The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Boss leaned hard on the new “scale”—another ace slapped onto the table (the table in his office was now imposing, oak, fit for a game of pool)—and the scale did impress: prime-time promotion, billboards and ads on the subway; they’ll make her into a cult figure of the new generation. What the hell else does she want? He strutted; he was proud of himself—it occurred to her that it was he, in fact, who wanted to earn her praise, as would any man from a smart and beautiful woman, but still something was off: something was gnawing at him; there was a gap, a hole he wanted her to help close.

  Just recently, about a month before, they were celebrating his housewarming—he’d moved into a new apartment, a magnificent, newly renovated, two-story next to the Opera Theater. It had to have set him back half a million bucks at least—the expansive living room with a brick fireplace, the marble-finished bathrooms like Roman thermae. And it was there, while the guests were touring the pantheonic bathrooms, to their happy laughter (pierced, time and again, like expensive upholstery with stubbed-out cigarettes, with uncontainable, hissing ahhs of envy), that Antosha, their cameraman whom they’d dubbed Occam’s Razor for his fast adherence to the principle of finding the most basic explanation for every human action and for being almost never wrong (“If your cynicism is what’s called the wisdom of life, Antosha,” she used to say, half-kidding, “then I wish to die stupid.” And he answered with his latent alcoholic’s suggestively loony half-grin, “You should be so lucky, hon!”), grunted, quiet and short, like a spit: “That’s it, the boss hit some big-ass pay dirt; time to jump this rig.” Meaning their channel, which was already sinking fast, turning, like all the others, into a corporation, a front for some uncouth money-laundering enterprises, and their captain, their boss and breadwinner, their producer and co-founder, drenched in sweat, as if he’d come from the shower, darted, like a halfback on a football field, across his cavern of a living room from one VIP to another, desperately ingratiating himself: Pyotr Nikolaich, have some sushi. You like it, don’t you? Aleksei Vasil’yich, a drop of vodka? (There weren’t many of them at the party, those men of Vadym’s ilk, with identical occiputs sunk into soft cushions of fat that make their heads resemble pool balls dropped straight onto their shoulders; Daryna knew almost none of them—there weren’t many, but a single type like that is enough to spoil an evening.)

  And at some point, after another one of his bendings-over-backwards, the boss must have caught Daryna looking at him—probably sneering a bit. But no, she must’ve been still sympathetic, because at the time she still thought this was all for the channel’s sake, that the boss was slavering the movers and shakers for their collective sake, for the cause, to keep the channel afloat—ate shit, bless his soul, every day so that Goshchynska could grow flowers on the air. Well, flowers always grow on shit, and television is no different from a beautiful woman: Does anyone blowing her kisses through his car’s window wonder about the inner workings of her guts, about the smack of fecal matter inside her intestines, whose regularity, by the way, is directly responsible for her radiant complexion? Except that here it wasn’t fecal but financial flows that were being pumped and someone did have to insure their regularity.

  That’s what she thought, pinching her delicate little nose, because in that gigantic tele-organism the role she was meant to play, after all, was not that of the colon but rather of the radiant visage, “the face of the channel.” And under that understanding look of hers, extended to him over the well-fed shoulders and masticating heads, the boss, as if waking up from a dream, suddenly looked triumphantly, conspiratorially, over his smoke-filled cavernous salon, literally smoothed the salon over himself—just like a woman, out of the dressing room, smoothes a new skirt over her thighs—gathered it all in, weighed it, and offered it to her, the whole thing with himself in the middle, with the same feminine inquiring anxiety in his look: What do you think? As if she were the one who held the controlling interest, as if the whole show would instantly lose its meaning without her approval.

  She remembers it seemed really funny to her at the time, and she laughed at him from across the table (she’d had too much to drink), saluting him with her glass in a mute toast: Cheers, sweetheart, here’s to you! And Lord, how he bloomed in return, glowing as if she’d lifted a rock off his shoulders, lightened his burden! And she had no clue that by then the channel’s fate was, must have been, already decided. Antosha, as always, had been right, and the controlling interest was being passed into someone else’s hands entirely—the ones that took her by the throat yesterday, using her boss’s hands to do the work. The same boss who saw her as an accomplice and continued to need her approval: You’re on the right path, comrades! Kiss my ass, asshole.

  It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?, she asks in her head—not of her mother (she doesn’t talk to her mother in her head) but of Adrian, with whom she is also unlikely to share this observation out loud because it’s not the kind of thing that you share with anyone, period—where do they all go, these observations that no one ever shares with anyone and that just gather dust in the dark corners of people’s brains? It’s hard to believe how much in this life is determined, sometimes, by a single accidental phrase, a single look—a conspiratorial glance, an encouraging expression across the room, just like that—and someone picks it up eagerly, grabs your hand, and drags you into their cabal, lifting the lid on such a teeming subterranean nest of worms that you would have preferred not to have seen, never even wanted to know existed.

  And it all starts with the commonest little misunderstanding—you were simply misunderstood. The world is full of crossed signals, and no one really understands anyone anymore. Such scale, such opportunities, such a leap in her career—what is wrong with her? The boss really could not understand, and if he were pretending, then only very little. And what about her project, her unfinished film? He blinked when she asked about that, as if trying to remember: What film? He’d forgotten already, he had erased that file from his memory—some people are lucky like that, they have the serendipitous gift of forgetting everything unnecessary. “The one about the UIA or something?”

  “You know what he said to me, Ma? About my Lantern? He said no one needs my heroes. That they are not the heroes in touch with the times.”

  In touch with the times, how wonderfully apt—it slashed her like a blade. Pyotr Nikolaich, Aleksei Vasil’yich—they’ve bought this time, just as they bought airtime. They thought themselves the major figures, no, the only heroes of life’s written drama; they believed, especially for themselves, and they lived their lives with this belief—until the last control shot to the head. But the boss, the boss! He’s not one of them; he’s not of their breed. He was a talented journalist once; he made that fantastic film in the early nineties, about the little Chernivtsi kids who’d gone bald. (A rocket fuel spill at a nearby army base, wasn’t it? The city should’ve really been evacuated—wait, wait, but the story somehow got hushed down after that, never came up again, and, just a minute, if she recalls correctly, the man who was investigating the cause of the disaster, a local, didn’t he disappear, die quietly under mysterious circumstances?) If she’s not mistaken? It’s hard not to be mistaken, hard to keep it all straight in her memory, when the memory’s long overburdened, the system’s overloaded, and her head has long ago turned into a computer box, cluttered, with snippets of film, with frames of unidentified provenance, shots of who-knows-where and faces with names unstuck from them (this has happened a thousand times: the face—you recognize, the person—no). And she tells herself she’s delivering information to people, but all she actually does is add to the piles of snippets in their heads and so help them forget because she doesn’t remember squat herself, except whatever’s blinking right in front of her, on whatever narrow strip is cleared of rubbish to fit in what’s due today.

  Shit, what if she is really in the wrong business?

  “They’re the ones out of touch,” Olga Fedorivna responds, bitterly, and Daryna vaguely registers that
she invests these words with something private, invisible, and inaccessible to her. And then her mother adds, though it’s not clear about whom, “Roaches.”

  A rickety bridge is in those words, a narrow plank thrown from one bank to the other. Daryna can sense it but has no time to listen to it; she’s riding her own current—and not only out of the pure momentum of an active life that never really hears those who’d dropped out of the system (Because what could they possibly tell us—the retired, the jobless, the homeless, the bankrupted, the crumpled wrappers swept to the edge of the sidewalk where we click-clack so dashingly along in our brand-new Bally heels that they’ll never be able to afford?) but because she is, quite simply, overrun with indignity, great and intolerable. She’s got a fresh hole gaping inside her, and she’s just begun to mend it. She’s too busy attending to herself, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis. (The conversation with the boss, retold to her mother in a slightly different edition from the one for Adrian the night before, acquires new contours in her mind in the course of retelling, in being fit together; this is the only thing that’s important to her at the moment—to redub and edit yesterday’s footage in her memory into such form as can be turned into an asset and lived with from now on.) All she needs is a grateful audience with supportive oohs, but her mom keeps falling out of character and darting off track, still somehow failing to grasp into which molds she’s supposed to fit and to turn into ice. She’s getting old, that’s a fact: losing her flexibility, losing her quickness. But “roaches”—there’s something to it: Mother does have a feel for words, not for nothing did she write poems when she was young, but then again, who didn’t back then, in the sixties. The boss now strikes Daryna as not unroach-like at all, despite the fact that he never wore mustache. It would fit him. A sort of neurotic jerking of the nose, which became more conspicuous the more nervous he got yesterday—like he’s constantly smelling something disgusting. Antosha even maintained, for a long time already, that the boss had to be doing cocaine, and after last night Daryna was inclined to believe it. A man can’t just live in that cloaca; he’s got to do something at least about the smell.

  “You know what I’m really sorry about, Ma? That story I had planned for next week, did I tell you about it?”

  “You never tell me anything.”

  Here we go—the guilt trip.

  “That’s not true, I do. The story was really heroic, no spin—about a surgeon from a district town in Donets’k Oblast, one of those, you know, mining ghost towns where every living thing has fled, and three-room apartments go for three-hundred bucks, and whole city blocks stand vacant. The surgeon’s salary is two-hundred-and-forty hryvnas, less than your pension. So, he gets called to emergency surgery in the middle of the night, and runs out—the streets are dark, no lights—and falls into a hole, and breaks his leg; then crawls like that, one leg broken, all the way to his hospital somehow, where he does the surgery. And only afterward lets them take him to the trauma unit—they had two gurneys ready after the surgery, one for the patient, and the other for his doctor. Men like that still live in this country. Tell Uncle Volodya so at least his colleagues will know.”

  What she does not say, because it smarts like a fresh cut, is how she’d spoken to the man on the phone just the other day when arranging for the film crew. He had a wonderfully kind voice, cozy like felt slippers, and he stuttered a bit, must’ve been taken aback—imagine that, TV was coming all the way from Kyiv to talk to him.

  And right after that they called her into the boss’s office. What Donets’k Oblast? Who cares? Forget it! Boss even switched to Russian as he always does when he loses self-control. The Donets’k Oblast was now to be portrayed as a land of sweeping prosperity, practically Switzerland, or better still, not portrayed at all. And then he said that thing about her heroes—that no one needs them; the show is cancelled. How to look that doctor in the eye now?

  And Mom, having ooh’ed at her daughter’s every word with hungry attention, proceeds to rub salt into the fresh wound. She waxes poetic that exactly, exactly the people like this surgeon are the backbone of this country—like she’s tapping her pointer on an exhibit for the benefit of an invisible tour group: “These are the kind of people who hold this world together, have held it since creation, and they must be known! Because when you don’t know such people are out there, it is very hard to go on living.”

  She is speaking about herself, Daryna suddenly realizes. About how she once had to go on living without that knowledge—for how many years? Seven? No, more than that—living as the wife of a certified schizoid. Engineer Goshchynsky had also once crawled like that at night along his very dark street with a broken leg—until they broke his spine, too. And all around, everyone else was normal, and no one crawled anywhere—people bought furniture and went on vacations to Sochi. Like we go to Antalya now. Those who didn’t go did not have a voice then and don’t have it now, and we’re better off not knowing they exist at all.

  A museum worker made eighty rubles a month. Uncle Volodya, a rich man by Soviet standards, after the wedding also took his Olya to Sochi. They wanted Daryna to come, too, but back then she was so angry that she signed up for the student harvest brigade instead and bedded Sergiy on the second night of the trip, on his windbreaker spread out on the sand. He had to throw it out afterward. From that first time, the thing she remembered most vividly was the draft between her legs, when she lay under the sky with her panties off. That, and the triumphant knowledge that she and her mother were now equals, that she couldn’t be told what to do. It’s possible that if it weren’t for Sergiy—if the wind-breaker didn’t unfold into long nights of wandering, poems on a boat, and her tears on his chest (wet stains on his T-shirt—she was marking the poor guy from all her glands)—she would’ve slept with the whole brigade that summer, would’ve erected a paling of phalluses between herself and her mother, not knowing then, in the blindness of her youth, that it’s not a way out. There is never a way out from one’s mother; it’s life without parole.

  For the first time in her life, Daryna realizes she had never tried to imagine—as if she passed a door a thousand times and it never occurred to her to peek inside—how, in fact, her mother lived all those dark years that were now stored in her attic in the four bulging folders knotted shut. How did she endure, frozen into Snow Maiden’s trim, upright form, Father’s entire hopeless struggle, and the crushing bulk of her environment, and the fear creeping under the doors, the bandits in the stairwell, vans with red crosses on them, the Dnipropetrovsk asylum, and afterward—three years of wandering in and out of hospitals with the urine-soaked remnant of what once had been the man she loved, without the knowledge, back then, that he was not the only one, that others were also crawling into their own dead ends, a whole, uncountable in the dark army of defeat’s heroes?

  And then she married again—and got heavy within a year, like all of her folded, suddenly crumbled, even her face. Uncle Volodya taught her to eat well, unlocked her dormant culinary talents. In the years her father was committed, those talents wouldn’t have been of any use; the two of them mostly lived on boiled potatoes. Daryna loved them when she was little, and still does—mashed, peasant-style, with sour milk, sprinkled with parsley if you have some—what’s not to like? A teenager has other problems, and adult children do, too, and you always miss your parents in time. And generally, living side by side with someone does not mean bearing witness to his or her life. But how did she endure, all the way until Father’s death, what held her?

  Daryna recognizes very clearly that this question is now directly relevant to her own life: yesterday she, too, closed a door that no one will be in a great rush to open in order to find out how she’s doing in there. She’s already felt the grip of emptiness, the air of solitary confinement—yesterday, after leaving boss’s office, when she curtly informed her guys that Lantern had been cancelled and that she would not be working in the new format she’d been offered. (But nothing about the Miss New TV show!) She
was not, of course, expecting the guys to rouse the whole channel to a general strike in protest. (Or did she, in her heart of hearts?) Besides, everyone’s been waiting for something nasty like this for a long time and this turbid anticipation weighed on them. Even the jokes in the smoking rooms were getting blacker and dirtier by the day, and while the storm clouds gathered on the horizon, folks began cutting out, resigning, scampering away like little mice, but something else stung her: that the guys, after they cursed and vented their shared bile (because the Lantern was their common brainchild, conceived and gestated together, a hacked-off chunk of their lives) and asked her if she was really going to leave the channel (and whether she had her eye on anything, oh yes, they were most curious about that), were suddenly no longer with her—she felt it: they withdrew inside, let her slip from the grip of their attention. Every one of them was already busy assessing his own prospects, scheming which way to paddle and how to recalibrate himself, and she was already outside the circle, standing there with everything she left unsaid scrunched into a crooked grin on her lips like one hose leg pulled on.

  Vovchyk, her director of so many years that they were basically family, even he made this unpleasantly preoccupied face, as if he’d just remembered some very important business, when she said the thing about banditry and whoring—that she was not about to be part of that, and she realized that Vovchyk would stay, under whatever ownership, and would be part of that, and was offended by her determination not to, by her instantly taking away his one shot at not feeling like a piece of shit while he did what he was going to do. Here’s the first person who’s happy to see her go; start the count, who’s next?