The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  “Let’s have a drink! Let’s drink, honey, let’s drink here, they won’t pour on the other side.... What’s that, why didn’t you finish your ice cream? Watching your girlish figure?”

  “Drink to what, Vadym? To whose victory?”

  “Ours, Daryna, ours! Let those Yankees and Ivans tussle all they want; our business is to make profits! The first round in this game went to Russia: after the Gongadze case, the Kremlin’s got Kuchma right where they want him, totally under their control. Now they’re betting on the Donets’k contingent, they do business together; they’re one crew and all that, I’m sure you know this. Going back to the Soviet days. And the Americans bet on Yushchenko—with the goal of keeping Ukraine in the buffer zone. And we shall wait and see how well it works for them.”

  “And all the people who actually live in this country—the way you see it, they aren’t a part of this game? We’ve no will of our own?”

  “Whose masses do, Daryna? Name one country. Or do you, by chance, believe that bullshit about history being shaped by the people? Don’t make me laugh; we don’t live in the nineteenth century! Seventy percent of people, according to statistics, wouldn’t know their own opinion if it bit them in the ass—they just keep repeating whatever they’ve heard. People are stupid, Daryna. That’s the way it has always been and always will be. People eat up what’s put before them. And you belong to the elite who have the opportunity to do the putting. So, please, do me a favor, don’t take that for granted.”

  He squints—quickly, conspiratorially—and again this flicker, like a shadow across the surface of the water (and I’m underwater; I am under the whole time; what gills do I have to breathe?) and a flare-up of another senseless hope: what if it’s a sign he is giving me (Before whom, in front of what third party or surveillance camera?), a sign that all this is not for real, that he is pulling my leg and I shouldn’t believe a single word he says? “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you”—was it Vadym who said that? (When?) But instead, he grows more solemn.

  “So when it comes to serious money, Daryna, only Russia is prepared to invest in us. That’s the reality.”

  In my mind, I shake off the water—droplets sit cool under my skin.

  “The foreign experts you mentioned—those are Russians?”

  “What does that matter?” he shrugs. “I am offering you the most interesting work a creative person could have, and right up your alley: take a dark horse, Vasya the gas-station-guy, doesn’t matter who, we can talk about that later.... You take him—and make him a hero! A leader! A cult figure with his own myth—you guys can figure out what that myth is, brainstorm something together. You’re creating your own hero, like the Good Lord from clay—how beautiful is that? And in the people’s memory that Vasya will remain the man you made him. It’s like a whole new kind of art, right there! And with the widest appeal—even cinema can’t come close.”

  You couldn’t say Vadym spent four years with an artist for nothing.

  (Art, Vlada used to say, contemporary art, is first and foremost the making of one’s own territory, a discrete exhibition space where no matter what you brought in, even a urinal, would be perceived a work of art: modern civilization has allocated its artists a niche in which we can play with impunity, letting off steam, but from which we can no longer change anything in the accepted way of seeing things.)

  “That’s not art, Vadym. Art is what you don’t get paid for.”

  “Whoa there!” Vadym even leans back in his chair. “And when Leonardo da Vinci painted the Sistine Chapel—was he doing that for free now?”

  “Michelangelo.”

  “What?”

  “Not Leonardo—it was Michelangelo. You’re getting it mixed up with The Da Vinci Code.”

  “So Michelangelo, whatever. What’s the difference?”

  “From the client’s point of view—none. The same job could have been done by someone else. They were only paying for a canonical treatment, nothing else. That airy lightness that blows you away, and you don’t even know why—that’s just a bonus, it may very well not have been there. Art is always a bonus. That’s how you know it when you see it.”

  “Give me a break.” Vadym is visibly irritated by our detour off topic. “That was a different time, so of course the commissions were also different. The church is also a governing corporation, and, while we’re at it, it was the most powerful one of its time. Take a broader view, Daryna! Everyone does this, not just politicians—every person tries to create a legend out of their life, if only for their kids and grandkids. It’s just that not everyone can have this done professionally—that takes money...”

  And another splash, and again I am underwater. Why didn’t it ever occur to me to see things the way he talks about them? Aidy’s professor at The Cupid, the old poetess who shook her dyed tresses before me so proudly—they are losers, amateurs who simply did not have any money, and so were trying to buy me with what they had: their thinning tresses, gossip, lies, the peeling gloss of worn-out fake reputations. And there was more, more—crowds of random faces spill out of my memory as if from the opened doors of an overstuffed closet: bosses of all kinds, administrators, directors, princes of tiny local fiefdoms, all performing their greeting rituals for me—television’s come!—in their offices. They click through my mind frame after frame like a newsreel from a military parade: the suits—gray, charcoal, black pinstripe, gray herringbone (one such bundle of tweed with suede elbow patches still calls me, keeps inviting me out to dinner)—rise energetically from behind their desks cluttered with telephones; a front-desk Mashenka brings in the coffee; and, after a short prelude, every one of them turns the conversation to his monumental contribution to one thing or another, blows himself up into a hot-air balloon, bigger and bigger, ready to fly up to the stratosphere, and stoops, and bows, and fawns over his goods. And then there were the high-fliers, the unacknowledged geniuses, the inventors of perpetual motion machines, and the victims of incredibly convoluted intrigues who couldn’t wait to fill my poor ears with assurances that their story was the one that was going to make me famous world over (the breed that, fortunately, has collectively diverted to cyberspace with the arrival of the Internet, like water finding a break in a dam).

  Lord, how many of them, in my years of work on TV, danced around me like savages around an idol, with tambourines, hollering, flowers, and toasts—all to sway me to turn them into the fantasy heroes they wished to remain in people’s memories? Like electrons wrenched from their natural orbits by some tremendous explosion, all these people, even when they managed to find perfectly good places for themselves in this world, kept smoldering with the secret conviction that those places were not really theirs, and that they were really meant for a different, amazing and remarkable, life, which had either been taken away from them or was not yet apparent to everyone else—and that’s why they needed an apostle, an advocate, a sculptor with a mass-media chisel who would help bring out the contours of the masterpieces hidden in the shapeless bulk of their biographies, someone who would chisel away everything redundant, and reveal them to the awestruck and speechless world.

  They’ve always been swarming around me, these wrenched-from-their-orbit electrons who dreamt of becoming simulacra. Only I used to treat their presence as an inevitable cost of doing business—like the dark side of the moon, a gloomy shadow that trails every vocation—this was just what you got for being a journalist, you couldn’t help it.... Now, when my own center of gravity has shifted, under Vadym’s assault, onto this other, dark side, I see for the first time, in close-up, the way the whole army of them, with Vadym at its helm, sees journalism; it turns out they weren’t the shadow at all—they were my profession itself, its essence, its bare and hard core, cleared of all extraneous layers: advertising.

  Not information. Not the collection and dissemination of the information that helps people develop their own views, as I had believed until now. (To journalism students at the university, when they asked me
what my gold standard of reporting was, I always said, watching their young faces turn puzzled and surprised, Chornovil’s underground Ukrainian Messenger, which he published in the 1970s—I can name no reporting more chemically pure than that.) But in fact, my shows are in the same class with commercial breaks: I am an advertiser; I advertise people. Others advertise beer and sanitary pads with wings, and I advertise people. Shape them into attractively packaged legends. That’s my specialty.

  And that’s all there is to it, as Vadym says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Twenty-five grand,” Vadym says. US dollars. A month. Until the end of the election campaign. And sits there looking at me, eyes narrowed. (What color are they?)

  I must be really good at advertising people. I am also, it would appear, good at controlling my face before the camera: he doesn’t seem to be able to read anything from it.

  Looks like he is a bit disappointed.

  “Hotel California” is ending; I hear the last chords. My head is pounding so hard that muscles throughout my whole body reverberate with pain. And inside—it’s empty; the fear’s gone. It’s the strangest thing: I am taking this round—compared to the previous one, in my boss’s office—incomparably more calmly, as if it were all happening to someone else. The reactions I do experience are peculiarly physiological—pain, nausea; the emotional machinery seems unplugged, as if my body has taken on the entire burden of this conversation and I, myself, am playing no part in it. As in a dream.

  Wait. What dream was like that?

  The pause is getting long (a commercial break without content, the screen burns vacant, and someone’s money is going down the drain as the purchased airtime ticks on: TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...).

  “What do you say?” Vadym gives up. Gives up first. So I am stronger than he is. And Vlada intuited it correctly when she painted me a maiden warrior to the accompaniment of “The Show Must Go On”—she had the right instinct: to seek in me the fulcrum she needed to leverage this man up and free herself from under him. It’s too bad I proved such a coward back then, got scared, flailed, and clucked “I’m not like that!” I did not recognize, I couldn’t see. Could not see anything, stuck my head in the sand: I needed everything to be just fine in Vlada Matusevych’s life—for my own peace of mind. I, too, betrayed her; I’m as guilty as Vadym before Yushchenko. I ran. I deserted. I abandoned her.

  What I’d most like to ask Vadym right now is whether he has seen those photos in her archive—the ones of the two of us, me in the witchy makeup, in the style of the early Buñuel heroines, Vlada with the bloody lipstick smeared across her mouth. But I won’t ask him this: even if he had found them, he wouldn’t have seen anything in them. And would not have understood anything.

  So I ask something completely different—what he least expects to hear. “Why me, Vadym?”

  And he looks away.

  “Why did you choose me, of all people?”

  (Softer, someone at my side seems to prompt—softer, more intimately, less steely...)

  “Money like that could buy you any of the super-popular faces from the national channels,” I rumble low like a cello or a bandura, an intimate, chest-deep timbre (of course, the voice is key, folks knew it all the way back in the time of the fairytale in which the wolf runs to the smith, smithy-smithy, cast me a voice—how’s that not an electoral technology?). “My show’s not that popular, it wasn’t even in prime time, never made the top ten...”

  “People trust you,” he answers simply. He has chosen to be sincere. Good move.

  “Oh. I see. That’s nice to hear.”

  A pause. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

  “And that’s it? That’s the only reason?”

  “Well,” he smiles wide, his most charming smile yet, “that and then again—we’re family, aren’t we?”

  We would be “family” if I agreed. That’s what he’s after—this is it, finally. We would, and the trafficking would vanish between us—delete, delete. Vlada would also disappear—the Vlada I remember. Vadym would’ve bought her from me, together with her death. The way he’s already bought her from her mother, and is now buying her from her child.

  Now, this is really slick. Not just slick—it’s awesome, it’s brilliant, it’s all but enough to have me sitting here stunned, breathless, with my jaw dropped again: regardless of the ends a man’s intellect is pursuing, the sight of said intellect at work is always as irresistible to women as female beauty is to men. I applaud you, Vadym Grygorovych. What was it he said—“history is made by money”? It’s only logical that this should apply to the history of an individual life as well—all one needs is to choose his witnesses well. Buy the right witnesses, as in any decent lawsuit. Because every story is ninety-five percent about who does the telling. And he knows that I know this. And I know that he knows that I know...

  For an instant, I short circuit, a spasm grips my throat, and I am blind with hatred for this self-satisfied face with its pink-lipped mouth lined with white ice-cream residue—but the hatred, too, is somehow not my own: I watch it inside me as though I were filming it. Somehow now I need to switch to his language—and I find I do speak it; I know how they talk, these people.

  “I understand you, Vadym. Now look what we’ve got here. You say people trust me. If I agree, then after all these...interesting experiments of yours, one thing is certain—they won’t trust me any longer. Even if I commit ritual suicide, samurai-style, right on camera, people will say—eh, a publicity stunt. I won’t make any more heroes; I’ll have to retrain. You say profit. Fine, let’s do the math. Twenty-five grand a month, how long do we have before the elections—six months? Okay, let’s say seven. Twenty-five times seven—a hundred and seventy-five. You are proposing that I sell”—(And here I break pace for a second: sell what? My country, which foreign secret services aim to shove back into the hole it hasn’t been able to dig itself out of anyway, going on thirteen years already? My friend whose death is on my conscience too, and whose memory is now on my conscience alone? No, none of that will do)—“sell my professional reputation”—(there, that’s better)—“for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars? For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Pechersk? That won’t cut it, Vadym. I did spend ten years earning it, you know. And you, as my father-in-law says, want to pay a penny for a handful of nickels.”

  The father-in-law (and Aidy’s dad does say that) is a bonus, pure art: Vadym’s never heard a whiff of any father-in-law, and it won’t sit well with him—it tells him he missed something (and I’m not as naked and defenseless as he’d thought, someone must’ve covered me). The smile remains on his face as he left it there, and now looks as untidy as an unmade bed. He licks his plump lips, his eyes wander around the big room, as if he were trying to remember something, and then he pulls out his cell phone, flips it open—until now the phone’s been off, that’s how important a conversation we are having—and finally refreshes his smile, bringing it now to a waxy ripeness.

  “I remembered this joke about the Place Pigalle...a really old one, from back in the student days,” he starts.

  “The one about women who can’t be bought, but are very expensive?” I smile, too: so there won’t be a raising of the price, it’s nice to deal with an intelligent man. “What did you think? That’s exactly how it is; there’s deep wisdom in that joke.... You know something else they say? An honest reporter only sells out once. This is not one of those times, Vadym.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” is all he says. Says it from the heart—he really is sorry.

  “Me too. You know why?”

  “Why?” he calls back, an echo.

  The Show Must Go On. The pain is making the world before my eyes congeal into a yellowish gloom, and I focus hard on the bridge of Vadym’s nose, it’s all I see before me, the bridge of his nose, this one fixed point to which the other parts of his face drift slowly, distorted as if filmed under water. Freddie Mercury’s voice ascends somewhere inside me like a bird set fr
ee from the dark spilling broken glass into my veins, invisible brushes multiply on my skin, tickling my temples, cheeks, eyelids—I see myself through the eye of a hidden camera, and the camera is Vlada’s: click-click-click. I grow still in the face, holding my breath, and feel myself suddenly grow more beautiful. I feel the flicker of fire under my skin, feel my features grow smoother as in lovemaking, feel my lips darken as they fill with blood—Vadym’s the only spectator of this show, but I am not doing this for him...smithy-smithy, cast me a voice, and now the cello comes in—a low, chest-deep timbre that no man can resist.

  “Why? Because this whole scheme, Vadym, looks to me like one monumental screwup...”

  “Is that so?” echoes the bridge of the nose.

  “Uhu. These big shots of yours cannot possibly be really good professionals. I suspect, in fact, they are nothing but really good swindlers.”

  “What makes you think that?” the bridge of the nose, says, startled. He is scared. So, he’s got his own money tied up in the deal.

  “How should I explain it?” Now it’s my turn to play, like a stage magician juggling knives, at being privy to secret knowledge. “There’s this thing—we professionals,” and I lean into this word with my voice as if pushing against a locked door, and feel the door yield under the spell, “call strength of material.” In his language, professional is a magical word, the object of a savage faith, an element of a religion in which the world consists of human demigods who rule it, the masses that provide the gods with a steady supply of ambrosia, and professionals, a breed of creatures somewhere between priests and useful Jews, who huddle in back storerooms like shadows in Hades waiting for the gods to reach down and tap them to carry out their operations. A professional’s position is duplicitous: on one hand he is, most certainly, the help, a whipping-boy runner, but on the other he does command a dose of respect, as a carrier of secret information, which the gods themselves, for lack of time, cannot master. So in this way, he has an upper hand on the gods, and who knows how he’ll decide to play it, and that’s why one has to be careful around professionals, as one had to be around soothsayers and witch doctors in the Middle Ages. One must listen to a professional, especially when he or she delivers a warning, and Vadym is very much listening, my cello call streams straight into his yawing ears. “A professional is born the moment he learns to sense the strength of his materials. Learns to intuit the limits of his pliability. Working any substance is always a contract, like with a living being—up to here I burn you, oxidize you, mold you, and you go along with it. As long, of course, as I am not trying to make knives out of glass or teapots out of paper.”