The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “You know, I never told you this… when Tolya was in Dnipropetrovsk…” (This Tolya startles Daryna like a tang of a string: usually Mother says Father or Dad, but now she is talking about a man she had once loved, and not to her daughter but to a grown woman, maybe even to herself.) “in daytime I could somehow manage to keep my mind busy—at work, the tour groups saved me, and then I had to find food; back then it was another full-time job, to stand in all those lines. I remember on a Sunday once I’d gone to every market—Zhytni, Sinny, Lukyanivsky, Volodymyrsky—no meat anywhere, they all sold out before dawn! And you had anemia then, and the school doctor said…” (How strange, Daryna thinks—she remembers none of that, only remembers that her period started later than other girls’ and for a long time she was troubled by the feeling that she’d suddenly slipped from the top of her class in everything to the bottom, and when she finally “had visitors” she was so thrilled she bragged to another straight-A student, Oksana Karavayeva, “I’m a young woman now!” and Oksana sneered into her face and said, “So go buy yourself a medal!”) “you had to have meat, even if just a little, even mixed with bread into cutlets, and it was all just empty shelves all around. I’ll try the Besarabsky Market yet, I thought; that’s a chance. So I went all the way there, and it was getting dark already—and they were locking up, right under my nose…. I just fell against a wall and wailed out loud! That I cried, that was the first time—after they took Tolya, for a long time I couldn’t. Went all hard inside, a piece of wood. At night, after I was done cleaning, washing everything…” (Daryna’s memory helpfully retrieves the long-forgotten: the humid haze of laundry in the apartment, steam from the sheets being boiled on the stove, windows in the kitchen fogged, and the wooden handle from an old butterfly net with which her mother, hair wet and face glistening with sweat, like a dockhand, turned the bedsheets, which distended into giant bubbles above the rim of the enormous pot. Did she do laundry almost every other day on purpose back then, to help her forget?) “after I make it all clean, and you’re already asleep—that’s when I was fit to climb up the wall! And no sleep, none, no matter how much I’d worn myself out. I better figure something out lest I lose my mind, I thought. So I thought this up: I’d lie down and close my eyes, and start playing movies in my head. I’d lie there and imagine Tolya’s come back already, so handsome, finer than before, and that they restored the Palace Ukraina the way it was at first—I’d see every little piece of parquet in my mind, how they’re laid out, like shadows, this chimerical optical effect it made—and that they’re giving Tolya medals up on the stage, everyone thanking him for saving such beauty, saying it’s all his work, he did it…. Everyone rises, and applauds, and they bring in flowers, big basket arrangements, and set them on the proscenium like on an opening night—and I’m sitting in the box, in an evening gown with open shoulders; Tolya used to say I had Bryullov shoulders and it was a sin ever to hide them, they were a national treasure…” (Daryna remembers her mom’s bright yellow dress, also, yes, with a portrait collar—her high neck, hair done up; the dress had lasted until she met Uncle Volodya, who must have also decided that such shoulders shouldn’t go to waste—Mom must’ve worn that dress for at least ten years, not much room for new clothes in eighty rubles a month with a teenage daughter.) “and I’d lie there like that, and dream, and dream, all so nice, like I’m putting a spell on myself—until I fall asleep. All the while knowing perfectly well, crystal clear,” Olga Fedorivna chuckles again, as if confessing to some childhood mischief, “that I’m making it all up, that it’s not there and won’t ever be—but it still feels better. Like a sort of drug.”

  “Daydreaming,” Daryna squeezes out, trying to make it sound considered (all diagnoses always sound considered, even the deadly ones). “It’s a term in psychology.”

  “Really?” Olga Fedorivna responds absentmindedly. The fact that a secret game she’d invented for herself and never told a soul in thirty years (One wonders, what does she talk about with her current husband?) has apparently been classified, named, and filed in the corresponding drawer with a label on the front, fails to impress her.

  Generally speaking, Olga Fedorivna has little patience for generalizations, an instinctive distrust of them whether they are scientific terms or political concepts—she doesn’t hear them, doesn’t remember them, still doesn’t know the difference between liberalism and democracy or what a civil society is—they’re all men’s games for her, only relevant to her own life inasmuch as they can one day ruin it.

  It occurs to Daryna that she’s inherited from her mother much more than she’s used to thinking she has. Her ability to play movies, too, it would seem—only Daryna’s movies have always been played for a wide release, always with the question of how to transfer them to the screen and show others, and her mother’s were produced for an audience of one.

  Now that’s a show she’d love to make: Wouldn’t it be something to capture on film all those fantasies people spin inside their minds to help them survive? Daydreaming on screen—television of the future! A great project, one has to admit, especially for a retired anchorwoman. Well, now that she’s been retired (No, after she has retired herself; let’s be clear about that!), she’ll have plenty of opportunity to dream up, without any constraints, like her mother once did, as many wonderful, sleep-inducing projects as she pleases, never worrying about bringing them to life. She’ll be the creator of her own private virtual reality, protected from everyone’s dirty hands. Clean ones too, unfortunately. A magnifi-cent prospect—might as well go hang herself right now. Really, not that different from getting on the needle.

  Still, something in what she’s just heard gnaws at Daryna, something’s stuck, like a fish bone between the teeth, and she stubbornly keeps pushing her tongue there—to pry it out.

  “Daydreaming can be dreaming while awake. Or dreaming with one’s eyes open. Dreaming in a conscious state.”

  “Of course it’s conscious, that’s what I’m telling you,” confirms Olga Fedorivna, as if she’s surprised that her daughter hasn’t taken her words on faith and needs to have something translated from somewhere else as further proof, while she, the mother, has already told her everything essential. “It’s not like hallucinations or something, God forbid!” (Oh yes, Daryna recognizes this, too; it’s their family legacy, the fear in their blood: it only takes one certified nutcase in the family, with a firmly affixed label—never mind that’s it’s fake—to keep them forever spooked, seeing the menacing shadow of insanity at every step. The “acute paranoid psychopathy” label they’d affixed to her father may not have implied any hallucinations, but “having obsessive ideas” was certainly enough for a diagnosis; and the kind of ideas considered obsessive were the ones you wouldn’t give up, even with such persuasive entreaties as a blow to the head on a dark stairwell.) “It was just me, thinking up this beautiful, beautiful fairytale for myself, just like the ones I used to tell you before bed when you were little. And I got so used to it sometimes, even at work during the day, I’d catch myself thinking that something really nice was waiting for me at home that night—the way it had been with Tolya.”

  Oh, so that’s the way it had been with Tolya. Daryna knows well this joy of a day brightened through, in every detail, by the anticipation of a night of lovemaking—only for some reason her mother’s naïve confession (which instantly opens the door to a whole pressing mass of other far-reaching speculations about her sexual life, with Uncle Volodya included, and her mother obviously doesn’t know how much she’s just revealed about herself, more than in the whole twenty years of their diplomatic negotiations) instead of moving her, reverberates in Daryna as a dull pain: an echo of her old filial revolt, perhaps, from which she emerged armed with an unassailable youthful certainty that she would never, under any circumstances, let any man dominate her, or maybe a vast, accumulated sympathy for her mother then and pity for her now, all at once.

  Daryna’s always known that she was a love child, and, as she got old
er, in her own relationships with men stumbled upon just such pieces of direct evidence, loosened up from the depths of her childhood memories, that her parents had been very happy together. For decades, those childhood impressions lay preserved inside her, waiting for the searchlight of adult experience to bring them out of the dark: here’s their family, coming home from a walk, and Dad lets Mom go ahead of him on the stairs, remaining to stand, with the little Daryna, below, his head thrown back, looking up, and then rushes, laughing, to catch up with Mom, jumping over two steps each time, and they tussle and giggle somewhere up there, on the next floor, forgetting in that moment about her completely. The way Adrian loves chasing her up the stairs now. Though it’s Sergiy to whom she owes this discovery; he was the first to confess he couldn’t help himself when her watched her move from behind (back then, before she knew men, she received this information with acute curiosity, and instantly recalled the expression on her father’s face when he stood on the landing with his head tossed back).

  It took her until about second grade to wrap her mind around the notion that Mom and Dad at one point actually met each other as complete strangers, who may not have met at all, and then she wouldn’t be here—and then she set to deposing them with a prosecutor’s persistence about exactly how they met. You could say it was her first interview, and she remained quite unhappy with it as with all her interviews before today (yesterday, yesterday!). She was after nothing other than a ready-made story that would have shown conclusively that Mom and Dad did not meet by accident at all, that it couldn’t have been otherwise, and that they’d fallen in love at first sight and for all time. And Mom and Dad, like a pair of high-school punks, stole the initiative and took the game in their own direction, incomprehensible for an eight-year-old. They goofed, shot, outdrawing each other, completely irrelevant, as they seemed to her, details, like snowballs, interrupted each other gleefully, mocking. And you said… —No, it was you who said… —Pish, I’d never. Who d’you think you are?—Yeah, right, you just keep saying that after you couldn’t take your eyes off of me! Mom giggled like a girl who got a note from a boy in class—something she had no, in little Darynka’s furious opinion, mommy right to do. Exactly as Aidy loves recasting their first meeting in humorous terms, loves improvising, in jest, new treatments for the same plot—how he barged into her studio, and she hissed at him like a cat, but her legs, hey, he took good stock of those legs right there and then, and resolved he mustn’t let them slip by!—and she giggles exactly the way her mom did, and tosses snowballs back at him. Now she knows what a bottomless source of renewal it is for every love to return to its origins, to the beginning, and how all this play reaffirms in you the sense of having triumphed over life (because you can only play with what’s yours, yours alone, what belongs to you and what no one can take!).

  Now she’s sorry she was such an inept interviewer back then. That in her demands for a story she failed to remember the details—only retained a general vague image, like in a snow globe: her parents are young; they’re laughing; and their faces, back then, half-buried in the snowdrifts of time, are like a source of light inside the glass.

  “Why are you quiet?” her mother asks, across the span of thirty years.

  Why? Because that love’s gone, and nothing’s left. Unless, of course, you count her, Daryna Goshchynska. (Who was it that just recently addressed her by patronymic, and with a kind of suggestive emphasis, too?) Daryna Anatoliivna Goshchynska, a retired television journalist, not quite forty years of age, who is languishing in bed at eleven a.m. like a log, with cheeks wet with tears, and has nowhere to go—not exactly a great, when you think about it, contribution to humankind. It is foolish to think that children set something right somewhere, do some sort of justice, supply the crowning achievement, or a purpose for anything. Love has no purpose beyond itself—every love has its own life and its own biography; it is a separate creature.

  Once upon a time there had been a love in this world, Olya and Tolya—“Otollya” as they used to sign postcards to friends—had been and then stopped being. Just stopped, for technical reasons—in conjunction with one signatory’s departure. And that’s it? Just like that? You leave life, disappear from the screen, and that’s all it takes for your love to vanish, too? The love that had buoyed you up for years?

  She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t know how to ask her mother: What did she do with her love? Did she archive it somewhere inside, tying the strings into a dead knot? Or, did she switch its tracks like Kyiv’s streetcar drivers used to do back in the in the seventies—by hand, with an iron hook—and set to finish loving Uncle Volodya with the same underlived, interrupted love that was so cruelly mangled halfway? Was it really possible that it was the same love that still went on for her? Because all that savage energy of the soul that is called love—the one that can cut you down with the force of a direct blow when you’re dusting the desk on which he used to unroll his blueprints, or when you find in a drawer an old scarf that still holds his smell, or simply anywhere, for no visible reason—cuts you down, the tidal wave of it knocks you off your feet and all you can do is fall where you stood and howl like a beast without words: Where is he? Why is he gone?—all this energy cannot possibly just disappear, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

  When she was young, Daryna did not think about these things, of course; back then, her only desire was to escape as soon as possible from her crippled family, which couldn’t do better than to hatch Uncle Volodya and his moronic medical jokes—one big taunt like a fart into navy sweatpants. And without any of that “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively” that once caused her departed father so much trouble. Unlike Hamlet, she acted, for being only nineteen, rather decisively. (Told herself as soon as she spotted Sergiy—this one!—and when, the following night, he, inflamed by her hurried, eager availability—take me, I’m right here!—drilled into her, thrown onto the sand, with his unexpectedly hard and hot member, she couldn’t help herself, even though she’d squeezed her eyes shut like she was at the dentist’s—so as not to see the instruments—and yelped with pain. Poor Sergiy all but got a stutter from the shock of this being her first time, enough to traumatize the boy for life. She was lucky it turned out okay—Sergiy was very moved, stroked her hair, and whispered “my baby” to her, and that’s when she burst into tears, burying her face in his gray, as she clearly remembers, T-shirt, into his chest, because after her father this was the first man’s hand that had stroked her hair.)

  Hamlet, to be totally frank, had a much easier time being decisive. After all, his father died a king, and the son had all the right to shove the two portraits into his mother’s face and point out: this had been your husband, and this is your husband, and tut at you, dear Mother. What assets did she, Daryna, have, except perhaps these memories of her early childhood, still warmed with love, elusive and tingling like a dream you can’t remember in the morning but that makes you ache with the sense of irreparable loss? And then, right away, the next frame: the yellow knobby bones with the feet sticking out from under the robe, the permanent, inextinguishable smell of urine around the home where you couldn’t invite any of your friends. (In the first months after the asylum, Father could only talk with great effort; his speech later returned, more or less, but the unpleasant strain in it remained until the end, like a person who’s crawling above an abyss and is afraid to lose his footing.) Nothing regal, nothing heroic at all—only the long, inescapable shame of a repressed teenager. And in this version of the play, Gertrude then tried, in vain, to make her daughter understand how much Uncle Volodya sacrificed when he left Father to die in the hospital and spared no painkillers for him: usually such patients were discharged, so they wouldn’t spoil the hospital’s stats with another exitus letalis. A perfectly fraternal act on her stepfather’s part, nothing like Claudius’s: all men of the same woman are in a way brothers (oh no, not all, she refuses to imagine R. and Aidy have anything in common; Aidy’s done nothing to deserve that!).
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  “Mom, what if I asked you what Dad and Uncle Volodya have in common?”

  “He’s kind,” Olga Fedorivna responds instantly, as if she’d been waiting for this question for twenty years. “I’ve always told you—make sure a man’s kind, that’s the most important thing. Seriozha was kind. And Adrian, too.”

  For the first time this morning Daryna can’t stifle a smile: the ease with which her mom ties into the same circle her own and her daughter’s men—the ones she knows—makes her forget, for an instant, the bottomless bog her boss had tried to drag her into last night. Images of her life’s kind men spin before her like in the Hutsul arkan dance—they’re all brothers; they all must be introduced to each other, so they all become friends. The circle flickers gathering speed, faster, faster, as it blends into a single being, a collected radiance of a single gaze that glows with tenderness—this lasts no more than an instant, and the vision disintegrates, but, how strange; she feels ever so slightly better, consoled. Somehow, her mother has managed to break her out of her gloom, alleviate the fear of loneliness. No, she won’t bend over for them, hell no. What her boss offered last night was more horrible than solitary confinement. Much more.

  * * *

  Once, in Polissya, Daryna got to see a quag—an unnaturally, acidly bright, motionless pool the color of light pickle mold in the middle of a marsh. From the distance, its utter stillness awed her: a blind, piercingly green eye of death. She remembers her sudden, intense urge to throw something into it—anything, just to break the spell of that uncanny stillness, to see, with her own eyes what it was like, what an end like that looked like, when the darkness sucks you in and there’s nothing to grasp on to; the mere thought of it makes everything inside go numb with terror, but still it lures, beckons to peek in.