The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “What if you brought a priest out to consecrate it?”

  “Dat’d be a whole lot of consecratin’ to do.”

  There’s something about the way he says it that brings on an awkward pause, the way it happens when a conversation slams on the breaks at a crossroads trying to decide whether to go on or to make a U-turn and head back. The woman ventures, “There ona other sidea track, back ina starvation, they hada grave… drove bodies froma village there and buried em. We, when we were kids, useda run over there in spring—to look: where it’s shallow, the dirt settles and sometimes human bones come up… humongous grave, they say it was! It was later they rolla asphalt over it.”

  “Over a cemetery?!”

  “Dat’s no cemetery!” the man cuts in, almost as if he’s angry. “Who’d go ’bout settin’ up a cemetery back in da ’30s? Dey just piled dem all into a hole, covered it with dirt, and left no signs. Da old people, dey just remembered da place, da ones who’re still alive.”

  “Yeah, the old Moklenchykh woman, who died last year, she useda go there every spring the week after Easter to light a candle… she’d just put it down ina dirt, and it’d burn. Once it burned all day till night, remember, Vasya, we seen it alla way over here through our window.”

  “You got no better business dan bringin’ dat up?”

  But it’s too late to try to rein her in.

  “And once, when we were kids, tha boys found a skull over there and kicked it around to play soccer…”

  “Now you’re full of it!”

  “Fulla what? What?” The wife pouts and again assumes her defensive position, arms under bust. “You count ’em: Lionka Mytryshyn—that’s one!”

  “Lionka was drunk…”

  “Were you dere drinking with him? And even if he was, then what?” she objects, not in the least concerned by the mild inconsistency of her dual objections. “Just think,” she turns back to her guests, “boy served in Afghanistan… the one who founda skull. Graduated military school, got the rank already, and no bullet could get him! And then came on leave to visit his parents—and bam! Drowned. Went to a pond for a swim…”

  “He was drunk, I’m telling you—dat’s why he drowned,” her husband persists. “You people just live to wag you tongues…”

  “Didn’t end with that, did it tho’? Allose boys who kicked the skull back then with him—all toa last one, none of em alive! Kol’ka Petrusenkiv smashed to death on his motorcycle; I was still in school then. Fedka got trampled over by horses one day when he was drunk—took him three days to die ina hospital, poor bastard, and Vit’ka Val’chyn—that’s way beyond even…”

  “Dat’s a separate story altogether.”

  “Just think—man dranka poison for Colorado beetles!”

  “Drunk, wasn’t he?” Adrian inquires stupidly, having fallen, unwittingly, under the spell of this macabre graveyard litany.

  “Nope, was not, dat’s another thing with him: got mighty insulted. Ninka, his neighbor, went missing a wallet, so she went after dis Vit’ka. Meaning, like he took it. And he got mighty insulted. Drank da poison at work, went home, and says to his wife, Valya, I’ll be dying here. Folks rushed to call da ambulance, but ’twas too late, dey couldn’t flush him.”

  “Ana wallet later turned up!” the wife triumphs. “Ina pasture. Ninka herself dropped it, the scatterbrain!”

  Daryna feels an urgent need to sit down. Her legs have suddenly turned to straw; this has happened to her before. When? Yes, of course, that night in Vlada’s bathroom, when she was washing the warrior-maiden makeup off her face.

  “So what’s dat soccer got to do with it? Like dat’s what killed dem! People talk nonsense—just to wag dem tongues!”

  Somehow, the yokel finds his wife’s mystical interpretation of the story decidedly unnerving. That’s weird, Adrian thinks—he’s the one who first brought up “dat special spot.” Or, perhaps, the man himself kicked around human skulls when he was little—and, like most, remains receptive to the idea of a metaphysical payback only for as long as it is someone else’s—never his own car that crashes on a defiled grave? As long as it is strangers’ blood being washed off the asphalt—that’s a reality show, same as on TV. But when it’s folks from his own village who are found guilty on the same count, that means you yourself aren’t completely safe and secure either, and that is something you shall deny with vehemence, right, Vasya?

  “Razing a church—dat’s another matter, I get dat,” Vasya proceeds to reason, businesslike. “Dat—yes, den—things happen. Dat’s better left alone, of course… Father said when dey had da church razed in dem village, all da ones who lent a hand dere—all were gone before da year was out! One fell to death right away—dropped off da belfry where he’d climbed to rip off da shingles. So da belfry just stood dere like dat—unstripped—no one would go up dere, until later, in da starvation already, dey trucked some soldiers in. But dat’s a church! I get dat, dat’s different. A skull—dat’s just a skull, of someone dead, and dat’s it!”

  Daryna has sat down on the edge of the couch and is hugging herself to contain the trembling. “Too many deaths.” That’s what Vlada said to her in the dream, the one in which she was looking for “a bill of ward” for those deaths. So that’s it! That’s how things are.

  Another ripple of chilly shivers runs through her: the angel of death has gone by. The conversation she had with Vadym the night before, still undulled and uneroded, still living on in her memory, now stuns her with its macabre absurdity, like a madman’s grimacing or kids playing soccer with a skull: it’s cheekily caricaturish, grotesque incompatibility with everything that is now happening here in front of Vlada’s work. Daryna feels, all but physically, the dense heat the painting radiates—like a fragment of skin that’s just been ripped off a living being. Biker girl, life was her racetrack, and she was always the winner… to hell with all those victories, they’re not the point. How could all those bloodsuckers have missed the most important thing? You were a genius, baby. It came out of you with this uncontainable force; you burst with it. And how is it that no one had your back?

  “Too many deaths.” You’re right, absolutely—there are too many. Perhaps, when there are so many deaths piled up in one place, and there is nothing to ward them (And what should be warding them, what kind of a bill?), their accumulated mass creates its own gravity—and draws in new ones, again and again? Like an avalanche? An avalanche—of course!—only this is from an earlier history, of the Kurenivka neighborhood in Kyiv: in the fifties, the city had Babi Yar paved over too—they built a dam and for ten years straight pumped loam pulp from a nearby brick factory into the biggest mass grave in the world, to leave no trace of it. They even built a stadium and an outdoor dance floor on top of it—and in 1961 the dam broke and a forty-five-foot wall of mud wiped out an entire neighborhood in thirty minutes, burying hundreds of people—no one had their backs, either. And the bodies that washed out of Babi Yar rushed down Kurenivka to Podil together with the living who were swept up in the flood.

  As a girl, Daryna had heard her fill of horror stories of the kind this woman loves so much: about a child’s hand torn off and left in her mother’s grasp when the child herself was ripped away by the avalanche, about a pregnant woman, trapped alive in a cement bubble. Babi Yar rebelled, adults said, only back then one said such things in a whisper. In a whisper and with a pillow over even one’s cradled phone: Soviet superstitions had it that you could be listened to through your phone even when you weren’t talking on it. And then the stories of it slowly faded—survivors dissolved in the masses of newcomers, the city grew, and the newcomers never learned about the flood. They just went to play soccer in that same stadium, Spartak, which was so quickly built up again.

  The dead were the ones who took you, Vlada, weren’t they? Other people’s dead—exactly when your own life shifted and slid, losing its footing? They are strong, the dead; they can do things. Oh yes, they are strong. Lord, how strong they are. We couldn’t dream
of matching them.

  This jolts her again. The woman will think Daryna’s got the hiccups. Or a concussion. One thought follows on another’s heels, in a series of spontaneous discharges, uncontainable like labor contractions or vomiting; after another surge, Daryna’s mind suddenly achieves final clarity: she knows now how it all happened then on the highway, “downa track,” at the Pereyaslav exit. She knows what the yokel’s afraid of—because he is afraid, has been the whole time, from the moment she recognized the cut-down canvas, glancing at her when he thinks she doesn’t see it, and then looking instantly away, like he’s been burned. Even though she, with no qualms whatsoever, does not take her eyes off him, as if they were each other’s dearest people in the world about to part, as if she were hoping that at any moment he might work up the courage to tell her everything he has to tell her, to the end, even though she’s already understood everything and does not need his explanation. It’s only Adrian who hasn’t yet figured out how Vlada’s painting found its way to this home—so she wills herself to knock down the barrier of disgust, releases her jaw, which has been clenched the entire time, and asks the yokel, unexpectedly loudly, as if speaking on camera, “Did the two of you search the car together?”

  Now it’s the yokel’s turn to be jolted by electricity. For a second, he’s covered in a cold sweat: Moderfucker, he thinks; now I’m fucked! And—for what?! Dat’s da worst of it—get caught over nothing! Go ahead, be a good dad, give your daughter a house-warming present, damn it! And said to da wife—don’t take it. It’s not worth da trouble, but no, she’d put her foot down—it’s pretty, she said, real pictures, in frames, like they sell in stores in Kyiv for big money, put it up nice in Ruslana’s new flat. Dey all gonna be sitting pretty now, and Ruslana, too, when dey get us for robbery—hell on a fucking stick, to get caught on such crap!

  And such an intolerably bitter sense of resentment for this outrageous injustice fills the yokel that instead of defending himself, he shouts out, straight at Daryna, almost desperately, as only an innocently wronged man could shout to a woman with such maternal eyes, “Like dere was anything to look for in dat car of yours! Nothing but dese here pictures!”

  In the silence that follows, a fly buzzes loudly somewhere under the ceiling: it’s spring, Adrian mechanically observes, as he regards the yokel with new curiosity. The spring will show who shit where. What is it that the cops call the dead bodies of the missing they find in the spring? It’s something lyrical, oh yes—snowdrops. Goddamn, the dude sweeps crashed cars, then. And this mustn’t be his first time either. And really, no reason for good stuff to go to waste—and the dead don’t care anymore. That’s why he went into such a huff over the tale of the avenging skull, the delicate soul that he is. Impressive. No wonder he and Yulichka reached an understanding.

  “Where are they?” Daryna’s voice trembles. “Where are the rest of the paintings? There should have been five—where are the other four?”

  Their hosts glance at each other: a pair of schoolchildren who’ve been caught smoking in the bathroom. Adrian wonders if the dude has connections among the local cops. The cops might be in on the action, too—the law doesn’t require photographic records for highway accidents, so they’re free to pick over the fresh carrion. Why not? It’s their loot—money, jewelry… one man’s war, after all. Adrian blinks automatically at the Haid mantel clock on top of the TV (quarter to noon): a respectable, well-made clock, straight from somewhere in bombed-out Königsberg or Berlin. Let anyone try to prove, after the fact, that the victim was wearing jewelry. And who would try to prove that—the victim’s grief-stricken family? Time to reclaim initiative, Adrian decides.

  “A bad story you got yourself here, Vasyl Musiyovych.” This time Adrian leaves no doubt about his police-inspector intonation, and the yokel, who’s been half ignoring the “boozer-ex” all this time, experiences a stab of confusion. “A really bad story. The police have been looking for these paintings for four years already; the accident made quite a stir in the news; it was on every channel. And the painter, the one who died, was not only a close friend of Miss Daryna,” the pair of schoolchildren obediently, as if following a teacher’s pointer, move their eyes to Daryna, “but also the wife of an elected representative.” Adrian says Vadym’s last name and watches, not without glee, an intense—he’s all but got steam coming out his ears—thought process manifest itself on the yokel’s face before being replaced by an expression of genuine pain: aha, he’s getting it—he’ll have to kiss the pictures goodbye; no way around it, no matter how loath he is to part with them.

  But the wife reacts faster.

  “Well, who knew what was ina car! It sat turned upside down…”

  Daryna freezes. Adrian can feel her thoughts as clearly as if it were his own brain being bombarded with electric shock; another instant and he’ll lose it, let it rip; only his worry for Daryna helps him to keep his cool.

  “But don’t you know that you had the duty to call the police and the ambulance? What if she were still alive, inside that car? Consult the Criminal Code, ma’am!”

  At the mention of the Criminal Code the woman shudders but does not back down.

  “Well, it was all just skittered ina mud!” She takes a new angle, now pleading. “Just think, that’s a whole load of trouble. If we hadn’t took it, it’d of been ruined anyhow!” she’s finally found her lifeline. “It was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand, right, Vasya? If it’d laid there some more, the paint would of come straight off. This way, I saved them pictures, you see.”

  She steps up to the canvas and runs her hand over it, with a sense of ownership, as if smoothing out a rug she’s selling, and shoots Adrian a sly sideways look (unlike her husband, she intuited Adrian’s status right away). In different circumstances, Adrian would have smiled at this—just watch her go!—but at the moment he is in no mood for comedy. The yokel catches on, too.

  “If you want to take this picture, I won’t mind… what about you, Galya? Let ’em take it, right? We don’t need it dat much. Only how do I know you’re telling da truth? Can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies.”

  Adrian understands they’re now haggling. The pair has realized they’re in trouble, but will keep kicking until the end, to try to get out with some sort of gain for themselves—if I can’t eat it, at least I’ll bite it. They don’t know how to be any other way; otherwise, they’d be as “mighty insulted” as that poor bastard that drank the poison for Colorado beetles. Only these guys won’t go drinking poison—they love life too much.

  And that’s when Daryna begins to laugh. She is not hysterical, nothing like that, she just can’t help it: the redneck’s last sentence, together with his offended look, gets stuck inside her and keeps spinning there, producing, with every turn, a new wave of raging hilarity—“can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies”—and she is shaking with laughter like a loose-bolted old truck on a dirt road; she is a rattletrap of unglued muscles and tendons, oh my goodness, wiping tears—rewind and rewind, again like contractions or vomiting, “can’t just anyone come over”; she can’t breathe, and the thing is the phrase loses none of its effect with repetition; it remains, to Daryna, insanely funny, and she cannot stop, even though no one else is laughing, and she herself could not possibly ever explain what’s so funny about it, but God, she’s about to burst—her panties are wet already, and tears are running down her cheeks like streaks of rain down a windshield; the redneck and his wife are a blur in her eyes, “can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing”—and she jumps to her feet, shaking her head and choking on a new fit of laughter, waves at Adrian, meaning, it’s fine, she’s fine, she’ll be back to rejoin the company in just a minute, she just has to laugh it all out….

  At this moment, the one who cannot not be watching the two of them through the mangled, swollen, and poster-clogged eye of her painting on the wall must clearly see Adrian and Daryna caught together, at once, in a li
ghtning-quick flash of déjà vu.

  As Adrian watches Daryna dash out the door, grabbing her purse on the run, he recalls a recent scene exactly like this one, at The Cupid—a stunning coincidence, like a repetition of the same movement in a dance, almost a rewind, but not quite; something has changed, because something always changes, and the elements of “then” and “now,” so brightly lit in our awareness, though they do call back and forth to each other with all their apparent congruity, like a repetitive geometric design, are still never one hundred percent identical. This time, Adrian realizes, there’s no need for him to run after her—she really will come back in a minute, as she said she would; she is fine.

  Daryna’s déjà vu, however, comes to her as a direct extension of her negotiations with Vadym the night before—still warm, still swirling in her mind in shreds of dirty foam: in the yokel and his wife’s naïve determination to bite off a piece of the action, no matter how small, and hide it in their cheeks, even when backed into a dead corner, Daryna recognizes the same element of a behavioral matrix she encountered the day before, the same “election platform”—to get off the shoals in a way that allows one to keep the controlling stake. And in this very instant, as Vadym and the cuckoo yokel become in her mind a single entity, the laughter that took her over lets up like a sudden spring downpour—as if she’d heard a joke that stopped being funny after it was explained—and Daryna, still shaking her head in amazement (Can you believe this?) feels for a pack of Kleenexes in her purse, sniffing, and pushes at a white plastic door, decorously hidden in a niche, on which a stenciled peeing boy glows proudly like polished brass on a military uniform.

  The bathroom smells of sweat and perfume: this is a well-off home, built to every city standard. From the mirror above the sink a woman she has seen somewhere before but doesn’t recognize right away looks back at Daryna: a clown or Lady Dracula. No—rather, a silent movie actress washing her face in the dressing room: the shoot is over, the role’s been played. (The terrifying beauty with fire hidden under her skin who once flashed up from under all that artful makeup is not coming back—and there isn’t anyone left to make her up anyway.) Her mascara is smeared into dense, predatory black fans around her eyes, and those eyes themselves, still not quite conscious, as if drunk with laughter, radiate, in contrast with their grotesque frames, a glowing, uncanny detachment, as if focused on something unseen. Something beyond reach.