The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “So there!” Antosha triumphs. “What else do you want? You know I don’t take up much room; I’m skinny and don’t eat much, as long as I’ve got enough for a drink, I’m happy…. You’ll be saving on me!”

  “Will you work for food? I can feed you. Like Lukash. They say that’s how he lived in the ’70s—whenever he’d visit whichever writer-neighbor of his, they’d go, ‘Oh, Mykola, perfect timing, we were just sitting down to dinner, come eat with us…’”

  “Yeah, that was their way of justifying their own fat mugs. Alright, woman, don’t fuss. I can always find a gig; there’s life in this old dog yet! One commercial can keep me on the road with you for a month, working for food alone, if that’s how skimpy your operation’s going to be.”

  “I’m not skimpy. If I get a grant—and there’s hope—I’ll pay you.”

  “I knew it! I knew it. Slave driver. If I don’t get you by the balls, I won’t get snow in winter out of you,” Antosha sounds cheerier: the official part is over, and now he can go to the bar. “So what’s next? When do we start?”

  “I didn’t know you were such a romantic soul, Antosha!”

  The deal has been struck, and Antosha knows it, so he can allow himself to get serious and drop his usual hayseed tone.

  “Dara, I am fifty-three. And, like everyone, I have my breaking point. You can tell yourself all you want that it doesn’t matter who it is running behind with your camera—spit it, wipe it, and don’t give a fuck where it goes from there, the stuff you shot, ’cause, like, it’s not your problem… but what am I going to tell my son? ‘Serve, my boy, as Grandpa did, and Grandpa didn’t give a shit?’ That’s from my army days, sorry….”

  “He’s in his last year, isn’t he? Will graduate this summer?”

  “Yep, from the same ol’ rez. What’s out there for him? Being the escort boy for the goons? I’d rather he didn’t tell himself one day that his father had been a total cocksucker all his life. I’d rather leave something behind. Something that could make him proud of me one day.”

  “Antosha,” Daryna says, feeling her throat go numb. “Antosha. We’ll make a kick-ass film, you and I. You’ll see.”

  “Of course,” Antosha agrees.

  “I promise you. Even if no one ever buys it—you’ll show it to your kid.”

  And Daryna will show it to Nika Boozerova. And Katrusya, she must see it—even if she’s too young to understand, she’ll remember it. When she grows older, Daryna will explain. They grow up so quickly! Children—those living clocks and all we can do is try to earn their forgiveness at some point in the future. And this person who will come (a girl? with tiny blonde braids?)—how will Daryna look her (him?) in the eye when they meet if she doesn’t make this? Her film. And Antosha, he is right: the film is his, too, and not only because he worked on it. It was Antosha’s eye, always, no matter how hungover, that unerringly found the best angle, that was hiding behind the camera during every one of those twenty-four hours—Vovchyk, her show’s director, had also done a ton of work on this, but what happened to his work has always been, for Vovchyk, “not his problem.” He didn’t have any trouble letting his employers have the final word about that. Antosha has not betrayed his work. He just hasn’t, and that’s it. Is this what Aidy, when he’s appraising all that antique workmanship, calls, with such purely masculine, guild-like pride (we women can never quite say it the same way)—a master?

  “Of all the shit to worry about right now, why would you pick whether anyone’ll buy the thing?” the master grumbles. “I was just so happy, you know, when I heard you got the footage out of there. Good job, Dara, I thought, you stick it to those bitches… ’cause I’m telling you I’ve had it with them. You know me—I’m basically an ox: you can hitch me to the plow forever, and I won’t even moo; I’ll just swish my tail at the flies… the Ukrainian temperament, we’re all like that. Until they bend you beyond the breaking point. And then it’s the end of the line: the ox stops and you can forget your plowing. If you’d just told me you already had someone else lined up, I would be quitting the studio anyway. I’d go wherever, to hell and back, doesn’t matter. ’Cause what these bitches are cooking up there, it’s fucked up, I’m telling you. And the people have no idea, they don’t get which way the wind’s blowing.”

  “You did. And I did. And I know others who did. And how many are out there that we don’t know about? It’s a big country, Antosha. They can’t just bend it however they want.”

  “I’m sorry about Diogenes’ Lantern,” Antosha suddenly says. “Real sorry.”

  “Uhu.”

  “You were holding it, you know. The lantern. And one could see there were people in this country…. And now all you see is shit crawling out from the woodwork and nothing else. Why should it be so, Dara? Why are they always putting us down? All the time, look at any time in history, it’s the same thing all over again—someone’s stomping us into shit, so deep we can’t even see ourselves. Is that some fucking karma we got, or what?”

  “Devil’s Playground,” she recalls. “That’s how someone put it to me recently. I mean, he said God’s, but it’s actually the Devil’s: he’s one of those people, you know, for whom these concepts are interchangeable, God-Devil, up-down, left-right… depending on the situation, what kind of a hand they get.”

  “Uhu, and they seem to be fucking everywhere… and what are you gonna do about it, huh?”

  “Make a film,” Daryna says. “Make a film, Antosha. What else would we do?”

  * * *

  It will be a film about betrayal, she tells Adrian when they are walking back through Tatarka from the restoration workshop. Daryna asked to come with him to see how they cleaned old icons.

  “About betrayal? But we still don’t know the identity of the man who led the raid to the bunker; we only have our speculations—so whose betrayal, which?”

  “Any. Of one’s country. Of love. Of oneself. Betrayal as a road that leads to death, but we’ve talked about that already—someone has to pay for every betrayal, one way or another, to restore the cosmic balance of forces that it violated. The greater the betrayal, the greater the sacrifice.”

  “So when are you starting?”

  “Tomorrow. I invited Antosha to have dinner with us, to discuss the changes to the script, he might think of something—there’re three of us now! There were three of us anyway. Without Antosha. Well, the little one hasn’t made the team yet.”

  “Is that why you turned the place upside down today—you were going through your stuff?”

  “Yes, and you know what I found? On my dictaphone, remember, it kept rolling in my purse on the way back from fishing with Boozerov, it recorded our entire conversation—at the very beginning, there’s a bit of Pavlo Ivanovych talking.”

  “For real? How could that have happened?”

  “Beats me—maybe the button got pressed, inside my purse, all the way back at the river, when he kept trying to send all that fish home with us. You can’t hear exactly what he is saying, so it’s just this irritating drone, as if from behind a wall, boo-boo-boo, persistent, like it’s trying to break through and just can’t, and it’s just the timbre and the intonations, nothing else; and you know, it gave me such a strange feeling, this voice, distilled like that to the pure essence of sound—as if I had heard it before, the same intonations, they were so dreadfully familiar, as if they belonged to someone very close… I’m not making this up, trust me. I didn’t even have it in me to erase that bit, even though it’s nothing to do with anything. And you know how it ends, the recording? With your voice—you asking what if I were pregnant. The first time you mentioned that. So weird…”

  “Adrian shrugs: What’s so weird about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Daryna slowly answers, thoughtful, as if still under the spell of that other voice—“I must be getting superstitious.”

  They stop at a crosswalk. In the openings between buildings, the dusk, already pricked with streetlights, smoldering, bluish and as
hen; the windows of the top floors flash with every shade of fire; and, in the dusk pooling below the red signals at intersections, the taillights of passing cars glow mysterious and sweet, like pomegranate seeds.

  “Look.” She touches his elbow.

  “At what?”

  Look at how magnificent the city is in this light, she wants to say; this is the only time when you can sense its rhythmic breathing—when all the dirt people tracked in during the day is extinguished by dusk, and even the noise seems muffled, like when you instinctively lower your voice in low light; it does not last long, this time, half an hour perhaps—it is a change of rhythm like shifting gears or catching your breath: the tired masses of working folk, worn, an inexorably uniform look on their faces, head home to their concrete shells, and restaurants-theaters-bars have not yet taken on the next human wave, with its fresh charge of excitement. And in this interval, if you catch it just right, you can sense the city’s own pulse, those anxious currents of waiting, pleasure, and dread that thread through it—an inaudible music—and feel numb with the love for this city, so defenseless in fact, and hear the trees grow through it, unstoppable, fearsome—the cottonwoods on its boulevards, the apricot trees and the cherries in the cubical canyons between its high-rises—you can feel their explosive, autonomous force, the same will to grow that is now inside me, and that is not given to anything made by the human hand (we do not notice it during the day, but should people abandon the city, the force of the trees would break free and run rampant without constraint until the eyeless ruins of buildings begin to sink in the boiling woods, in the wild primeval thickets, the same as the ones from which the city once emerged, some two thousand years ago). If only she could film the city like this, caught at just the right moment—for the film’s opening. Despite the fact that it’s not, at first glance, connected to Gela’s story at all.

  And, she tells Adrian, she would like to film the restoration workshop they’d visited. It resembles his dream shop of antiquities a little, the Utopia he told her about: with its unhurried, taciturn men in leather aprons, filled with a special inner dignity, with graphite-black fingers and an assured, almost genetic confidence in their way with objects—an atmosphere of unworldliness, so uncommon in the modern world, and, to an accidental visitor, all but church-like, and inseparable from honest work; the atmosphere she remembers from Vlada’s workshop, and up until recently one could glimpse it in the last relics of ancient artisanry: cobblers’ kiosks, TV repair shops, countless basement rooms smelling of wax and turpentine, where men fixed umbrellas, locks, eyeglass frames, and just about everything that could be fixed.

  This disappeared in our lifetime; we watched it vanish, these pitiful remnants of the once-powerful Kyivan commonwealth, wiped out by the Great Ruin of the twentieth century: smiths, coopers, crockers, tanners, and lorimers, the once-glorious guilds that for centuries built up this city, founded churches and schools despite every alien tsar and magistrate—men who sat just like this in their tiny workshops two, and three, and five hundred years ago, and took with gravity into their hands the things people brought them, pronouncing their verdicts once and for all, as only men who know the true and good price for their work can. Not the price people pay at the market, but the one that is measured by the sum of expended life: the number of dioptres added to their sight over the years, the wheezing in their turpentine-laced lungs, their skin burned from constant heat, the high-contrast map of their wrinkles. The absolute concentration and surgical precision of movement with which a restorer, looking through a magnifying glass, dabbed away layers of age-old grit from a spot on an icon evoked in Daryna a downright sacramental reverence—a feeling remarkably similar to the one Gela’s story aroused in her. But this is also something she cannot convey to Adrian—she doesn’t know how to explain to him what these images could possibly have to do with a film about resistance. Except maybe as a metaphor for her own archival work—for her method (if that’s what it was): this persistent, ant-like, unwavering, peeling off of layer after layer, inch by inch….

  This is also resistance, Adrian thinks. Daryna’s got it right. To work the way these restoration guys work—in utter self-dedication, for miniscule pay, purely out of devotion to what you do—that is resistance in its purest form, the essence of resistance, like that voice stripped of words down to a bare melodic lament. She’s got it right. An intelligent woman must, after all, have a leg up on an intelligent man because she is endowed with this additional perceptiveness, one we lack—one that stems from her sisterhood with every living thing, regardless of place and time….

  A passing trolleybus blows a used ticket at his feet, and he bends down, moved by a sudden urge to pick it up, see, as he used to do when he was little, if the number is lucky, but he misses it: the ticket flies off, mixes with other litter at the edge of the sidewalk. There’s another thing I will never find out, he thinks, and shrugs, surprised at himself: I must be getting superstitious, too.

  Aloud, he tells her that what he loves most about the city at dusk is its quiet courtyards—and gold rectangles of light from the windows cast onto the snow.

  “Onto the snow? Why snow?” This surprises her a bit.

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be snow,” he concedes, without real conviction; it could be on the asphalt. For some reason, he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, and she understands it—their thoughts, in the warm, exhaust-laced air of the spring evening, flowing in and out of each other, like intertwined fingers. The light turns to green and they step into the crosswalk like a pair of well-behaved children—holding hands and not even noticing they are.

  * * *

  VMOD-Film

  Written by Daryna Goshchynska

  EXT. CITY – NIGHT.

  In the courtyard behind a city high-rise, on the playground, a girl sits—she’s squatting like a young child, but there’s already a frozen, unchildlike grace in her pose. The playground is empty: it’s getting dark; the little ones have all been taken home; the girl is already too old for the sandbox, but still too young to be part of the next shift, which will soon arrive with their glowing dots of cigarette tips in the dark, the strumming of their guitars, and the bursts of silly laughter or a girl’s squeal ripped from the hubbub, or the tink of rolling glass—the chaotic, Brownian splashes of puppy-like youthful sensuousness that will make a late passerby shy and hasten to reach his door.

  Later still, in the short hours of night, when everything grows quiet, the couples will arrive, and some retiree, kept up by his insomnia and arthritis, will come out on his balcony for a smoke without turning on the lights, and will catch below a moon-glazed glimpse of flesh freed of clothes, a white stain—a breast, a hip—and will get angry because now he won’t be able to fall asleep until morning for sure. But all this will be later sometime—it’s all yet ahead for the girl who squats very still at the playground.

  It is growing dark, the apartments’ windows light up one by one, and the girl can barely see what she’s got in front of her: in a hole dug into the ground (it rained the day before, the earth is moist and sticky, and easy to dig with a toy plastic scoop someone left behind in the sandbox); in a white frame made of apple-tree blossoms barely visible in the dark, a piece of silver foil, spread flat, catches what little light is left. What she is to do next, the girl doesn’t know. And she doesn’t have anyone she could ask, either. But she remembers her mother doing it, like this. She remembers, from when she was very little, that this is how her mother used to begin. The paintings came later.

  Somewhere above, a window clatters open—the sound sends a pack of crows tumbling out of a nearby chestnut tree where they had already settled for the night.

  “Ka-tya! Kat-ru-sya!” a woman’s voice calls, echoing over the yard.

  The girl startles, shielding the little hole she’s dug up. Then she looks back at the building (in the lemony-green patch of open sky between roofs, an inaudible shadow glides by: a bat).

  “Coming, Gran!”


  Glass! This shard, right here. To cover the hole. And then you bury it, and stamp the dirt flat, smooth it over with the scoop so that no trace remains: no one must see what she was making here; God forbid, someone should find out…. Not now. Not ever.

  The girl stands up and dusts the dirt off her knees.

  AFTERWORD

  This book was conceived in the fall of 1999 and begun in the spring of 2002; over the next seven years, the book and I grew and developed together guided by the will of the truth that lay hidden in this story and that I, exactly like Daryna and Adrian in the novel, had to “dig up.” This is why the traditional legal formula of the publishing world whereby “all characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or events are purely coincidental” does not fit: Only the characters in this book are purely fictitious. Everything that happens to them has actually happened to various people at different points in time. And could still happen. This, actually, is what we call reality.

  Reconstructing the wartime and postwar events—the ones that are reflected in Adrian’s dreams—was the most difficult and crucial task. Ukrainian, as well as European, literature is yet to develop a more or less satisfactory, adequate, and coherent narrative from that period; one is hard-pressed to find another time in the history of the twentieth century that has been buried under such veritable Himalayas of mental rubbish, packed over the last sixty years almost into concrete—the layers upon layers of lies, half-lies, innuendo, falsifications, and so on. Historical excavations of this period have begun only in the first decade of the new millennium, and in the course of working on The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, I was often delighted to receive another new message from fellow “expeditionists” spread all over Europe, from the British Islands to Ukraine, groups that, coming from different angles (different traditions, fields, and genres), have set to clearing up this logjam, Europe’s largest and most difficult—the so-called “truth of the Eastern Front.”