The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  A pause. Loud breathing. TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  “It explodes. Or cracks.”

  His face—I feel it throb, pulse inside me like a second heart—gathers again to the focal point of his nose, as if distorted by a bent mirror.

  “It’s the same with people, too.”

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  “That’s what I call reality. That which lies beyond the limit of pliability. The part that we can’t measure because we can’t see it—or only five percent of it perhaps…”

  “Five even?” he shoots back, ironically: numbers have a soothing effect on him; with numbers he’s safe, back on his own territory.

  “Five percent is the statistical deviation… in accidents, the X factor. They say there are always five percent more survivors than the theory of probability would’ve predicted.”

  The face across the table from me remains impassive, only blinks as if against the wind. How did she have sex with him—was she on top? He must be so heavy, unwieldy, like a strongbox full of dynamite.

  “Watch out, Vadym. They’ll leave you a royal mess, those quacks.”

  And, suddenly and to my own surprise, I realize instantly that this is true. That things won’t go their way. Won’t go their way at all, ever, no matter what illusions they peddle. This comes as an inexplicable certainty, unshakable, clarion-clear, as if all I had to do was speak it, and here it is, summoned, like the “Sesame” that opens a cave—it came and parted the solid rock before me; it broke the spell, and now it’s clear that things cannot be otherwise—that whatever malfeasance Vadym intended toward me is nothing but stuffy, creepy smoke, the miasma of a mind unhinged, moon-blindness that obscures everything unyielding, all that can’t be bought or eaten. How could these people, blinkered, and with nothing but the sewage of streaming dollars under their paws, possibly hope to bring down an entire country full of mysterious, unquantifiable life? That’s just a glitch of the matrix in their ailing heads, a mental affliction—like hell they’ll get it!

  The man across the table from me, by contrast, has no certainty of this kind, on either side of the scales, and I can see it: he is left alone at the mercy of his own mind, submerged, as if into his own miasma, into his own calculations that he is so afraid to get wrong, his snappy faculties busily sniffing over the warning he’s just received, weighing whether it merits a revision of his well-composed, multilevel equation, or if it can be brushed off, deleted, in which case he would also have to delete me as an authoritative source right along with it, and that’s more difficult. I am still a professional and, once I’ve been offered a certain amount of money, I can’t be crossed off the books just like that. They are held hostage by their own money and the hyperreality they have created; these people are physically incapable of admitting that something they paid for, or were about to pay for, could turn out to have no value whatsoever, because this would mean they’d been had, and that, by definition, can never happen to gods.

  The man across the table from me is throwing sparks, at this moment, like a faulty telegraph wire—a short-circuit, a cognitive dissonance: he must accept one of two things—either he’s just fucked up royally with me, or he is looking at the prospect of fucking up even more royally in the game I just refused to play—and that’s it, a dead-end; this dilemma has no solution within the framework of his system.

  And now I remember—as if a new picture finally breaks, easy and free, independent, onto the surface of the one I persist in keeping steady before me with a superhuman effort of my throbbing brain—a picture that has spent the entire evening fighting its torturous way up through my long-suffering mind: a déjà vu, the recognition of a once-seen, completely different face—sharp, eagle-nosed, and thin-lipped, protruding like a wolf’s snout with close-set eyes—but it doesn’t matter that the face is different, because now I know where I saw it before. It emerges in my memory now, a giant dark mass, like a whale surfacing, bringing with it the image that I’ve been groping for, blindly, for so long—that dream of mine, the one dreamt two weeks ago, on that wild night—the night that would not end, as if Aidy and I lived several lifetimes in that single night, on the verge between dream and wakefulness; my beloved tried to run after someone, shouted that he had to kill the traitor, and I was his land, the moist, sloshing darkness that kept him afloat.

  I don’t remember how many times we made love. I was exhausted. I was plasma. I was a runny mass; he melted me completely, down to the most secret nooks and crannies. I was dying and could not die, and then it finally came, and I saw death with my own eyes and recognized it, the white flash of it that I’d known once before: a thousand searchlights aimed at me, a new sun exploding in the depths of the cosmos, the birth of a new planet. After a night like that one could go a year without sex. No wonder I hadn’t felt like any for two weeks already, that’s never happened to me before—it was as if we opened the doors to something beyond that night, and that otherworld poured into us more than we could hold, and, aside from our all-night vigil of lovemaking, all that stayed with me were fragments of our conversations when we lay, in the ebbs, spent but still in each other’s arms, and kept mumbling things, interrupting each other like drunks, desperate to scoop up and somehow hold in our words what was already seeping back behind the door. We were dreaming the same dream; the magnitude of memories is finite—the girl in a sailor suit, Aunt Lyusya with a sack of western flour, the childhood secret abandoned in the yard in Tatarka, Aidy’s notes on a pack of Davidoff cigarettes about blood in Kyiv and women who would not cease giving birth—but these were all just words, impenetrable and flat like lids, and the other dimension we had glimpsed beyond them was already hidden from us again. And although in the morning I, too, carefully wrote down all the details I managed to retain, the entirety of it had hopelessly and irrevocably disintegrated.

  But now it surfaces again, to prove that it didn’t disappear at all—it bobs up for a single, short sliver of a moment, in the fully renewed, searing sharpness of color it had that night, as if I were looking through a camera zooming swiftly in, framing the night, the woods, human figures cut out from black cardboard, set against a blood-red fire, and right there, smack in the focal point—got it!—a protruding, stern, and stiff face, like a wolf’s snout, not so much handsome as commanding with the sculpted perfection of its features, with eyes purposefully narrowed to Tatar-like slits, so you can’t even see what color they are, and someone beside me (a woman’s voice) prompts with the name Mykhailo! and in this single glimpse—because in the next instant, the ocean’s smooth surface closes back on itself, and the dark mass of the whale’s body vanishes below it—I recognize him. I recognize what I’ve known ever since that night: this is the man who caused Gela’s death—just like Vlada’s.

  This is what she wanted to tell me in that old dream of Aidy’s, my radiant girl, my radiant-eyed Gela Dovganivna—when she took Vlada’s seat at the table in the Passage. They knew, Vlada and Gela both, what I did not know: they had been cheated the same way—by loving the force that destroys life while that force pretends to be the power that rules it.

  And just as I grasp this, it’s gone. What’s left is Vadym turned the color of a beet in his sloppy sportcoat and droopy lilac tie—there he sits, chair turned sideways, holding his snifter of cognac in his hand, and breathing over it so hard you’d think he were waiting for something to hatch from it. And that’s it. And even my head—thank God—does not ache anymore, is clear as a bell now. And neither do I feel tired, not at all—although it must be bloody late by now, close to one in the morning…

  And with the lightest touch, very gently, so as not to alarm him, I push, just as he recommended, the button he was trying to buy from me—he must be vulnerable to this pressure now; he is without defenses, without his usual inch-thick armor.

  “Vadym,” I am not asking—I’m pleading; not a prosecutor—an accomplice: “Why do you think she died?”

  He startles, blinks at me, and looks down rig
ht away.

  “Don’t torture me, Daryna. I’ve racked my mind thinking about it.”

  “Were you fighting?”

  Despite what I feared, he does not bristle or go on the defensive—he is subdued like a little boy before his mom, when he knows he is in trouble. (So my warning did scare him; so he does have something to be scared of.)

  “That’s the thing… if only I’d gone out with her that day… or sent a driver at least…”

  But she didn’t let him. Maybe she didn’t even tell him where she was going. Maybe they were no longer talking as friends, were not talking to each other about anything at all—a two-level, 3,600-square-foot apartment has plenty of room to keep you from running into each other, and she left unannounced, without a “Bye, honey, be back in an hour”—just bolted through the front door, like a gunshot, and that was the last memory of herself she left him; the next time they met was in the morgue.

  “She was about to leave you, wasn’t she?”

  He looks at me with a growing alarm.

  “She told you?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  I know how it can be; I’ve been there—with Sergiy, and with other men—know what a breakup is like when it takes you a long time to find the courage to do it. I know what it’s like when you have to force yourself to drag your own body from point A to point B like a corpse, automatically putting it through the motions it has learned by rote; what it’s like to have a heavy, impenetrable cloud of thoughts hanging constantly over your head, thoughts you’ve done laps around, the same track over and over: “How could this be?” and “What do I do now?” And then you stop suddenly in the middle of the apartment as if someone had ordered you to freeze, trying to remember vacantly, what did I come here for? Things are a little better when you lie in a bathtub and the water slowly washes away the solidity of your body together with the thoughts wedged in it. And another thing you can do is go for a drive, especially outside the city, on the highway; she used to love that—she said that was her way of resting: a monotonous motion, the even ribbon of asphalt unspooling before her eyes, the soothing flicker of trees on the sides of the road, rain against the windshield, the measured back and forth of the wipers, the rain, the rain…. Of course she went alone; she wouldn’t have taken a damn driver in a million years—one would have to talk to a driver….

  I can imagine how it was. How it all happened. I don’t even need to go there, following her tracks, as Vadym did—I just know.

  And he knows that I know.

  “Don’t torture me, Daryna,” he says. From his heart. And adds, “Life goes on anyway, you know?”

  As if he weren’t the one who spent the last two hours lecturing me about how he is the one shaping that life, without inviting me to join him on mutually advantageous terms. Apparently he sees no contradiction here, no cognitive dissonance this time: he simply dives instinctively into the current that, at the moment, lifts him from the shallows with minimal losses—while keeping his controlling interest intact, of course. One can be quite certain—he’ll double-cross his FSB crew, too. And pull his money out of the scheme right in time—he will take my advice.

  When someone turns to truisms, it’s a sure sign that it’s time to wrap up. Life goes on, most certainly, who could argue with that? I look at the man across the table from me (I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. The embodied dream of an eternally rightless nation of its own, native force that would protect and defend them…) and feel my lips curl, as if in a mirror with delayed reflection, into that same meaningful smirk of the loony-bin nut: I know where I’ve seen you before. But you—you don’t know me.

  He expected absolution, and my silence unsettles him.

  “By the way,” he says, pretending he’s just now thought of it, “how are you doing money-wise—have something to live on?”

  Now it really takes all I’ve got not to laugh in his face. Bless your cotton socks, you could’ve thought of something funnier! Or is that it—he can’t?

  “Don’t worry. I do have someone to keep me.”

  Then what is it you want, you fucking bitch? his eyes all but scream, hating me. Any rejection of money, in his system of coordinates, is equivalent to blackmail, and my behavior points at some hidden threat that he absolutely has to neutralize—and without delay.

  “Not R. by chance?”

  So he knows about R., too. That’s no surprise, really, since he had contacted the channel’s management and assembled a file on me; a pile of dirt on a future partner is also part of the controlling interest package.

  “No,” I shake my head. “Not R.”

  “If you wanted, I could buy your pictures from them… the ones of you with R.” And he grins, as if he’d seen them himself.

  And if he had?

  “I don’t give a damn, Vadym.”

  The amazing thing is that I don’t, in fact, give a damn. And finding out that the new management of the channel has armed itself with the pictures that R had taken of me in various revealing poses (and didn’t he say to me back then, “Don’t be so sure!”) utterly fails to produce the effect Vadym counted on. I just don’t care—and that’s it. As if it truly weren’t me—as if I hadn’t been the one sprawled naked under the flashes, with a strap-on, smeared with sperm. You can wallpaper your whole office with those pictures if you feel like it, boys—you won’t get to me.

  “They wanted to cover their bases,” Vadym explains, not yet believing that the bullet he’s been saving for so long has missed by so much. “In case you decided to make a fuss about that Miss New TV show…”

  Aha, so my dear ol’ boss must’ve really felt compelled to hustle, bless his heart. He threw everything he had to plug the hole in his wall. I wonder what kind of story about me he intended to spin based on those pictures? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t wonder—not even a little bit. Don’t even feel like flexing my imagination in that direction.

  Instead, something completely different occurs to me—with the same dreamlike ease, as if someone else had determined my actions and all I’m supposed to do is leap off the cliff—a plunge, arms at my sides, head first like a swallow, into the dark-blue abyss below…

  “If you really want to thank me for the consult, Vadym,” I measure out a pause with just the right dose of sarcasm, “then there’s something else you can buy from them for me.”

  Happily, eagerly, he pulls his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and personally writes it down, running his stylus over the screen—he’ll do this, he promises: the materials for my unfinished film, for Diogenes’ Lantern, yes, that one. Working title—“Olena Dovgan.” He really will do this for me, I’ve no doubt—he’ll rescue Gela and all my other Dovgans from that vipers’ nest: look at him perk up, his hands suddenly moving with an unusually solicitous busyness. It’s hard for him to believe that he’ll get away from me so easily, that he can buy my silence so cheaply: I will never again speak of why Vlada died. What we both know will remain between us.

  He has no idea that it is Vlada who at this instant is buying, with his hands, my film. The film I now know how to finish, by myself, no matter how much it will cost: I know now what has been missing. And Vlada’s death, too, will be in the film—it’s the only way I can tell the truth about her. And it doesn’t matter that the man who caused her death will have a different face in the film—the face of the man, the farthest on the right in the old rebel photograph. Because aside from the factual truth, grounded in names and faces, there’s a deeper truth of the stories lived by individual people, a truth invisible to strangers, one that cannot be made up or pretended. One that lies beyond the limits of pliability.

  And, as if it had just been sitting there waiting for the right moment all this time, a cell phone rings. My cell, I hadn’t turned it off, and I already know who it is, and my facial muscles melt involuntarily into a smile while my lips squeeze out a mechanical “Excuse me” to Vadym.

  “Lolly?”

  “Aidy!
” I holler, so loudly the whole room seems to echo, as I break out from the dark underwater cave into the light of day. “Aidy, I’m here! I’m here, I’m okay! Don’t worry about me, I’m on my way out already; I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”

  “Thank God,” he exhales loudly into my ear, my love, my man, Lord, how happy I am to hear his voice! “Alright, kiddo, get on the road. I’ve got all kinds of stuff going on here…”

  Forgive Me, Adrian

  Brew us some tea, could you please,” Lolly asked.

  “Chamomile? We’ve only got chamomile left; I didn’t have a chance to buy anything today.”

  “That’s fine, let’s have chamomile.” Then after she sipped it, like a gosling—hardly any, as if forcing herself to swallow—she put the mug aside and smiled: “We’re like a pair of geezers—sitting here with the wrecks of our lives drinking chamomile tea before bed. We just need some aches and pains to complain about to complete the picture.”

  Had to have been that fat rat, I thought, that Rep., the bastard, who’d gotten to her with the women-of-a-certain-age talk, the whole now-or-never shtick, up or out. As a client of mine used to say: under forty, it’s enough for a woman to be pretty; after forty, she needs to be rich—and made eyes at me, even though the old battle-ax had ticked past forty back when I was in middle school. And Yulichka must have just sat there, listened, and made another mental note.

  “You did everything right, Lolly. You did great; I’m proud of you.”

  “You know,” she said, brightening, “my mom used to say that about my dad, in those very same words: that he did everything right. Weird, isn’t it?”

  Lolly has changed. Matured? Knowing her and the way she, the straight-A student, reverberates in response to every blow life deals her—taking it as an instance of cosmic injustice—I was afraid, at first, to dump the entire truth into her lap the way it had landed in mine: here’s what happened, my love; we’re in deep shit because my secretary has taken me for a thirty-thousand dollar ride (and I’ve been an idiot; I’ve been such an idiot!). But when my girl, with her gaze turned wondrously inward, told me about the dinner she had with that fat Rep. rat, it totally blew me away, so my own screwup instantly diminished in importance: Are you kidding me? This is war! Unannounced, secretly creeping, real GB war, and no one has a clue about it—everyone’s got their noses stuck in their own shit and can’t even see what’s going on out there!