The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  He had his story taken from him, taken away. It was done with his consent, with his own hands, and there isn’t anyone to blame now. Maybe he really would have died if he hadn’t agreed—it was those who didn’t agree that died. And those who lived now have no tale to tell us because they’d already told it once. And, unfortunately, not to us.

  They should be telling us another story now—a story of taken stories. The story of their defeat, but no one wants to do that. Vlada, too, probably never heard from her mother about that episode with Baldy—and would Nina Ustýmivna even recall it herself? People often forget the evil they’ve done unto others, but retain forever the antipathy toward those they’ve wronged—reasons for this are found and fit into the puzzle later, retroactively. Vlada may have heard Baldy’s name at home, spoken with a bit of scorn, with a magnanimous chuckle, as one commonly speaks of ambitious losers, and may have thought him one. And somehow I find this unfair and hurtful—as if they’d cheated her, my Vlada. As if everyone, all of them, cheated her and were cheating her her entire life, since she was little—all of them driving her, together, into the ditch.

  I am tired. Good Lord, this day’s got the best of me. Was it only this morning that I was getting ready to meet with Vadym, rehearsed in my mind the prosecutorial speech I’d prepared about the girls’ show, made sure to choose the right jacket and turtleneck—the same ones I wore to see him in his apartment on Tarasivska, the day Vlada died, counting on the outfit triggering Vadym’s Pavlovian reflexes, engaging subconscious machinery of memory and guilt? What an idiot!—like men even notice what a woman is wearing unless they intend to rip her clothes off.

  God… it’s too much for one day—feels like this morning was at least a week ago. And the intoxication’s passed, blew clean out, and I’m cold. I’ve got this chilly shiver running down my back—I might be getting sick; it’s flu season, and there’s this draft from the doors…. And, please, there’s no need to be yelling at me—I’m already tired beyond belief, and can’t possibly muster the effort to react to any stimuli, except maybe if he picked up a knife and went ahead and sliced me into halves like the circus woman in the box, only I doubt I’d come back together again—Aidy, can you do something about this? Why won’t he stop yelling at me?

  And look how red he’s turned—crimson, poor thing, the whole bald spot flushed like a jug of cherry liquor split under his skin. God forbid he “took a conceit,” as Aidy likes to say, meaning, had a stroke…. Only separate phrases break through to my awareness. (“Who’s the injured party here? What, was anyone injured because of me? No, no one can say that; go look as long as you want, you won’t find anyone!”) His monologue refuses to coalesce in my mind; it splits and shatters. Plus he is yelling, and I have trouble with yelling even when I’m fully awake—yelling in falsetto now—no longer a baritone—with hysterical girly modulations, which are also somehow fake, as if he’d memorized in advance the right way of screaming his indignity when he is suspected of collaborating with the KGB. Or maybe, in all those years of leading a double life, he lost the ability to speak spontaneously altogether—just forgot how you do it, say what you think, without prepared notes in your mind? (“It was me they threw out on the street like a dog, and it’s your Ninél’s fault! Hers and hers alone! You can’t ever deny it!”)

  Aidy coos something soothing to him, as he’s done the whole evening—now would be a good time for me to make amends, curtsy peaceably, maybe even apologize, say I didn’t mean anything like that at all, tell them I want to go home now—stop, enough, enough of these memories, the ripping open of old wounds, of this eternal Ukrainian self-destruction. Aidy slaps his hands on the table like he’s slamming all the demons I’ve summoned back into the boards—enough, time to step out; it’s stuffy here, the ventilation’s crap, and it stinks like dirty socks—he can be squeamish, my Aidy, only it’s not socks, I think, detached as if in someone else’s mind: it’s the stench of decomposing souls. I’ve been reeling them in all day today, drawing them in like a thread on a spool—first Vadym, now this character, and if this is the new journalistic investigation that I’ve assigned myself to, I don’t want to touch it with an ten-foot pole.

  And that’s when Baldy bursts open with a new, no longer false, undeniably honest sound: hurried, the last blubbering argument from the shut-off tap, the triumphant cry of well-aged hatred. “But God sees it! He sees it all! Walked over dead bodies she did, and dead bodies she got—or did she think it would always turn out her way? Thought she’d have her bed of roses—first with her husband, and once she drove him to the grave, then with the daughter she’d make into a Big Artist? Vladusya the genius. Yeah right—stamped out a bunch of those folksy paste-jobs of hers, Ms. Cookie-Cutter. Sure they played in Europe, what doesn’t? It’s been a desert for God knows how long. The Brits give out their Turners for shit you wouldn’t believe, and everyone here’s just happy to play along—fancy that, a world-famous artist, drives a sports car! Not very far she didn’t! Now her old matinka gets what she deserved!”

  The next sound is that of a chair falling. It’s from under me—and I, on my feet, loom over the defiled table, like Lenin over a pulpit in an old Soviet movie, and yell, choking, at the lenses of those Beria glasses, something barely sentient and incredibly pitiful, something that begins with “How dare you” and instantly makes me want to disappear from the face of the earth. And when Aidy emerges from the ensuing brouhaha, from the snowstorm of the waiters’ white shirts and the dense smatter of faces that have turned to look at me, when he rises to his full monumental height and waves his arms like a conductor over the orchestra pit where the band’s gotten drunk and is now banging out a loud cacophony, I cede my pulpit to him and flee in a most undignified manner. Tripping and painfully slamming my hip into a corner of a chair or a table, blindly ripping my coat off the hook—out, through the doors with their desperate squeal of hinges, into the rancid, soggy, oily gloom the streetlamps are swimming in, down the stairs, coughing and slipping, to the thump of my own boots—and only on the sidewalk, where I stop, do I notice the napkin clenched in my hand: When did I snatch it, and what for, I wonder—was I going to throw it into Baldy’s face?

  Night, snowdrifts, streetlamps fringed with mist, clouds above Prorizna running fast, so fast, unwinding into streaks of smoke above the bluish glow from the moon. When I was little, Mom and Dad used to take me for sled rides at nights—they’d hitch themselves to the sled and run down the long winter street, and one time I fell out of the sled on a turn and just lay there, in a snowdrift, a well-padded bundle. In the minute or two it took my parents to realize what had happened, the whole universe came crashing at me, alone—like an astronaut out of his ship, in open space. I remember the sky above—a star-dotted blackness—and the incomprehensible, cosmic silence, the likes of which I never heard again. When my parents returned, noisy and laughing, I already knew the world was different from what they were trying to make me believe it was. That a person was alone in it. And that to cry—something I remember they were very surprised I didn’t do—was futile. There was no one to cry to under this sky.

  I don’t know how much time has passed—maybe a minute or two—when the quick scrunch of snow under a familiar step calls to me from behind my back—slush-slush, the thick vapor of breath, the dear smell of a tobacco-scented coat, aftershave, warmth, skin—home. Keys jingle. “Baby, don’t—here, get in the car before you catch a cold on top of everything, come on.”

  And only now—after I turn to him, bury my face in his chest, in his dear smell, clawing through the soft fabric of his scarf, between the lapels of his cashmere coat, pressing, burrowing into his whole self, as if digging deeper into the ground to escape an artillery attack—do I finally let all my tears run at once, all of them, accumulated, it seems, over twenty years—from that day when I cried into Sergiy’s chest, the first man to whom I opened up. I let loose with a single blast, as if the cork were knocked out of me with one terrible, hiccupped sob, and the weeping th
at had sat all day in my throat like barking, breaks out. Like dogs barking.

  Mama, Mommy. Aidy, Aidy. Don’t let me go.

  * * *

  “You asleep already?”

  “Uhm-hm…”

  “You’re kind of different with me now, you know?”

  “Uhm-hm?”

  “And when you enter me… inside… it’s somehow different… I don’t wait for the climax anymore, you know? It’s just, you’re inside me, and that’s it. Like in a dream. Or like breathing.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “You silly. Good, of course… it’s good. Go back to sleep.”

  “Come to me.”

  “What, again?”

  “Yep. Again and always. What were you even thinking putting this shirt on?”

  “Listen, do you believe that? What he said about Vlada’s mom?”

  “That she ratted him out? I think so—why else would one hate someone else’s wife like she was family?”

  “No, not that. The part about Vlada’s father—that she killed him? Do you believe something like that could happen?”

  “Your feet are still cold, you little goose. Here, let me. All kinds of things happen.”

  “Have you ever been with a woman like that? One who is killing you, and you know it—day after day?”

  “I forgot. I forgot everything that was before. You’ve got the wrong guy to interview.”

  “What do you mean, wrong guy? Who else am I gonna ask now?”

  “You’re funny. I want you. All the time. Can you believe that?”

  “No, listen… earlier in the day even, when I left Vadym’s place, I was thinking the same thing about Vlada. That she had no other way out, with Vadym. That it was like a tunnel, you know, where you can only move forward. What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? No wonder they didn’t much care for widows in the old days… or widowers, either.”

  “Mm-m.”

  “No, I mean it. The one who survives, he or she, sort of, didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip. Let death have them, you know?”

  “Hush. Don’t think about that. You and I will live happily ever after and die on the same day.”

  “Really? You promise?”

  “Cross my heart. Worse comes to worst, we’ll blow ourselves up with one grenade.”

  “Why did you say that? About the grenade?”

  “How should I know? I was asleep, remember?”

  “You poor thing!”

  “Yep. You’re the one who roused me—and instead of getting down to business, took me to task about who I killed.”

  “I love you. Here, put your paw right here, uh-huh, that’s good… I know you didn’t kill anybody. Honest.”

  “Cross your heart? You believe me?”

  “I do believe you, Aidy.”

  “Let’s sleep then.”

  Room 6. Adrian’s Last Dream

  And we will dream the same dream. The same dream, my love—only we will be watching it from different ends.

  Where are you, Adrian? I cannot see you. I’m here. Don’t be afraid. Give me your hand.

  At night, the wind howled and wailed in the vents, mournful like the clamor of the lost souls it drove through the dark, host after weeping host. The giant firs at the entrance to the bunker flailed their boughs, clawing at the air, and for a moment Adrian thought dozens of hands were pushing the branches apart, splitting and cracking their way through the forest, and heard in the howling of the wind a distant echo of foreign voices calling to each other and the baying of dogs. But it was only the wind—lem wind, as the Lemko people from beyond the Curzon Line called it.

  They—who had wandered the entire summer in a wasted, deserted land, among the villages burned by the Poles, where only feral cats, remembering people, ran out to greet them—believed that air could hold echoes of voices that had once rung through it, and insisted that the wind often brought, mixed with the smell of the charred homes, the clamor of a great human mass—children crying, cattle bellowing, engines running—all those unmistakable sounds of a twenty-four-hour deportation, which in reality happened already two months ago.

  Every time, Adrian patiently explained to them that it was not physically possible for a sound to exist without its source and even used a stick to draw on the ground the range of fading fluctuations. But, of late, he himself experienced such auditory hallucinations more and more often: his nerves were wearing thin, which was bad because ahead of him loomed the entire unbroken winter like a wall that could not be scaled—only dug under, crawled beneath by the patient marking off of days, one at a time, on the calendar in the bunker.

  “I’ll craze!” he thought suddenly, in a flash—and got angry at the thought, jumping onto the trunk of a fallen spruce, slipping under it, hugging it with his arms and legs, delighting without shame in the joy of his body roused from immobility, each muscle awake (pure sport, a child’s game—he could’ve just as easily walked on top of the log, sweeping over his tracks with a handful of fir brush). His body responded, engaged, instantly recalling its long-forgotten skills, the deeply buried spider-like four-handedness of a mountaineer, which a long time ago, in a different life, had carried him over mountain gorges on Plast climbing trips; this was the same body, limber and lithe, and it was a blast of true delight to move it ahead like this, bear-fashion, under the log, trying not to disturb the feathery cap of wet snow on top. Instantly sweaty, warmed from inside with a healthy heat, dry as a fire’s, he crawled to the spot where he was to leap down into a quick, nonfreezing stream—the “warm-run”—pulled himself astraddle the log and drew a triumphant breath, looking over the whole wooded gulch, lit by the snow’s glow in the predawn dusk.

  And that’s when it struck him, sharp as the proverbial stick in the eye, the thing they’d feared: the snow had betrayed them. The first, fleeting, phantom November snow—as soon as the wind changed and breathed warm from the south—didn’t hold, it sank and opened above their underground bunker, a thawed-out window of dark earth, clear like a circle of breath on cold glass.

  Even from where he sat, he could see the rusting of last year’s leaves in it. Aw, for the love of tripe!

  The wind “spilled” them, undid all their conspiracy. Even a child would know that under that patch of earth people lived and food cooked—on a tiny gas flame that smoldered for three hours to make a pot of gruel. Rot it. This bunker was never any good. He didn’t like it from the moment he saw it: not dug deep enough, shoddy (loose earth kept falling from the ceiling with a rustling noise, over and over, grating on their already ragged nerves) and fatally tight for the five of them. But at the moment they had no other choice but to stay and wait. And now he was walking away to the city, leaving his comrades to the mercy of fate—and the southern wind. By noon it should thaw more, speckle other open spaces with the same ice-hole blackness, and mask their hiding place anew—the air he drew in was humid, only the wind had to hold. Nothing to be done now—dawn was near. He had to go. Over the same wet snow.

  He freed one hand from his overcoat’s sleeve and with a quick motion, like his mother used to do whenever he had to travel away from home at night, made the sign of the cross over the bank, which seemed to have held its breath in the predawn stillness, with the black stain against the white.

  And plunged into the creek.

  “De-vil’s winds! Accur-sed winds!” That’s how Geltsia recited the poem for them—she knew myriad poems by heart, while he had forgotten everything unnecessary that he had ever learned and could not stop marveling at her, making her recite again and again, so he could exist in the presence of her voice, whose sound in the darkness packed thick enough to cut with a knife the breath of four lice-ridden men (and she—She!—had to breathe their miasma), spilled like cascades of silk, seemed to glow like silver. And that’s Tychyna? Really? The same one who now writes odes to Stalin and the kolkhozes?

  Ever since his Gymnasium years he loved no poet more
than Ólzhych, his “To the Unknown Soldier”—that was about him: his life. But Ólzhych had been tortured to death in a German concentration camp by, they said, none other than Willie Wirzieng himself, whom Adrian was supposed to liquidate back in Lviv in ’43. Twice he tried, and both times something had stood in his way—that Gestapo man must’ve sold his soul to the Devil; the Huzuls say about such people that they have “help”… Adrian buried Ólzhych for himself then, together with the guilt about the failed missions; nothing in the world could make him recite one of his poems now. Even to Her. No, especially to Her.

  De-vil’s winds. At least it’s safer to travel in this wind: his steps cannot be heard in the woods. Although it’s not just his steps that cannot be heard—those other ones, if they came, wouldn’t be heard either.

  He once had the alias Beast—a long time ago, back with the Germans. Later, when Beast got on the GB wanted list, he had to change his alias, but, thank God, did not lose Beast’s sense of danger, which had kept him alive through the years in the underground and now whimpered inside him like a squashed pup: the wind carried the smell of a raid.

  But after all, he thought, trying to reassure himself, wading in the free water of the warm-run (he would walk another two hundred yards, just to be sure, as far from the bunker as possible, so he wouldn’t betray its location with a stray footprint)—after all, this was no surprise: this raid covered the entire district and had been going on for more than a week already; it was the reason why they had to halt in the woods in this opportune makeshift bunker—still a ways from the village where they planned to winter.