The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  And after this—slowly, drop by drop—the forgetting began.

  Lord, is this really all?

  * * *

  Daryna Goshchynska gets up from behind her desk, walks to the window, and stands there for a long time, looking through the dark glass at the scattered flickering stars of city lights below. How little light there is in Kyiv—and it’s the capital. One can only imagine what the country looks like. Dark, dark. How poorly we live, Lord, and how bad we are at dying.

  “Daryna?” Yurko, a colleague from the evening news, calls out, puzzled. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  A light switch clicks and the window pane projects—suddenly, so it gives her an unpleasant jolt—an image of a beautiful young woman; in the partial light that eats up the details, she is really young and extraordinarily, piercingly beautiful; it’s almost frightening, this beauty, something pagan, witchy. She’s got long, Egyptian eyebrows and dark lips as if sated with blood—this is not her televised self crafted to make viewers wonder about the designer of her suit and the brand of her lipstick. This face is something carved out of the night by the light of a bonfire—primeval, elementally gorgeous. Before she turns back to the world and Yurko, who has been talking at her all along, Daryna hungrily takes in this impenetrable face, both hers and not her own: so this is what she looks like when she is alone—much stronger than she feels.

  She draws from this strength to give Yurko a dazzling smile. “I’m sorry; I was thinking… what did you say?”

  “I’m saying, a young man just called for you.” Yurko’s eyes turn silky with insinuation. For a couple years already, their relationship has been balancing on the brink of flirting, which is not much, but no man likes to find himself a herald of another man’s arrival, and Yurko lets Daryna use the small pause, if she will, to explain herself, to dismiss, if only with a twist of an eyebrow, the young man as a second-class citizen. She does not, so he grins magnanimously somewhere in the direction of this man, “He was worried about where you were.”

  “Gosh, I turned my ringer off. Thank you, Yurko.”

  She glances at her cell. Of course, it’s Adrian. Unhappy Yurko retreats out the door. How strange that she forgot Adrian existed. That she keeps forgetting about him—as one forgets about one’s own arm or leg. She picks up her phone and calls him.

  “Aidy?”

  “Lolly?” His voice bursts with unmediated delight, as it always does when they haven’t talked for a while, even for a little bit. For an instant she feels the imprint of his hard member, like a silk-covered rock, in her hand and a blast of Adrian’s smell (Cinnamon? Cumin?) hits her with such forceful nearness that she must sit down on the edge of the desk, squeezing her free hand, unconsciously, between her legs. Lolly was the name she was called when she was little, before she could roll the r in Daryna, but Adrian didn’t know this; he derived the name anew from doll—my doll, dolly—Lolly in keeping with the childishness of his love’s language, a characteristic shared by many openhearted men. He couldn’t conceive of being embarrassed by it either, and at first she resisted, feeling uneasy—I’m not a doll!—but the Lolly that hadn’t been heard for thirty-odd years must have worked its magic, overcoming the momentum of her experience and confirming, once again, the nearly metaphysical expedience of everything Adrian did, as if he had, in fact, possessed some secret knowledge about her, which called for respectful obedience on her behalf, and perhaps it was precisely because he sensed this, that he always called out his Lolly! so triumphantly, like a young dad who’s just picked his firstborn’s name and is thrilled with the sound of it. And still it unnerves her a little, and the thought that a stranger might witness this shameless profession of his bliss makes her want to put a hand over his mouth—he could be at his office, in a cab, or a store, or wherever.

  “Where are you?”

  The question sounds like she’s worried, and that’s how he interprets it, which makes her feel a little guilty, as if she’d toyed with him on purpose, so she tries to focus and listen diligently as he explains how he finally made it to his unpronounceable department at the university where he is still considered to be working on his dissertation, but didn’t catch the head of his committee, and the secretary promised the boss would be back soon, and he wasted almost an hour drinking a pot of coffee with that hen—except that Adrian doesn’t call her a hen because he never says anything negative about anyone unless absolutely necessary, and even when it is urgently and critically necessary, limits himself to a remark about the subject’s one unattractive deed and does not generalize, while Daryna, on the other hand, has long nourished the suspicion that the department’s secretary has the hots for Adrian and uses every chance she gets to enjoy his company; it’s really shocking what girls will do these days (for fairness’s sake Daryna admits that before she was Daryna Goshchynska, a national news anchor, she herself was not above making the first move with men she liked, but this was ancient history, so shrouded in the mists of time that it doesn’t placate her now). While Adrian talks, she blinks mechanically at her reflection in the glass—now her usual screen image, only badly lit and with a cell phone pressed against her ear.

  Vlada and Adrian—they’re separate drawers, parallel channels of her consciousness: she and Adrian met when Vlada was already gone. And now she feels no urge whatsoever to introduce them in her mind to each other—it’s a new era, a new calendar. PV, Post Vlada.

  Artem, now he knew Vlada. And, Artem marked the beginning of Olena Dovgan’s story for Daryna (she smiles at the flashback to the humble basement where the story began and her compromised pose at its inception); Adrian appeared after that, in the second act, so to speak. Artem is now in the past, too, and is unlikely to make another appearance in her life, as if he’d played the role he’d been assigned and left the theater. For a split second, Daryna feels woozy, lightheaded, as if she’d soared above the flow of time on a giant swing and looked down on it from above, like from that enormous Ferris wheel in the park when she was little, reeling every time she reached the very top, where she could see as far as the horizon—Was she scared to face the whole world at once, alone?

  There was something illicit about that bird’s-eye view of life, of what seemed then like the whole world, like the view from the top of the Tower of Babel; it was something not permitted, something that a human being was not meant to tolerate for more than a slipping tail of an instant—and now she is slipping just like that, unmoored by a sudden meteoric convergence, in her mind’s eye, of people scattered throughout time and space, with no connection to each other that a normal, ground-level view could discern into a single, meaningful design, a complete picture, a vista. A mere flash of a vista, really, because the very next instant the picture disintegrates, scatters, just before Daryna grasps a single line from Artem—through Dovganivna—to Adrian and remains sitting on the edge of the desk with a vision cooling like sweat between her shoulder blades: the sudden knowledge that everything around her is threaded with these lifelines, and a hundred, a thousand of them run invisibly through her and into other people’s lives, but to discern and comprehend the pattern they draw—a picture so grand, so magnificent, that a single glimpse of it fills you with knee-buckling awe—is impossible if only for the single reason that the lines extend way beyond your chopped-off field of vision, beyond the frame of your life, your short, damn it, short years, threading together people from different centuries—let alone generations—different ages, finding them further and further apart, so far apart you could never see them. This living fabric knits and weaves us together, flows, shifts, loops, and passes, and we have no hope, with our meager few decades of allocated time here, of leaping from its midst to see it from above and discern its infinitely scattered pattern, more intricate than a star map, but we all rub together unknowing—the living, the dead, and the not-yet born—who knows how many of us, and what chimerical knots have conspired to have her sitting here with the voice of the man she loves in her hand—and she can’t even
see why she loves him, why him and not someone else?

  “Hello?” the man in question says gently, as if carefully patting her awake; he has sensed a thinning of attention on her end of the line, a transition, as he would put it, from the solid to the plasma state. “Lolly? Are you there?”

  “Uhu… Aidy, do you remember the ontological proof of God?”

  He snickers—not because the question strikes him as absurd, and not because it comes out of the blue, but because any surprise coming from her delights him inordinately, still. She wonders how long this will last.

  “I used to, but I can’t just give to you off the top of my head. Why?”

  “I think I just discovered it.”

  He laughs out loud, laughs at his clever girl, his tireless inventor. He’s happy to find her in a good mood.

  “I’m serious. There must be someone who sees the entire picture—the whole thing, from above. Like from the Ferris wheel in the park. Only not just right now, this moment, but all the time.”

  This sounds exceptionally stupid; it’s been a while since she proclaimed anything so inane with such heartfelt conviction. Like a schoolgirl, really.

  “Oh, you are so smart!” But he agrees, he agrees preemptively with whatever she wants to say. As long as it makes her happy. As long as there’s peace and quiet and good counsel—with the only acceptable exception of her moaning in the bedroom on the king-size bed with a Moroccan silk comforter. He likes it when she moans—“don’t stop the music” is what they call it.

  For a moment, Daryna is filled with such anguish as if someone has pushed her out of a rocket ship into open space and cut the cord: nothing, nothing, and no gravity. She is alone.

  Adrian, meanwhile, picks up her idea from another end, as if with a pair of tweezers, places it on a glass slide under his mental microscope, and sets another on top, until hers is utterly unrecognizable. “I can tell you one thing, from the theory of probability, if you want to know. I read somewhere that statistically the actual number of accident survivors exceeds the projected number by five percent. Consistently.”

  No, she doesn’t want to know anything of the sort. She doesn’t even want to make the effort required to decipher his abracadabra—like at a math lesson in school when you know you’re going to be called on next and will have to come up to the board and pick up where the previous victim put the chalk down. But Adrian is a kind soul—she’s being unfair—he’ll explain it all himself.

  “Theoretically, the dice should roll fifty-fifty: the number that survives should be the same as the number that dies. But five percent more survive, consistently. These five percent—the X factor, the unknown intervention—that’s God. He’s mathematically proven to exist.”

  “No kidding? That’s really interesting.”

  She’s not being ironic—okay, maybe a tiny bit—she really finds it interesting, and the classroom is warm, and the lights hum cozily under the ceiling (it’s still dark outside, first period, winter), and the piece of chalk creaks on the blackboard peaceably—only it makes your fingers feel funny, like they don’t belong to you, unpleasantly woolly and slippery on your pen…. Her earlier reverie is gone, vanished; she’s only managed to latch on, like a bulldog, to the word threads, and now it’ll spin in her mind for the rest of the day, she’ll mouth it absently, threads, thready-threads. Threads. Threads that make up a pattern that we can’t see. That’s why no story is ever finished, no one’s. Death cannot put a period on it.

  At this point, it finally occurs to Daryna that this deeply intellectual discussion will add a hefty charge to their cell-phone bills, enough that they could have had the discussion much more pleasantly somewhere nice over cake and coffee. Once again Adrian’s yuppie profligacy dulls her own poor-girl instincts: she sees—and apparently will always see—money as a set of opportunities, fanned out in front of her like cards, from which she must be careful to choose only one, the best, and, for Adrian, money is something to be spent on whatever strikes his fancy, here and now. And this, despite the fact that they make almost the same at their jobs (hers pays slightly more), so it’s not a matter of numbers—it’s about an internal freedom that no amount of money can buy; you either have it or you don’t. So it looks like she doesn’t, but so what? Let it go already.

  “Why did you call me when you knew I’d be at the studio? Just to chat?”

  “Actually…”

  His voice changes, recoils as if upset with something, retreats like a scared little snail into the safety of a dark crack. Something happened, Daryna’s stomach sinks—but no, it can’t be, if something bad really happened (And why does she think it has to be something bad? Why is she always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the world to come apart, what is wrong with her?), he would have said so right away, instead of dragging things out—or wouldn’t he? They haven’t lived through a calamity as a couple yet—no accidents, ambulances, or financial disasters—only piddly stuff, the usual everyday vexations, problems that one has to solve and that are amenable to solving, so how would she know how he endured misfortune? Real misfortune.

  “Well… I wanted to tell you right away, while it was still fresh. I, you know, dozed off after lunch, just nodded off right in my chair, so weird—that’s how I missed my prof.”

  “Vitamin deficiency!” she laughs operatically, like a diva in the La traviata banquet scene—she can’t contain her relief: nothing’s wrong, everyone’s alive and well! “‘I fear daytime sleep: it dreams clairvoyant torment,’ that’s from Tychyna,” she throws in on the same breath, gathering momentum, like an ice-skater heading into a sparkling, spinning toe loop of inspired twitter—and slams on the brakes, with a gulp of deflating lungs when she realizes that’s not it, he hasn’t told her the whole thing.

  “That could very well be. I had a dream.”

  “A dream?” It’s as if the word was obscure to her.

  “A dream,” he repeats stubbornly, which makes the word lose its meaning completely. “Of you and Aunt Gela.”

  “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” she mumbles, automatically, echoing the meaningless word and groping around for a quote, anything to help her keep her balance as her world rocks: she has no business appearing in his already suspicious dreams in the company of dead people; that’s enough to send a chill down the spine all by itself. But she and Aunt Gela—Olena Dovganivna—do exist together in the waking world, connected by a completely reasonable project: that cursed film of hers, the agony of it, and the fact that still, after all the work she’s put into it, she can’t find the single right turn of the key that will unlock the story, that one twist of the plot that will set the entire mechanism in motion—could it be possible that Adrian, as sensitive and finely tuned to her mind’s frequencies as he is, unconsciously reflected her growing, unsettling obsession with Dovganivna?

  “And what were we doing in your dream?” She giggles, and her giggle comes out pitiful, tinny—as if he’d told her a scary fairytale and she now needs him to say it wasn’t true. And yet she already knows—from her gut, from inside, where it resonates loud and clear—that things stand otherwise: he won’t. And it’s not about her film.

  “First the two of you were in a café, a summer café; you were sitting under an umbrella. It looked like the place in the Passage… both in summer dresses, you were laughing… drinking wine.”

  Aha.

  “And then?”

  “You know, it was complicated,” he gives up suddenly, and lets a genuine, unconcealed plea of alarm for her fill his voice. “I can’t remember everything now; that’s why I called you as soon as I woke up… I wanted to get it all across without losing any, but you weren’t there…”

  I was, I was, clicks in her head—right when you called, I was looking at the same footage, only with a different dead woman!

  “Let’s talk about it at home, okay? I’ll give you the full debrief, promise…. And, Lolly? Let me come pick you up, okay?”

  “No way,” she says in her
best not-a-care-in-the-world voice—to calm them both down. “I’ll get a ride. Yurko will take me.”

  She does feel a true and urgent need for Yurko’s company, for their playful, easy banter in the car along the way, for the juggling of slightly off-color jokes and ironic comments about the day, their regular, pleasant emotional gymnastics, refreshing like a shower or a cup of coffee—one of the well-ordered world’s small rituals that give us the sense of security and stability. That’s exactly what she needs.

  “Don’t worry about it, Aidy. It’s nothing.”

  “I’m not so sure. Not so sure at all.” She could almost see the way he shakes his head, trying to get rid of the nagging idea that buzzes inside his head like a trapped fly. He looks so funny when he does that, like a boy—and he says, just like a little boy, “Promise me that you’ll be careful!”

  She gives another operatic howl, more dramatically now, in a mezzo-soprano, out of Wagner.

  “There’s always that margin of five percent, right?”

  She shuts her phone and stares for another second into the blackness beyond the window, at her antipode fleshed out of the night by the trembling glow of a fire. The otherworldly, thunderously beautiful face with elongated Egyptian eyes and dark-blooded lips rises toward her, chin resolutely thrust up—and suddenly shivers with a quick chilly tremor, as if swallowing a sob that’s burst from deep inside.

  Vlada, Vladusya. Help me.

  Daryna Goshchynska turns around, presses the eject button, pulls out the tape with the copy of the interview, throws it into her tote, and yanks the zipper closed. She puts her raincoat on, turns the lights off, and throws the door open.

  “Yuurrrkooo!” her throaty, trilling call resounds in the empty hallway over the clicking of her heels—almost like a dove cooing.