The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  I can almost hear Lolly’s voice right now, telling me sensibly—like a cool, tender hand on my feverish head: Why are you making such a big deal out of it? And I am, my golden girl (because you are my golden girl, have been, are, and will be, no matter what lies ahead of us), making a big deal of it, and I don’t even know why. And I can even tell myself, plain and simple (don’t know if I could ever tell you, though) if I wanted to have something to be really proud of, I should have nailed myself, damn it, like Jesus Christ to the cross, to our doomed thermionic generator seven years ago. I should have lived on bread and water, quit smoking, told Tatyana to go where the sun don’t shine with her constant whining about how she’s got nothing to wear (I hope she finally caught herself some fat dickhead after we split; she was still pretty enough for that), bitten off a piece of some foreign grant for the lab, worked eighty hours a week like a bulldozer, and forgotten about the rest of the world—but finished the project! Like that. Then I would’ve shown myself what you showed by resigning from your channel: resistance of the material. I would know then that I couldn’t be bent, that I’m capable of standing my ground. Instead, I split.

  I could’ve been a scientist—a real scientist and not just another PhD in physics. But I’ve already missed the age of brilliant ideas—those all happen before thirty. Bohr developed the model of the atom before he was twenty-eight, Einstein published “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” at twenty-six, Bell invented the telephone at twenty-nine. It’s a good age: you’re starting to know what you’re talking about, but you aren’t scared yet because you don’t believe you can lose. A constant upward ascent. I used it up on building my business. My best years, right here—in this office, in these catalogs. In this damn log: two Russian copper coins in good condition, fetch up to twenty-five Euros a piece at Russian auctions, if, of course, one gets lucky. And why shouldn’t I—I’m a lucky motherfucker, ain’t I?

  What I’ve never told Lolly is that as a second-year student I caught the eye of Strutynsky himself, God rest his soul—and that was the same as falling into the hands of a living god. When the old man shuffled into the lecture hall, always in his dust- and chalk-powdered suit, everything froze as if a basilisk had just entered. We, young bucks, had no clue back then that we bored this legend, with his scornfully drooping eyelids, to tears: the distance that separated us could only be measured in light years, if at all. And Strutynsky wasn’t a teacher, and did not know how, or feel inclined, to begin to breach that distance. What he did know how to do—magnificently—was to spot, through those leaden eyelids, like a mythical Viy, those in the massive class before him who had the potential of breaching that distance themselves one day, who could rev their thought to the speed required.

  There were three of us like that, that year—Gotsik, Zahar, and myself—and that’s who he taught, collecting quizzes from the rest of the class and giving them to us to grade. It was in his seminars that I first experienced that dazzling exultation that comes from the energy of a thought set free—and it’s never come back as powerfully since. The brilliance, the clarity when chaos begins to make sense under the quickening assault of your thought and finally—poof!—turns into the slim crystal of a formula—there’s nothing else like it. A complete loss of self and a sense of omnipotence at once—you step out on a break reeling like you’re drunk and feel sweat running down between your shoulder blades. Skydiving’s got nothing on it.

  So I do know how it felt to them—Einstein, Bohr, all those dudes who could. The whole thing is in not letting your assault slacken. In knowing how to keep it up. For years, if need be, that’s the thing. For years.

  Instead, I split.

  It’s been a long time since I dreamt of complete, perfect solutions—and I used to, they came for a while even after I left the lab—as if my unemployed thought, evicted from its home, moved to the basement of my mind and kept stubbornly running her Singer sewing machine there: night after night formulas lit up on my screen (I still remember that cold metallic glow from below!), appeared, as if spelled out by an invisible hand, bloomed like seaweed, like underwater flowers, one time a whole scheme came together in space as if made out of snowflakes, like the fairytale about the Snow Queen; and in my dream I somehow knew that the space was four-dimensional, but didn’t remember the proof itself in the morning, only retained a general impression—of spellbinding, freezing beauty. Or maybe I did remember but didn’t write it down—because what would I’ve done with it? The day then dropped into my mind like a dirty sponge and erased everything it didn’t need without a trace. Fifteen years ago Strutynsky used to say I had a unique cognitive apparatus—I interrupted him with a question in the middle of a lecture and the old bloodsucker’s eyes flashed like laser-beams: “Vatamanyuk,” he said, fixing me with an enamored stare that made me blush, “you have a unique cognitive apparatus.” The glory of that moment lasted me until I graduated. It sputtered for a long time, that apparatus—spinning empty, like an engine without fuel. Fading oscillation, a faint SOS signal, dying, dying… I doubt it could be revved again to cosmic speeds now.

  Gotsik’s now a postdoc somewhere in Minnesota; Zahar’s top management at a German trade firm, develops their strategy. Or maybe Danish, I don’t remember. No physicist came of him, that’s a fact. Nothing’s ever come of anyone doing science in their free time. Science is not your folk art, be so kind to observe.

  Maybe I could get a stand-up routine going: Old whore crying over her lost chastity? In the subway, with that ocarina accompaniment?

  To tell myself, straight, what I’ll never have the guts to tell her about myself: Adrian Vatamanyuk, you’re a loser. Yes, you’re only thirty-four, and you’ve accomplished certain things in this life, you eat your bread with butter and even caviar, have a business and like it (love it, in fact), own an apartment in Kyiv—one of Europe’s most expensive cities, let’s not forget, and a small capital—have friends, and finally, the most important thing, the love of your life. Your defeat is looking quite successful. Indeed, so successful that no one, except you, can see it.

  It is nested so deep inside me that it’s long ceased being a foreign body. It’s become part of me.

  I didn’t break down. No, no one broke me. I got scared. And my breaking point was truly the day I caught myself looking for a cigarette butt I could pick up and put in my pocket. I’d seen our engineers finishing someone else’s before—the guys would “disinfect” them by running the filter ends through a match flame. Half of our class had fled into business already; rumor had it some of the faculty had turned to small “shuttle trade”; someone had seen Assistant Professor Rybachuk at the flea market with spare parts and burnt-out lightbulbs (which people bought to screw in at work, after taking the good ones from work home for themselves)—although not in Kyiv itself but in Irpin: there was a “professors’ flea market” there for those who still would’ve been ashamed to have anyone they knew, let alone a student of theirs, come by their spread. It was only later that our professorate caught on to the notion that grades, exams, and diplomas were also commodities for which one could charge students money without having to stand out in the cold or even to leave the building; and back in the nineties the country still roiled in a violent chemical reaction whose outcomes carried some to the top and sank others to the bottom.

  There, at the bottom, in the increasingly visible deposit were accumulated the paupers, the hoboes with dollies and plaid oilskin bags the size of suitcases, people with no age, with dead eyes and faces that looked like they’d been sewn from linen crumpled damp and never ironed out. A few years ago, at the door to Pantagruel, I was assaulted, with demented roaring and open arms, by one such half-decomposed Lazarus fresh out of the grave; with horror, I recognized him to be Sashko Krasnokutsky from my class—we’d solemnly declared ourselves milk brothers once, after we’d found out we’d both slept with the same ever-willing lab tech from the radio physics department, Ilonka-the-Barbie.

  “We’d sucked at one tit!” S
ashko had roared happily at me then, and his roar hadn’t changed since his student days at all, still sounded like a bike without a muffler, only it wasn’t so easy to tell that it was, in fact, Sashko, that was doing the roaring: he was missing front teeth, and kept slurping up his spit. There was something caricaturish about our run-in at the restaurant, from which I’d just rolled out all fat and glossy like the bronze cat they had by the door—stuffed with a good dinner and a half bottle of Beaujolais Villages—and here was this toothless monster like something dug out of a trash heap slapping me on the shoulders with the choking roar, fit for the loony bin, “Huw’sh it shakin, bud!” This could have looked like a prank, like a skit based on the well-known joke about the two old classmates:

  “And how’s your life?”

  “I haven’t eaten in three days!”

  “Hey, man, that’s no good; you gotta make yourself do it!”

  Only a purposely bad skit, crude and grotesque, as life always looks when it aims to imitate folklore and other literature. Plus there was one “but,” one departure from the text: Sashko wasn’t about to complain to me about not having eaten for three days, not at all. In fact, he seemed to be completely oblivious to the dramatic contrast between us and went on babbling as obliviously and cheerfully as if it were he and not I who’d just finished some young Beaujolais, and about three bottles instead of half.

  From his lisping I more or less gathered the poor slob played the stock market, and played himself clear out of his home, the oldest story in the world. Basically—went after wool and came back shorn. But the horrifying thing was that Sashko wasn’t pretending or bullshitting when he gabbled about it in a casual, could-happen-to-anyone tone, chuckling now and then as if this were something amusing and unimportant—and next stammered enthusiastically with his toothless mouth about his “exshellent proshpects.” Never mind that the only prospect he could’ve been hoping for was a good nursing home: he really could not see himself from outside. Apparently, at some point on the descending slope of his life, he shut his eyes and checked out, refusing to watch the horror of it once and for all, and probably saw a completely different version of himself when he looked in the mirror—the one who used to walk around with his pockets stuffed full of condoms and banged Ilonka-the-Barbie, who eventually married her department head and went with him to the Sorbonne.

  I gave him a twenty on some face-saving pretext, even though he didn’t ask for money, and he was so happy that I thought he’d latch on to me like a tick after that, whine for my telephone number and so on, but he said goodbye quickly with the air of a man late for a business meeting and trotted off through the park. A little later when I drove down Zolotovoritska, I saw him duck into a bar on the corner, saw the tense expression of his back (exactly that: the expression of his back), and that’s when it finally dawned on me where he lit out for in such a rush: the bar had gambling machines.

  It was as if someone had shown me an alternative version of my own life. What could have happened to me if I hadn’t one day, watching for a cigarette stub underfoot, seen myself from outside and been horrified: Holy shit, is it that easy? Snap, and you’re on the trash heap and several generations’ worth of survival experience—of those packed off into camps, stripped of their property as kulaks, deported, the heroes of Grandpa’s tales about Karlag, all their long-forgotten skills, “I saw me a stub with a line of red lipstick and broke from the ranks after it”—defrosting in you as they’d been taken out of the freezer?

  I remember the exact spot where it hit me—on Shevchenko Boulevard, not far from the University subway station. Like something shook me out of a coma, and I looked around, stunned, slowly recognizing the place. In moments like this, your mind, for some reason, always fixes the place like a postcard: it’s late fall, slush, drizzle, dim streetlights; street stands line the Botanic Garden’s fence, and the garden’s dark presence looms below, the massed domes of St. Volodymyr cathedral in the brown sky above. It was as if I were seeing it all at once, from above—the gigantic, steep Kyiv slope down which I was being carried like a parachutist; I felt this downward motion in my body as it sometimes happens in dreams—down, into the dark, scraping against the spikes of the fence and the naked branches of the Botanic Garden.

  All young and brilliant, the winner of every academic competition and Strutynsky’s own pet, I was plummeting, going down without any resistance, pulled into the last residual sputtering of a stopped machine, only this time the machine was real. My research lab was in agony; our entire system of research institutes was in agony; all our applied and fundamental physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, that had spent the previous half-century feeding and clothing themselves off the accumulation of increasingly more perfect means of destruction—and now that only the Russians, of all Soviet heirs, had the privilege of killing anyone—had come to a grinding halt. So our jackals feasted on the scraps from the Russian’s table—falling over each other to pawn off deathly junk on whatever Asian/African fiefs were buying, so they could beat one another to buying live giraffes for their dachas, dialing the fuck out on all our science for decades to come.

  What solar batteries, you moron!—I almost groaned out loud, right there in the street, seeing, as clear as on a graph, the remaining trajectory of my motion: lower and lower, down into the deep-water murk, with a thin line of tiny bubbles, into despair, the hopeless peddling-piddling of whatever came my way (I’d already sold two of Grandpa’s cigarette cases and eaten through the get). Everything inside me rebelled, every little cell squealed, “No!” And my entire fucking unique cognitive apparatus that had been hitched to the thermionic generator hammered feverishly, revving out of inertia, and dragged me in the opposite direction—up, clinging to every alternative I hadn’t bothered to consider before. I called my cigarette-case guys that same night.

  I didn’t slam any doors as Lolly did. I, when you think about it, didn’t quit anything abruptly, the smartass that I am—like all Galicians, Igor would say (he’s one of those who’d binged on the Brothers Gadiukin band in their day and came to believe, once and forever, that Galicians constitute a special breed of people). Officially, I can always go back; officially I’m still a PhD candidate in the Semiconductors Department. Weekend scientist, that’s me. People think you can do that. That it’s like an office manager’s job: you come in, turn on your computer, work however long, shut it all down, and walk away—free as a bird. Some clients, when they learn I’m a scientist, and a techie to boot, look at me with new respect: that’s an extra layer of cool. Shit that’s cool. In moments like that, I feel like a male prostitute who’s killed his patron and is now peddling her things. No one except me knows that I had to bury a part of myself—forever; that’s it, lights out, it’s all gone. That I live with my own corpse. As do all my peers, actually, only for some of them it’s worse. For most of them, to be precise.

  I took Sashko Krasnokutsky, who lunged at me out of the darkness and then fell back into it, to be a fortuitous—that’s how selfish I am!—sign from Providence. A visual aid illustrating what it was that horrified me that day on Shevchenko Boulevard—and that I did well getting horrified. Sashko’s arc led down, mine—exponentially, up: E to the nth degree. That’s how it seemed to me then.

  For a while, it even soothed the constantly stinging pain of dull dissatisfaction with myself. I recognized this pain in others, too, especially from the way people drank, the way they celebrated a contract, the way they worked so hard to prove to themselves that “life is good” that they ended up face down in their salads. Hell no, I told myself: two cognacs or three glasses of dry wine, and not a drop more. Plus the swimming pool, plus the gym. I was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the time—a big cheese, like that heron among the birds. The only thing I missed—my dreams: I didn’t remember them anymore. Nothing to do with alcohol—just, a part of me went cold like an unused room in a house.

  And unused rooms, as is only to be expected, are where ghosts move in.

&nbs
p; “Adrian Ambrozich, yu hev a meetin et haf past faiv.”

  Yulichka emerges at the door, barely covered below the navel by her new maxi-belt. Where’d she get the idea that she’s got legs fit to be peeled to the root like that?

  Out, you moron!—I barely keep from barking, but the pure love of truth keeps my mouth shut: my secretary is no moron. Instead, I do something I’d never in a million years expect from myself: I get up, go right up to her (her perfume’s rather nice), bend down, and run my hand over the entire length of her satiny-black-hosed, calvary-bowed thighs—she could press them together and you’d still fit your head between her knees—bottom up, all the way, to her crack, to her very pubic bone sheathed in her micro-skirt, and squeeze it so hard that my brave Yulichka hisses. Hisses but doesn’t give in, what a trooper, take one for the team. That’s what I thought—a G-string. And it doesn’t cut in?