The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Are you the only child?”

  Yes, she is. I needn’t have asked. I feel more connected to her with every passing minute—like with a stray kitten picked up from the street: the longer you hold it, the harder it is to let it go back into the urban jungle. Why is it, though, that I can’t seem to find the courage to ask Nika if she knows that her dad and I go way back—that he knew about my existence before Nika was even born?

  Because I, too, put on a show for her dad. I, too, played my capstone concert: look, here I am, the same girl you read about in Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna’s personal case, under Children. I am the daughter, with the stress on the first syllable, no, back then, they probably had it in Russian still, dotch. Darya, born 1965—here I am, look (a turn of the head), all grown now, a well-known journalist, come to offer you a job working with me on a film I am making…. The way you show off to the doctor who put your broken leg together: Look at me dance, doctor!—or to the school teacher who suggested you take exams to film school back when you were in eighth grade, to every person to whom you owe something in your life, knowing they’d be pleased with your all-As school report, because it’s their achievement, too, they played a part in it. Played a part, exactly. If it weren’t for Nika’s dad’s goodwill, my life would’ve gone down a decidedly more crooked path. But this doesn’t mean that he, who lived his entire life under a stranger’s name, and raised his only daughter with it, should find my archival digging pleasant—why on earth should he?

  You cannot expect of people the impossible, Miss Daryna. Or, as Aidy’s dad says, “Don’t brag about your stove in a cold house….” Why would anyone expect the man who still goes by the name of Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov to help me find my, e-er, relative if he never looked for his own birth parents?

  And—what right do I have to judge him?

  Nika, having broken free of the direction of my imaginary conductor’s baton in our little conversation, is back on the subject of music, cooing about her studies, bragging about her piano professor—of course, I see: she, too, is reporting to me. I, too, am somehow, tangentially responsible for the choice she made. A living mollusk in a shell cracked open: naked, defenseless, its flesh soft and runny (on a plate, in a seaside restaurant; when was that?). And a kind of new, unfamiliar sorrow floods me—not the bitter-scorching kind that parches you into a salt flat; no, this one does not scorch, it is moist, and it makes me grow weak, soft like earth under rain. I heave with it; I swell to the very edge of my vision, another instant—and I’ll burst with it, and it’ll come pouring out through my eyes, nose: Nika, Nika, you poor girl, what have they done to us all?

  We cross the square before the monument—pausing for a second, as always, where the urban axis reveals the sight of two constellations of cross-topped domes with the fortresses of bell towers, St. Sofia’s and St. Michael’s, and your breath, no matter how many thousand times you’ve seen it, explodes out of your chest in an uncontrollable A-ah! (the awkward upright trunk of the future Hyatt in its green mesh of scaffolding does not, fortunately, fall into the same line of sight)—and step into the gates as if into a pocket of silence sewn into the very center of the city: behind the ancient walls, the street clamor fades, and here even Russian tourists grow sort of subdued, as birdsong emerges, loud and triumphant, and the babbling, the crystalline babbling of dozens of streams from invisible gutters—you hear it so much more here than outside…

  One’s gaze flies up of its own accord, climbing the eastern wall of the cathedral spotted with patches of pink plinthite; Nika pauses for an instant, too, and then starts back on her topic again: the Germans swindled Gubaidulina out of the rights to all her works, got them virtually for pennies, but Nika will play the piece anyway, even without permission. It’s not a big deal at a student concert, who’d ever find out, right? Of course. And we’ll go this way, now, Nika—through the back, past the public restrooms, toward the old seminary: the old monastery orchard glows from afar with the softly goldenish froth of just-opened buds and the ant-like mesh of sunspots on the new grass.

  On the corner in front of the restrooms a young Japanese woman, like a doll with an unbending back, is setting up a camera with a timer on a tripod, and we stop to let her take the picture—the woman turns to us, bows smiling like a cork-tumbler toy, thanking us with a mouthful of vaguely English mush and takes off at a teetering trot toward the clump of other cork-tumblers lined up against the cathedral wall. They all also mewl something, smiling with their mush-filled mouths, a red light blinks in the camera, the ballerina-backed lady gives a high-pitched yelp, must be to say, one more time, and trots back to the camera. And Nika and I walk on, as huge and awkward among these delicate creatures as a mama bear with her cub. It seems that for every square yard with a view there’s a Japanese person with a camera, I tell Nika, but she couldn’t care less about the Japanese, or their super-hitech machines (and our Antosha dreamt for so long of having a camera with a timer!).

  Nika stares at me, lower lip bitten down, and I can again see on her large, childlike incisors the traces of the lipstick she’s eaten. “Miss Daryna!”

  I stare back at her: What now?

  “Will you come to my performance?”

  She is not all that self-centered, this girl. Not all that insensitive…

  “I will.”

  It comes out unexpectedly solemn, a line in a sugary melodrama.

  And I know that I will, in fact, go.

  * * *

  “Why,” Adrian asks, “did Olga Fedorivna not want to come?”

  At the intermission, they opened the main doors, the ones that lead to Independence Square via a columned porch, and the thin crowd—looking more corporate than bohemian, made up mainly of the insiders, family dressed up as if for a wedding and friends and who keep excitedly calling out each other’s names in the foyer—spills outside in two separate flows, for a break. Daryna and Adrian move along with the crowd; she’s got her arm hooked through his elbow and holds on as though she were afraid of being left alone in this strange milieu.

  “I don’t know,” Daryna answers, scanning the crowd distractedly. “She just said, ‘I’m not going,’ and that was that. Very resolutely, too, I didn’t expect it…”

  Daryna imagined the outing as a family affair: Mom, she thought, would enjoy going out with her and Adrian for an academic concert, albeit a student one—she doesn’t often get a chance to do something like that with Uncle Volodya; he is one of those people who always coughs in the middle of a most delicate pianissimo at the Philharmonic, and if he makes it to the opera, he always tells everyone how the box stank of socks (at our opera, the boxes do stink of socks)—and on top of that, or actually, most importantly, Boozerov is here, which, in Daryna’s mind, ought to have held for her mom an absolutely irresistible attraction, greater than Ravel, Lyatoshynsky, Britten, and Gubaidulina put together. Daryna thought her mom would be as curious to see Boozerov face-to-face again after all these years as Daryna would be to watch them: a scene in a script written by life itself, only the camera is missing (she—daughter, witness, and accomplice—would act as a camera).

  She liked this plot; she was already thinking which dress she would suggest her mom wear. Despite the extra weight that so vulgarly deformed her once-trim figure, her mom could still look quite presentable if properly packaged. The fact that Olga Fedorivna rejected the idea as soon as she heard Boozerov’s name—I won’t, I don’t want to, end of discussion—that she refused to be cast in this film, Daryna thinks, with the bitterness of self-irony, in a way, did more to align her mother with Boozerov, in Daryna’s eyes, than if the two of them were now standing here in the foyer exchanging polite small talk. Essentially, both had told her to get lost. Both refused her demand that they look back.

  “That boy who played Liszt—I liked him,” Adrian observes when they, having found a spot by a column, get busy puffing on their cigarettes.

  “Liszt? Oh, that one…”

  “You could see he was really into i
t,” Adrian elaborates. “The rest of them are so stiff, like they’re in a military parade, these kids. But that one was different, he had the spark… Paa… ba-ba-bam… Paa… ba-ba-bam,” he sings in a nasally sorrowful voice, rolling his eyes, to the tune from “Years of Pilgrimage,” and Daryna can’t help chuckling, looking at him with tenderness.

  “Remember I told you about my trip to the Zhitomir region? To see that man whose address Ambroziy Ivanovych gave us?” she asks, seemingly out of the blue.

  “That old geezer who was in the Kengir uprising?”

  “Yeah, that one, but the uprising is not why I bring it up…. It took us forever to find his place, it’s way out there in the boondocks, out beyond the village—so we were driving around, stopping at every corner, hell knows where we’re supposed to turn, and there’s no one to ask—and here comes this little old lady in a padded coat, just marching across the field, at a good clip…. We ask her, where does so-and-so live around here? And she goes all suspicious: and what do you want with him? And we say we just want to talk to him, about the Kengir uprising. And she goes—hard, you know, like she slammed a door into our faces: That was ages ago! And marches off, without looking back. And later it turned out that old lady was his wife, the one who was also in the Kengir camp, and that’s where they met each other, tossed one another notes from the men’s barracks to the women’s; you remember that, don’t you? You saw the footage…”

  Adrian smokes and looks at the lights on the square—as if it were from there, through the noise of the traffic, that Liszt’s lost tune were wafting over to reach him, a soundtrack. Years of pilgrimage, the very beginning.

  “‘That was ages ago!’” Daryna repeats with the old lady’s intonation.

  “Uhu,” Adrian nods, and it is not clear what he is thinking about.

  “That was how my mom said it: ‘I’m not going.’ She sounded almost angry. I asked, ‘But why not, Mom?’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to’—and that’s the only explanation she gave me.”

  “It’s only fun to go back to places where you won. Who wants to go back to where you’d been beaten, Lolly? And who wants to see the witnesses of your defeat again? That’s not much fun, either.”

  “But I didn’t think Boozerov was a witness of her defeat. Quite the opposite.”

  “It would have been if your father were alive.”

  “Exactly. I’d thought I could replace him in this mise-en-scène. I thought, for Mom, I was something she’d accomplished in her life, something she could show off to anyone. Rather self-important of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Can’t say it wasn’t,” Adrian answers, purposely in the Galician manner, as he always does when he wants to soften the edge of his words. And smiles. Their eyes meet, meld together, and for an instant everything around them fades, is switched off—everything except an invisible circle of electricity that pulsates in the space around them and welds the two into one, until their two hearts skip the same beat, tremble with the same wonder, the wonder that each feels upon waking up next to the other: what a miracle it is that I have you, and what did I ever do to deserve it? And, because such self-generating (and self-locked) circles never remain unnoticed by those around them, since they radiate precisely the surfeit of warmth that makes life tolerable, the column where Daryna and Adrian chose to stand draws glances—the two of them become visible, as if held in a precisely aimed spotlight, a curious silence gathers itself at the next column where a whole pride of academic lions glows with its white manes. (“I’ve been in art since 1956,” goes a snippet of overheard conversation.) And there, already hurrying toward them, across the entire porch on his stubby legs, is the one for whom Daryna kept searching the crowd—in the concert hall, looking over the orchestra-level seated heads, and at the intermission, in the chaotic churn of the crowd rushing through the doors.

  “Good evening, young people!”

  “Pavlo Ivanovych! Greetings!”

  They are no longer surprised that he spotted them first: that’s what he trained for, after all—but Pavlo Ivanovych’s current appearance cannot fail to stun anyone who is used to seeing him in what you’d call the office setting. Adrian has only seen men like this—happily shaken, drunk on their own importance—among his friends, when they became fathers and proudly took juice and jarred puree to their wives in the maternity ward. Pavlo Ivanovych is literally glowing, not just emotionally—he’s even broken into sweat in his generously cut, iridescent Voronin suit, even though the night is not nearly that warm; he’s broken into a sweat and glows, as if glazed, which miraculously makes his magnificent head (his skin, in the light of the streetlamp, has acquired a clear olive tint) even more handsome, almost perfect, like the head of a lacquered idol with a disheveled mop of hair, spiked in two distinct places like the horns on Michelangelo’s Moses, and his eyes burn with the inspiration of a biblical prophet: one can tell this is a big day for Pavlo Ivanovych.

  Daryna struggles to strike the right note, feeling like a stranger at someone else’s banquet: any words in such circumstances would be inappropriate, but Pavlo Ivanovych, obviously, needs no words whatsoever—their presence is enough for him to include them automatically among the circle of insiders who don’t need to say anything, because everyone knows they are all in the same boat. When Pavlo Ivanovych shakes Adrian’s hand, he does so with strong, honest, muscular gratitude, one man to another.

  “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

  He really is moved. It’s good, Daryna thinks to herself, quickly, that Mom didn’t come: he probably wouldn’t even have noticed her, simply—couldn’t accommodate her, too. Adrian is the first to find the right tone—businesslike and sophisticated at once.

  “That’s quite a strong class your daughter’s part of.” He nods at Pavlo Ivanovych gravely, like the lions at the nearby column. As if it were a soccer team, Daryna almost snorts. But, to her surprise, the words prove right, exactly the kind that a stirred-up dad is capable of hearing at the moment: in them is not only an assessment of the first part of the concert they just heard, but also a fan’s anxiety (How will our girl look against such strong colleagues, will she hold her own?), a lifeline thrown to Nika in advance, in case of a less-than stellar performance (to lose out against the strong is, of course, so much more honorable than to outplay a bunch of slackers) and, most importantly, the voice of expert support, which Pavlo Ivanovych swallows with a neophyte’s thirst. It must be, Daryna intuits, that he himself doesn’t know much about music; it’s just a status symbol for him, like the directors in Soviet movies who inevitably had Red Army officers of purely proletarian pedigree play grand pianos as a sign of their complete triumph over bourgeois culture. And in this unfamiliar world into which his child has set out, Pavlo Ivanovych looks at every initiated person like a new recruit to a colonel. The men exchange a few more lines—of co-conspirators, accomplices, members of the same club—and Daryna, relieved that Adrian has taken charge of the conversation, recalls suddenly her own appearance, thirty years ago, at a school performance: dressed as a snowflake, she danced and sang a song in English, “The snowflakes are falling, are falling, are falling,” and her daddy, young, strong, and handsome, sat beaming in the first row, nodding his head in time with the music. Back then, when she was eight, she was still trying her best for Daddy, and the world was warm and cozy. What a pity that it all came to an end so fast.

  Why did she come here? What does she have to do with these people?

  She no longer knows. Why does this aging SBU-type, who has all but unraveled with the solemnity of the moment (just like a bad-mannered teen who doesn’t know how to behave in public!), keep insinuating himself into her and Adrian’s family? (At the moment, he is standing at a bad angle to the light, and she can see the white streaks of saliva, like colostrums, in the corners of his mouth—have your liver checked, or something, will you Pavlo Ivanovych?) He is comical in his inflamed paternal incarnation, like a yiddishe mame of Odessa jokes. Of course, how else? He’s from a “hom
e,” a foundling: people, who were themselves deprived of parental love when they were children, will never learn to love their children naturally; they will forever swing between extremes like the color-blind forced to paint with colors, and what the hell does she want with this stranger’s life? Another life that she for some reason has to fit inside her?

  Doesn’t she have enough of them already—other people’s lives stashed inside her, like in a safe to be kept in perpetuity. She’s done nothing but muddle around in other people’s lives, and they tramp all over her like on this square, demanding that she produce from their strife and failure a spark of meaning they cannot seem to achieve themselves; she has borne all this happily; she’s liked it, although there were some interviews after which she spent the rest of the day in bed, feeling like she’d been run over by a tractor. But for these two—Boozerov and his defenseless (like a snail without a shell) Nika, with her childish worship of Daryna—she has no more room, sorry, that’s it. It’s too much!

  These people have no connection to her; she has nowhere to store their problems—and fails to see why she should be compelled to do so. At this instant, Daryna thinks her mother did the wisest thing of all: what had been is gone; it’s closed, and stored up in the attic, and really what point is there in dredging back up what’s been buried for years? You can’t go your entire life pulling everyone who’d appeared in one or two episodes of it behind you; no one’s life is big enough for that!

  She looks at Pavlo Ivanovych unable to overcome her sudden dislike—those streaks in the corners of his mouth are especially disgusting. Doesn’t he understand that his girl has already grown beyond the age at which one tries one’s best for one’s daddy—and that no matter how much he fusses and beats his wings he can’t keep her under the glass dome of his warm and cozy world? At her age, Daryna thinks angrily, I was already living with Sergiy—and thank goodness, she, Daryna, chose well, because at the time there were many more men eager to live with her than is recommended for a young fool, feeling abandoned by her dead father and living mother at once, who would have plunged into bed with anyone who’d mistake her for an adult.