The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Fighting a pile of old letters at home, in another useless fit of resistance against the expanding paper chaos, I recognized the hand on an envelope with such intense emotion that it pinned me to the spot like an animal in a spotlight: This is from someone I once loved! And only after I read the return address did I realize it was Vlada’s writing. Is it truly not the person that we remember, but only our own feelings attached to them? Does the loss hurt because it leaves us flailing, throwing our severed emotional limbs after something that’s no longer there? Only the places that were unsoiled, untouched by subsequent visits retained the memories they originally held: the bench on Prorizna Street, next to Yama Café, where in the fall of 1990 the two of us sat burning our palates with “the double-halves” of coffee from Soviet cups with handles broken off to discourage anyone from stealing them, while below, in front of the Central Post Office, the not-yet-renamed Independence Square roared as a single body—its low drone swelled into one explosive boom after another, reverberating off walls, running quakes and shudders through window panes, all the way across the deserted city to the old Jewish market and the striking trolleybus depots—and the empty trolleybuses, their poles lowered and wires drooping like wet whiskers, stood aligned in two rows along Khreshchatyk, as if readied to be used as barricades; our faces felt the hot breath of stormy, combustible air—the crackling air of unrest that is released from the fissures between epochs like subterranean gases from between slipping tectonic plates, the air that picks you up and carries you along, air you can walk on, run on, shouting and not hearing your own voice. Our lips, parched after a day of standing on the square, burned as we passed our single cigarette to each other; we drank the boiling-hot double-halves and Vlada talked and talked without pause, as though she’d broken through many years of silence—about her divorce, about how things can’t go on the same, how life had to change, how it had to begin, finally, for real. “We had no youth, Daryna,” she said, meaning the students who’d lain down in the square and no longer got up—the students on their backs, face to face with the sky, their features starved into seraphic transparency, their suicidal headbands with the words “hunger strike” etched meekly in white on their foreheads—and we envied them because, unlike them, “we had no youth.”

  Vlada’s verdict cut me to the quick—it was so brutally true; she always possessed that unsparing clarity of vision, an astonishing degree of honesty for a comfortable Soviet girl. I felt the same as she did, but she was always first to recognize and articulate what it was, and as I listened to her then I felt, for the first time, a stab of another thought, one that I had been afraid to acknowledge—that my own marriage had expired just like hers, and I had to find the courage to tear it apart soon, to sever it surgically before the rot infected the two souls entangled in it. The world melded into a giant, rolling mass; our lives, and the only era we’d known, were falling apart in front of our eyes, and they were being ground down to irreducible solid specs that could then be sucked into the dark maelstrom of history. We had both married very proper Soviet boys, handsome and nice, college and, later, graduate students; and it was only when time came crashing down around us that we realized that these proper Soviet boys, so handsome and nice, feared nothing more than growing up—that an insurmountable horror of the adult life in which one had to make independent decisions had lain latent in them like an incurable virus, and it took nothing less than an utter collapse of the social system that had relied on men just like them to bring it out. Vlada had sensed all this a step ahead of me and was first to jump ship, to paddle her one-woman rescue raft away, with the infant Katrusya at her breast—I don’t think I would’ve had the guts were I in her shoes, but then again, I didn’t have the guts to have Sergiy’s child either. She had not a shred of fear in the face of the unknown; her whole being hummed, aimed at the future, as though she were set atop a tightly coiled steel spring ready to pop, and the energy she contained charged me, too, giving me some of the same confidence—she was wearing a black leather jacket that day, and I remember thinking with a smile, in a sudden rush of tenderness, Biker girl! All she needs is a white helmet...

  The bench on Prorizna is still there—after they closed Yama Café, they turned the place into a casino so it no longer serves as the perch for bohemian smoke breaks and now sits empty most of the time, on a blank slab of asphalt, no longer hidden by lilac bushes that were cleared to make a parking lot for the casino-bound Mercedes and Porsches—the only surviving monument to that autumn when we were, as it turned out later, still young, so young that we didn’t even know it. Because only youth, having found itself straddling a widening chasm between two eras, can leap forward with an easy heart, away from its crumbling past, can send whatever has been to the trash, like a bad draft, and set out, at not-quite thirty, to “live for real”—it is only youth that has the arrogance to cross out the years that have not satisfied its ambition: time teaches you to waste nothing, to savor unhurriedly, like wine, things that years earlier you would’ve brushed aside on a princely whim, thinking, as young Katrusya said whenever she missed her bus, “Dey’ll send us anoter one, bettuh.” Time teaches you that no, unfortunately, they won’t.

  Vlada had ten more years exactly—ten berserk years of living “for real,” at the speed of a Harley barreling down a mountain road (with Katrusya in her backpack); ten years in which she, a single mother without any material resources, except the studio on the Andriyivsky Descent that she inherited from her father, transformed herself into a truly accomplished artist, possibly the most successful painter in Ukraine—if you can measure national success in foreign sales, of course (although lately even our homegrown fat cats have begun to warm up to the idea that owning a Matusevych is badass), or in foreign sales and Ukrainian envy, because the latter is far more precise and sensitive than money alone: money, after all, is relative, and no one ever has enough, but envy always circulates in reliably high supply, and the more of it that roils around you, the thicker and more noxious its vapors, the more certain it is that you have risen, damn it, risen above the crowd.

  (As if she did it on purpose, as if she’d stood up from the trenches and let the sniper’s bullet find her. As if someone up there cared that we shouldn’t rise too far above anything, that we should toe the line. Inch forward, slowly—not the way she wanted it, “for real.”)

  It is always on Prorizna, when I pass the orphaned little bench on its bare knoll, that the stubbornly offended, purely childish thought—It’s not fair!—pops up like a forgotten buoy and hits me anew. If there’s still someone up there who enforces the rules, then it was even more unfair of him to rip her out of a life that she lived full tilt (literally) like a crock dentist who pries off a good tooth—Oops, sorry, a bit of a mistake here, but you can’t put it back, can you?

  Vlada herself must have been more than a little cross after she’d been deposited in the next world so unceremoniously: the very first night, while her body lay on a morgue shelf, she appeared in my dreams unusually furious—in her studio, wearing those same threadbare overalls and rummaging through drawers in search of something; she waved me off when I called out to her, desperately, with my whole being—meaning, leave me alone, I’m busy—and said something truly bizarre, something about “a bill of ward” that she urgently needed because “there are too many deaths.” I memorized those words exactly because, although the language of dreams is as impenetrable as that of prophecies, it is incapable of untruth and therein lies its central distinction from what we say and hear in daylight; it is our perception that skews the dreamt messages, “instrument bias” as scientists call it, and that’s why whenever I manage to preserve something I heard in my dreams until morning I write it down verbatim, even if it sounds a hundred times less meaningful than what I heard Vlada say to me on that first night, especially since, as it later turned out, on the same night in Vlada’s mother’s apartment, where Katrusya was staying, lights spontaneously went on and off in different rooms, doors opened and clos
ed, and the girl cried out in her sleep, “Mama!”—apparently, Vlada was searching there too, searching for her bill of protection, but against what? And to be given to whom?

  At the funeral, the teary womenfolk chatted themselves into the consensus that Vlada must’ve been looking for the lost paintings, the “many deaths” referring to her subject matter, and one gallery curator, turned irretrievably kooky on canonically dogmatic Orthodox grounds, blurted out what would feed the whispering, watery-eyed gluttons in certain circles for a long time hence: “You must not toy with a topic like that, you know?”—not without a dose of moral superiority, like someone officially tasked with watching over cosmic justice (Vlada couldn’t stand these born-again types and called them “the church CheKa”). The men, who generally held more positivist views, found a different interpretation more appetizing right there at the wake, especially after they’d had a couple drinks and the quickest of the ladies joined in and went to work with their knives and forks. To them it was quite obvious that Vlada had been “marked,” and for quite a while, “’coz everyone knows you could hire a professional hit man for five hundred bucks on a slow day, and a single one of Vlada’s painting would fetch many times as much, enough to whack your own mama—Five hundred, ha!” “Didn’t you hear on TV the other day? Just outside Donets’k, someone dug up a grave the day after the funeral to pull ten hryvnas out of the dead man’s suit pocket that a neighbor saw the widow put there.” “No, that’s not what I’m talking about, stuff like that always happens, I mean professionals, for them to slip a car into a ditch, especially off a wet highway, is easier than falling off a log!”

  And so the conspiracy theories spread and knotted one over another, growing more incredible the further they spun away from the actual event, and it was no use trying to talk sense into the people who’d never seen, other than on TV, either Vlada or Vadym (whose imposing representative’s figure at first thoroughly discombobulated the police; I remember seeing an inspector in the maelstrom of kin and friends, and a few others, all in uniform caps and with identical shifty looks of small thugs caught red-handed). They wouldn’t hear that A) no signs of any contact with another vehicle were found on the smashed Beetle; B) the investigation was able to reconstruct, rather competently, the path traveled by the car as it swerved off the highway, which C) made the crash a clear and conclusive accident, to the great relief of the police, who nonetheless purported to keep looking for the lost paintings, although you didn’t have to be a genius to guess that they’d never be found, unless, I don’t know, someone tripped over them—and what Ukrainian cop, if he still had his wits, would wear down his soles chasing after some “pitures,” no matter how many times you tell him that they cost more than some stolen Volga?; and, most importantly, that D) we do not, thank Lord, belong to the EU, regardless of how hard our anointed leaders thump their gelatinous chests to make precisely the opposite point, and one would be hard-pressed to find a decent art-thieving mafia in the deep ass that is our independent-of-any-rationality nation, where a modest bribe to a local official lets you carve out a piece of a brick wall with any Bruno Schulz fresco you fancy, or any fresco for that matter, anything, really, and the pickings have been slim ever since our last Goya and Ribera were sent to Moscow for “conservation” in the 1960s, never to be returned, just as no one intends to give us back the gems of the Tereshchenko collection that Grandpa Lenin himself traded off to Armand Hammer for his relief effort in 1921; so, no, it’s been a good half century since a self-respecting art thief could find regular sustenance on our lands, not to mention the fact that one needs a good network of legitimate art dealers to smuggle things out, and, as our cameraman Antosha puts it, Where the fuck do you find yourself some of those?

  Ukrainians, as any preschooler will tell you, focus on much simpler, homely things: arms, drugs, non-ferrous metals, poached Carpathian lumber, girls “for work in Europe”—fail-safe operations, with good cash flow, and who needs academies and shit like that; let things take their course, the country’ll find its way; let all those nutty artists and other trash feel secure as they would in their mommies’ bosoms for the simple reason that no one gives a flying fuck about them; let them live and graze, if they can find themselves a pasture.

  Vlada and I talked about all this a million times, laughing at especially burlesque episodes, such as the time she bought her apartment—a transaction that involved a change of clothes in the bathroom stall at the real-estate trade exchange to release a money belt packed with fifty thousand sweaty dollars from its rather erotic captivity under Vlada’s bodysuit; don’t let anyone tell you that money doesn’t smell, but who would have thought twice about the little woman as she marched down the street, wrapped in layers of baggy knee-long sweaters like an onion? Just like that, Vlada went all over the city, and outside the city, alone with rolled-up canvases in her car because no one on God’s green earth would ever want them! Folks, think about it, I wanted to tell all those scandalmongers who wouldn’t give up on their murder mystery involving a famous artist and unimaginable wealth (three paintings, in fact, which together might have fetched ten thousand dollars on a good day in our kind of market): What would your hit man do with those paintings? How would he go about turning them into cash? So, of course, I laid it all out—my iron-clad logic of A, B, C, and D, and so on—as soon as anyone mentioned the topic (And the idiots just wouldn’t let it rest, would they?); for the longest time their openly disapproving response remained a mystery to me: Why did they always behave like I was taking something away from them? Like I came to steal something precious? At the same time, parallel and yet more outrageous versions seeped out of some dark corners, like water trickling from under the door of a flooded bathroom: one was that the accident was Vlada’s way of killing herself, and what shocked me most was that this version was popular not among the casual, nothing-better-to-do observers, but among her own people—the painters she knew, all of whom suddenly felt compelled to voice their personal, unique eyewitness accounts about the last time they saw or talked to Vlada and how they “would never guess anything like that”; the other hypothesis, even crazier in its own way, was that Vlada was killed because of Vadym, as in, someone wanted to send him a message, a mysterious competitor or, God help us, a political rival—as if the dude were the redeemer of the anti-Kuchma coalition or something. But this one stopped me in my tracks for a second once I remembered his desperate muttering of “I killed her,” which, let’s face it, could have had a different meaning from what I was able to comprehend, with my bovine perceptiveness, at the moment, especially when one recalled that the number of politicians and entrepreneurs killed in car accidents on our country’s roads grew longer by the day—a fact that was even deemed noteworthy by The New York Times, which doesn’t bestow such honor on Ukrainian events very often—and every one of those deaths had been ruled, in official speak, “a misfortunate accident.” Philosophically speaking, the ruling had its own logic: there’s very little fortune in anyone’s sudden death, and as far as accidents go, every single event in our lives is an accident, all of them—or, maybe, none at all—and the very hairs on our heads are all numbered, only we’re not the ones doing the numbering, a conclusion that prompts our nation, which had given the world the great philosopher Skovoroda, to settle back, having made a bit of a fuss, every time, into its very Skovorodian stoicism; but to imagine that one of these “accidents” could have been aimed at Vadym, that he was so important that someone would’ve considered Vlada, his utterly uninvolved-in-his-business girlfriend, collateral damage—this was too much, even for Ukraine. Yet no sooner could one version be dismissed than several new ones appeared and spread in every direction, overtaking, like rising water, every dike reason could put in their path, going under and around in countless trickles, and it took me more than a few months of this to learn not to blush like a ripe tomato and screech mean things, quite without composure, every time someone asked me the question, with its probing emphasis, “Are you sure it was an
accident?”—more than a few months to grasp that it was not truth people asked for, whatever it ultimately turned out to be, but a story. Amen. And who am I, who makes a living manufacturing such stories, to judge them?

  Against my better nature, I had to admit, nothing is better suited for a story than the sudden tragic death of a brilliant and famous young woman. No young man’s death could ever produce the same effect—it’s as if men were expected to die, were doomed to die by some silent communal pact, if not in war, then somewhere else, as if the poor things were quite unfit for anything else, and that’s why with men, it’s not the fact of the death itself that we judge but how well it was performed: Did the deceased meet his fate chin-up, did he take it bravely on the chest, thus fulfilling a man’s purpose, or did he try to hide, like a coward, and betray said purpose dishonorably? We must reach one of these conclusions—call it The People’s Death Police, if you will—and that’s why we will not forget the case of journalist Georgiy Gongadze until we are delivered his tangible, bleeding real death instead of anonymous beheaded remains dug up somewhere in the woods. But no one remembers Vadym Boiko, the face of Ukrainian TV in the early 1990s, who shortly before a blast in his apartment was giddily showing his colleagues a thick file—I’ve got them all, those old Commies, right here, at last, you’ll see it all tomorrow!—and when the smoke cleared everyone saw Boiko’s burned body and cracked concrete ceilings. Boiko is quite forgotten because why would anyone bother remembering if everyone knows what happened?

  A young woman’s death is another matter altogether: it is always seen as a violation of the very natural order of things, since the first thought is inevitably about her brood—when there isn’t any (and will never be) and when there is (who will watch, oh, who will care, who will wash my orphan’s hair as the folk song mourns, and a million like it, century after century). A story is badly needed here—it alone can help restore the natural order of things; it can focus the frame and present this one death as a horrible aberration, a painful disruption for which someone, somewhere, will have to answer, if not now, then eventually, and if not in a court of law, then to a higher Judgment. If, on top of everything else, the victim was seen as a princess, showered with gifts by fairy godmothers every birthday and Christmas (Which already hinted at a trespass, inserted the required measure of injustice into the equation: Why should she be the special one?), and if she never once in her life acted the victim because she was too proud, or had principles, or for whatever other reason, then it only makes more sense to blame her for everything—let her take it all, if she’s so special—and close the case, turn, spit, curse, nothing like this would ever happen to me. A story like that is a chant, a protective spell that seals the other person’s death, puts it in an airtight glass sarcophagus, fit for a museum display—you can look, you can walk around it, you can even run your fingers on the glass and tap it with a pointer as you teach the lesson of how one ought not to live, lest one intends to find oneself at the height of one’s powers—and six feet under: Always buckle your seat belt, follow the rules, avoid dubious liaisons, don’t paint unsettling pictures and, for God’s sake, don’t rise so far above the crowd. All my dogged As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and so on were no more than a pathetic, wasted, toothless attack at this thick glass sarcophagus—an assault on people’s fundamental, self-preserving belief that death, our own or someone else’s, must have a sensible reason, that the world is just. And what did I have to counter this—my wimpy, childish, and inconsolable “It’s not fair”?