The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  When Mom died I was too little to know anything about this, but I still remember, a whole year before her death, being gripped and torn, so I sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, by waves of suddenly surging dread that Mom would die. They say it often happens to teens, and there is nothing mystical about it—the usual prepubescent rollercoaster. But the sense, from back then, of doors opened onto the cosmic cold and the draft of a strange will blowing through them—a will stronger than anything I could have imagined then or could imagine now—I kept this feeling. I remembered it like a dog remembers a scent. And so when it comes again, when the doors creak open—I recognize it.

  Only I don’t know how to obey.

  (If back then, when I was twelve, I hadn’t let Mom go on that last trek to Goverla, if I’d latched on to her clothes and screamed, “Don’t go!”—would she be alive now? Although, on that actual day I didn’t have any sense of foreboding, no one did—not even Dad.)

  I cannot let go because the fear for Lolly grips me. An irrational, instinctive fear—the dread that I won’t recognize the moment when I need to latch on to clothes—hers this time. The fear of being under fire from all sides, like those wild pigs in the preserve: you don’t know where to aim when they come.

  Or who is coming.

  Still, what if the “chaild” is actually me? And it’s Mom who was asking for my forgiveness? (For what?) Lolly, Granny, Mom, Great-Aunt Gela—so many women already hold me in their net, ensnare me with their presence, and now Yulichka wants a piece of that action, too—like they’ve all conspired behind my back, sending each other their secret signals. Women, of course—they have to be more sensitive to any drafts stirred up in the universe; they, with their monthly bleedings, must be well familiar with this anonymous force that takes you over unilaterally leaving you to simply change your pads obediently. Women ought to be wise as snakes; they ought to be the ones showing us the right way to live, so why are they always so damn helpless?

  Calm down, Adrian, keep it down man.

  “Well, that’s quite a story.” I smile at Yulichka with Olympic composure. “I think I read this somewhere, or maybe it was a movie—this guy comes to a new town, checks into a hotel, and just like you, right then, overhears someone else’s conversation on the phone. And in the conversation they’re making plans to kill someone, so the guy then spends the rest of the movie trying to decide if he should go to the police—but he doesn’t know any names, or dates—so he’d just look like an idiot. Alright, sweetie, is that all? No one else called?”

  Yulichka coolly flutters her heavily mascaraed lashes at me. I recognized this same tense mistrust from the guard at the Tax Inspection office the other day—a hick who’s convinced that the whole world is just waiting for a chance to rip him off—when I tried to tell him a joke. The poor sucker didn’t even smile. But the mention of her immediate professional duties produces its usual effect in Yulichka, like a “sic ’em” command to a police dog, and she sets obediently to reporting who else called while I, here in my little alcove that’s loftily referred to as the office, was indulging in my philosophical meditations instead of doing work. (Which was, actually, the right idea: when reality starts to leak, there’s no better way to show it who’s boss than to plunge into the piddly, routine stuff, like organizing my acquisitions log—only it looks like our reality is leaking for real this time, despite my attempts to derail it.)

  “End you hev a meetin et hav past faiv,” Yulichka reminds me for the umpteenth time.

  I assure her, with somewhat exaggerated gratitude, that even Julius Caesar couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because while holding five things in your mind at once is pretty impressive for a man—we men are all single-taskers; we can only focus on one thing at a time, but fully and to the end (and if you couldn’t, and split, that’s your own problem)—no man, let him be ten times Julius Caesar, your namesake, by the way, could ever dream of keeping track of as many things at once as do you, my priceless, for which you earn my awe and respect!

  Uf-f—the emperor’s namesake, lips still pressed into a displeased crease, slips back out the door where the bell just happens to have announced someone’s arrival (probably just a stray window-shopper). Thank God. Now I can loosen my tie and gulp some water straight from the pitcher.... What I’d love to do now is my yoga routine, the best thing for restoring composure—just to drop into forward bend and hang there a good five minutes or so, like a shirt on a clothesline with arms hanging, so that blood comes back to my head and my mind becomes correspondingly clearer. Doesn’t look like I have time for the whole routine—how long do I have before the meeting with my so-called art consultant? (Another lummox who can’t focus on one thing, never mind he’d spent his whole life waiting for the chance to do just that. Dabbling in freethinking in other people’s kitchens, amassing in his mind a veritable archive of rare and arcane knowledge, and collecting in his tiny Khrushchev-era apartment the complete set of albums published by the “Art” press that’s not worth shit to anyone now. A guy who wanted to write, one day, once freedom rang, a fundamental work on the history of the Ukrainian underground, and when said freedom finally did ring, boomed, in fact, louder than anyone had ever expected, the only thing he turned out fit for bragging was a treatise for students about his friendship with dead Grytsiuk and Tetyanych. And if small hustlers like yours truly weren’t tossing him bones every so often, he’d still be walking around with kefir in his net sack. All of them, those Soviet-bred “brilliant intellectuals,” turned limp and shapeless on the free range, like jellyfish taken out of the water. In bright daylight all their submarine gloss turned out to be a mere optical illusion, a side effect of the atmosphere of social paralysis so prevalent then, which was the only thing that made it possible to mistake impotence for a kind of spiritual aristocratism. So we’ll have our half past five today—a meeting of impotents from two generations.)

  At our modest dinner, I will ask the professor to certify with his distinguished signature the authenticity of a pretty dubious Novakivsky. (I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the work is not by Novakivsky, but by one of his students. It will do just fine for the rake who’s got his eye on the piece—he’s already abused his privilege to move half the National Museum into his lair, enough’s enough!) And once the dear professor, after a bit of posturing, agrees (he’s never once refused), I’ll also ask him, for dessert so to speak, a little extra after the main business of the day, to find Yulichka a spot as a distance student in his art history BA program (which is why the poor thing’s been lunging at the end of her leash with diligence—reminded me five times about this meeting!).

  This entire, well-rehearsed ritual of ours, in which he acts the impoverished aristocrat who’s bringing me, the obtuse nouveau riche, the light of science and knowledge, and I pretend to eat it all right up, is in about forty minutes. I’ve time to spare, only it’s already rush hour; the streets are jammed, Kyiv’s been choking like a deathbed asthmatic lately. The way you have to crawl through downtown now, you’d rather run cross-country in a gas mask; and what the fuck, I ask you, are we feeding a mayor for? A cell phone, obviously, is not something the professor would have, can’t warn him if you run into a jam, so it’s better not to be late and not to make the old man nervous, the easier to work him at dinner. Alright, he-rre we go, back and up—temples tingle pleasantly as if filled with champagne, the dark wave falls noisily away, rings fade from before my eyes. Consider me fit to roll out in public—triumphantly, like a brand-new BMW from the garage.

  See you later, Yulichka. (Yep, gawkers—a young couple, the miss in a muskrat fur coat, welded to the cabinet with the Soviet porcelain, and Yulichka, like a Cerberus-bitch, looming nearby, acting the guide but actually watching they don’t steal anything. I don’t need to stay; if they feel like buying a porcelain vixen or a young pioneer in shalwar, Yulichka’ll handle everything on her own; she’s a bright girl. She’ll be priceless once she actually learns a couple of things.) I embrace the whole group
with one mighty smile as I walk by, and that’s how they remain imprinted on my retina, the trio, with three heads turned toward me, like a magnified copy of something manufactured by the Konakiv Porcelain Factory—see you later, goodbye, go to hell.

  And only when I am in the car putting the key into the ignition do I see that my hands are still shaking.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  This comes out by itself, like a breath. How naïve—there are never answers to questions like these. I don’t even know if it’s a “who” or if there is more than one, maybe a whole platoon studying me through their crosshairs from the invisible afar. Before, there were only dreams. Now a phone call. That’s closer, warmer, as in the children’s game. They are coming closer, rapping on the window, breathing on the back of my head, into my face, with their dogs, their explosions, their bursts of machine-gun fire, forgive them, Adrian. Brr. No, warmer is clearly not the right word—the hell it’s warmer. It’s like snow poured down your spine.

  Let me sit here just another minute, I ask “him”—“them,” head resting on my fists atop the steering wheel. It’s not like I’m afraid to be driving right now. I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to bore again, like a dull corkscrew, into the exhausted flesh of this deranged, wildly sprouting city, into the falling dusk and the crawling current of hoarse cars, through the drifts of dirty snow piled by the curbs, cars sometimes buried inside them, and past the water-filled ruts splattered with flashes of reflected lights along the sidewalk, accompanied by the squealing of car horns where traffic begins to coagulate into clots, which make you squeal out loud. And all so that I can arrive on time to a place where I will lie and be lied to, so that I can later lie somewhere else and get some money for it—Lord, what a waste.

  Lord! You see what a fuckup I am—I’ve nothing to show You in my defense. I did not spend sleepless nights thinking of how to make this world a better place—although the world would, probably, become a better place if solar power got even five percent of the time people spent on gas pipelines (like that gas will flow forever!—go to Dashava, look at what’s left when gas wells are sucked dry). But I’m not one of those who breaks through walls. And I didn’t do much laying of life for friends—once only knocked the teeth out of a rake. Our asshole union organizer went after the weakest guy in our group and worked him over on the kolkhoz trip so hard the guy had to be taken away in an ambulance. Turned out to be a diabetic, didn’t actually have to come with us, could’ve gotten excused without a fuss, but was ashamed before a girl he liked; after they’d taken him to the ICU, I went up and socked that capo right in the mug like every one of us wanted to do, because if no one did, we’d all have felt like accomplices later. Afterward, though, I often shook hands with other scoundrels knowing full well they were scoundrels, but their scoundrelism had nothing to do with me at the moment, and what could be worse than that?

  Be hot or cold but not tepid—that’s what You said, Lord, and I’ve been tepid so many times in this life I can’t stand myself. Whatever gift I had, I flushed down the toilet, and I don’t know how to love my neighbor like I should because I know I haven’t given so many folks their due that I can’t even count them anymore. And I’m not even sure that I actually love people—not friends, or family, but people. I love objects; that’s true. I love things made by human hands—that may be the only shred of physicist that survived in me.

  When I unscrew the lid from an old watch and spread it on a velvet cloth, like Grandpa used to do, the miniscule nails, perfect, like living beings, the clever mechanism carefully tucked inside, as if in a small nest, it’s like a warm soft paw touches me from inside. These things are still alive; they breathe—unlike the ones sweeping us under their mass-manufactured avalanche today. And although I refuse to change the world myself, I still love this substance that somebody else’s hands had once tamed, in which one can still glimpse the folded trajectory of another’s thought like the light of a dead star. Gold sand, a sparkling trail. Sweat between shoulder blades during a break between classes.

  Look—Grandpa showed me when I was little—a transparent-blue dragonfly, a reed, a sun-drenched splash—look how perfect the dragonfly’s fuselage is, you couldn’t dream of making a thing like that! Old things still have that same thrill that rang that day in Grandpa’s voice—a human’s joy at being in the presence of the perfection of living forms. The joy of overcoming chaos. When all these things die out, crumble, move from antique stores to pressurized museum chambers, this joy will vanish from our life together with them. Then we’ll be completely stuck in a sanitized, dead space filled with radically different things—ergonomic and anonymous, like disposable needles. And what’ll be left for us to do then but eat our own shit and scream that God is dead?

  Lord! Yes, I’m a fuckup, and yes, of all You’ve given me, I only managed to keep a few mere crumbs from slipping between my fingers, but if there is any truth in my life, it’s in the fact that I did not betray them, not one from the army of those anonymous craftsmen who had the ant-like persistence to transform the world, bit by bit, passing it on to me the way it still was when I was a child. My store is just my way of trying to keep that world alive for just a little bit longer, against the avalanche. My way of being loyal—tepid maybe, fucked up, yes. But at least in this I am not lying.

  And the woman I love—and I know you see I love her, Lord. I’ve never loved anyone in my life like I love her. I really could die for her if it came to that; she feels this in me, this ability of mine—to be loyal. Maybe that’s why she loves me, the fuckup.

  Keep her, Lord—no matter what happens to me, if something really were to happen to me, and all these specters storming at me from their other worlds are for a reason. If they’ve set to shake my soul (“I love you hard and shake you harder,” Granny Lina used to say to me when I was little—or was it Mom who said it?) until that poor soul drops clear out of my body like the pit from a cherry—to heck with me, whatever, only I beg you Lord, keep this woman because I love her!

  How strange, moisture between my fingers.... Could I be crying?

  I raise my head. It’s gotten dark, and the sky above the city went out like the screen of a giant computer—only the artificial keyboard light remains, a neon-pale blaze above the roofs—the nocturnal aura of the metropolis. And—here you go!—right before my car, two elongated golden rectangles have fallen onto the snow, stretching across the entire well of the yard from a second-floor apartment window. Like God’s smile, I swear, like a sign of consent.... If an angel in white robes had alit right now onto the hood of my car and nodded soothingly, meaning, everything’s fine, dude, don’t sweat it—I doubt I’d be happier to see him.

  For some reason I am always moved by the light falling from a window at night—like a promise of a sweet mystery. Or a vision from a forgotten dream. I’ve even come to love the yard of my Troieschyna apartment block ever since I saw that lacy light from the barred windows at night—and what, you would ask, is so special about that? But there it is, glowing-laughing, and I can’t take my eyes off it—thrown onto the snow, like a stained-glass window in church, the tall gold-haloed window. It has to be tall, like in church, and in old-Kyiv townhomes, and our Lviv ones also have windows like those—and it seems any moment now a woman’s shadow would appear there as though on a movie screen, retreat, then surface again, hold still leaning against the frame, like she’s is waiting to spot someone invisible below. And as if a trail of someone’s footprints sits darker than the night on the white steps to the building’s door, and makes my heart squeeze with something never fulfilled and so dear—my beloved yard, the rejected Kyiv Secession of the cement-boom era—no, cities, like things, also have souls, and all the generations of barbarians, our own and the ones now invading, cannot shake it loose.

  For a moment, everything grows still, inside and around me. As though everything were falling into its proper place, and I, too, were in my proper place. Here, behind this dark window, also barred, facing the yard
, is my little alcove; here is my store, and I am an antiquarian. And I know already that I will remember this moment forever—stopped, torn out of the current, like a swollen drop suddenly filled with weight.

  Forgive me, Adrian.

  I’ve forgiven. I’ve forgiven everyone. I hold no grudge against anyone. Do you hear me, Mom?

  The first chords of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” suddenly thunder gravely, from here, from inside the car, and they make me jump like a blast of the archangel’s trumpet. The next instant I realize the sound is coming from my cell, which has fallen out of my pocket and is lying on the floor—I reach for it, knocking my head against the wheel, absolutely certain that I am about to hear Mom’s voice. I’m certain I will know it at once, even though the only thing I can seem to recall is an age-distorted recording on the ancient Vesna recorder’s reel. (An amazingly low, rattling contralto recites Mavka’s final monologue from Lesia Ukrainka’s “Forest Song”—“Ah, for that body do not sigh”—and unless you knew that Mom had just over a year left, that strange voice would not evoke any special emotion.)

  Okay, okay, God, where’s that button—“does anybody kno-o-ow what we are living for”—at last, a direct link, at last I’ll hear what they want from me and what I have to do—a direct link to my fate.

  “Puss, where’d you go? I’ve called twice already,” says my fate in the dearest voice in the world that makes everything inside me come instantly back to life, makes blood run through my veins afresh, and I giggle, consoled, but, strangely, disappointed. What a log head, how could I’ve forgotten that this is Lolly’s new personal theme song? She’s got it on repeat all day long. Although if you ask me, you’d do better climbing gallows than going to any shows to that tune—but my funny girl put her foot down, and says I don’t understand.