The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Do you mean to say,” Lolly then inquired, frowning and biting her lower lip in concentration, “that you are seeing someone else’s dreams?”

  “No, that’s the thing, that’s their other distinction: it’s more precise to say that I’m dreaming someone else’s consciousness.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Um, how do I put it… it doesn’t look like a dream—more like a memory, a very vivid, visceral memory, with touch and smell—only I am absolutely certain that whatever is happening has never happened to me. I know it’s not my memory.”

  One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language, plus your vocabulary expands to such unprecedented levels that sometimes people think you’re the one who writes for a living. So, here’s the picture—stuck in my mind after I dreamt it a least a dozen times: a forest in springtime, tree trunks spotted with sunlight, the smell of wet bark and sap, a very green smell, and the man walking in front of me is dressed in a gray-blue military uniform with a Schmeiser over his shoulder, only his belt is not made of leather, for some reason, but woven, with stitching. We are walking through the forest “goose-file”—somehow I know that’s what it’s called—and this sturdy peasant back, girded with its woven belt, is the last thing I see when a dry stutter explodes from behind the trees; something shoves me hard in the chest, and everything goes black. After that, I don’t remember anything—it’s gone like a piece of paper in dark water. A bit later, after she’d had a chance to confer with knowledgeable people—she knows more experts in various fields than the State Reference Library, all she has to do is pick up the phone—Lolly, excited as Sherlock Holmes on a case, reported that such woven, stitched belts do, in fact, exist, and have for quite a while—as part of the US Army uniform. You see, that’s what I mean—how would I ever know that?

  “Okay, what about that Schmeiser? Are you sure it was a Schmeiser?”

  “Absolutely, and the forest looked very much like our forests here, not the American woods, and more than that—in my dream, I knew what everything was called, not just the trees but even the bushes: thorn apple, heather, juniper.”

  “Well, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all—you could have picked those up somewhere, in passing, like when you went hiking with your mom when you were little, the time you climbed Goverla, and then just forgot…”

  “But by this logic, is it the same with the American uniform: I knew it once, then I forgot? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  In response, Lolly arranged her face into one of her proprietary contortions: one lip thoughtfully pursed, brows scrunched together, eyes like a pair of tiny pointy horns—“the silence of the wolves” it’s called, when she runs out of arguments but doesn’t want to admit defeat (she also has “the silence of the lambs”—with big, piteous eyes, when she’s begging for mercy)—and, of course, as always, I had to laugh and hug the little imp. But I also had to wonder: Heck, what if I had seen a uniform like that somewhere before, like on one of those shoddy posters in military prep classes? We’re all Cold War children after all, and those with technical education especially—all groomed to work for our dear ol’ military industrial complex, which, may it rest in peace—met such inglorious demise that I’m the last one of our class who still, at least on paper, counts in the ranks of our profession, although others never relied on it for their bread and butter, and it’s good they didn’t because it wouldn’t get you a single dry a crumb now. I’m lucky I liked playing with Uncle’s cigarette holders when I was a kid—who knew I’d start a business out of that, ha!—but I still remember the u-es-es-arr’s terrible military secrets, like the fact that the diameter of our noodles matched the caliber of our bullets, and that our cocoa factories were engineered to switch to manufacturing gunpowder in twenty-four hours, so why shouldn’t some rotten layer of my collective unconscious spit up a long-forgotten detail about those dirty imperialists we were so keen to fight?

  A logical explanation, to be sure, but I didn’t like it: it was inelegant. It lacked insight, an inspired suddenness of association that makes everything click together like pieces of a puzzle, with no loose ends left untucked. I can certainly ignore my gut feeling here—no matter how loudly it screams that what I saw in my dream is someone’s death as it did, in fact, happen—but I’m still physicist enough to know what makes a good, true solution, and that, Lolly, is elegance; a single inspired maneuver that puts everything into place.

  “I understand,” Lolly sighed, giving me the lamb look. “It’s not only your formulas that work like that.”

  “That could very well be true, but you know what else? Now that you mentioned Goverla, I’m convinced it was a Carpathian forest.”

  I really don’t want to go shower and wash off her smell, even after I eat. “Sloppy McGrimes!” Lolly teases when we eat breakfast together: nice natty girl that she is, she won’t take a sip of her coffee until she’s showered and put on her underwear at least—she doesn’t understand what it’s like for me when she’s so squeaky clean. Stop, right now.—I’m afraid that is not possible.—Where’s your willpower?—Gone, never to be seen again.—Maniac!, but raspy, tender already, eyes misty, my sweet girl, white undies slip down like a flag of surrender, and then she whimpers softly like a teddy bear, and it makes everything inside me turn, all over again. “You know,” she said one morning—after we made love like that in the middle of the kitchen and she sat there on her chair so totally, unbearably mine, languorous-luxurious, with her hair wet at the roots, and contemplated her lazily parted thighs—“you know, men are so doglike in their instincts: always in a rush to mark a woman as their territory.” I could only mumble something back at her then, like a happy idiot, and didn’t feel jealous until later, when I could think again, remembered the barn door after the horse bolted, as Granny Lina would put it. Although, really, what’s there to be jealous of? Her memories? Please. Only for some reason, when a woman hears a man say something like “You women are all the same,” she triumphantly interprets it as more proof of her being right—“See! I’m not the only one.”—and a man, by contrast, gets all worked up over the mere possibility of just being one in a lineup of previous offenders.

  But hey, I know my way across this minefield; I’m not one of those morons who ask something like, “How many did you have before me?” I’m not one to ask questions, period. Lolly and I mapped out our sandbox a while ago sharing bit by bit, scoop by scoop, the things that were most important for the other to know; I even shook hands with Sergiy, her ex-husband, once at a large party, and I remember I almost liked the guy—he had an open face and a boyish smile that must still work wonders on women—if not for his handshake: limp like a dead fish, like all the air had been sucked out of him a long time ago and he keeps dragging his shell around because these burdensome social obligations force him to do so. An aging boy, one of many.

  The one thing I really wanted to know I went ahead and asked—“Why did you split up?”—but never got an answer, split up and that’s all, as if that in itself was the answer; it certainly was the only answer she needed, and she didn’t feel like coming up with another one just for me. Okay, that’s her right, what can you say? Worse when she lets something slip, a phrase, or a reference, something that sounds sentimental, nostalgic, and when I jump in—sometimes a bit too sharply, I’ll admit—before she goes all doe-eyed reminiscing—sure, that one, the guy that you went to the Baltic sea with, the one who taught you to eat lobster—she’s stunned, every time, “Did I tell you that?” She doesn’t remember. Fortunately, the number of love stories in our lives is finite. (And I still don’t know how to eat lobster, pick at it like a retarded monkey, no fun at all, just more trash on my plate.) The number of stories is finite, but the number of memories is infinite, and that’s a big difference—Lolly mentioned that man because she thought of something compl
etely different from what she’d told me about him before, and that’s why she’s always surprised: the lobster had nothing to do with it. She doesn’t remember, but I can see it all perfectly: the broken red shell on a white platter, the plump, juicy half of a lemon with the lobster’s ravished flesh, the ecstatic licking of fingers, the plastic bib the waiter solicitously supplied shamelessly splattered with juices—to eat a lobster it’s almost a sexual act, if you know how to do it, of course, and I’m not even talking about the smell that lingers above that table—softly salty, so much like the smell of my girl herself, which, naturally, may not be something that occurs to her at that table at all, but most certainly occurs to her companion if they’d spent the previous night together and if he is not a complete idiot… okay now, that’s enough. I’ve no business in her memories. Especially since she wasn’t talking about the lobster this time at all, and the number of memories is infinite. Like natural numbers—a countable infinite set. That’s the thing.

  The thing is, toots, you cannot ever tell yourself fully and completely to another person, no matter how close you are, even to the one with whom you mix your breath by night and share the world by day. I don’t know; maybe identical twins can do it, but only for a while, as children…. It’s like finite and infinite sets: regardless of how they depend on each other, the first one will have a limit, and the second one will not. End of story. Instinctively, you try to help things along by adding as many shared experiences as you can; you make the woman you love a constant witness to your life—hoping, vaguely, for a purely arithmetical advantage, for strength in numbers: to have the sum total of hours lived together outweigh that of the time spent without the other. (And why hours? Why not minutes, or seconds, or milliseconds? How long does it take you to experience something, to pick up an impression, a feeling that would morph somewhere in the deep dark mines of your subconscious into a memory I have no hope of accessing, like chlorophyll into coal?) Only it’s all for naught—Love’s Labour’s Lost, as Grandpa Shakespeare wrote. (Am I right, Lolly? Do you appreciate my English?)

  The math doesn’t work for the simple reason that even the events we experience together (Remember the time we went to buy our first desk lamp at The Guiding Light, and you were so taken with those tri-jointed arms, playing with lamps all over the store, folding and bending, and I was trying to explain the advantages of halogen bulbs over the incandescent ones, and you listened like a straight-A schoolgirl, so attentive you let your little mouth open a bit? And later, after we left the store with our purchase—not something with a jointed arm, but a totally different, stylish one with a heavy chrome column—you asked just as enthusiastically, on that same brainwave, without even changing your voice, “Didn’t that salesman look like a mole?”—and all I could do was stare like a slow-witted goat, not knowing what to say, because the very fact of that salesman’s existence had escaped me, let alone what he looked like.), all those things we live through together, Lolly, leave each of us with discrete memories, and the number of these is also infinite.

  This, if you think about it good and hard, can drive you nuts. I did go a little crazy with this idea back when I was a student: let’s say we have two infinite sets, say of natural and real numbers—how are we supposed to compare them? Which one is “less” and which one is “greater” if they are both potentially endless? It’s just like that with us—we have two infinite sets: one is the number of all your memories (X) and the other, the number of memories you share with me (Y). Mind you, there’s also the concept of a set’s power, as when every member of Y directly corresponds to a member of X, but not the other way around; this means X is more powerful than Y. Example: I remember that there was a salesman at The Guiding Light—that there had to have been one!—but not whether he looked like a mole, a camel, or an ox. And even if I spend the rest of my life holding your hand—which, of course, would cause certain inconveniences—X would still be more powerful than Y, and no feat of my imagination would help me see the man the way you did. So.

  Eggs, that’s what I want.

  What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but given to you anew every minute—all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other’s sentences—“that’s just it, exactly, that’s what I just thought”—thrilling us as if we’d just found a secret door in a shared home, but I bet had we tried to write out our individual trains of thought, separately, and then compared notes, we’d see we weren’t thinking the same thing at all—only about the same thing. The difference is obvious. X remains more powerful under all conditions. That’s why it is so rare for two people to dream the same dream.

  But they do, don’t they? Late Granny Lina told about the time in Karaganda, where they’d been deported, when she and Gramps dreamt the same thing on the same night: that the ice had cracked on the river and all three of them—she, he, and my eight-year-old dad—leapt from one ice floe to the next, holding hands, until they made their way to the shore, where they could see a white house on the green slope, the table draped in a white cloth and set for a meal out on the porch. Gramps then said, “Looks to me, Lina, like we’ll be going home soon”—and later it turned out that it was that night (or almost that night) Stalin died, and in about a year they did go back.

  It’s different, of course, in that I wouldn’t want to share a dream like that with Lolly for all the tea in China, thank you; a dream like that is a glimpse of the future when the same danger haunts both. It’s borne of a forced intimacy, when you’re being squashed into each other by outside forces, melded into a single mind because you’ve got nowhere else to go. That’s some kind of marital bliss, right there. Who knows how they’d fare in normal life. But what if the threat comes from inside, not from the outside? What if it’s enough that my girl’s memories are an infinite horde, and I have no way of knowing which one of them will turn against me?

  By contrast, these dreams of mine have become a kind of a shared secret—the kind that married couples have. I’ve never been married before, so I love stuff like this, probably more than she does; I think it’s so cool that she wants to remember these dreams, writes some of them down, generally treats them with the utmost seriousness, like a homegrown Dr. Freud. I’m the same with her cycles—always keep track of them in my mind, so that I can reassure her whenever she worries for no reason. She is pretty good, though; she really studied psychology. When they had the course, she said she spent the entire semester in the reading room, bingeing on specialized literature, even talked her way into an internship at an asylum: first, because the kid must have itched to find out exactly how she got left without a father, but also, I bet, because she was not without doubt—what if something was really wrong with him, the diagnosis not a sham? As a result, what she knows about the discipline goes way beyond the usual intelligentsia erudition, which is, by itself, vastly beyond my grasp—all I know I learned from my sales practicum; I’m a self-made psychologist (“psychomite,” as Lolly says). It must have been because of her that I’ve grown to love these dreams. Because they are not just mine, but ours, together.

  Although truth be told; they are no one’s, and there isn’t much to love about them, either.

  They just stick in my mind like burrs.

  Last night it wasn’t the death in the forest (and not so much death, as the back of that guy with his Schmeiser), no, there was something else equally unnerving. All these dreams are unnerving—not in their mood, but in their stories. Inside the black Opel Kadett there are people in unfamiliar officers’ uniforms, up in front, to the left, and to the right of me; I’m in the back seat, and they are taking me somewhere because I’m a suspect in a murder, but I know that I’m not in any real danger, that it’ll all resolve itself somehow. Another image: must be a doctor’s examination room in a clinic because surgical instruments are bei
ng boiled in a small metal pail on a spirit lamp; I can see very clearly the tiny bubbles as they rise to the surface and burst around the tools like sparks…. And there was a woman there, the one wrapped in a white sheet; I don’t remember what she looked like—in the next frame she gets up and walks somewhere with me, down a low-ceilinged corridor, to a ladder, phosphorescently white in the moonlight, where I lean her against a log wall and raise her skirt…. Darkness pulses with widening concentric circles of fire, and a slow female voice, impassive like voice-over, says, “It’s never like that, it never happens like that—twice out of three times in a row.” This feels piquant. The woman must know such things. Of all things, an erotic dream this one is not. I feel nothing. Not just nothing approximating an orgasm, but nothing at all. Not a thing. I only register the facts, as an outside observer: two fiery contours and it’s never like that, apparently, twice out of three times. And how is it, then? With Lolly, I see all kinds of things, but no fiery circles that I can recall.

  That’s another thing all these dreams have in common and the reason I thought of them as something alien from the very beginning: unlike regular dreams, they’re utterly emotionless. No joy, no fear, no anxiety, no arousal, nothing—only stories; the colors, smells, sounds, the feel of things—all there, no problem, all senses amplified like when you’re high on something, but the emotions are missing. If these are, in fact, memories, they must come from a disconnected brain. A zombie. The raving of a severed head, as Granny Lina would put it.