The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  I ran around the kitchen, smoked one cigarette after another, and shouted that something had to be done; we can’t just let a pack of hometown goons hand the country over to the Kremlin, lock, stock, and barrel, just because they think they can, and that this Vadym was an old Soviet rat for sure. I know his breed; I’ve seen more than my share of them—the ones who first cleaned out the Komsomol and Party purse and then made a beeline for politics where they could clean out everything that was left in state ownership. What was it you said he traded in, kerosene? You know what it’s called? Agents of influence, that’s who they are—the agents of GB influence, every last one of them, on the Kremlin hook, all these former rats, bitches, fuckers; we should’ve run the lustration back in 1991, that was the only way to get rid of these Soviet cancers, and now look how they’ve spread!

  I felt a kind of uplift in my rage—a certain purifying relief from having found a more deserving object of scorn than Yulichka, who’d been running schemes with my competitors behind my back—I’d shaken off the nasty feeling of having been robbed that had burned me all day, and felt myself filling with a pure, ethyl-alcohol-like civic outrage: Who do they think we are, these bastards? Do they think they’ll get away with this? I opened my shoulders wide and stood up tall facing a real, worthwhile enemy, one with whom you want to cross swords—while Lolly, by contrast, remained amazingly composed the whole time, as if she weren’t really surprised to hear my news (I’ve always suspected that she disliked Yulichka). She asked succinct, businesslike questions and generally appeared quite calm—as if all the blows that came this evening fell, for her, onto an invisible protective pad. She used to behave differently under stress. When she was resigning from the studio, she went around all but shaking. But something new has emerged in her; she is somehow distant: she even spoke without triumph or melodrama about how elegantly she undid that fat Rep. My poor girl’s nose has sharpened to a point and grown pink with exhaustion; the lamp above the table cuts deep, unmistakable, graphic lines from her nose to her lips—without makeup, she is always so dear, so sweet I get shivers inside when I look at her, but only now do I see how much she’s worn away in these last few days, become all ether, even her face has grown longer and gaunt. She no longer looks like a teen, I thought. For the first time since we’ve been together, I felt that she really is older than me—and not by a mere six years, but by a much greater, immeasurable distance.

  “Let’s go to bed, love”—I could barely stand up straight myself, and wondered, what happened to being nineteen, when I could party all night like the Energizer bunny and in the morning grab a breath mint to blunt my hangover breath before running to class all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

  “Uhu,” she nodded, “let’s,” and raised her eyes at me, and they suddenly pierced me through all the fatigue, the mental numbness of the late hour, and the burnt-to-cinders adrenaline; they went through me with a living music as though they’d gained a voice and sang—her eyes glowed with tenderness, and obedience, and sadness, and something else so inexpressibly feminine that I a felt a lump rise in my throat.

  “Can we go see that man in the country tomorrow?”

  “If you want to,” I wheezed in the voice of the old Mafioso from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. God damn it, I was so moved I just about broke down crying right there. The next morning, I planned to go to Boryspil anyway, to see that country hick Yulichka had expropriated—to find out the details and assess my losses (a cuckoo clock, a walnut credenza, what else did that witch hand over to Brey & Co. behind my back?)—but I’d intended to go alone; I’d never gotten Lolly involved in my business before…. The business, however, had never been subjected to anything like what Yulichka did to it. I’d warmed a snake on my own chest, as they say.

  This, essentially, is the thing—as it became clear once the ball of initial shock had a chance to settle a bit, to steep, loosen, and unravel into separate strands of damage: where I suffered financially, where I suffered morally, where the firm’s image was damaged, what pieces I had to pick up first to try and patch at least some of the holes—this is what cut me the deepest—that I had warmed a snake. Of all the damage, of all the holes, the breach of trust is the most painful, and there’s no way to fix it. Such a great secretary, my irreplaceable assistant, my right hand! She was so perfect I wanted to pinch myself. And she was always informed of all my plans, damn it, and damn it again! How could I have missed it—the little bitch’s been swindling me for six months? And I just ate from her hand when she fed me the story about the man’s heirs, a son and a daughter, who got cold feet and convinced their old man not to sell any of his stuff. She was all seriousness, so preoccupied—“Gosh, Adrianambrozich, wat are wee goin to do, thei refius to sell nou?”

  “We have to make them a better offer,” I said like an idiot. “We’ve no other choice.” And the interested parties, it would appear, made Yulichka a heck of an offer indeed: when I called the guy myself, he wouldn’t even speak to me—know nothing, sell nothing, changed my mind, go to hell—he honestly did not want to talk to me, like someone had really riled him up against me or just told him a boatload of lies about me, but at the time I still didn’t suspect anything. I’ve no idea how I found it in me not to betray myself in any way, to keep my cool today (actually, yesterday already) when my bank director, an old and loyal client, complained to me, with a veiled reproach, that he’d seen a new piece at the minister’s home, a Secession cuckoo clock, and heard that this marvel’d been found right here, not far from Kyiv, in a village next to Boryspil—meaning, how’d you miss it, you moron, right under your nose? That hit me like a truck. The trusting, softhearted Adrian Vatamanyuk, friend of small children and animals. And Melitopol prostitutes. And after I just gave the bitch a raise and got her a tuition-free ride to a degree in art history—go, sweetie, get educated; we’ll get ahead one day… fucking A. And how, as the textbook puts it, should one go on with one’s life? How should one be building up one’s business, or anything else for that matter—if one can’t trust anybody?

  And the funniest thing is that Yulichka’s whole scheme would have come to light sooner or later anyhow: a cuckoo clock is hardly a needle in a haystack on our pathetic market, where it’s a like a village, where everybody knows everybody else—you can’t keep a secret like that for long—but the greed must have gone to our little schemer’s head. The chance to bite off a piece of pie she’d never dreamed of… I do wonder what commission Brey’s people offered her, how much she sold me for?

  Essentially, these two things are no different: selling a person or selling a country. Lolly’s asleep already, but I go on talking to her in my head: the difference is purely quantitative, Lolly, not qualitative. The single difference between your Vadym and my Yulichka is the scale of operations: your rat charges more. And that’s it. It’s just that there’s us, my love—and then there’s them: those who serve something greater—and those who serve themselves, trading in what’s not theirs (and I shouldn’t call them whores—prostitutes, at least, peddle their own, anatomically inalienable, goods). It’s like a pair of enemy camps, and the line between them is like the line of fire at the front. This may be the only line between people that actually matters. A division that can never, under any circumstances be overcome. A thin line, unseen to the naked eye—and there are turncoats who’ve crossed it, but also the ones who lost their lives to it, as always happens in the line of fire. And it’s not clear of whom there’s more.

  This just occurs to me, a belated response to your already half-asleep confession, when we were getting up from the table: go ahead, you go to the bathroom first—no, you go; I’ll have a smoke here. You said, “You know, I understood this thing about Vlada and Gela, too, the mistake they made; it’s your dream from a year ago. I’ve cracked its code: they had the same death.”

  “What do you mean, the same death?”

  “Well, not literally, of course, but they both died for the same reason.”

  “I don’t know, soun
ds to me like you’re really reaching there, toots.”

  “No, it’s true, Aidy. I just haven’t figured out how to put it into words yet, but you’ll see when I finish that film; I will finish it, just let me get the footage from Vadym…”

  For a moment, I confess, I thought you were beginning to ramble with fatigue, and I got scared for you about your own old fear, which you’d, apparently, injected into me without my noticing (because in love you exchange everything, to be sure, from sweat and microflora to dreams and fears). Your father was in an asylum. What if there really was a reason? I remember I went all cold inside—and that’s when you said this thing that has lodged inside me and goes on churning like a small engine someone forgot to turn off, propelling one new sleepless thought after another: “She, meaning Gela,” (or did you say Vlada?) “mistook the other for one of her own, and you can’t err like that in love. In love—it’s deadly.”

  You saw it in your own way, too, in your woman’s way—this line between us and them. You saw it as it relates to men and women—where it’s like a species barrier that must not be crossed.

  “Can’t do it in love,” you said. “And what about sex? Can you do it in sex?”

  You see, toots, I actually have, ever since we got together, stopped seeing other women as women. I’m not kidding. It’s not like I don’t see the inexhaustible variety of women, their butts, and all the other things a normal dude sees around him—I do, and quite clearly, but none of it feels like a cause for action anymore. I just don’t want it, and that’s it. As if there were a single woman left in the whole wide world—you—and the all the other members of your sex, they’re just people. So when Yulichka paraded her G-strings and miniskirts in front of me, I sort of felt sorry for her: like a child whom some bad people taught to put on this show, and who wouldn’t get it if you tried to teach her that she’s a big girl now, and it’s not appropriate to act like that. But, to be completely honest, I can’t be sure that if you hadn’t come into my life, I wouldn’t have done the merciful thing one day and kindly fucked Yulichka in my office—to be humane, or whatever, given that the poor thing is always begging so hard.

  Vasylenko banged her; he’s the one who brought her to the company. He’d take her to the bathroom in the middle of a day, too. I remember I grumbled (because I didn’t like it, there’s a proper time and place for everything, damn it) that it must’ve been Lyonchik Kolodub’s Komsomol whoring that infected our office with some airborne virus that compels the corporation’s director to unzip his pants when we need him to be thinking with his other head—not for nothing is it said that spaces retain the karma of their previous owners. There was a reason all the Party’s district committees were always housed in former bordellos.

  But soon enough it turned out that Vasylenko’s acquisition could do more than wear skirts that end above her panties and bend over in bathrooms—the Melitopol (or Mariupol, I can never keep it straight) orphan had a well-oiled brain, too, and was already taking accounting (or secretarial) evening classes somewhere and quickly became not just our secretary (three hundred dollars a month plus bonuses), but a true comrade in arms: whenever we, the three of us back then (Vasylenko, Zaitsev, and I) discussed any new projects, Yulichka was unfailingly there to assist and, more often than not, would make a useful suggestion right at the moment when we were about to go for each other’s throats.

  As long as Vasylenko was there, she felt very comfortable; even the time I pointed out to her that she had semen in her hair; she just smiled at me winsomely and said, Oh! (And that, by the way, was the only time when I felt the tiniest urge to unzip my own pants and ask her to repeat the procedure with me, purely for sport, because how am I worse than Vasylenko?) I don’t know if she rolled over for Zaitsev, too. Apparently, as far as she was concerned, once my partners departed in search of better hunting grounds—from the very beginning, they were both interested in making money much more so than they cared for antiques; they didn’t care what they sold—and I remained the sole owner of the business, with her as my secretary (five hundred dollars a month plus bonuses). I was the one who was supposed to take her to the bathroom. And since I didn’t do that, she decided to teach me a lesson.

  What do you say to that, Lolly? What do you think about that theory?

  I know, you won’t say anything because you’re asleep already—you’ve sunk yourself under the blanket (you have a very cozy way of curling up there, under the covers, and without you, my own bed now feels like a hotel one) and zonked out, as if unplugged. Very still, only making a small noise as you breathe regularly into the pillow—funny, like a bunny rabbit.

  Sitting up with you now, while you sleep, with the nightlight on, I catch myself smiling. Like I’ve smoothed out inside a little. “Sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other,” Mom used to say to me when I was little, kissing me before sleep: a fairytale charm. Sleep, my brave girl, you did everything right; you held your ground, and I am really proud of you. But I can’t sleep, despite how tired I am: I’ve wound myself up, and smoked too much—burned through three packs almost—to a wheeze in my chest and my heart pounding just under my Adam’s apple. And tomorrow I have to be rested and fresh as a daisy, and the pressure—to go to sleep, damn it, and right now—only sends my nerves into overdrive. Classic insomnia, the professional ailment of Ukrainian entrepreneurs. Most of my colleagues have given up the fight with alcohol (three fingers of cognac before bed—and you sleep like a baby, Igor assures)—and some have moved on to sedatives, which is no good at all. And the ones who deal in really big money call in even heavier artillery. Things keep going this way, and people at parties will soon be asking each other, who’s your dealer, the way they now ask, who’s your stylist?

  So we’ll go visit that cuckoo dude tomorrow, alright. I checked the map—it’s really not that far at all: right after Boryspil, after the exit to Zolotonosha. Zolotonosha, such a nice name—means gold-bearing. Dude was a gold mine indeed. A Klondike of a dude. The same stretch where Vyacheslav Chornovil crashed—and Vlada. Still no one knows if it was an accident, or if he was murdered—that was also right before the elections, exactly five years ago, and the old camp general, as they called him, was rumored to be thinking of running for president.

  That story looked bad, it looked really, really fishy: a KAMAZ truck knocks the car with the future presidential candidate off the road and then vanishes into thin air—that’s textbook Russian. And it was right after that, it seemed, that things went south in general—as if with the death of the camp general, an important spring finally snapped in our society, and we lost, as Lolly puts it, the strength of the material. The journalists didn’t bat an eye at the time. I remember one rookie even made a big boo-boo in the media when he wrote something along the lines of, good timing for the old man to die. If he’d hung on much longer, he’d have risked becoming a caricature, like a retired Don Quixote—which looked bad, like a young high-flyer’s dancing on an old fart’s grave—and not long after that, the rookie himself crashed, only without any KAMAZs involved: he and a buddy of his smashed into a tree when they were driving home drunk from a nightclub. Fate, you could say, really rubbed that one in. Better to refrain from dancing on graves as a general principle.

  What was that joke my banker told me? This lady has to walk through a cemetery at night, and sees a man, and asks him to see her to the gates. No problem, he says. Thanks, she says, I’m really scared of dead people. Sheesh, he replies, surprised, why would you be scared of us?

  That’s not as silly as it seems. I’ll have to remember to tell Lolly the joke in the morning.

  Not scared, no. But we’ve pushed them completely off our radar, the dead—we’ve come to ignore them, plain and simple. And it’s not sitting well with them, looks like. In the old days, people knew how to live with their dead, invited them into family homes for Christmas and so on…. One dreads to think how many have been added to the other side in the last century—the dead that no one mourned. One can very well imagine
they’re about ready to revolt against us. A mass uprising, the Great Revolution of the Deceased. What if they do rise up from the graveyards one sunny day and take to the streets?

  One thinks such happy thoughts in the middle of the night, doesn’t one?

  We should buy flowers when we go tomorrow, put them on that spot on the highway. I wonder if it’s even marked in any way….

  Better go make myself another cup of that chamomile tea. Now I know why old people drink it—they also suffer from insomnia.

  Suffer indeed. At this very hour.

  The thought puts me on my feet. All this piddly shit you do, waste your life on, only for your own family there’s never enough time… I’ll just go ahead and call, right now. Why not?

  I shut the bedroom door behind me (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and do the same with the kitchen door, turning the light above the table way down, so it doesn’t shine into my eyes; I noticed this a long time ago: people speak softer in low light, instinctively keep their voices low. Two closed doors and a hallway between me and my girl—I don’t have to worry about waking her.

  Man, I smoked the hell out of this place! Rooms where people smoke a lot and for a long time, especially when warm, smell not of cigarette stubs or smoke, but of decay: not quite of cadaver yet, but of the stage right before that. A unique whiff of rot: it instantly calls up, on its associative heels, the aromas of whoring, wet dog, and alcohol from the night before. Boy, have I smelled too much of that. And how many people have I seen off to the graveyard already?—the ones with whom I hung out in this atmosphere of uncouth smell that no AC can filter out; back when we were all young, this was the smell of our jolly poverty, the air of Soviet dorms and sophomore parties—and later it turned out that our money stank just the same. Vovchyk, whom I met all the way back at the Sinny market, died of a heart attack at thirty-five; Yatskevich OD’d one day; people said Red (I forgot his real name) coded, he always drank like a fish. Kukaliuk even had me over to his dacha—a brand new two-level, but it also stank just like that, only even more rotten, sweeter, with cigar and weed thrown into the mix. Kukaliuk complained that some politician double-crossed him so that he now owed everyone, like land to a kolkhoz—and next I heard Kukaliuk fell out of a train he’d never taken in his life.