. In the current global scheme of things, that’s our only asset: we are a country conveniently located for transit. And that’s where we can earn our commission—and trust me, it’s not pennies. The future outlook is not too shabby either, if one knows how to use one’s head.”

  “What kind of outlook do we have if no one cleans up the shit?”

  “You’re not paying attention,” he chides me. “I told you, the Yalta era is about to end. The balance of power in the world is changing; new players are coming to the stage...China, possibly India. And until the new trade balance shakes itself out, Russia and America will keep dragging us back and forth, like dogs in a tug-of-war. Neither will let go—the bone’s too big. We’ve always been a trading card in the big countries’ games anyway; it’s a function of our geography. Except that only a few of them in the past century realized that Ukraine is nothing less than critical for any serious political ambitions—Lenin knew this, and, by extension, Stalin. Today, the Russians understand this much better than the Americans. Europe’s not even worth mentioning—they’re off the field, and it’s not a given that they’ll ever get back on it, aside from falling into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Not the least bit. Gazprom already owns a good half of Europe. They have Nord Stream lobbyists in every European government. Everyone, Daryna, loves money. Especially the big kind. Especially when the one paying it is someone you used to fear. That’s power. Money, you know, is not just banks—it’s also cell-phone service operators, and Internet providers. You see what I’m saying? As soon as those losers in the EU implement electronic ballots, you can write Europe off. Politically it’ll mean no more than some Kemerov region; they’ll have all their leaders chosen in Moscow. So the stakes are quite high, Daryna—it’s a big game. And in the scheme of this game, we are the testing ground for new management technologies. The ones that will determine the fate of the world in the new century. Try to see it that way.”

  “So what, we are a kind of a shooting range? Like in World War II, and with Chernobyl? Your big players come play here, see what happens, and then bury us again—till the next time?”

  “A range—that’s well put. Here’s to your health!” He holds up his snifter to let the cognac flash in the light. “You have a way with words. History’s secret range. Not bad at all, it’s got that something...I bought this book the other day, by a British guy, about Poland, a thick one.” He stretches his fingers, a pair of sausages, to show me. “It’s called
God’s Playground. I liked that, too—I think that’s even more fitting for Ukraine than for Poland.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be God’s. Should be the Devil’s. The Devil’s Playground.”

  (Devil’s Playground, yes—where the best are the ones who perish. The ones who expose themselves, who stand up from the trenches. One can’t expose oneself on the Devil’s Playground—can’t step into the floodlight’s beam, unless one plays for the side that’s sitting in the bushes with the sniper’s rifle; on the Devil’s Playground, one can only make good if one lives the way Vadym says: get low and watch where the strongest current will run—and swim in it. You are a wise, wise man, Vadym, aren’t you; you’ve got it all figured out...)

  “Why do you have to be so dramatic,” he mutters, and an absurd hope that he is simply drunk flares up in me—that he is just drunk, that’s it. Look at how much less cognac there is in the bottle; I didn’t even notice how he’d siphoned all that out. This may well be merely the ramblings of an intoxicated man. Damn it, why is my head crackling and hissing so much—like a cell phone with a weak signal! No, drunk he is not.

  “Now, a range—that’s well put!” He sticks to his tune. “That’s exactly what it will be. Just you wait and see—there’ll be a whole bunch of interesting new tricks launched for the first time in these elections! Someday, they’ll write textbooks about it. Post-information era government technologies—that’s something! It’s like when they first split the atom. In the beginning, no one could see what possibilities that opened up either. This’ll be an interesting year for you and me, Daryna.” All of a sudden, he rubs his hands together with such a youthful, hungry lust for life, like a teenage boy after a swim that I, taken by surprise, miss my chance to react to his “you and me.”