The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Later, after she was gone, and the stirred-up viper’s nest of the Kyiv bohemia couldn’t get enough of the event (not without the schadenfreude at the comforting prospect of things returning to their natural order in which all Ukrainian artists, without exception, are starving and unknown), it became intolerably painful to accept that realization about Vlada’s life, especially after the cost of her lavish funeral became the subject of greedy, whispered calculations—“a fortune for the coffin alone!” (The first time I heard this, I wholeheartedly wished, on a swell of pure molten hatred, that the appraiser get one of those coffins for his own use, and wished I could take my imagined curse back when I remembered that the moron had thyroid cancer, and that Vlada herself had bought him some rare drugs from Switzerland, out of her own pocket, of course, because he had no money, and she’d always paid for everything out of her own pocket, the invincible iron girl, except, as it turns out, not invincible, and not made of iron at all.)

  Where did she get it—this unwomanlike certainty of hers, the rock-solid confidence in her chosen path? I, who was conditioned to hone in, like a radar, on applause, who withered like a flower in stale water without a regular dose of male admiration (what an idiot!), in the course of our friendship gradually learned to take a mental tally of my actions—for her, first and foremost, and tried my hardest to earn her praise, made only more reliable by the fact that, unlike the approval of men, it had nothing to do with the length of my legs or the size of my rack—to the point where the smallest vexations sent me scrambling for the phone, to cry on Vlada’s firm shoulder, and she never once told me to get lost and get a life, as I, undoubtedly, deserved. She seemed so unflappable and solid: her career grew like a cottonwood sap—up, up; her boyfriend shot straight from the launchpad of his shadowy business (I still don’t really know what it was that he did exactly, but the money must have come from the kind of sources our nouveau riche prefer not to advertise and only mention in passing, as a joke) into elected office, and just kept going, and Vlada said he was almost done with the mind-blowing mansion he’d been building for the three of them somewhere in Roslavychi, the exurb dubbed “a slice of Switzerland,” among pristine meadows and ponds; her Katrusya went to the British Council School, with the children of foreign diplomats, to the tune of ten thousand bucks in tuition per year (Vlada paid). Her life was wonderful and would only keep getting better—and this also gave me security, a firm foundation for the confidence I needed so much, as if Vlada’s success promised, by some primitive, inaccessible logic of association, that everything would be similarly wonderful in my life as well, if not today, then tomorrow for sure. What else feeds female friendship if not this associative twinship, this reciprocal mirroring and intertwining, and don’t friendships die precisely and only when they run out of such associations?

  That’s why, when a month or so after our interview she complained to me of not being able to sleep—and she so rarely complained about anything, and always only in the past tense, after whatever difficulty had vexed her had been overcome, the barrier cleared, and the effort involved reduced to a source of comforting insight for a friend in need, as in “I know exactly what you’re dealing with, I’ve gone through the same thing, but see, I made it, and so will you”—I simply missed the alarm, failed to receive the signal, or, more precisely, ignored it like background noise: such signals, apparently, are only recognized by cretins like myself in deep hindsight, after the funeral, when all the heaving and sighing and shaking of heads adds up to a critical mass and reveals that such signals fell around the deceased in her last weeks like hail. How could we all have missed them, under what collective curse?

  “Would you believe it, I can’t sleep,” she’d said on the phone, as if extending an invitation to marvel together at this unusual phenomenon, but at two in the morning the tireless gurgle of her voice bore into my ear like a subcutaneous irritation because I had to get up at six for a live session and was close to falling over as I moved around my apartment, bumping into furniture, half-aware of packing my bag, with the phone against my ear that seemed to be slowly mashed into a bloody mess as she dripped, “I have this idiotic fear, like, if I fall asleep, I will die.... ”

  “Vlada, you’re simply overworked,” I said, for the sixth time in the last hour, “nothing comes without a price; you’ve had a hard year, leave it all and go on vacation somewhere far away”—thinking that the newly elected representative also needed some resting, since apparently he had no way of helping a woman fall asleep and was turning into one of his brethren who get from stress to stress by drinking their way through a sea of alcohol, only to be diagnosed with erectile dysfunction by age forty—and Vlada was still babbling, unflinchingly, that yes, I had a point, and they were already planning a trip to Dubai, or Abu Dhabi, one is cheaper and the other more accommodating, and which one she’d recommend in case I decided to get away, finally, too, until I had to plead for mercy and howled, “Vlada Matusevych, would you please shut up and let me get away for the four hours I still have?!”

  She laughed—a short, erratic flute scale, strangely melodic but suddenly awkward, as if she just then realized that she’d been keeping me up, and unsettling, too, because I also felt awkward for having flaunted my sleepiness to a friend suffering from insomnia—and it felt like I’d left her to fend for herself at night in an unfamiliar place. The laugh stuck in my ear like water, except that it did not, like water, seep warmly into the pillow as I slept through the short hours, and I woke still hearing its silvery echo, which, should I have had the wits to stop and listen to carefully, would have spelled out another warning signal—a sign that my outburst, which had slipped out of my grip like an ax falling from tired arms, had cut an invisible cable from the great edifice that is life, and it shuddered in response. In Vlada’s tinny laugh, high like a taut string’s ear-splitting response to an errant touch, razor on glass—that’s the dissonance that the four hours I still had must have sent into the widening, humming circles of infrasound vibrations that were already swirling around Vlada, because the truth was that at that point, I had many more hours left than she had; hers were countable, hers were slipping away, hers were almost drained to the bottom, but neither of us could have known it then.

  And three weeks after that she did fall asleep—precisely as her late-night fear warned her not to—in the middle of the day, in her car, on the highway to Boryspil, on her way to meet her agent who was flying in from Frankfurt with her paintings; he insisted he’d given them to her and they parted at the airport; but when Vlada’s overturned Beetle, crumpled like a tin can around her body, which was speared, hard, by the steering wheel, was lifted from the ditch and cut apart, there were no paintings in it, neither in the back seat, nor in the trunk, and, of course, one could assume that the car was robbed after it had crashed, or one could indulge a swarm of far worse and entirely outlandish suspicions about the accident, of which the only one that retained any vestiges of common sense, and thus could keep the living from losing all of theirs, was the idea that Vlada had fallen asleep while driving and the car had swerved off the wet highway (it had been raining just before the accident), and no one would ever know—this haunted me for a long time afterward—whether in the last split second before impact, as the Beetle flew into the ditch, Vlada was shaken awake in time to realize what was happening (Long enough to be terrified? To scream? To feel the pain? To hear the sound of her own bones crushing?) or if she’d woken up already on the other side, trying, unsuccessfully, to rub her eyes and slowly coming to realize that she no longer had eyes nor hands to rub them with. (This would be better—so much better that I spent many months convincing myself that that’s exactly what happened.)

  “I killed her,” repeated Rep. Vadym, face frozen into a bizarre half-smile, as he sank, fat and red (Vlada, small as Thumbelina, had always preferred large-scale men), into the ottoman; his shirt had come undone and a patch of high-quality underwear stuck out; a bottle of Courvoisier stood on the rug at his feet, an
d he held his glass with both hands, mechanically swirling his drink and repeating his mantra—“I killed her, I killed her, it’s my fault, I should have been in that car”—and this grotesque teddy-bearishness of his was the hardest to take, especially when paired with what he was saying, so inconsistent with reality, so discordant with what had happened—like the sound a razor blade makes on glass—as if he’d been cut and pasted here from a different movie altogether. I thought he was beating himself up for having let Vlada go alone, that he was crushed with the desperate realization that if he’d gone with her, she would’ve lived—and it was hard to argue with that—but it dawned on me that he was not feeling guilty about Vlada so much as feeling sorry for himself. It took all I had not to scream at him, Shut up!, even though he was not really speaking to me, or asking anything of me, and would’ve been asking the same question if I weren’t there, would ask his drink, and the ottoman on which he sat: “Dear Lord, how am I supposed to go on living?” And then with a precision amazing for his size, he put the glass down on a coaster and hid his face with his hands, half-moaning and half-mumbling something completely incomprehensible and leaving me to stand there helplessly and stare at his fingers splayed against his baby-pink bald head like a bunch of sausages.

  It wasn’t duty that brought me speeding to his damn nouveauriche apartment on Tarasivska—just finished, with a penthouse, and a glass roof—I hadn’t come to comfort him or to meld with him in shared grief; there was something else I wanted: I was watching him like a slowly darkening mirror that still held Vlada’s image, to find on him still-warm bits of her presence from the day before and pick them off him, like lint, to see him—as I realized I’d begun to do—with her eyes, something I’d never done before, when he was just a boyfriend (that’s how Vlada referred to him, always in English), not her lover, not her man, her boyfriend; that’s why, on some level, my mind put check marks of approval against his underwear, and the unexpected delicacy of his movement as he put the glass down—a quick aha, so these paws with sausages for fingers know how to be sensitive—and noted also his dry eyes—Vadym poured much more into himself than he let out, a sign of healthy virile appetites, of a vigorous bladder and other organs (once, when the two of them came over, we spent five hours sipping Courvoisier, but he never once got up to go to the bathroom; Vlada always said they had a great physical relationship, she wouldn’t have said anything if it weren’t so, so her insomnia had nothing to do with that). But it wasn’t like I’d run there to appraise him for an auction and grade his condition either; these things flashed in my mind at random, in double-exposure, I felt neither distaste nor sympathy for this man, and when I told him it was not his fault, I did so not because I felt sorry for him but solely out of respect for Vlada’s death, which belonged to her and her alone, and must have been woven according to the unique design of her lifetime. As for Vadym, I instantly and irretrievably cast him the role of the banana peel on which people in old movies slip at fateful moments and crash to their deaths, but real life, unlike movies, sets up its fateful moment long before any banana peels make themselves available, and that’s why Vadym’s mechanical screeching—I killed her, I killed her—was irksome and offensive: it disgraced my proud and independent Vlada by claiming agency in her life, it reeked of yellowish newspaper clippings, which were, no doubt, to appear very soon, scandal-mongering vultures must’ve caught the whiff of offal already and begun circling around the house, tomorrow there’d be flocks of them, see if you can hide from the flashes then—but this was also something one had to survive one way or another, and it would all happen later, in the noxious weeks when her death would be deboned, quartered, and roasted with different sauces in a breathless recipe contest broadcast to every household in the nation, until the thing got so frayed and worn that even my heart stopped seizing every time I saw her portrait and the portraits became just pictures of a famous person, an entry in a Who’s Who.

  In those first few hours, there was only one thing I needed, and that’s why I came to Vadym’s apartment and sat there with him, as he vacantly drank the cognac that refused to do its work, while Vlada lay somewhere on a freezer shelf with a tag tied to her toe—I couldn’t shake off the pesky and senseless idea that she was cold there and kept shivering myself, ripples of sudden chill shimmying up and down my skin just like that time in the Passage during our interview, when Vlada shape-shifted for an instant into an acolyte on the eve of his vows, someone destined for other-worldliness, only now the chill would not stop; I could not get warm and kept going back to the cognac, and every sip I took, instead of warming me lodged in my chest, solid and unyielding, like the steering wheel—and the only thing I wanted, the thing I came for, was to confirm, right there and then, that Vlada had been happy with Vadym. If I had that reassurance, I’d feel better; I’d be able to craft the horror into some semblance of meaning, like if she herself had showed up and said, with a resolute bounce of her bangs, I’ve no regrets, you know? None, you have my word.

  Again I washed up in her apartment just as I always did in moments of panic and confusion—I’d come looking for comfort that only she could give, in the very apartment she’d left the day before, and then gotten into her sunshine-yellow Beetle. And then slammed the door shut.

  Later, someone must’ve rung the doorbell, or come in, or Vadym finally had to go to the bathroom, because I was left alone in the living room and stood next to the uncurtained window watching a dense, fluorescent Gauloise-pack blueness quicken and solidify outside; during those days, all colors appeared painfully saturated, all lenses focused in all directions at once, and my eye kept tripping on utterly irrelevant frames—on the way to the cemetery out the car window a pair of dogs, one spotted and the other black and shaggy, rolled on a pile of lacquer-glossy wet leaves; and on the subway bridge, as the funeral procession passed under it, a homeless man with a patchwork tote, bowed against the low-hanging sky—with the kind of sharpness that also happens when you’re in love and every randomly arranged instance, once it falls into your sight, swells, rounds, and breaks off like a distinct drop of water; so, maybe it’s only in love and death that life becomes truly visible for us. Through the window, amid the fluorescent blue, I could see children playing on the sidewalk across the street, sharp moving silhouettes, black cutouts, with only their white sneakers flickering in the dusk like dying lightbulbs; in the foreground an old woman in a tiny knit hat, swaddled like a cabbage in many layers of clothes, searched slowly, with mesmerizing, dendritic stiffness, through the trash cans; and then, very slowly, as if filmed with speed-ramping, a car crawled by, a dark Mazda with blazing lynx-like headlights, and as I stood there in the raincoat that I never did remember to take off, I saw myself from outside too—someone painted into this creaking, straining, but still unfolding picture, and also saw, with the same piercing clarity, that Vlada was no longer part of this continuous time. We were being separated by its implacable flow; its forceful tug, so palpable at that moment, dragged me—now only me—blindly along and left Vlada behind, in the yesterday, marooned in the past as though on an ice floe, and the widening gap between us was rapidly filling with a roiling, rushing surge of new frames of life without her. I watched this flood come and knew I would never be able to tell her about it—up till that moment, from the minute I heard, and later with Vadym, the whole time, my mind kept addressing her, sharing its shock with her, chastising—Why did you go alone, Vlada? and a million other trifling post-factum warnings—and it was still she I entertained, and soothed, and came to ask: Were you happy with this man?—but it was already like talking into a dead phone, and all I had left to do was hang up and let this terrible, slow current carry me irretrievably forward, without her.

  I understood that Vlada had died and I had remained to live.

  When Vadym returned and we started talking again—finally, the cognac took effect and memories burst out of him, random and unstoppable—I said “she was” for the first time about Vlada and was surprised at how easily i
t came and how easy it was to continue, from then on, in past tense.

  This must be it, then—ground zero—when a new count is set to begin and a new system of coordinates takes root and reaches outward into the unknown. Time fills you in, layer after layer, like calcium encrusting joints, and the things and places that once bled with the dead person’s presence dry up and scab over with repeated daily use in this new time, the time “without”: the crosswalk, next to the movie studio where Vlada once sneaked her yellow Beetle behind me and stuck her shaggy, golden-wheat head out the window and hollered, “Daryna!” having been crossed another dozen times, sheds her presence and no longer hurts, becoming just another crosswalk; the windows of her apartment—the ones I checked for light as soon as I came out of the subway, the ones whose glow made me walk faster in anticipation of our kitchen-table talk after she’d put Katrusya to bed—first became the dark windows of an empty home, and then dissolved into a row of other windows, as if swallowed by a crowd, until one day, as I walked by, I realized I could no longer find them—was the first one the second or the third from the corner balcony?—and stood there on the sidewalk struck with my mouth open, like Lot’s wife, trying to remember the layout of the apartment, while lines from Hamlet swirled in my mind, “My father died within these two hours. / —Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.” (Or twice two years—does it get any easier?)