The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  All of a sudden, Vadym starts laughing—with his entire body at once. His monumental bust in its Armani suit coat shudders above the table like Etna, with subterranean jolts; his face contorts pathetically, as if he were chopping onions, and looks so comical that I, too, can’t help smiling—making both of us look rather stupid. Vadym nods to a long-legged, long-necked, and black-clad young woman who has appeared, like a miniature giraffe, out of thin air next to our table. “Ice cream, Mashenka.”

  From his mouth, this comes out as warmly as “sausage” did a bit earlier. Mashenka, before disappearing, shoots me, from the height of her triangular face—a Cubist’s dream—a professionally manufactured smile, a mirror image of my own momentary grin, and, at the same time, a sharp, wary look of the territory’s mistress who is about to leave an untrustworthy guest alone with her male: this is mine, don’t touch it. Wow. Did he really find the time to put his stakes down here, too? She’s pretty stylish, Mashenka is; she could’ve been a model… wow again. What about the massaging Svetochka now?

  “At least you still have taste,” I tell Vadym vindictively, following his little black giraffe with my eyes as she leaves the room.

  He pretends he didn’t hear, and pours me more wine. He does stop laughing, though. Only breathes heavier and louder than before. Exercise, you need to exercise more, Vadym—what kind of shape are you in, breathing like that at your age? While Vlada was alive, he and I always used to be a little caustic with each other, but back then I wrote it off to the natural jealousy every man feels toward his wife’s girlfriend, an owner’s reflex—so now I keep pushing. “You own this restaurant, don’t you?”

  “What if I do?” Vadym replies, looking slyly around the brightly lit, black-lacquer cave and squinting like a cat that’s trying to get you to pet him. “Do you like it?”

  Now, this is a look I remember exactly where I’ve seen before—that’s what my boss looked like when he waited for me to praise him at his housewarming, signaling at me with his eyes across a giant room full of people: applaud me now, go ahead, applaud, confirm to me that it hasn’t been all in vain—give my marathon swim through shit its long overdue justification.

  So is this what Vadym’s brought me here for—to show off his new acquisition, to get my approval—you’re on the right path, comrade? Now I finally catch on to something I should’ve caught on to long ago (for the smart woman Vadym believes me to be, I can sometimes be incredibly daft): for him, I have replaced Vlada in the bar-setter’s role—if I approve, she would have approved, too. And then everything’s okay, and Vadym’s life is back in tiptop shape. That’s what he wants; that’s what he is trying to extract from me. He doesn’t miss a beat, this guy. He’s a bull!

  Do you have to be a toothless old hag to stop falling into the same trap—to stop mixing up strength and resilience in men? In every war there is but one law: the strong die and the resilient survive. There’s no special accomplishment in that, no credit to be given them; it’s the genetic programming they were born with—to survive: like the lizard that grows back its tail, or the earthworm that regenerates its lost segments. Vadym, who so recently appeared to be utterly annihilated by Vlada’s death, has put himself back together like the damaged Terminator—by disassembling his dead wife into the various critical functions she performed for him and redistributing them to other women: N.U., Katrusya, several Svetochkas and Mashenkas, to each her own, like in Buchenwald, and only the niche of the bar-setter (“How am I going to live now? She set the bar for me…”), the one to whom you bring your life like homework to be graded, to receive, in return, a clear conscience and untroubled sleep—this extraordinarily important niche in every Ukrainian man’s life has been, for Vadym, unfilled, and he must be feeling a constant discomfort emanating from that spot. No one will tell him the truth now—he’s got too much money for that. But I—I’m always there. I’m Vlada’s closest friend, and I want nothing from him; I’m the perfect fit. And should I be inclined to blurt out something contrarian—well, that’s exactly why he’s given me, completely for free, his very valuable piece of advice: keep quiet.

  Now I am supposed to pay him back for this favor, tit for tat, a fair trade! I am supposed to applaud his new acquisition without interrogating him about where he found the dough for the new glam digs (especially right now, when the powers that be are taxing everything that moves to fund their anti-Yushchenko campaign, which is beginning to look like an actual war and not just a publicity war, and Vadym’s ostensibly part of the opposition, if I’m not mistaken, so what fairy godmother waved her wand and conjured this restaurant?). I should praise the interior design and Mashenka and whatever else, whip up a bunch of compliments and ensure for him the aforementioned clear conscience and untroubled sleep. And I should not, God forbid, ask what the hell he wants from this fucking restaurant, and why, once he had money to spare, he didn’t put it—toward his dead woman’s memory, as she had dreamed of doing (“when I have real money, Daryna…”)—into any of the squalid pig-farm barns our museums have become: the National right here, for one, where to this day they can’t give what survived of the Boichuk School the space it deserves; or the Hanenki, out of which you could, if you fancied, lift a Velázquez or a Perugino as easily as canvases out of a crashed car—oh, the list goes on and on! That’s what Vlada would have told him. But I won’t because I don’t have the right to. And he knows that. He knows, and waits, and squints with pleasure in advance—like a cat about to be scratched behind the ear by the mouse he’s caught. How can you not love the guy?

  “You, Vadym, are an amazing piece of work.”

  He instantly takes this for the compliment he feels due, swallows said compliment like a morsel off his plate—gulp!—and brightens up so sweetly that only a complete bitch wouldn’t feel disarmed. “You shouldn’t have turned down the dinner! My chef has three international diplomas, beat a French guy at a contest in Venice last year.”

  Dare I hope he is not about to take me to view those diplomas?

  “As I said, I’ve eaten already.”

  “And now you’re missing out; you can be sure about that. You have to join me for dessert, at least.”

  “Uhu, as my granny used to say, ‘you haven’t eaten an ox until someone saw you do it.’”

  “Mh-hm,” Vadym agrees, either because he doesn’t get it or because he didn’t quite hear me. “Our grandparents lived through some real tough times, what can you say…?”

  And that’s why now we take such pride in what we eat, I think but do not say out loud—1933, 1947—it’s all stowed away somewhere inside us, coded into our cell memory, and the children and grandchildren, delirious with the sudden abundance of the nineties are now busy growing new segments, like the earthworms—catching up for everything uneaten in the generations before them. Only it’s as if there’s been an error in the genetic code, a mutation that’s been selecting for the most resilient, the best at chewing and digesting, and it is now they who fill our city with the petrified refuse of their gigantic intestines: restaurants, bistros, taverns, pubs, diners, and snack bars multiply at every step like mushrooms after the rain, only dentist’s office marquees can compete with the eateries in their intrusive density, and if one were to stroll around Kyiv with nothing particular to do (only who now can go strolling like that, with nothing to do), one might very well think that people in this city do nothing but eat, eat—and have their teeth sharpened so they can eat some more.

  R., too, took great pleasure in talking about the delicacies he ate in Hong Kong, and the ones in the Emirates, and others in New York, in some stratospheric establishment where they don’t even give you a menu you just order whatever comes to mind, and don’t ask about the price. “And do they really just get you whatever you ask for?” I asked him. “They certainly do,” R. assured me with dignity. “What if it’s an endangered species? Komodo dragon brains? Siberian tiger steak? Or something more environmentally friendly, perhaps—charcuterie of donor kidneys, chopped out of some
Albanians or Mongolians no one bothers to count?” R. laughed. And when I asked him, up front, how many starving people could be fed for the price of that one dinner, he took offense and called it bigotry. Although he, unlike Vadym, wasn’t even a bit heavy.

  This is who they are, these serious people—all those who, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, rushed to rake in never-before-seen capitals, first as cash knitted into their undershorts, and later as transfers to offshore accounts—this is who they are: the descendants of a pogrom. The kind of pogrom modern history couldn’t fathom, and which, for that very reason, it failed to see or acknowledge when it happened in its own time, simply pressed the delete button. And now it is too late, they have arrived—the ones who, as Vadym said, make up the best pogrom squads. They have arrived and will take revenge on the new century for the mounds of deleted corpses from the past, spawning similarly deleted mounds of new corpses, and never suspecting that they themselves constitute a mutation—a tool of revenge. Flagellum Dei, the scourge of God (where did I just hear this phrase?). They have magnificent teeth, brand new titanium implants, and are insatiable like the iron locusts of the Apocalypse: they have come to eat, and they will eat until they burst—until their titanium teeth grind everything in their path into dust.

  Suddenly I feel so tired, as if all the air had been let out of me. As if he’d sucked me dry, this Vadym—although it is not at all clear how he could’ve managed that. A growing ache buzzes at the back of my head; I try to hold it straight. The black-giraffe Mashenka brings ice cream in silver flutes—his own ice cream, made in house, Vadym continues to brag, from that same wonder chef.

  “Taste it, you won’t regret it. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?”

  Rich, thick-enough-to-cut-with-a-knife ice cream, yellowish like cream, does have an unusual taste—like the taste of country cooking: something filling, dense, unrefined and fragrant, from an era before plastics. One helping of this is enough to keep you full for a day. Obediently, I say this to Vadym. He nods like a professor happy with a student’s answer on an exam.

  “Now this, Daryna,” he suddenly says didactically, “is the reality.”

  “What—the ice cream?”

  “And the ice cream, too.” He is no longer smiling. “All this,” he looks over his cave again, “and many other things. The ice cream, by the way, is all-natural, made with real milk. No chemical dyes, no GMOs. You know what gee-em-Os are?”

  “I’ve seen that abbreviation before…”

  “Genetically modified organisms. The ones that are winning a growing share of the world’s food market and our national market as well. Soy beans, potatoes with scorpion genes…”

  “Good Lord, why scorpion?”

  “So the bugs won’t eat them. And they don’t. But we do, all of Polyssya has been planted over with those potatoes. Western importers are dumping all this shit on us with no restrictions or controls whatsoever; another generation—and we’ll have the same problems with obesity as Americans do today. And in a few more generations on such a diet we might very well start growing tails, or, say, hooves, no one can tell for sure which in advance.”

  “Come on, that’s straight out of Hollywood!”

  “Yes!” Vadym responds, inexplicably encouraged. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You were so full of fire and brimstone when you were talking about reality and how one doesn’t kid around with it, you almost had me. You’re good! You nailed it, as if from the screen. But what is it—this reality? To listen to you, it’s a… a…” he hesitates for an instant, uncertain outside his regular vocabulary, “a fetish. As if reality existed separately, all by itself.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?”

  “For some village grandma—it may very well indeed. But you, of all people, ought to realize that reality is manufactured by people. And you can’t draw the boundary anymore between what you call reality and what’s been manufactured,” he slows down again, looking for words: he is not used to abstractions, “realities that have been manufactured by people.”

  “Simulacra?”

  Damn that silver tongue of mine! This is not a word Vadym knows—and for a few seconds he studies me with the unblinking antipathy of a redneck whose first instinct is to suspect treachery every time he runs into something unknown. (This momentary clash—as if he and I had rammed into each other at full tilt—makes me instantly dizzy; the world, shaken, lurches into motion like sloshing water, and a queer sense of someone else’s invisible presence flickers by, a near presence, somewhere by my side, where I don’t dare turn my suddenly aching head.)

  “It’s postmodern theory,” I hear my own voice say, also as if from somewhere beside me. “Media, advertising, the Internet—they are simulacra. Phantom phenomena that do not bear a direct relationship to reality, but together constitute a parallel reality, the so-called hyperreality. A famous theory—Baudrillard wrote about it. He was French.”

  “See!” hearing that he, by himself, came to the same conclusions as a famous Frenchman, Vadym regains magnanimity. “That’s what I’m telling you. Just then, when you didn’t believe me, you said, Hollywood, and that’s perfectly normal, that’s a normal reaction. It’s harder now to believe the truth than something made up. Any truth is the result of so many complicated moves and connections, with so many of those moves hidden, that a regular guy could never dream of making any sense of it. And something made up, a fiction—that’s what they call a slam dunk, every time. And the more information there is out there, the more regular people will favor simple solutions.”

  “Occam’s razor?”

  “That’s it. Tell the public that Kuchma ordered a journalist killed because the man had criticized him—and everyone will believe it. Because that’s what dictatorship always looks like in movies. But if you tell them it was a special operation of several intelligence services, one whose geopolitical significance for the region could be compared to that of the Balkan war—and people’ll look at you like you’re nuts.”

  “So was it really an intelligence operation?”

  “Doesn’t matter!” Vadym cuts me off, lips holding back a smile that threatens to slither out like a worm, and that same sensation, of a rocked vestibular apparatus, undercuts me again: a splash, a giant mudslide, the solid ground under my feet slipping apart like fissured ice.

  He is bewitching me. He is bedeviling me, like a professional seducer, so that I won’t know what to believe—this must be how he gets all the women: by robbing them, step by step, of their footing, turning the ground beneath their feet into shifting gray sand like in that dream Vlada had, and once he has, all that’s left for his bewildered victim to do is to throw herself onto his broad chest: he is a wall of a man, the solitary rock among a fog of phantoms! A powerful erotic move, to be sure, but where, damn it, have I met a man exactly like this before (not R., R. was simpler)—with the same calmly assaulting manner of persuading and subjecting others, even with the same cunning glint of insanity in his eye? (A patient in a faded grayish gown whom I saw looking at me, a fifteen-year-old, in the yard of the Dnipropetrovsk loony bin, grinning as if he knew everything about me—all the worst, the stuff that would never in a million years even occur to Mom who went twaddling on about something pathetic; neither would it occur to her that a visit to my father could evoke in me any feelings different from her own, and that I, boiling with tears of rage, stood there thinking that my mother was a fool and my father had abandoned me, had betrayed me for the sake of his own, terrible grown-up business that was more important to him than I was, and had become this helpless desiccated old man with murky eyes. At that moment, I hated them both, with all the fervor of teenage resentment, and that’s when it hit me, head on, blinding me—the look of that other character who grinned as if he had read my mind, and I went cold—and only later saw what it was he held in his hand tucked under the loose hem of his robe.)

  “Take another example,” Vadym pours out more of his sand. “The White House announced that Iraq had weapons o
f mass destruction—and everyone believed it. And never mind that they still haven’t found those weapons—and, most likely, won’t. They’ll be morons, of course, if they don’t; if it were the Russians, they would’ve planted some right away, and then no one would ever dig up what actually happened. There you have your reality. And you say—bad governors. No, my dear, the effectiveness of a government must be judged according to the tasks that the government sets for itself. The stuff that goes out to the public—that’s not an indicator, you can’t pay attention to that.”

  He lied to her, I suddenly realize. He lied to Vlada. I don’t know how, I don’t know what about, but I know it as clearly as if the right switch finally flipped in my mind and the light came on: he lied. And was perfectly effective at it—Vlada lived with this simulacrum for three years and did not notice it. Only close to the end did she begin to suspect something—all her works from the last year of her life were full of a growing premonition of a catastrophe. Her best works, the ones that triggered such a fit of anger in Aidy’s art-worm (I still blush at the recollection of that ugly scene). And not in him alone—few in Ukraine appreciated Vlada’s Secrets, something about the series transgressed the boundaries of the acceptable.