The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Without Lolly, that’s what I would’ve thought, most likely: I’m losing it. So what if it feels good—feels like a glimpse of another world, like in the mountains, when you can suddenly see a distant valley from between the peaks—loonies dig their trips too, no? But Lolly already told me—very firmly—no. She said they are incredibly unhappy, those people, except the ones who go through manic phases, but those spells don’t last very long before depression sets in again. This did not describe me at all, and she also told me to quit messing with things I know nothing about. She said it almost like she was offended, like I strayed into someone else’s misfortune, a very limited-access territory. Like it was a privilege I didn’t have. Sorry, toots. This I understand; I’m not a knuckleheaded lobster-eater eager to take a pretty reporter for a ride around Benelux (the Be and the Ne may be out of my reach, but a nice vacation in Croatia is very much in the offing this summer—Lolly doesn’t know yet, I’ll tell her in another week or so)—I know there must be some dark things in her memory, especially where her father is concerned, dark and heavy like boulders that she piled into a wall around herself, a fortress of self-preservation locked even to me. A closed subset of memories we’ll say—literally and figuratively. Alright, if that’s the deal, I don’t mind. And I still feel a pang of something, funny human creature that I am: like if I were a full-blown lunatic I’d be more interesting for her, more heroic or something… as if it really mattered to me to stake a claim on whatever part of her life she’d cordoned off for her father—who, let us be completely accurate, was not really mad either, so you, Lolly, need to re-examine your self-appointed position as the Crazy People’s police. Every man has a right to his own lunacy. Or something like that. You bet I’ll exercise mine every chance I get.

  The bacon nice and crisp. Crack-splat, crack-splat, crack-splat—three eggs into the pan and the kitchen instantly fills with assertive hissing. An inquiry into the fridge yields cucumbers, a disheartened bunch of radishes, and a few shoots of chives. Life, ladies and gentlemen, is not all that bad. Add the Chumak mayo (buy Ukrainian!) and we’re a chop and a toss away from a Vitamin Salad, a happy throwback to the era of geriatric socialism. Oh, wait a minute, I’m lying—there was no mayo in socialist stores; we relied on farmers-market sour cream. When we were students, it took a special trip to the Theater Café on the corner of Volodymyrska, on the spot now occupied by the five-star condo high-rise, for the marvel called “egg under mayonnaise”: a hard-boiled egg garnished with a teaspoon of mayo. Best bite you could take with a drink. If I ever decided to go into the restaurant business, I’d have a hard-core period place, fierce eighties. I’d call it something appropriate, like Caféteria or Obshchepit, Shcherbytsky’s as a last resort, but still, no fads, no frills, no vulgar falsifications like that Co-op chain that’s “co-op” in name only. No siree, we’ll do it right, and we’ll be true to the last archaeographical detail: rickety tables on duralumin-tube legs, always with a piece of folded paper under one of them so you don’t spill your borsch; forks and spoons of eternally greasy bendable aluminum, no knives in sight, obviously; and for the napkins in the middle—plastic containers repurposed from the office-supply inventory loaded with hand-cut little squares of dense smooth paper, the kind that goes transparent under the lightest touch, catching your fingerprints better than the cops. On the menu, aside from my favorite Vitamin Salad, of course, we’d have mystery cutlets breaded with prickly stale crumbs, to be served with blue-hue mashed potatoes; fried hake with steel-colored, weapon-grade noodles; pelmeni with vinegar; borsch; and dried fruit compote, always with a dark-brown layer of silt, most likely of plant origin, on the bottom of the glass. Oh yes, and the chopped beet salad. Glasses of the thick-walled, octagonal variety, vodka with beer, and the puzzle of “a choice of desserts” for dessert, represented most often by a sizeable pile of sugar-dusted chopped dough appealingly called Finger-Licks—when I came to Kyiv, in my first year at the university, which, not to spoil anyone’s breakfast, also happened to be the Chernobyl year, I lived almost exclusively on these Finger-Licks until I figured out how to cook. For old times’ sake, I’d serve “eggs under mayonnaise” too, but only when I got really sentimental, as the spécialité du jour.

  Done right, with the walls painted shoulder-high in green oil paint, some vintage-scary posters, light bulbs in only half the lights, and a guaranteed half an hour before a waiter acknowledges your existence—basically, with a full immersion into the period atmosphere—a place like that couldn’t keep people out if it wanted! And not just Western tourists, although that’s a gold mine right there. I’ve got to sell it to someone. How about that character with the silver Mercedes, next door? I can’t believe no one has done it yet—boys must all be embarrassed about their valiant Komsomol youth; they all want new and foreign stuff, some weird fruits de mer and Château-de-Fleur, they’re all gourmands from Konotop—not much better, really, than the hillbillies in the old days, who all craved high-shine East German dressers and made room for them by getting rid of old hand-painted chests and Petrykiv step stools. The grandkids would now give anything to have those back, but tough luck, it’s all gone. Now we have to buy classic Kyiv china back from Europe, import our own stuff, and not just the china. And still every auction is packed with the French Empire; it sells like pancakes, and dudes bid each other out of sight, ’coz that’s how cool they are, and it makes me want to say—brother, be yourself, whenever did your granny ever lay her eyes on French Empire? Why are you buying someone else’s past? Now a genuine Shcherbytsky’s setup I could supply in a blink—heck, it’d be the hottest thing in town! It’s bound to come around sometime in the next twenty years anyway, so what are we waiting for?

  Anyway.

  To heck with historical authenticity, I dump about half a can of olives into my Vitamin Salad on a last-minute impulse, it’ll be a Greek Vitamin Salad, a post-Communist hybrid; too bad there’s no cheese, some feta would be nice, or, better still, some fresh Carpathian bryndza… alright, this’ll do. Now, bread into the toaster. Nothing like the smell of toasted bread. Finally, I’m fully plugged into the outside world—and drooling. Time to turn on the TV; it’s tuned to Lolly’s channel, but of course, inane slob that I am, I’ve slept straight through her segment and land into the latest news. Which will tell me that Americans are still bombing Baghdad. Fucking blitzkriegers.

  No sooner do I settle in front of the TV and stuff a heaping, steaming, awesome forkful of eggs and a bite of warm, crusty wheat toast into my mouth than the outside world mounts a surprise attack: the phone rings. Screams like it hurts. Should have set the answering machine to pick up.

  “Gud mornin, Adrian Ambrozich.”

  It’s Yulichka, my busy bee—already up and running the office, bless her heart. If only the sweet soul could find it in herself to speak Ukrainian, so I wouldn’t have to lose ten seconds of my life every time this Adrian Ambrozich comes up and I have to merge him with myself (which is, at the moment, chewing). Some clients, aware of my principled distaste for patronymics (“Oedipal complex,” I usually explain, kidding, of course, but many still get somber in the face, and go “Oh, sorry, sure thing…”) pitch something totally outrageous, like “Mister Adrian”—somehow they think it’s the Russian equivalent of saying “sir” in Ukrainian. It’s ridiculous and ungrammatical, but really popular—another post-Communist hybrid, like my salad, only far less appetizing. So why should a man have his breakfast interrupted?

  “Adrian Ambrozich,” Yulichka is clearly excited because she doesn’t even apologize when I mumble with my mouth full—“I hev some hick here, from a villadzh, somevere next to Boryspil, he brot a Swiss knaiv, from var-taim, with a small so, in gud condishn. He ses at home he hes a kukoo clock end a walnut wardrobe, used to be his grandpa’s, he sed.”

  Whoa! No authentic cuckoo clocks have been sighted since about a year ago; Bray has scrubbed the market clean of them, no prayer for small fish like me. Is this for real? Yulichka certainly has the nose, that’s the
main reason I hired her. Walnut ward-robe—that could be anything, but we can’t let this redneck out of our sight!

  “Hold him there, Yulichka,” I hear myself say in Russian. Wow, I didn’t think I could: that’s what money does to a man—and not even money yet, a mere providential waft of it in the air. Makes me think of Les’ka, we were at the university together: she and her husband went into the gas business under the tutelage of some Petya from Moscow, and later Petya turned out to be gay and would come visit every time he got the itch for Les’ka’s hubby—Les’ka would move out to the guestroom then. Do not judge so ye will not be judged, indeed.

  At the moment, though, Yulichka couldn’t care less about what language we’re speaking: We’re both breathing hard on our ends of the line, like a pair of lovers (like with Lolly before dawn, I think, irrelevantly).

  “I meid him koffi.”

  “Good job,” I say in Ukrainian, having regained my self-control; she does know what she’s doing. “Keep him entertained for just a bit longer, I’ll be right there,” I almost add “just let me take a shower.” To heck with the eggs, leave the pair of warm golden eyes to grow cold on the plate, but I have to shave at least—I can’t very well roll in all stubby! Have coffee at the office: I sourced me a mean espresso machine, no shabbier than Bray’s.

  A catch, finally! Man. About time—been scraping by on small stuff for years already, junk, bric-a-brac, whatever I can find, totally like that runaway goat from the nursery rhyme, as Lolly recites, “Ran past a stream—snatched a gulp to drink, ran past a trash heap—snatched a bite to eat.” No way to run a business, really. But now if I could take a spot at a good show, Doroteum’s coming up, for one, with a few really nice pieces…. Alright, stop it, enough daydreaming—go already!

  Turning off the TV—like clearing the table: erase the picture. Salad into the fridge, the egg dregs glowing with protein—into the mouth after all, albeit on the run, plate into the sink—and I’m in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, with the water splashing and the Gillette buzzing as happily as a bee on my face, when my mind suddenly registers, grants access to the footage that was on TV while I talked to Yulichka, the ochre-and-mud vision of Baghdad that’s been on every channel for the last couple days: far below, a bridge in the clouds of sand or blown-up brick dust, and a thread of American Abrams tanks crawling onto it, out of palm-tree greenery, from left to right—from the distance they look like a pride of monstrous prehistoric turtles. This turns out to be the last shot filmed by one of our own—Taras Protsiuk, Lolly knew him—from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel moments before the first turtle, which had already begun to turn its turret toward the camera, fires, and the next shot every TV channel in the world shows is one of Taras’s dead body, face down on the concrete with his legs folded under him and arms thrown wide, no longer holding his camera. The sound—I can’t remember if I heard any sounds. The guttural menacing growl of the tanks as they rolled onto the bridge—did I hear it on TV, or somewhere in my mind, after the dry rattle of the machine gun, in that dream last night?

  I go cold all over. I stand in the middle of my bathroom, on the mat, barefoot and stripped to my boxers—and shiver. Something’s short-circuited. Something—an idea—illuminated everything in a flash, and I must find it again, hunt it down and catch it before it vanishes into the chatter, into the thick of all other thoughts that came with it and now crowd inside my head like a drunk party in a small living room; shove them aside, look for the one that flashed, not quite whole, snippets of conversations with Lolly. Associated Press pledged assistance to the dead cameraman’s family… Ukraine in deep dark ass again, because how can a country demand any sort of investigation of anyone else if it routinely whacks its journalists right at home, and cuts their heads off for good measure, like scalp hunters… Lolly once drank with Taras, may he rest in peace, at some TV-people party of theirs… to the guy in the tank, the gleam of the lens may have looked like a signal for enemy fire, war’s war, God damn it, or as some insist, it looked like a sniper—only why would a sniper be a threat to a tank?… the Americans have really gone nuts in Iraq this time around, keep shooting their own like they’d had their heads spun around, as Granny Lina would say, Well, shouldn’t have gone a-hunting after those desert demons, should they?; our boys said they lost their wits like that when they were in Afghanistan…. Where the hell is my aftershave? I always put it on this shelf, where did she put it? I hope the Rep.’s ride isn’t blocking the driveway, better to just call a cab… phone numbers for Taxi-Lux and Taxi-Blues, damn it, I’m late and the redneck with the cuckoo has nothing to do at the office but add zeros to what he wants for it. A close-up of a weeping Latina reporter in a white T-shirt, it’s blazing hot in Baghdad, the coffin with Taras’s body being loaded onto the plane, and one of the guys who’d sat with him in the hotel bar just the night before holds the camera steady, and even if he’s crying, too, no one will see his tears, because his eye is the camera, and it’s outside him, external, impersonal, and pure… Stop. Stop, stop. Here it is; I’ve got it… slow now, easy, don’t lose it.

  The image of the tanks on the bridge that Taras captured on film and that now runs on every channel—that was the last thing he saw in his life, right? The last memory fixed by his mind. Only he had a camera in his hands—he was lucky (that’s so wrong to say!) to have the whole world see the last thing he saw before he died.

  Question: What would happen to that last shot captured by his consciousness if he hadn’t had the time to transfer it from the retina of his own eyes onto that other one, the mechanical eye of the camera?

  A camera can be turned off. It can be set to play. A camera is a very simple device. But where does it all go from your own, human eyes if it’s you who’s been turned off?

  Why do we choose to believe that it all just disappears, fades into nothingness with the person? Because there’s no play button? But we don’t get to watch it when the person is still alive just the same. No matter how close we are, how intimate, we’ve no way to glimpse that footage, as I have no way of entering Lolly’s memories. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

  The back of the man ahead of me, in the uniform with a woven belt, the dry rattle from behind the trees—and blackness. After that—blackness. This picture, this last picture, with the back, the grass and the underbrush, the thorn apple and heather and juniper, the sun bunnies on the tree trunks, the smell of humid earth and soggy greenness—where does it go? To what posthumous vault?

  The black Opel Kadett with the unknown army’s officers, the spatula boiling in sparkly bubbles, the stairs phosphorescent in the moonlight, the woman’s voice keeping a methodical count of our orgasms… I am not mad I tell myself as I try to suppress the shakes; I am not mad. Calm down. I’m not mad. I’m just watching someone else’s footage.

  Made by a dead person who didn’t have a camera.

  He doesn’t care that I don’t deal in that kind of antiques.

  I know this is true because I am shaking. The puzzle has fit together, no loose ends. Dreadfully simple, elegant really, as it ought to be with the right solution. The only thing missing was this basic, obvious premise: the footage kept in one’s mind does not disappear. And why would it? Just because a man didn’t happen to have a camera? Please, the camera is incidental; all it does is prove that the film is there.

  Just like these dreams.

  The absolute, inviolable certainty that I am right calls up, for a moment, the half-forgotten sweetness—that blissful, triumphant unclenching of brain cells that used to come in abundance from lab research and that can never be fully replaced by the satisfaction of a well-done business deal, no matter how complex the scheme. Nothing to write the Nobel Committee about, to be sure, but the thrill is just the same—and perfectly sufficient. The world can be explained. Specifically, somewhere out there lies buried a humongous, immeasurable—infinite, that’s it—vault, an archive of things once witnessed, of footage that wants to be watched. How, by whom, those det
ails are not important. This, one must admit, is a comforting thought. An idea that offers a man, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, a shot at non-lonesomeness (that’s a Lolly word). As in: my memory, in its entirety, I bequeath to Daryna Goshchynska/Adrian Vatamanyuk (choose one). Okay, maybe not in its entirety; that may be too much, but wouldn’t this make for a great sci-fi story? I’m full of ideas; I’m shedding ideas this morning. Spawning. A morning of high ideation. A high-yield morning. I’m Ideating Adrian. Mister Adrian Ideatov. No, better, like an emperor—Adrian the Idea Bearer. Wow. Watch out, Boryspil redneck, I’m gonna get your clock and your little cuckoo, too!

  Snickering at myself (no one else to snicker at in the empty apartment), I rub into my cheeks a pleasantly cool squirt of silky Egoist (never did find that aftershave)—soon as I get to the office, I’ll desire a double espresso from Yulichka. Pull on a brand new, just-out-of-the-plastic, crinkly Hugo Boss shirt—a T-shirt won’t look respectable enough—snip off the hateful plastic whiskers that stick in the seams where labels had been attached, straighten cuffs, admire the package; cool and style all around, good to go to Sotheby’s, or to a Swiss bank, yes, definitely, Sotheby’s first, then to the bank to unload the cash—and then it finally catches up with me, like late-night heartburn, this very simple, little tail end of my earlier idea, sudden and undeniable like a door slamming into a face: Why me?

  Sweet Jesus, why me? Why did he, the one that gets shot in the dream, whoever he was, choose me to sit through his archival reels—if I didn’t ask for it?

  And, while we’re at it… who was he?

  Black Woods, May 1947