The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Last she heard from him was an e-card sent in late 2002, from some total armpit, Manitoba, where in winter the temperatures fall, like in Siberia, to twenty below, and the air’s so dry your lips crack to blood. What the hell was he doing there, in that desert? What was he wasting his life on? He was a natural—no one could draw people out like he did—he’d talk to a post and have it spilling its guts before you knew it. He had that effect on everyone, even the president, or, actually, back then just a candidate. (A remarkable show it was: that redneck never caught on that he was being stripped to his dirty laundry in view of the entire country and went all soft, started bragging about his poor postwar childhood and how back in ’55, dressed in his only threadbare suit coat from his native village, he rode in a coal car to take the institute entrance exams because he had no money to pay for a passenger ticket—and he shone, glowed with the sated pride of the victor who can now show the world a whole warehouse of suits in place of that old coat he’d ruined, and fine suits indeed!)

  Vasyl’ko was the first to locate this little spring that powered, as it eventually turned out, the whole wind-up mechanism of our so-called elites—their deep, lusty thirst for revenge for all those Soviet-time humiliations, and to hell with the cost: back then, in the nineties, no one could yet see that the only thing these people desired, as they took their seats in our TV sets with an increasing sense of entitlement, was to climb Kyiv’s hills (knocking a few floors off the old buildings—so they don’t block their view of St. Sophia) and throw, right there on Yaroslav’s grave, the triumphant feast of new nomads. Vasyl’ko wasn’t after some deep social analysis, and never forced any conclusions upon his audiences—he just knew how to listen; really, it couldn’t be simpler; how to listen to what people were telling him and hear the incredible volumes they said about themselves, without noticing, when someone listened to them the way Vasyl’ko did. He could repeat any conversation, even one overheard by chance, almost word for word, and now everyone’s just yakking away over each other’s heads and nobody hears anybody.

  The new crop—they’re totally checked out, blank, like they were born with the earbuds in. Nastya the intern, while her guest is talking, keeps herself entertained by rehearsing the different angles of her supermodel smile, waiting for him to finish until it’s her turn to voice the next question. While Vasyl’ko, a communication genius, who even in a ninety-second vox pop could present any random passerby as a one-in-a-million precious soul, is observing Canadian sparrows through his binoculars somewhere at the end of the world. That e-card he sent sported a bright-yellow-chested creature with a tuxedo-black tail, and Vasyl’ko wrote that it was a new hobby of his: bird-watching. Bird frigging watching.

  And such stories were myriad; they were legion; they were everywhere you looked. People emigrated, disappeared, dropped off the radar; old phone numbers when she called, thinking—he’s the one I’d love to bring in for the new show!—were answered by strange voices. No, so-and-so had sold the apartment, and didn’t leave a forwarding address—as if an invisible tornado swept through their ranks, leaving only a few of them who had once been called the first echelon of the Ukrainian journalism, those who still remembered Vadyk Boiko and the first show he wrote and hosted on the only Ukrainian channel that was on the air back then. The whole country watched it, streets on his nights empty like after a flood, and then one winter day in 1992, Vadyk, very happy, bragged to a colleague about a pouch of papers he was about to publicize: “I’ve got ’em Commies right here. I’m gonna drop a bomb on them!” And forty minutes later a bomb exploded in his apartment, where they later found his burned-alive body plastered to the floor. The authorities announced a few theories that all boiled down to the victim having burned all by himself, and without anyone’s help whatsoever; they closed the case, and no one would bring up Vadym Boiko’s name on the air after that, as if he’d never existed.

  Maybe if we had spent the rest of the nineties speaking and shouting about him, if we had kept reminding each other about him, if we’d gathered for an annual wake and aired it live every winter, all for one, in solidarity, on every channel while that was still possible, maybe then it would’ve taken them longer to take care of us? And the thing is, we all went so quietly, without a peep or a fight, and the Gongadze case doesn’t count: by the time Giya’s head (literally) rolled at the close of our wild nineties, the bitter and magnificent age of aspiration and hope, of skyrocketing careers and buried projects, of daily self-congratulatory banquets where we went to graze with a laugh at first—here, give me today’s wire; let’s see who’s got a release for dinner tonight—and later more and more selectively—ugh, I won’t go there, those bastards never have booze (The boozeless bastards were the last surviving holdouts of the Helsinki group who were still talking, mostly to themselves, about the lustration problem, but who cared about them anymore?)—by that time, although we still picked and chose our clients and put on superior airs negotiating the price of whitewashing some rotten company’s reputation, we were already tame as guinea pigs—we’d gotten used to beer at Eric’s, and jazz jams at 44, to flying to Antalya and Hurghada on vacation. We had already partaken of designer boutiques and our first discount cards. We were well-fed, well-groomed guinea pigs, with glossy fur—those of us who managed to find our way to the flood of money currents—we had no instinct for danger, and that, perhaps, was the main mark of our generation: bare as bones, armed with nothing but our parents’ blessing of go-ahead-kiddo-and-you’ll-have-the-good-life, we stuck our heads into the trap happily and with an easy heart, even with a sense of our own relevance; we took pride in our glossy furs, in being paid, and being paid well—for being talented and insightful, of course, what else?—and then it was too late. We went along, thinking, in our naïveté, that we were shaping the new television landscape—we measured our ratings, thought up new shows, and, like children, felt unbelievably cool when we said “in Ukrainian here for the first time”—and what we really did was dance on blood, and that unavenged, unreprised blood ate at us from inside, insidious as lead-laced water.

  “What came of us, oh, what came of us?” squealed Irochka Bilozir on every channel—another burnt-out star of the nineties, relegated soon after to the faceless infantry ranks of synthetic Russian pop; her helpless squealing, as it later turned out, was the true chorus of that era, only no one heard it when they should have been listening: Something wrong was really “coming” of us, but so inconspicuously, day by day, drop by drop, how could anyone notice?

  People were changing—they didn’t just drop off the radar, out of the country, out of the profession, lost to the margins, to the Internet, to small-town newspapers that no one ever reads, to radio frequencies barely buzzing along on foreign grants and dying almost before you could find them on the dial—even those who stayed on the radar were no longer the same. Something broke in them, their internal resistance disappeared: where you could, not so long ago, a mere two, three, five years ago, find a solid, good shoulder to lean on, things suddenly slipped and lost shape—softly, viscously, with eyes shifting and hiding in the hangover swell of the eyelids. “For free, Daryna, only your mom kisses you; let’s make a deal: you show me what you’ve got and I’ll show you mine”—and the especially principled editors put five-fold markup on the especially libelous dirt on their own pals and would not budge a cent, all in the name of their sacred friendship. “Don’t take it personally, bro,” they’d say afterward to the victim, “how’d it be if we ran an interview with you?”—and the victims agreed.

  The multiplying personnel gaps were then filled, like a karst cave with water, with the watery-green teenagers, who had absolutely no clue, wanted to know even less, and were only too eager to take on the most blatantly partisan political product. Oil barons enthroned their mistresses in the so-called Lifestyle Interest sector, morality and culture included, and the hordes of serf souls delivered the shows for their silicone-lipped, porn-shells turnkey, so all the ladies had to do was roll in and read p
repared text at the camera. And the same guys who once, in the early nineties, broke their backs to raise, like proverbial barns, the most resonant media projects (which later sank, quietly, noiselessly, into the pile of rubbish, and smashed crippled shadows crawled out from under the ruins for a long time afterward, limping to reception buffets where they could eat for two days in advance), the guys who in 1990 lugged bundles of the first independent Ukrainian newspapers from Lithuanian printers and took the police clubs to the kidneys for their efforts—these same guys, saddled with premature beer bellies and bald spots, went to earn their living as whipping boys for parliamentarians—as press secretaries to various political roughnecks who were liable to bid them fetch their mineral water in thunderously unprintable language right in front of the press corps. And the whipping boys quickly learned to affect permanent holy-fool grins that were supposed to evince their complete philosophical invincibility against the whole vanity of vanities of this world, full-contact Buddhism as Antosha used to say, listening askance, like whores to an inappropriately chatty client, whenever Goshchynska got on her soapbox about her heroes—as if calculating, in their minds, what kind of money was paid for the box, and how much of it they could hope to snatch for themselves.

  At some point all professional topics just expired, suddenly and at once; people stopped talking seriously about what they did, because no one did anything seriously anymore except make money. At some point—What did it look like? When did it come?—very suddenly, they all stopped caring, as if the once-released virus of the latent disease that had been eating away at them from inside finally did its job, and the only thing left to do was to record the rigor mortis. And not even rigor but a viscous, boggy mass that sucked you in everywhere you turned, and the sense at yet another dinner that the people mobbing the tables with their plates and glasses, slurping in unison, clattering tablewares and getting instantly drunk (many never sobering up again) were not living and—no sense denying—yet rather successful in this life, these corpses, decomposed into the already-runny, porridge-like consistency: reach out to touch them with your hand and the goo would swallow your whole arm. This vision came to Daryna more than once or twice—a hot, scorching thrust at the nape, the cerebellum, like a blast from a champagne cork (or a gunshot—straight at the nape, into the pituitary, muzzle pressed into the hollow between the hemispheres).

  Once, soon after Vlada’s funeral, it came again—at a restaurant, at some celebratory occasion, at the point when the tables are stripped down to the soiled dinnerware, sweating waiters stumble splashing dessert onto the parquet floors, and the conversations lose coherence, scattering into a chaos of solo monologues, a lady of Balzacian age resolved to speak about Vlada and kept squawking, peacock-like, like whizzing a saw through a log, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t believe that she is dead!” And one of the men, totally wasted, grunted peaceably back at her, a deep echo rung from a bell, “Who of us is alive?” Daryna remembered the cold shiver and, at the same time, the scorch of fire that burst into her nape like a bullet, and instantly sobered her up. Pushed her, like a cork, to the surface of the general chaotic noise, as if lifting her up to the ceiling from where, as she looked disengaged at the stirred-up maelstrom of people and leftovers, she thought with superstitious horror that it’s true; he’s right—there are no living souls here—this is the underworld.

  Vlada—how did she know this? And this angle, this point of view from the ceiling? She had a painting, in the Secrets cycle, titled After the Blast. It was a view from above, and in the middle, a splattered circle of light like a multistrand crystal chandelier spun fast on its hook, shattered into animation-sliced circles like ripples spreading on water. Vlada was always fighting stasis; she used to say the Old Masters’ work already contained both animation and cinematography, and, in comparison to them, we gained in technique and lost in imagination: we’ve grown lazy and forgotten that one can communicate everything, absolutely everything by painterly means alone, even sound, as Picasso did in Guernica, the noise of the air raid brought across with dimmed lights and swinging lightbulbs. And that’s what Vlada also achieved to a degree in this painting: Her blazing circle of light was like a multilayered wheel knocked off the chariot of the terrible Advertisement God, spun with raging, blend-into-a-single-blot speed; and beneath, a field the color of rot was peppered with a dense black confetti of tiny human shapes like remnants of a defeated army—each with a logoed shopping bag (the bags were shrunken photographs glued onto the canvas). Hugo Boss, MaxMara, Steilmann, Brioni—a brand-name spill.

  The critics commented acerbically that Matusevych painted “an explosion at a shopping mall” and should demand remuneration from all those brands for advertising them. But in fact she had painted a war—the one we were losing every day, without ever knowing it, as we sped, helter-skelter, across that rusty rotting field. And as it turned out, it was only our bodies that kept moving. We were running in the underworld. We’d been blown to smithereens somewhere along the way. We didn’t know there were mines, no one had told us: we kept running, panting, clutching our brand names to our chests, our apartments, our cell phones and automobiles—and still thought we were alive, because no one had told us we were already dead.

  “Too many deaths,” Vlada had said in Daryna’s dream—and really, it’s like someone had knocked the bottom off the fairytale barrel, and a legion of deaths had broken free. Something happened to death itself at the century’s turn, a transformation that had gone unnoticed for too long: like a new note from the orchestra that at first seems an accidental false noise and then grows to redefine the whole symphony, a new form of death swelled and took root—death without cause. Up until then it was commonly believed that people died of illness, of old age, in accidents, or at someone’s hand—that a matter as grave as the cutting short of a life must always have cause and death had been quite accommodating, finding new pretexts for itself every time. But at the turn of the century it suddenly quit playing by the rules, lost its mind, and among the old, still comprehensible deaths squatted with growing impunity this new death—a death deranged.

  Young men were killed in their sleep by their hearts, which had never ached and then suddenly stopped; young women drowned silently in shallow bathtubs, under the shrouds of still-warm bubbles; a person tripped, fell on a sidewalk—and did not get up again. As if all it took were a single casual breath, a single careless tap of death’s fingers—and several lively, busy little shapes with logoed bags in their hands fell with phantom ease, like in a computer game. People did not notice that they ceased being shocked by the news of a classmate one hadn’t seen for several years no longer alive, a colleague one could finally pay back for that old loan long been buried. “Darn!” Yurko once griped. “He’d promised a tutor for my kid!” Death stopped being an event—people reacted the same as if the deceased had moved out of the country, making sure to erase the old addresses from their contact lists; death no longer demanded an explanation. Somehow, all at once, the tethers that held one to life grew loose—rotten threads that could pull apart any moment. As if in all the crowds that flowed through the streets, that flooded offices and cafés, supermarkets and stadiums, airports and subways, there was no longer, in all those people together, enough total life to require any kind of effort to pry a physically healthy person out of it. On the contrary, it took an effort to hang on to life. And to remain alive was a feat achieved by only a few.

  You prepared us for nothing! Daryna wants to yell at her mother. You, the slave generation, submissive daydreamers with eyes wide open—what did you give us? What the hell is it good for, all your survival experience, your lifelong struggle in lines for a piece of meat, for imported boots and an efficiency flat with a separate room for your children, if the only thing with which you managed to arm us is your faith that the page had been turned—stomped out, forgotten, and now your children will have the good life, because we can earn as much as we want wherever we want, and no one will start a KGB file on any of
us just for speaking Ukrainian? You couldn’t imagine a better world and so obediently buried your dead for it, without a shred of dignity, except maybe the tears you swallowed somewhere in a dark corner at night, and you did not even teach us to take pride in our dead—you silently acquiesced to the very thing that was demanded of you: to admit that they lost because they perished, and the winners were the ones who had stayed alive, with apartments, dachas, and Sochi—the successful ones, as we say, we who’d gotten this virus from you—to despise those who’d been left behind. You gave us nothing else, nothing at all, nothing but the pride in our own bank accounts and our own faces on TV—you launched us into life, light as puffballs, and we blackened and burst as soon as our youthful vigor began to flag; you loaded us with emptiness, and now we’re passing it on to the next generation.

  All this could have been screamed blindly, with the inspiration of hatred that, once ruptured, shoots far in every direction, like an abscess that’d been swelling with pus for years: It’s you, you; it’s all your fault! And what a relief that would have been—to find, finally, an entity of which one could demand the account! But Daryna is silent. She resists the urge to leap upon this slippery surface and speed along with a surfer’s breathtaking ease—dear Lord, how many times has she witnessed scenes just like that between mothers and daughters? What terrible things were confided to her by the same old Irka Mocherniuk, who always said that her mother had castrated her father, and had screamed at her mother, at the peak of her own marital problems, that their entire generation should’ve been sterilized like they did in China so they wouldn’t have had any children? And Irka’s mother called Daryna and cried on the phone telling her all this, begging her to “influence” her Irochka, as if Daryna and Irochka still went to school together and sat at one desk. But Daryna herself is resolutely incapable of forcing anything like that out of her throat: it gets stuck. Unlike her friends, she no longer feels entitled to judge as she had when she was nineteen. And not because it’s been twenty years since then—there are no statutes of limitations between parents and children. It’s because, in her case—as she realizes very clearly—it would be unfair to judge her parents: they did give her something.