The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Stodólya, as if reading Adrian’s mind, suddenly reached into the chest pocket of his jacket and unfolded a paper packet much worn along the creases to reveal a small photograph, which he offered to Adrian—for an instant, it seemed even his face, always cautiously drawn to a point, with that aiming crooked nose and the sharp eyes set close to each other like a wolf’s, softened, warmed from inside, and almost smiled.

  “This is she.”

  But Adrian never saw Stodólya’s smile, although he was very curious to find out how an enamored Stodólya might smile. It is quite possible that Stodólya was, in fact, smiling as he held the photo in his hand, but if he was, Adrian did not see it.

  The woman looking back at him from the picture was Geltsia.

  Room 4. From the Cycle Secrets: After the Blast

  Hi—hello, sweets. Here—give us a kiss. M-mua. Why are you all so, sort of… discombobulated? You goof, of course everything’s fine, better than ever. Yurko dropped me off right at the door, just like I said on the phone, and what did you have to dread? (Such a stupid way to use that word—he says dread whenever he means worry, and I can’t seem to break him of this habit. Dread, by the way, is a transitive verb: One has to dread something, like war or famine, and if one is talking about someone, then one can worry, fret, brood, agonize, lose sleep, and dozens of other synonyms, but who speaks like that anymore?)

  Here, hang up my coat, would you please? M-m-m—what is that smell? Hol-y mol-y, what is going on here?—is someone coming? Wow! Look at all this stuff; it’s like a five-star restaurant in here, flowers and all…. You—you are really something…. Can I taste it? Straight from your big skovoroda here? Okay, your skillet, whatever, but I must point out that the name of Ukraine’s greatest thinker was, in fact, Skovoroda, so it’s a perfectly good word…. Alright, alright—quiet as a mouse, watch me, z-zip; I’m out of your way, going to wash my hands. Or should I go ahead and shower for such a romantic occasion? Dress for dinner? And perfume myself with something fabulously sexy? By the way, did you know that of all smells men find vanilla the most arousing—don’t you think this smacks of some sort of infantile fixation on their mommies’ cookies? No, really, I read it somewhere—not about fixation, about vanilla; I figured out the fixation part all by myself, with the help of my towering intellect, what else? O-oh… Aidy! That’s not where the intellect is… not even a woman’s, let go! Very well, good sir, if you find intellectual women so irresistible, I shall henceforth be known by my new pseudonym: Daryna Skillet. Pretty catchy, no? I’ll get myself a column in Women’s Life. About the big stuff, and such. Only no one would ever know what a “skillet” is…. Aidy, you lummox, did you not get shampoo at the store again?

  Chianti? I like that! I like it a lot. (Such a guy thing to put on this whole show, with wine and flowers, and then forget to get shampoo, which ran out two days ago!) Looks like a decent bottle too—2002—nicely done, Mr. Sommelier…. Oh, come on, the candles—that’s too much, that’s like something they’d tell you to do in Women’s Life—have you been reading that crap with a flashlight under the covers? Sure, over in that drawer—there should be a new pack. Yep, that one. Are you supposed to eat this with a fork or a spoon? Aidy, will you get a move on—I’m starving! Oh, it’s the candleholder you wanted to show me? Oops, I’m sorry, I got distracted by the candles—so, yeah, let me see… cool…. What is it, copper? Bronze, huh. And how do you clean it? Or is supposed to be this… pickled color? More like mold on a pickle, actually—that’s exactly the color, isn’t it? Super. I love it. Weighs a ton, too! Wow… it’s like in that Lesya Ukrainka story where the lady companion cracks the old baroness’s skull with a candelabra just like this! The one in the story is bronze, too. If you take a good aim, and really swing it… no kidding. A multifunctional piece. Alright, where are those candles? Let’s have the picture complete. Hang on, let me turn off the lights… uh-huh. Doesn’t go with our kitchen at all, but in a large house somewhere in the suburbs, where you could put it on a marble mantle—sure, it’ll look great. Or like, in a dining room, in the middle of an oak table the size of a tennis court….

  Have a buyer yet? And how much do you charge for this beauty? Some more, please, I haven’t eaten…. So is that what’s paying for the banquet? Mm-mm, this is great! Say it again? Gnocchi? I get it—it’s like galúshki, only Italian…. Thank you, that’s good for now, or I’ll get wasted on an empty stomach… mm-mm. Potato dough? And then what—I’ve got spinach, cheese, garlic—and something else…. Whatever it is; it’s fantastic. And you made it all yourself? With your crafty little hands. See, Aidy, it’s like I said: you only get better with time…. Thank you! Who’s the buyer—that big fat marmot of yours with piggy eyes? No, I actually like him—you can tell the dude’s pretty sharp and not completely without taste. He sounds like he’s really into antiques and that tells you something right there; he’s not like all the other ones, the ones that buy music halls for their sluts… yep, and TV stations. You just had to rub that in, didn’t you? Alright—cin cin! Nope, prosit is German, and we’re drinking Chianti, so you gotta say it in Italian…. Smell that! This wine’s alive and kicking, I tell you what.

  (Please, I can’t cry now, not now—he’s been so sweet, I don’t deserve all this—and why do I have to wind myself up like this. I’m like a vibrator, pardon my French, with the off switch busted—just buzzing, buzzing all the way home, and why, one wonders? So what, he had a dream? People dream things all the time—it’s just a dream, nothing special about it; so what if his subconscious replaced Vlada in my footage with his great-aunt Gela? Put a known entity in place of the unknown one, that’s perfectly natural—all it means is that he thinks about me even in his sleep, looks for me, feels where I am and what I am doing at the time—because he loves me, my Adrian, sweetheart, sunshine, darling….)

  You know what? Your ears move when you chew. I swear they do! Do like this… see, see! That’s hilarious. Not true at all—not everyone. What, now you’re gonna say mine do, too? No, I don’t believe you, wait, no, let me see it in the mirror….

  (Why did I forget—how could I forget, so it only now comes back to me: Vaddy—that was how Vlada addressed her Vadym, not in public, of course. God forbid. And not when she spoke about him in the third person—she was always fastidiously proper, buttoned-up like a graduate of a young ladies’ pensione, not for her the vulgar familiarities of mere mortals—she always referred to him by his full name, and I only heard this domestic one once or twice, when she let it slip accidentally, like when you lean forward too far, and a button comes undone on your blouse, and everyone glimpses your underwear. One of those times may have been the night when the two of them came to visit, and Vadym brought a bottle of Courvoisier, which he proceeded to drink by himself because Vlada and I preferred wine. Something irked her enough that she forgot herself for a moment and addressed Vadym as she did at home, in private—“Vaddy!”—followed by something really sharp, angry, nothing like the nice-but-firm tone that women use to put a check on husbands who may be enjoying themselves a bit too much, those half-jokes designed to preserve the company’s good spirits and decorum. To hell with decorum! This was raw, this would make you look away to avoid staring at the exposed patch of underwear, and since I was the only one present and had absolutely nowhere else to look, I think I giggled or blurted something inappropriate. I don’t remember what exactly, only how awkward it was…. Had we been alone, without Vadym, had he gone to the bathroom, or out to the balcony for a smoke, everything would’ve been cleared up right there and then, but Vadym sat between us, rock-solid, like he was bolted down to the floor, chair and all, like the bed meant for the next victim in The Hound of the Baskervilles—sat there like it was his singular mission not to leave Vlada and myself alone even for a minute, no matter what, even if his bladder burst, and this monumentally benevolent solidity of his transformed our girlfriend chirping, whether or not it contained any trifling dissonance or mutual concern, into a sort of organic white noise, littl
e waves lapping innocently at the foot of the rock, too insignificant to cause the rock any manner of discomfort.

  Before that night I hadn’t had much opportunity to observe powerful men at close range—men with the kind of great power that comes from great amounts of money. All my previous experience dictated that a man brought by his paramour to be checked out by her girlfriend should fan his tail like a peacock and deploy the full arsenal of his charms, real and imagined, so I was ill-prepared to deal with the strategic advantage Vadym had instantly gained on us by holding down his position at the table, next to his cognac, and maintaining the indulgent expression of a charitably minded giant. He had complete and undeniable control over the terrain on which his relationship with Vlada unfolded and did not allow me a single peek into that realm—left Vlada and me in the dust like greenhorns, to put it simply.

  Could this be precisely what she loved about him—the cold-bloodedness of a professional player, the chess-master’s logic applied to human pieces, and the fierce, single-minded focus on the results, which artists so chronically lack? An artist is totally different; he or she is forever doomed to wandering, mind and body, in tangential details, sinking into obscure complexities, into colors and shades, patches of knitting and shards of porcelain, and put before people of action, with their unwavering pursuit of “Ready! Aim! Fire!” and the jackpots hit as a consequence, must inevitably feel like a teenager in adult company—and that’s exactly how I felt with Vadym that night.

  Vlada had to have felt that way, too, and for a lot longer, only she thought it was really cool—we’re always attracted to those whose souls ooze vital enzymes we lack most desperately ourselves. Actually, I don’t even know why Vlada wanted to see me that time: something must have been grating on her, something she’d come to doubt already, but somehow we spent the whole five hours conscientiously discussing sociopolitical issues—Kuchma and Gongadze, the shake-ups at the top and the rein-tightening we felt in television, the Venice Biennale, and how profoundly Ukraine managed to fuck it up, and what a redneck pig-farm manager our deputy PM for humanitarian programs showed himself to be—all those things that Ukrainians always talk about, whether they’re friends or just met each other a minute ago, forever marveling at the breakneck speed with which their ne’er-do-well country hurtles off yet another cliff, like the farmers in the joke about the cart full of melons that breaks on their way to the market and they stand there, gaping at all their melons rolling down the hill, and one says to the other, “Hey, look, the striped one’s ahead.”

  That’s how we spent that night—bemoaning whatever striped things were getting ahead—even though beyond all that usual nonsense, Vlada—and by extension, I—did sense something unsettling, unsolved, something that must have been the reason for her bringing Vadym over. Something that made her seek out, hope secretly for a moment of truth, for that late-night hiccup in personal machinery when, warmed with alcohol and easy banter, one feels the need to call off one’s internal guards, loosen one’s tie for a moment, and become oneself—for the alchemic brew that induces confessions, unlocks closets, pulls out drawers, drags up long-buried secrets and extracts declarations of old, age-old love—or equally old envy—all those stunning stories you never even suspected to be hidden right under your nose, like lions sleeping in savannah grass; such séances don’t last long, a witch’s count—from the first roosters till the second—but they are the zenith of every party, its catharsis. A party without them is like sex without an orgasm; they are the living knots that make the threads of friendship stronger, and if someone only taught those poor Americans not to go home at ten, but to hang around for two or three hours longer and let things take their course, they’d save a fortune on therapy.

  They left right after midnight that time because Vadym had to fly out, at some ungodly hour before dawn, into the boon-docks, to Dnipropetrovsk, or Odessa, to the nonexistent pipeline “Odessa-Brody.” So in the end, it was Vadym, again, who set the timer on our little soiree; he was the one who had constructed the whole evening and controlled it, from start to finish, making sure nothing got loose—all guards posted, all buttons buttoned, ties knotted, and nothing, nothing, about it gave him the least bit of bother, except maybe his bladder that had to hold five hours worth of cognac, but that was the price he was perfectly willing to pay for his victory, hands down, over us. When Vlada called me the next morning, ostensibly to share impressions, or, as we called it, to debrief, it was already a new day, with new troubles and concerns, and if she had ever intended to tell me anything that would’ve been, in Vadym’s opinion, undesirable, the moment for it was gone, lost forever. Flushed, you could say, down a pipe…)

  I’m coming, Aidy, just a second… I’m trying to wash my mascara off, got a clump in my eye.

  (…because how could anyone ever imagine that a man can replace a woman’s best friend—that’s just silly, and it shouldn’t ever work that way anyhow. And yet every man, in his heart of hearts, holds the opposite conviction most dear: they all believe that as soon as we got one of them, we no longer need anyone else in the great wide world. But even when he’s such a sweetheart, and really wants to understand you because he truly loves you, and you love him too—really love him, not just bang him—even then, you can never hope to fall into that perfect and complete sync that exists between two women; and he will always begrudge you that, albeit just a little and in secret even from himself, and that is why love is always and inevitably war. Love is War, how Orwellian—and it is war, a special kind of war, one in which the winner loses it all… I’d rather be dead before I win one of those, that’s what I’d tell you now, Vadym, Vaddy—now you actually use that name yourself; I’ve heard you do that, now that there isn’t anyone else to call you by that name—after you’ve seen your victory dead, quite literally, in an oak coffin with brass handles, so why are you still beating on a dead horse, Vaddy?)

  Just… a… moment! Can’t you wait another second? I can’t hear anything in here, stop talking—you and your habit of hollering across the apartment like it’s the open range or something!

  (That’s another one I can’t seem to cure him of—I’ve pointed it out so many times and all for nothing… Aidy’s just like his old man: when we took the crew to interview him, he didn’t hesitate to bellow at us, myself and the cameraman, from another room—never mind that we were perfect strangers to him. Every man turns into his own father, so does that mean that I—what?—am I turning into my mother, too? Ugh, that would not be good….

  Now Vlada, she never resembled her mother in the least bit; it was more like Nina Ustýmivna was a sort of an aging child for her, an adopted and really obnoxious child—Vlada rarely even left Katrusya with her, only when she had no other choice—but actually she managed her mother rather elegantly, unlike yours truly, she knew what buttons to push. Whenever Nina Ustýmivna took a deep breath to launch—with that heavy, theatrical sigh that instantly made my skin crawl all over—into her favorite oratory about what hard, sad, hopeless lots Vlada and I drew in this life—meaning the absence of certified-and-stamped husbands, because, of course, Nina Ustýmivna’s mantra, “a dead husband is better than no husband,” was her holy and regularly professed creed, and she never did really accept her daughter’s divorce, of which her daughter, smart girl that she was, informed her only after she had the paperwork in hand, saving herself from several valium-mediated dramas—no sooner could Nina Ustýmivna begin one of her “cello solos,” as Vlada called them, than Vlada would raise her eyebrows and respond, very solemnly, in the same grave cello tones, “What husbands, Mommy? Please, we can’t be bothered, nous sommes les artistes!”—and for some impenetrable reason, the French exerted on N.U. had the same effect as a crack of a whip on an old lesson horse. Her whole affect would change into a collected, grandiose kind of posture, monumental in a vaguely imperious—imperial—way, as if the woman suddenly remembered that she was “an artist’s wife” and must bear this time-honored designation with the utmost dignity.
And the funniest thing was that N.U.’s real name, the one on her passport, was not Nina, but Ninél, an anagram of Lenin, not something one acquired with a high-bred childhood and French governesses—and really, it’s not like there were any governesses left in the USSR in the 1930s—but proof, quite to the contrary, of the wild and raucous youth of Vlada’s Komsomol–activist grandma and her Bolshevik-minted (one of twenty-five thousand) Ag teacher grandpa, who, as Vlada sarcastically pointed out, had to have run roughshod on plenty a kolkhoz-resistant “location” before they decamped for Kyiv in 1933; so, she added, we’re lucky it’s Ninél and not Stalína, Octyabrína, or some other Zvezdéts you’d never shake off.

  I suspect that it was in Nina-Ninél Ustýmivna’s rigorous school of behavioral management that Vlada acquired her benevolent, gracious, ironically indulgent attitude toward the “professional wives”—that breed of belligerent females with the eyes of bored ewes who always lurk, like security guards, in close proximity to their husbands, aiming for a chance to grab, à la the unforgettable Raisa Gorbacheva, their own share of limelight when you are having a professional conversation with their husbands, all the while communicating to you with their every grimace and gesture exactly what a hopelessly inferior creature you are as you stand there all alone, with no man in sight whatsoever. I can’t help myself around them: If not for your VIP beefcake, I’d pack you off where the sun don’t shine, bitch!—but Vlada found them as entertaining as an exotic animal species, like the white rhinoceros, and she almost felt sorry for them somehow, just like for those poor rhinoceros that are so easy to spot and shoot in their bright white skins.)