Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Their arguments ended—a long time ago. What happened yesterday was just a line drawn under the emptiness, dead air that’s been running for who knows how long, rustling with the blank frames of the played-out film. No more movies for you. She, Daryna Goshchynska, has been discarded as, by the way, many before her. Decommissioned, my dear, decommissioned, your place can always be filled with fresh meat, more agreeable and always willing to please—with a moistly open little maw and ecstatic whimpering when it’s being had through every hole.

Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, is busy spinning her own thread of thought—mother and daughter run their parallel courses like two rivers divided by the hilly terrain of incommensurate experience, making inept swerves toward confluence and missing each other time and again.

“You’ve been sort of edgy for a while, Daryna. I even wondered if maybe things weren’t working with you and Adrian; I’ve been worried about you. I could see you were all nerves.... ”

Of course, if it’s “all nerves,” then it must be men troubles. Mom’s logic is ironclad. But the funniest thing, Daryna thinks, is that they both guessed wrong. She, for one, has been blaming all her tension of the last year on the film about Dovganivna, like an ostrich with her head in the sand—nose and ears plugged to avoid paying any attention to the stupendous shitstorm that raged around her, muck first pooling around her ankles and then rising to her knees, making it harder and harder to move, never mind breathe: live debates were disappearing from prime time; news people complained about receiving daily thematic instructions from their channels’ owners, prescribing exactly how they were to present each piece of news and about which they were to keep mute as fishes. Original programming sank under the tidal surge of Russian imports, as if life were being replaced by slipshod alien simulacra slapped together on a desktop by a sophomoric nerd—the dusk of reason falling all around. But she thought she had found a niche where “it don’t flood,” as Yurko liked to say; they all thought so, everyone who stayed with the channel to the end, stubbornly refusing to notice that it does, in fact, flood. Until, that is, it flooded absolutely everything in sight, and it became clear that there were no more niches—only those who pay and those who deliver the goods. Meaning, that’s how those who were paying saw things, and to them it looked like the natural order of things. The unnatural part was that there appeared to be no one who would object to that view.

“That’s what they offered me, Mommy, one of those imbecile talk shows.”

“Instead of your Lantern!?”

“If you can imagine that. A show for young people. The producer said ‘we’re revitalizing the channel’s brand.’ They’re betting on young audiences, and I’d get, as they saw it, a mega bonus: the youth talk show. You know the drill: Just say no to sex without a condom; we met in a karaoke bar, and so on,” she stumbles, swallows the lump that’s come up in her throat (assholes! assholes!) to finish. And then there’s the Miss New TV beauty pageant—but no, she’ll leave out that new part of the programming; it’s not fit for Mom’s ears—one shouldn’t tell such things to museum workers of advanced age.

“What carry-oakie bar?” Olga Fedorivna asks, dejected.

Once again, Daryna feels her eyes fill with tears. What’s the point of rubbing it in like this—for her mom, or for herself? Of all people to whine to.

“Doesn’t matter, Mom, that’s just an example. They want me to wear braids. Revitalize my image, you know, make it easier for the target audience to relate. You’ve seen those commercials: generation jeans, everything and at once?”

“Did they all lose their cotton-picking minds?”

Olga Fedorivna’s voice prickles with sharp, rejuvenated notes that bring on, in a hazy fade-in, a vision in Daryna’s mind from more than thirty years ago: a trim brunette in a bright yellow dress marching across the kindergarten yard beside a flummoxed teacher to whom she is reading the riot act, while little Darynka looks on through the window of the dining room, where she’d been locked up after dinner to finish the hateful sour cream—a whole glass of goo that she, in desperation, forever abandoned by everyone, sits straining, with disgust, through her puckered lips, which does nothing to lower the level of the white gunk under her nose. She looks on and a blast of joy shoots through her both for the knowledge of her imminent liberation—Mom’s here!—and the shock of her first experience of seeing from outside: this is my mom—how beautiful she is! If only you could always remember your parents the way they were in their best years. But there’s never time for that, because you’ve got bigger fish to fry—your own best years, which, just like theirs, pass, damn it. They pass.

The thing that really got her was that her producer never, not for a second, doubted that their offer would flatter her, that she’d be delighted by the mere fact she’d been deemed suitable for a youth talk show. And worse yet—she did, for an instant, feel flattered. Like when the driver of the car next to her at a stoplight sent her air kisses, like when men in foreign airports occasionally turn to look at her (and she could be completely sure that they didn’t recognize her, that the lit-up looks and the uncontrollably loose grins were meant not for a TV star but simply for a beautiful woman, because at home you could never tell the difference—men look at attractive women and celebrities in the same way), like when a black Lexus sped up and slammed on the brakes next to her in the street, sending a fan of water into the air, so she barely managed to jump out of the way, and from behind the rolled-down window appeared the mug of a boy umpteen years her junior to say, in a leisurely Russian, like a restaurant order: “Leave your phone number, miss.” (And only when she laughed into his face, could she see by his changed expression that he recognized her, fired up with a different, more preemptive interest—here it is, the power of the media: “Wait...don’t you...don’t you work on TV?”)

Such things always pleased her, she won’t deny it; they gave her new zest. For a moment, she was almost hypnotized, listening to her boss tell her about herself: they’ll style your hair into braids, for a “frisky,” as he put it, look, and dress you more casually, youthfully, from Benetton, something informal, a little top, shorts and over-the-knee boots, a miniskirt. What paralyzed her was not so much his tone of an old seducer as her own eternally feminine eagerness—to submit, spellbound, to the hands of a designer, stylist, makeup artist...anyone who would make her different, better; and the audience, ready to appreciate their efforts, is right there. The salesgirl hands you a few more skirts that go, in her opinion, with the jacket you’re trying on in the fitting room, while the man sits with his newspaper in an armchair waiting for you to come out and sashay around the store, turning in front of the mirror and smoothing the skirt over your thighs and behind, as though molding your own body—you’re your own Pygmalion, the outfit your marble: What do you think? For that one moment, in yesterday’s entire conversation, she did feel ashamed, but she won’t tell her mother about it, no way, and her mom wouldn’t understand it anyway. She’s never set foot in an expensive boutique and, really, it’s not like Uncle Volodya could sit in that armchair waiting for the shape-shifting séance with the Sphinx smile of a man who will pay for everything in the end. No, their generation did not get to experience as many of life’s joys as ours, and isn’t this precisely what makes us, in our heart of hearts, look down on them?

“That’s right, Mom, and that’s exactly what I told him—and that I won’t be made into a public spectacle.”

That was not what she said, not what she said at all. She only knocked him off his tone—a bed-broker’s business tone in which he proceeded to wrap her up and tie her with a bow. She went to the edge of his desk and perched there like a stripteuse, jerked up her sweater, flashed him with her bare belly and asked him in that angrily ringing voice whose cracked shards can still—who knew—sometimes be heard in her mother’s voice, “And how about my navel—have it pierced, or are you chicken?”

He broke off, forgetting to shut his mouth, dithered, and waved her off, meaning, stop it—but got back on track right away, regained his balance, glibbed with a chuckle, “Yum, I’d like a piece of that!” But from that moment on, spoke with her as with an equal, an accomplice. (How apt that old actress had been who told her once, after a session, when they were sitting in the old woman’s pauper kitchen drinking tea with biscuits that had obviously been diligently scrubbed clean of mold before being served: “When push comes to shove, sweetie, it is better to be a whore than a thing.”) All she did was shove him a step off the top of the mountain where he’d clambered and stood, triumphantly, engrossed in self-admiration, and then rolled, rambling, down all by himself, dragging her with him and scraping her bloody along the way; but that part—about her boss, about R.—was not for telling Mom either, that was for her to figure out on her own.

“And what did he say to that?” Olga Fedorivna persists, apparently still clinging to something, something that looks to her like hope. Daryna feels a small stab of annoyance. When she was young, her mother’s insistence on using details to shield herself from reality, this clinging to small things (after Daryna’s father’s death she kept telling everyone how well he ate the day he died—porridge, carrot juice) used to drive her to distraction, made her want to slap her mother: Wake up, already! Youth has no idea yet of the effort the art of survival demands—it is an incredibly vacuous age. And we’re at such pains to stretch it out for as long as possible.

“Mom, you’re like the sheriff in Natalka Poltavka: and what’d you say to that, and what’d she say to you?”

It’s not like she could tell her how the boss went on to explain to her, as an intelligent woman, all the obvious advantages of the new course. First playing to her weakness (no one could say he didn’t know his personnel!)—her incurable need to be liked, the curse of the good girl (with, of course, what else, big bows in her braids) that’s been hanging around her neck her entire life; to have people applaud, to be praised, wow, Darynka’s such a smart girl, did such a nice job reciting that poem!—and then appealing to her ambitions, of which there are plenty. How else? Who would ever agree, if they had no ambition, to dunk their visually rounded mug like a goldfish into millions of living-room aquariums twice a week: This is Diogenes’ Lantern, and I am Daryna Goshchynska.... We’ll be back after a break...(The cosmic blackness on the other side of the studio floodlights aimed at her—effectively blinding her—seem to be populated, like a giant auditorium stretching out to infinity. It’s as if millions of eyes are looking at her from there, and every time, even after seven years on air, it seems people are sitting out there, very still, waiting, ready to creak their chairs, cough if she strikes a false note, even though there are no chairs in the studio except the one under her; she can feel that populous held breath in the space between her and the screen, the eyes of those to whom she speaks—they hold her up as water holds a swimmer.)

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.”

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?