The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Essentially, none of my shows ever grew out of the themes that I so thoughtfully pitched to my producers and colleagues. They were all conceived out of just such small details, some hook that caught my attention and teased with the promise of inaccessible secrets, like a distant glowing window seen at night from a passing train: Who lives there? What are they doing? Why is the light on so late? As a rule, such things did not make the final cut, either remaining somewhere beyond the scope of the lens, or making a brief appearance in the background, so inconspicuous that I alone could find them, like a signature hidden in the corner of the picture. Or, to be completely honest, like a note acknowledging another defeat, equally private, because I hadn’t once been able to make something—something I felt it was possible to make if only one had the lost secret code—of my pile of beads and gravel, hadn’t managed to turn these pieces so that a single change of light could illuminate someone’s life completely, totally, all pieces in their places, hadn’t once created this!!!.

  Which does not mean that one should stop trying.

  I have no other method—if this even counts as one. I don’t believe in other methods—I think they all have been milked dry. And to do things any other way would simply be no fun.

  I don’t know what drew me into the photograph where, among five Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers, second from the right, stood a young clear-eyed, bareheaded woman (“A unit,” Artem whispered, pushing the print across the desk toward me, careful to touch it very lightly with his fingertips as if the picture, if not handled with caution, could explode with a gunshot) with bangs curled into a Hollywood roll, as was the wartime fashion. She seemed to smile at me, this lady whose small waist was cinched so smartly, even whimsically, with the uniform canvas belt, and whose entire posture exuded a calm, self-possessed confidence—not of military discipline, but rather fox hunting on a family’s grand estate: here’s the young mistress waiting for her horse to be brought up, the pack of purebred hounds straining their leashes and whimpering excitedly just outside the frame. She would look perfectly complete with an English riding crop and a pair of white gloves, and yet her sophistication (so out of place in the middle of the woods) also had a wondrously feminine quality—consolingly cool, like a strong, kind hand against a hot forehead—that must have had a soothing effect on horses and hounds, and young men with automatic weapons. She was the only one among them who smiled, her lips drawn in a barely discernible curve.

  “What a beautiful woman,” I observed, for some reason in a whisper, although she was not so much beautiful, in the usual sense, as radiant: even in the faded picture, she was surrounded by a visible halo of light, like an Old Master painting of an angel sent to deliver the glorious word—“Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard.” Artem blinked sideways and grunted either in agreement or, conversely, was simply shocked by my silliness, as any historian would be after he’d just shared a prized archival document with a total philistine—all she can think of is pretty women!

  Nevertheless he responded, with his thin, crooked grin that seemed to mock preemptively what he was about to say, somewhat lewdly, “So which one of the four do you figure she slept with?”

  “This one,” I said, without hesitation, pointing to the guy on the far right, with wolfishly close-set eyes and a crooked nose, letting Artem’s transparent implication slip without acknowledgment. (By then he and I hadn’t had sex for at least three months; I saw no reason to galvanize our naturally ebbing liaison and found a new excuse every time we ran into each other so that he may well have begun to suspect that I suffered from a mysterious chronic illness, a constant menstruation or something.) The wolfish guy posed with one foot forward, as if on the move, hand securely clenched around the hand guard of his rifle, which he used to balance himself like a walking stick, and my certainty about him was all the more puzzling because had I been that woman, I would have chosen another—that one, standing most apart, the last on the left who looked to the side, as if the whole photographing business had nothing to do with him. Of all the men in the picture, with simple, peasant-looking faces, chiseled by many generations of hard physical work (And isn’t war, too, hard physical work?), he alone was truly handsome, a dashing brunet, a perfected and ennobled clean-shaved incarnation of Clark Gable with unaffected, long-buried sorrow congealed in the dark eyes. Clark Gable couldn’t muster such sorrow for the most lavish fees; this was something cultivated for years, not gained in an instant. This was the sorrow that filled our folk songs, all, it seems, in minor key—marches, ballads, doesn’t matter, the words don’t matter because they can’t contain this sadness or explain its origin, only music can—and the brunet had musical eyes, eyes that sang.

  Artem’s hand carefully, solicitously stroked my thigh through the slit of my skirt, climbing higher and higher above the knee, and I automatically thought, as I always did, about his wedding ring: I worried about it snagging my hose. I could have just moved away—after three months, that would’ve been enough—but I remained transfixed, bent over the table and riveted to the picture, where, I was now convinced, a silent secret drama played out between the woman and these two men. Artem breathed harder; his thumb found the crease between my legs and went to work on it through the hose and the panties. He was always a very diligent lover: a scholar and a bibliophile, he did everything as if armed with a solid list of reference materials, which sometimes made me feel like I was a rare artifact equipped with an invisible user’s manual, and other times like he was mortally afraid of me, and I’d rush to his rescue, ignoring the taste of long-refrigerated cheese that would linger in my mouth afterward—Artem’s beautiful penis, for some reason, was always cold, and so was his whole body.

  But in that instant, eyes locked on the picture and nails cutting into the table, I suddenly felt a fierce arousal, much more intense than if I’d been watching porn—unfamiliarly menacing, desperate, and predatory, as if this were going to be my last time, as if a spotlight had found and blinded me, leaving nothing of me but a base, well-deep scream that did not sink, but instead rose, climbed as through a narrow shaft, pushing aside my aorta, breaking through my clenched teeth, and it didn’t matter anymore who—or what!—jerked up my skirt from behind, ripped down layers of fabric, faster, faster, I focused myself in the point where my salvation would come—and it came, instantly, like a summer storm—and someone’s paw closed over my mouth, and I realized that the scream that thundered in my ears had come from my own throat. I shook my head, refusing the paw, and blinked slowly—murky yellow smears swam in front of my eyes, and the first thing I could see clearly when they began to dissolve was the photograph with the five figures in it: their silhouettes burned with sharp white light, as if on a negative. I had to blink again, and a few more times—until the photograph cooled to its normal condition—and then observed that it wasn’t the picture that was shaking but the table, for the important reason that I was folded onto it in a rather uncomfortable pose, with Artem studiously pounding me from behind, while also attempting to keep one hand over my mouth—this was all happening at his workplace, after all, in the library storage basement, and could have turned quite piquant if a coworker peeked through the door, except that he always locked it as soon as I arrived.

  It occurred to me in that instant—an inanimate and vacant blob of cognition, not even a real thought—that this was the only thing that attracted me: the unheated basement with its linoleum floors, the soporific yeasty smell of rotting paper, and the conspiratorially locked shabby door lent our pitiful little fling the exciting air of delinquency, like when you’re students and fuck like rabbits in every suitable nook, and quite simply erased from my memory whatever attempts Artem may have made to transplant the action into a regular apartment, with a regular bed.

  I straightened my clothes quickly, checked myself in my compact mirror, all without looking at the happy, sweaty, and confused Artem, who felt the urge to show some uncalled-for tenderness, which, as the poet Pluzhnyk once said, “is born
on the far side of passion,” but froze up in the face of my indecent efficiency and monosyllabic grunts. I may have made it look like I was fleeing from the site of shame and dishonor, but my mind, sharpened by the orgasm, ran like a super-computer clicking through an algorithm with maximum effectiveness and minimum use of energy: “You have my 1928 Kyiv guidebook, by Ernst, don’t you? You still need it? And would it be okay if I borrowed the photo, just for a while?” I slipped the photo between the yellow pages of the innocently extracted Ernst, pulled my purse closed around it, made sure I didn’t leave anything behind; Artem caught up with me when I was already halfway through the door with his kiss (sloppy) and the warning that he’d call at the end of the week (Why is it that men always have to stake a claim on the future when they say goodbye? Like I wouldn’t call him if I wanted him?)—and that’s it; that was really it. We did not see each other again, and when he called, I complained of how busy I was, said I’d love to, it would be heaven, but I can’t, I really can’t…. I’m quite good at that if I do say so myself.

  Artem (thrilled about a chance to prop up a worn-out romance with a substantive obligation, as often happens when affairs are ending or beginning—when you’re lending books, CDs, and pictures, and inventing shared engagements that are hard to evade later) asked me at the door what I was going to do with the picture, and I mumbled something cryptic along the I’m-thinking-to-do-something-about-UIA lines; it’s a hot topic (as if I were rehearsing what I’d say to my producer). Of course, this was just a flaky-artist excuse—I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. I was firmly convinced that only Western Ukrainians had the right to write, film, or say anything about the Insurgent Army because it was their families who held, just under the surface, either “forest boys” themselves or someone deported “for abetting,” and when someone got deported, the whole village was sent along, just to be sure; so it’s a miracle the Soviets didn’t manage to pack them all off to the other side of Yenisei, as the Poles did when they cleaned out this side of Vistula. Why on earth would I go try to stick my two cents into what, to some, still feels like a bone crushing?

  All I had in my personal history were Mom and Uncle Volodya’s, my stepfather’s, accounts of the 1947 hunger in Eastern Ukraine: Uncle Volodya (I never could bring myself to call him Papa Volodya, as he and Mom would have liked), then a fifteen-year-old Odessa boy, worked alongside adults netting fish from under the ice and kept his family alive. Around the ice holes, he said, all day long lingered swollen women on elephantine legs, immobile, like ghosts: they waited for the fry to slip out of the nets, snatched them off the ice, and gobbled them down, raw. To get bread—the blessed, salvific bread—both his Odessa and his mom’s Poltava communities outfitted expeditions to Western Ukraine (“in Western,” Uncle Volodya stubbornly kept saying, as if this illiterate patch on his generally very proper, for someone from Odessa, Ukrainian was inseparable from the events of the past and had to remain uncorrected; “in Western” was his, and “to Western Ukraine” belonged to a different generation). These hunting parties stuffed themselves, like sardines in a tin, into the deranged freight train #500-J that chugged from one station to the next with no order or timetable. Its ghoulish nickname was 500-Joy because it was liable to stop without warning somewhere in the middle of a field and stay there for five hours, or five minutes, and start again just as suddenly, leaving behind a shedding of the unlucky ones who jumped off to relieve themselves. So they learned not to look for cover, and just rolled off the train’s platforms and roofs—head over heels, men and women—all in a rush to bare their behinds with a single feverish thought: to make it, and to claw back into one’s spot before someone else had taken it. This constant fear of losing the spot was branded in Uncle Volodya’s memory, and his spot on that train must’ve been especially hard to win—a starved teenager shoving and elbowing grown men—but I was captivated by the vision of that sexless orgy of the hurried mass expulsion of bodily fluids and solids along the train, the ease with which people could be transformed into a herd.

  Those treks after bread were no safer than the ones undertaken in the name of breadwinning today—migrations after work, to Westerner Europe, the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe, aboard a sooty Icarus across Poland and Slovakia, where every clump of trees might conceal an eager Russian gang, quick to block the road with their Kalashnikovs aimed at the bus. Uncle Volodya, who made the rooftop journey on the 500-Joy in the spring of 1947, remembered a flashlight blinding him in the middle of the night and the icy needle of steel against his throat. “Got money, boy?”

  Incredibly, he thought to fold back both sides of his threadbare jacket exposing its empty inside pockets and to squeal the first thing that came to mind, “Going to my brother’s,” and they left him alone, didn’t frisk him; though he did have money—carefully sewn by his mother into his boxer shorts—he could not say the same about a brother. (What he must’ve had was a dream, a boy’s secret dream, an orphan’s dream of a brother, an older one for sure, who would come back from the front, beat down every offender, would protect and defend—and the dream did protect him.) In their eyes—the eyes of dirty, famished people who hurriedly washed the railroad embankments with steaming urine—the then newly annexed Galicia—in its eighth year of being whipped, along and across, by frontlines and now a guerilla war—still retained the glow of “Europe,” an oasis of unimaginable luxuries. It beckoned much as the new, Schengen Europe beckons today’s Ukrainian migrant workers—and to those who were lucky enough to make it, it bestowed generously of its riches: a sack of dried biscuits for some, two bags of buckwheat and a bag of dried peas for others, and for the luckiest ones—a packed, shaken-down, and leveled sack of flour. Mom’s older sister, Lyusya, may she rest in peace, managed somehow to carry precisely such a marvel on her back all the way back, with a change of trains in Zdolbuniv, and that’s how 1947 did not become, despite the Ukrainian plans of the mustachioed Generalissimo, a conclusive repeat of 1933, so the UIA can be credited with winning at least this war, one that’s not mentioned in a single history textbook. Not a single food-rationing crew in the late forties would risk going into a Western Ukrainian village to “shake down grain”; if it foolishly did, it would be remembered as last seen on its way to that village, as Uncle Volodya told it, with a satisfied predatory smirk, which still held something of the boy in awe of a friendly power—someone’s in for an ass-kicking!—but which also was colored with a tinge of resentment and something a bit like envy, as in, sure, easy for them to fight, they didn’t swell on the ice with me, Where’d they be then? Swell you did, I could have said to Uncle Volodya (and did, often, in my head, but never out loud), but that time was different from what happened in 1933—there was by then a large and, by all accounts, fairly well-organized army that had spent the previous three years practicing their bread-defending skills on the Germans; this experience kept the country alive.

  Aside from the Finland campaign, this was, no matter how you look at it, Stalin’s only defeat; and, for forty years after he died, the official Soviet history spared no funds or imagination to pay “the West,” as they called it, back. The funding part stopped being a secret for us—the sophisticated kids—in school, when no other topic provoked such heated arguments during the breaks: for our parents, the war was still alive, not something fixed in books, and the families’ accumulated memories diverged way too far from what we were supposed to memorize, resulting in a nearly chemical incompatibility, words and memories bubbling and bursting, finally depositing the textbook in the clear and despised category of “Bullshit!”

  And that’s really all that I personally could claim to know—not much. So the whole UIA thing had nothing to do with anything.

  I just could not leave the photograph with Artem. It was mine—it had become mine. And not just because I happened to have been thoroughly fucked on top of it without putting up much resistance. Instead, I didn’t resist because at that moment I was possessed by someone else’s will. That’s what it had
felt like. (And for the rest of that day I could barely move, as if I’d been run through a meat grinder.)

  The young woman who stood with aristocratic ease among four armed men in the middle of the forest and smiled imperceptibly, the woman surrounded by a halo of light, a chimera of photography, had a name—Olena Dovganivna.

  And beyond that, I really knew nothing.

  * * *

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m never going to make this film. Never.”

  “Of course you will. It’ll all work out,” you say with confidence that scares me.

  Your family silently looks out at me out from the photographs, all at once. I can’t believe it. What did you see in me? (A question that must never, under any circumstances, be voiced, so I bite my tongue anyway, just in case—I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about it.)

  Something I never told you: When you kissed me that first time (actually, it was I who kissed you first—when I couldn’t stand for another second to be held in your ecstatically adoring gaze that only lacked a pair of hands folded in prayer—of course you were intimidated, with me being a TV star and all), what shook me most, wrung me more cruelly than ever, was the expression I saw on your face when our lips parted: the look of a man who climbed to the top of the mountain, then turned around to look at the valley, and saw the earth swallow the city where he’d come from. You looked at me as if you didn’t recognize me, as if I oscillated and changed shapes every instant, and the flickering of ecstasy and horror on your face mirrored my shape-shifting, and for an instant, before we looked away, I glimpsed through your eyes the ground parting beneath; silently, with the sound on mute, buildings collapsed one after the other, as if filmed from an airplane by an awestruck cameraman.