The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Dear sisterhood: Let us all love our mother-in-laws, for they are our future; they are the women we will become in thirty years (otherwise, your beloved would never have noticed you, would never have recognized you). Let us love our rivals, past and present, for each one of those women has something of ours, something that we ourselves fail to notice and prize and that, for him, is sure to be most important. Shit, does this mean I have something in common with that droopy-faced hag with eyes like burnt holes in a blanket!?

  And this is just the beginning, Lord. Just the beginning.

  Apollinaria, Stefania, Ambroziy, Volodymyra. (How comical these cloche hats from the Jazz Age of the already-past century: these tightly fitted little felt pots, pulled down to just above the eyebrows and banded with silk—you know it’s silk because it glistens even in the prints—with tiny brims and round tops; and the women’s legs, always in stockings, even in summer. Just think how they must’ve sweated, poor things.) To shuffle the photos is to greet each one of them silently with my eyes, despite the fact that they’re all long dead. I’m the one poorer for it.

  It’s not just me looking at them—they do look back. I realize this in an instant (I couldn’t possibly explain this, even to you!) with the same precise and inexplicable certainty as I did one day, many years ago, at St. Sophia Cathedral when I had wandered in, lathered after a half-sleepless night, agitated not so much by any real events but by the much more deeply disturbing premonition of fundamental changes in my life—changes whose advance I could feel from all sides at once and which I knew portended the end of my youth.

  The ticket office had just opened and I was the first visitor, all alone in the echoing and alert silence of the temple, where every step on the terrifying cast-iron floors rang all the way through the choir lofts. I stood at the bottom of the honey-thick twilight suspended in half-consciousness by a swirling, tilting pillar of sunlit dust until I suddenly felt a thrust at my chest: from a fresco on the opposite wall of a side nave, a white-bearded man in a blue, richly draped, floor-length cloak looked at me, his dry, walnut-colored palms pressed together. I felt faint—a soft, furry paw brushed me from inside—a shaky shard of a vision slashed through the air. Something stirred. I stepped closer but the man—this monk or statesman with the time-darkened face and those clearly drawn, typically Ukrainian contours that are also soft like the lines of aging mountains and that one still recognizes, so easily, in the faces of the men at the Besarabsky Market—was already looking at something else. Only the eyes—implacably dark and swollen with knowledge—burdened his face, as if not given quite enough room, and it seemed they would turn upon me again at any moment. I couldn’t stand it and looked away first, and it was then that I saw what I had never noticed before, as if helped by a sudden shift of light: the cathedral was alive, it teemed with people—every wall and arch was inhabited with dimly silent, time-smudged women and men, and every one of them had the same otherworldly eyes, pregnant with the ecclesiastical pall of all-knowing.

  All these eyes saw me. I stood there in view of a crowd, only it was not a crowd of strangers. They took me in with such kindness and understanding, as if they knew everything about me, so much more than I could ever know myself, and as I slowly dissolved—like a pat of butter in warm water—in their encircling gaze (I couldn’t tell how long this lasted, time had stopped), it was suddenly revealed to me as the most obvious thing in the world that these people did not just live a thousand years ago; they had lived for a thousand years, taking in everything that had passed before their eyes until their gaze held the quintessence of time—the heavy slow suspension of a millennium, clots and crystals of time squeezed together like tightly pressed atomic nuclei. And I was before them, a mortal, barely nineteen. I wasn’t even a woman yet to tell the truth (it was soon after that I became one), so perhaps mine was the kind of revelation classified in theological literature as a maiden’s vision or some such. At any rate, never again, in any of the ancient holy places—not at the Athenian Parthenon, nor on the bare site of the Jerusalem Temple, nor in the Garden of Gethsemane—would those, visible or invisible, who persist in a place for ages, welcome me as one of their own. All I ever felt again—even when I managed to be alone with them—was their purposeful wariness, not menacing or defiant but more akin to a held breath, a whisper: What do you want, woman?

  I must admit they have a point. Indeed, what business do I have with them? Having once accepted a man, a woman passes irretrievably into a different gravitational field—she simply falls into time, into a silt-clogged stream, falls with the entire weight of her earthly body, with her uterus and ovaries, these living chronometers. And time begins to flow through her, no longer pure (for when pure it does not flow at all, it stands still, like that day at St. Sophia; it is a single lake, a placid spill of the radiant dark-honeyed twilight) but embodied as she is in her clan—her kin—in the endless chromosomal rosary of the dying and resurrecting genotype that pulses with mortal flesh into that which we call—for lack of a more accurate term—human history, every one of us plugged into a serial circuit and once in, you cannot jump out, you cannot see the whole thing from outside. Unless you’re a nun—but it’s too late for me now.

  And so now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this new feeling. They look at me from these old photos as if I owe them something—I shrink and shy in their heavy gaze that reaches so far beyond the moment captured by the camera, unsure about what it is they expect of me. It’s as if they don’t know if they can trust me, like they need to size me up, to see if I am good enough for the family, how serious my intentions really are. (Good Lord, what nonsense am I thinking?!) These women with their cloche hats and their thighs sheathed in sun-spotted Jazz-Age dresses (it is a clear summer day, and there are trees in the background that might still be growing in the same spot, and a dog, his tongue wearily lolling from his mouth) and their buttoned-up, sporty-looking boys in turtlenecks and breeches, and men with black moustaches like butterfly wings above their lips, later called Hitler moustaches (but Hitler hadn’t yet come to power, and across the Zbruch River no one had yet stacked mummified-alive corpses like hay, and Lemyk hadn’t shot Consul Mailov, and Matseiko hadn’t taken aim at Minister Pieracki...).

  And then here are those after the war, in incomparably poorer rags, who managed to live despite it all, the remainers, or better, the survivors, meaning the nonetheless living. (Which sounds so much kinder, doesn’t it?) And here is a tiny snapshot after the deportation, with oppressive, low-slung volcanoes on the horizon (Kolyma? Transbaikal?), and the boy in the foreground is struck with a completely different leanness, not the athletic kind but the thoroughly plebeian, hunger-worn kind. He wears a baggy jacket with hideously padded Terminator shoulders, and so does the young woman with poodle-like curls next to him. Both are laughing into the camera; their heads are close together yet their hands are behind their backs, as if still under the armed guards’ command, but laughing joyfully nonetheless, laughing from their hearts—their entire beings so happy about something. What is it, one wonders, that could make them so happy there?

  Something painfully familiar flashes in the tight ripples around the man’s mouth, like déjà vu or a dream you can’t recall in the morning. I must have seen this same expression in your face, must have caught its fleeting, uncanny breath on your features, gone in an instant without a trace, a message from a long-gone soul who has only this one way of reminding us about himself—and if I look carefully (What exactly do you imagine I’ve been doing here all this time, gulping down eyeful after eyeful?), I can find something of yours in many of these faces, something imperceptibly altered but shared nonetheless, as if an errant beam of an invisible torchlight, dancing over them, flashed you out of an accidental fold of another’s features or in a turn of another’s head. Here, here it is; it almost coheres but again merely almost, and the dream of unrecognition goes on, growing slowly more nightmarish, as if now I am chasing a fleeing ghost.

  “Here’s
my paternal great-uncle,” you introduce with a note of involuntary solemnity, or perhaps it just sounds solemn to me, and I define silently: Paternal great-uncle means the brother of your paternal grandfather. My lips stretch idiotically in the smile of a well-brought-up girl who is working hard to be liked by these adults—pleasure to meet you—and suddenly a blinding, shimmering veil of tears slips across my sight, and I hurry to swallow them, blinking them away before you notice because, like all mama’s boys, you automatically interpret a woman’s tears as a personal reproach, instantly growing sullen, as if you’ve been struck, as if, except for you, there is nothing for a woman to cry about in this world. I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t have it in me to resist the numbing spread of this insane, universal tenderness that pools under my skin like blood from a thousand wounds—this visceral, glandular, animal pity for these dead, for their youth, their speech, their laughter no longer audible from where we are, their piercingly pitiful, childlike innocence to the impenetrable gloom that awaits them. Or, perhaps, it is the pity I feel for you and me, for the two orphans abandoned to fend for themselves—like Hansel and Gretel in the dark, dark forest—two lonely shipwrecks washed up onto the shore of the new century by the last, life-draining effort of so many ruined generations of men and women whose only achievement in the long run was to bring us into this world. And on this we ought to congratulate them posthumously, because most of their peers didn’t even manage that.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Please, what is it?” (with your brooding, almost injured face and your immediate impulse to hold me against your chest, to stroke my hair, to shush).

  “It’s okay. It’s over now, I’m sorry.” Let’s go on. To the 1960s chignons and nylon raincoats, to the things that already pop up in our own childhood memories, things that are no longer photographic but fully corporeal, with a feel and a smell: I remember how loudly one of these raincoats rustled when we hid under it in the wardrobe. And, oh, I had a toy bunny just like that, in short pants and a lace ruff! I just can’t remember what it did when you wound it up. Beat on its drum?

  Looks like I’m still playing the little girl’s role; and you’ve got the adult part this time: You are the ambassador for all your dead. You do look like you’ve grown older just in the time spent with them, grown out of the lankiness, the floppy-eared-ness of that loose-limbed boy who walked as if scooping up some extra space, and whom I followed with my eyes from behind my window, until he disappeared around the corner, a thread unspooling, only the thread came out of myself—my own body—like a silkworm’s.

  Sometimes I am overcome by an almost maternal pride—as if I were the one who brought you into this world, so well put-together, with such relaxed grace in every gesture. The previous generation of “exemplary boys”—those Soviet ones who were destined to be “pioneers,” “Komsomol men,” and then “Communists” (and turned out exactly so)—moved differently, more stiffly, with the implacable military uniformity of the future pyzhyk hat wearers, still so easy to spot in any international airport that one doesn’t have to think twice about coming right up and chatting with them in Russian. And perhaps that’s why I couldn’t ever stand them—those exemplary ones—and why I—the straight-A student with big bows in her hair—gravitated inexorably to the punks, although, of course, you are no punk, and there is no one to whom you could be compared—there were no such boys in the days of my youth; they hadn’t been bred yet. This must be whence my fits of maternal pride, this feeling never known with any man before. Not the “look what I’ve got” feeling on those mornings when I wake up first and, pulling back the covers, stare with hungry curiosity anew at the man stretched out on his back beside me, and weigh, like a merchant, my life’s loot in pounds; and not the blood-bubbling thrill, like a burst of champagne, when I am approaching from a distance and you haven’t seen me yet: “And a man like this loves me!” Not the first, or the second, but a kind of a spellbound, puppy-like wonder, as if I’ve shaken off sleep, rubbed my eyes, and still cannot believe it. Can this be my man, exactly as I imagined him? (And I have always imagined him since my now-distant school days!) So alive, so real, so much more unexpected, nuanced, and interesting than I myself could ever have invented; so big and skillful with his let me do this and really so much better at every task than I am (even at cutting bread—he gets paper-thin, uniformly even slices, a pleasure to behold, while all I can manage are thick unwieldy chunks, lopsided and saw-edged as if a hungry beast mauled the poor loaf). And most importantly (I boast to my girlfriends silently, and then aloud, no qualms whatsoever), most importantly, he does everything with this amazingly natural ease and simplicity that must have something to do with his infinitely touching grace, like a young animal’s—the complete lack of any need, rooted in the body, to pretend to be something other than himself (to march in step, to keep eyes on the head of the man in front, to look the boss in the eyes and lie with an unclouded gaze).

  No, I certainly could not bestow upon him this gift of organic dignity, no drawer of my imagination held such a treasure, and never before had I encountered a person who could pass through falsehoods with the same calm ease, emerging utterly untouched by their falsity. Here my contribution amounts to staring in amazement—slack-jawed, like a child at a magician—and pondering how wonderful it is, after all, that it was not I who conjured you! For the first time, practically in my entire life, I can finally say it’s great that I have no control whatsoever over what you are and what you might yet become. Even better, I don’t want any. I am afraid of it; any intervention on my part would be for the worse.

  You, naturally, entertain no such notions. Who knows what kind of notions you do entertain about me? Sometimes I get a bit scared—love generally is a scary thing, happy love no less than unhappy, only for some reason no one ever talks about that.

  Fear blew through that very first moment when you—smiling as if at an old friend—set out toward me across the bedlam of the TV studio and the chaos seemed to dissipate before you—to disappear from the frame—so irrelevant was it to you as you stepped over the thickets of tangled cords and swerved around treacherous machinery with the grace of a nocturnal animal in the dark woods, and inside me suddenly surged the intoxicating sensation of a mind at the brink of collapse. As if the invisible wall that separates us from chaos slid apart, and one could now expect anything: this new young man of unclear origins could be a psycho, for example, one of those maniacs who keeps calling and lies in wait at the studio entrance—only psychos don’t have such openly childish smiles (and, simultaneously, as if on a parallel track, sped the rueful thought, he must have a girlfriend, a young one, one of those hip ones in a strappy top and tight little pants); and that’s when I heard your voice addressing me and froze for an instant, because you dropped this outrageous question as casually as if we had played in the same sandbox, only you’d stepped out for, oh, thirty years or so, but now you’re back and...

  “Have you been looking for me?”

  That was a hell of an introduction!

  “Why would I be looking for you?” I shot back, quite sensibly, as I willed the cracking wall back into place and the surrounding world into a semblance of normalcy, but the world had already turned—like a dress, inside out—and I saw myself through this young man’s eyes: still in makeup from the recent recording, as if cut out from a TV screen, which always produces in newbies a staggering effect—like the familiar flat picture has been replaced with a 3-D one and alive on top of that (you can try it on for size, see how this woman fits—how she’s just tall enough for the top of her head to brush against your lips). My face like a cream puff, hair brushed smoothly back so that no one would be left ungraced by the sight of my exquisite ears, the rest of me packaged into a leather vest and a white musketeer blouse from Bianco (thanks to the sponsors mentioned in the final credits), with black—and, by the way, seriously tight—jeans. All the cameramen love getting shots of me entering the set from afar, full-
length and legs in the frame. You can tell I fixed what I was wearing that day in my memory, forever—that unmistakable sign of all momentous events in our lives—although at that moment, my TV-star getup was strapped on tight like a bulletproof vest, in full combat mode.

  What is it you imagine you want, kid? And who the hell are you anyway, for me to be “looking for” you?

  “I was told you’re looking to make a film about Olena Dovganivna.”

  Aha.

  “And you care because?”

  “That was my granny. My great-aunt, actually,” you added with a quick apologetic smile.

  He does have a sweet smile, I thought then; it lights his face like the sun breaking through the clouds, though his lips move only a little. Something at first made me classify him as one of the Russian-speaking, bracing myself for the forced, just-learned Ukrainian, tight as a new shoe, with foreign phonemes rubbed raw like blisters—“lookedd,” “toldd” (for Christ’s sake, unclench your teeth already!)—and the cringe-inducing hobbling through phrases as they translate them, word for word. It’s like watching a drunk try to stay upright. Our producer talks like that, very deliberately, “I think calls into the air (meaning on-air calls) must be cut short.” Or, “We are in need of a stronger show, with unique countenance.” Unique what? Oh, content, unique content. Even the young man’s purely Galician, “That was my granny,” didn’t prove anything since the linguistic neophytes eagerly borrowed the Galicians’ colorful words—folksy phrases and even the trademark lilting intonations—only to deploy them in most unnatural ways, believing all the while that this is exactly what one ought to sound like when one speaks pure and authentic Ukrainian, which, to be fair, they may never have heard spoken by anyone other than a Galician. And it’s not like Galicians can’t speak Russian either. As soon as they land in Kyiv, they switch and chirp merrily along, as if they were keeping Ukrainian for their own secret use, behind layers of mysterious rites and seals of conspiracy.