Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

“Why aren’t you eating anything?” notices the solicitous Aidy.

Why? Because I feel sick to my stomach already, and without any food. It would be just physically difficult right now to swallow pieces of another creature’s roasted flesh. Bits of some innocent calf that went under the ax in the bloom of his youth. It’d be like dropping boulders down into my stomach where they’d remain lying, dead weight forever. I smile silently, this time apologetically, and reach for my wineglass again—like for the rail in a rocking subway car (this place is just as crowded and smells exactly the same, too—of wet clothing and cigarettes). This is how people drink themselves to death.

Vadym wouldn’t have given me the meeting if he had known what I wanted to talk about. No doubt about it: he’d have hidden and wouldn’t have answered his phone. He’s been avoiding me lately anyway—did he possibly think that I hold him accountable for Vlada somehow? Right away, as if to justify himself, he rushed to tell me about Katrusya—that he’d seen her just the other day, and had taken her to Switzerland for a skiing vacation; how nice of him. As if I didn’t know about this already, from Nina Ustýmivna. He just kept on talking, as if afraid I’d interrupt him. About what a big girl Katrusya is already, and how one German boy had a crush on her up there in the Alps. Only N.U. had told me other things, too: that, besides Katrusya, he’d also taken his masseuse, Svetochka, on the trip. Well, life goes on, you can’t mourn forever, can you? A man accustomed to a monogamous relationship would perish like a zoo animal set free in the wild—someone has to take care of the orphaned guy. Fine, let him have Svetochka. Although I don’t think she makes appropriate company for his stepdaughter. (I generally try to avoid thinking about what kind of creature Nina Ustýmivna will raise that child to be—I know all too well what it took Vlada to get out from under her mother’s influence back in the day. If she actually ever had—if it’s even possible.)

For God’s sake, what, what did this Vadym have that put such a spell on her?

Aidy, noticing that my glass is empty, wordlessly refills it from the bottle—Aidy knows what to do around the sick, a rare gift for a man. No, he just loves me, my sunshine, my bunny rabbit, and I’m an ungrateful beast. I’m so sorry that tears of contrition suddenly well in my throat, tickle inside my nose: Aidy, my love! What’s this threadbare old weasel still doing here? When’s he gonna go already? Shit, what am I—how’d I get drunk so fast? And the roof of my mouth is already numb, as if cowled with a metallic film; I need to get a bite, I do, a piece of bread with butter would be best—the fat neutralizes the alcohol, which I learned from Sergiy way back when. Or was it someone else?

The worst is that now I can’t get rid of this wretched, rotten thought—like when you snag your hose, and it runs and runs, and you can’t put it back together—what would Aidy be like if I died suddenly? Would he go feral, look for a replacement, too? Well, at least I don’t have a child, that’s a plus. And I wouldn’t leave paintings behind—it hasn’t occurred to anyone yet to do a televised retrospective, and thank God for that: a TV show dies the second the credits end and the commercial rolls. It’s the same with a person: as soon as the grave is filled, commercials start rolling, the recently departed becomes an information product, and there’s no way to tell truth from lies anymore. And the more time passes, the less hope there is. Like finding those paintings of Vlada’s, from the Frankfurt flight, something for which Vadym, in his own words, “doesn’t have time right now.” Of course, the elections are around the corner, don’t I understand? No, I don’t. Kill me, I don’t; and I shall not: How could you have lived four years with Vladyslava Matusevych and not have the slightest idea who you’d lived with?

To be fair, Vadym did sponsor the posthumous show at the National Museum, hired a curator—the best one, he bragged (according to Vadym, he always gets the best of everything!), but, in this case, actually just the most famous. I tried (and failed) to convey to him that the two were not the same. It was at that show where I first caught the whiff, like stale breath from a painted mouth, of this vulgar, mercantile tang that had never clung to Vlada when she was alive: the thunderous rock band at the entrance was out of place, all those musicians in aviator helmets, who later cruised through the galleries with benevolently stoned grins; and so were the Gothic-looking damsels with baskets of roses, which they, for whatever reason, strew all over the floor (a creative touch of the fashionable curator who knew how to blow up a budget); and the video, sliced like salami from the footage of the various European museums where Vlada’s work had appeared, was also somehow distastefully pretentious, like a promo for a travel agency. And that’s exactly how it played: “Where is that? And that?” the ladies inquired of their companions, with lively interest—much livelier than for the canvases displayed on the walls—as they crowded before the screens, lined up as if for a glamorous photo shoot, some with feather boas draped across their shoulders to match their gowns. As is always the case at art shows, there were among them a few truly beautiful women, and everyone singled out a model with her linen-white hair in a pony-sized tail as a real, honest-to-goodness prostitute from Crimea, from a Yalta hotel, or so they claimed.

The prostitute, or whoever she was, quickly got drunk on the free wine and danced a solo for the helmeted rockers—she was marvelously supple, as though performing a pantomime. I really liked her, actually, and I think Vlada would’ve liked her too: the prostitute was, in fact, real. Otherwise, it was a bizarre audience, like a mixed salad of diplomats, politicians, officials, bankers, artists, journalists, who filled the rooms and melded with the paintings on the walls in a colorful shimmer that seemed to produce a new chemical compound, an amalgam with the paintings, and in this way seemed surreptitiously to displace, to falsify, Vlada. Vlada who was no more, and about whom this audience, truth be told, couldn’t care less. I saw almost none of her friends there, none of the people who simply loved her—perhaps because they were not VIPs—but I did see a few of her artist colleagues who would’ve gladly drowned her in a puddle with their own hands while she was alive—and enjoyed every second of it—and who now were just as happy to be talking to the proffered dictaphones about their many-year friendship with Matusevych, cropping the edges of their verbal group shots to make themselves appear not only of the same stature as the deceased, but also just a little taller. And someone had already uttered—and kept repeating—the word “generation,” and a thing repeated enough, as everyone knows, ceases to be a lie.

Not to be found among the guests was the aging Rita Margo, “Saint Rita,” the universally known concierge at the studios on the Pechersk hills who was always ready to entertain little Katrusya while Vlada painted, or to run to the store for milk for Vlada herself—anyone who accomplishes anything in art has a guardian angel like this one. Mostly invisible to the public, they are unfailing, self-denying shadows, all those editors–makeup girls–gaffers who are rarely mentioned in brochures and catalogs except in tiny print somewhere in the back where no one would ever look, while in fact they are the ones holding it all together, the ones who glue together, like swallows with their own spit, the whole edifice with the glorious name in foot-sized letters on its facade. Vlada always said that Rita Margo was the ideal “artist’s wife”—apparently comparing her to her own mother, who had spent her whole life in that role never having had any particular qualifications for it; while Rita Margo, with all her qualifications, did not have the fortune of an artist husband and was not, it seems, fortunate with men in general, except for her blind son who sewed or glued something in the invalids’ co-op.

At the show, N.U., although much withered after Vlada’s death, still looked presentable: a black dress, black lace shawl, the wife and mother of artists—alas, both dead. She, for one, liked everything; everything was exactly the way she’d wanted it: “Dara,” she exhaled at me in the bathroom with sincere elation. “Just think, we’ve got six elected representatives here!” I was just dabbing my makeup with a napkin in front of the mirror, and pitied her as much as one would have pitied Rita Margo’s blind son had he appeared suddenly among the guests, but at the thought that in these six damn elected representatives (Vadym’s legwork!), she saw the meaning and justification not only for her own life, but also for Vlada’s, I wanted to cry. Such a feeling of desolation swept over me; I wanted to cry, not to unload it, but to wash it all out, just as I wanted to cry now—without any hope of ever stopping, a quiet drip, like drizzle “Les saglots longs / des violons / de l’automne,” pardon the French, Nina Ustýmivna. Ever since I left Vadym’s office, I’ve wanted to cry exactly like that—like the long sobs of autumn violins—and that cannot be allowed under any circumstances. Better to drink.

Oops, looks like I just devoured the butter meant for the whole table—how rude of me!—the weaselly looking gentleman makes for the empty butter dish with his knife, and his shiny physiognomy, which could also stand to be dabbed (Why is he perspiring like that when there’s such a draft from the door, I shiver every time it opens?), spells blatant disappointment: something’s been snatched from right under his nose again, as has happened to him throughout his life! Aha, so that’s where this mournful mouth of fortune’s redheaded stepchild comes from—been getting the short ends of sticks all his life. But why sweat like that, I wonder? His hands must be moist, too. Now I recall I didn’t shake hands with him when we were introduced; instinctively avoided him, only nodded. I see I get sort of mean when I’m drunk. This is new; I don’t remember being like this before, but something in me, I swear, has quit feeling sorry for everyone—my sorry-meter must be busted. Aidy waves at the waiter; Baldy sits back in his chair and laughs—a piddly, weaselly sound, he-he-he. As our cameraman Antosha used to say, run for your life ’coz you’re getting sober.

Back then, at the show, I couldn’t shake off the sense that Vadym actually couldn’t care less about all those paintings, since the woman who’d made them was no longer there. He needed Vlada alive and warm—and Vlada was gone, and the works that were left behind must have caused him pain just like her clothes in the closet. All those whimsically artistic dresses that she, when she’d had more time, made for herself, and the later ones, hand-picked from designer boutiques, a whole flock of chic outfits in diverse styles—traditional, sporty, avant-garde—but all belonging together by virtue of something elusively Vlada’s own, like exotic birds that alit in Vadym’s apartment on Tarasivska from places she went without him: the pale-pink Milano flamingo with large gold buttons; the blue-black Parisian blackbird of a short trench; the stern, closed-neck, cardinal-red Ralph Lauren dress from the other side of the ocean, bought when she had a show in Chicago; and something else unendurably, tenderly blue, tropically undulant that looks so great on a blonde and instantly fired off the flash of her hair in one’s memory. How could a heartbroken man ever live with that menagerie, which, as soon as one opened the closet door, screamed the absence of its owner at him?

This belonged to the Problems-That-Had-To-Be-Solved category, and Vadym solved it in one fell swoop—called a team from a thrift store and, in a matter of hours, they packed up the whole flock in plastic bags, like a dismembered corpse, and hauled it all away to an undisclosed locale. “You must always give the deceased’s clothes to the poor,” Vadym declared didactically when I gasped at the news, “You...what...gave it all away?” “And you...what...wanted some of it for yourself?” he shot back with morose scorn—meaning, do I also count myself among the poor? (Vadym enjoys disarming his opponents by humiliating them—he is good at it.)

“There were dresses she designed in there, Vadym, that’s also her legacy; they could’ve been exhibited.” (I purposely deployed an argument that ought to have sounded convincing to him, used the language of tangible reality, a language I learned long before I met R. and could be quite fluent in if need be.) A show of her designs—why, what’s wrong with that?—and if I did secretly want not just “something” but her entire wardrobe to be kept intact, so what? What if I did want to put glass over it and bury it, dig a little hole in the ground just so I could know that the feathers she dropped do exist somewhere, are kept safe, and that one could come to that place, slide open the door to the ground, knock-knock—and the revealed secret would shimmer, its colors playing in your eyes, a living smattering of brilliant shards: here is Vlada like a bird in the red closed-neck dress, face half-turned; and here’s the lilac dress, and there was a little amethyst-studded hat to go with it; and that’s what she wore when I saw her for the first time (I remember I’d had time to think, who’s this Snow White? And in the next instant she was stepping in close to me, uncoiling from the bottom up with her head tossed back, like a cat about to leap into a tree, “Good evening. I am Vladyslava Matusevych.”); and here’s the chiffon scarf that flies off in a gust of wind, gets tangled in her hair (it’s August, the café in the Passage, and her pale face opens up in the piercing nakedness of a leafless tree, like that of a monastery novice about to take his vows)? Even if this was what I truly wanted, I was not about to advance such arguments to Vadym, and he didn’t know me well enough anyway to take them seriously: such arguments, pulled from the totality of our inner lives, always sound unconvincing and pitiful; Aidy’s the only one to whom I could ever confide anything like this, with others it’s better to swim closer to shore. How far did Vadym swim out, one wonders?

“That’s not how you do a show,” was all he grumbled at me then; he was obviously not going to admit that there was anything offensive, as far as Vlada was concerned, about so categorically getting rid of her things (out of sight, out of mind!). He organized his show not long after—the way he saw fit. Much to Nina Ustýmivna’s delight. Maybe he should’ve married her instead of Vlada?

They do now make a kind of a family, with Vadym cast as Katrusya’s weekend dad. And Svetochka cast as his help. Katrusya does with Vadym exactly what she does with her labrador, Putty, named after the Russian president: makes a show of jerking his leash—his tie—in public so as to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that this massive and, as she sees it, all-powerful dude is hers alone; she calls him Vaddy the way her mom did and teaches him various useful tricks, such as toting around her skiing gear or anything else she wishes to have toted. Not bad for a teenager—one day, when she grows up, this damsel will avenge us all.

In response to all that, Vadym just huffs like a Gypsy bear, and not without pleasure, and N.U., misty-eyed, beholds the idyll. Vadym, if you think about it, got himself a pretty cushy gig—for one lost woman he gained three, a full set: Katrusya for emotional attachment, Nina Ustýmivna for spiritual understanding, and, of course, there’s Svetochka with her permanently engaged massage organ, where it is always so nice to stick his worked-up dick. Especially if it makes itself known at an inopportune moment—say, when Katrusya, the innocent child, climbs onto her Vaddy’s lap.... Although I highly doubt that a thing like childhood innocence even exists in this post-sexual-revolution generation.

Irka Mocherniuk’s kid has already enlightened his mom about sex—it’s when a mister and miss kiss each other where they “go wee-wee”—and suggested he and his mom do the same, right there in the bathtub, when Irka was giving him a bath before bed. Irka said the thing that shocked her most was the way he looked at her at the moment: wily, askance—like a man, “exactly like a man, Daryna, you wouldn’t believe it!” Grandpa Freud, wherever he is now, is rubbing his dirty hands together in satisfaction, and Katrusya’s already, what, thirteen—high time to, as the national bard did, herd her lambs beyond the village on the lea.

Gosh, now I’m feeling like I can’t breathe—wasn’t there water on the table somewhere? Aha, I see—the water’s been appropriated by the bald weasel; he’s moved it close, to keep it handy. That’s fair: I take something he wanted (butter), he takes something I want (water), and in such manner a balance is maintained in the world, and it (the world) continues to spin. Spins, God damn it, so fast I’m seeing black.

“Excuse me...may I have some water?”

The sound of my voice makes the glass wall between us crack, and noises spill over me from the general hubbub of the café like knives from a sack, discrete and separate: the clatter of plates in the kitchen, the desperate creak of the front door, the sharp soprano, like a car alarm, at the next table; the bald weasel, in an unexpectedly theatrical, self-regarding baritone, accustomed to people taking notes (Is he a professor or something?) cuts in, too. “Of course, of course, right here, with great pleasure.” He’ll even pour it himself. He’s making a fuss, reaching across the table (revealing the moistly darkened armpits of his already dingy shirt—it’s obvious he’s worn it before today); how solicitous of him! Aidy’s sitting next to him in his elegantly unbuttoned sport coat, calm and sharp like a snow leopard; it makes my heart flutter just to look at him—this ability of his to maintain an utterly natural benevolence in the most artificial, contrived situations. Who would ever think that he’s the conductor of this show? It always puts me in a state of mute awe: Is this possibly the same man with whom I made love the night before? Whose cells are probably still swirling somewhere inside me like tonic bubbles? “Oh, I see, it’s Perrier.... Thank you very much, that’s enough.... Pardon?...No, you’re not mistaken.... Yes, on television, quite right, Diogenes’ Lantern.” (Oh God, do I have to go through this now, too?)

Baldy oozes grease (And why did he want to eat more butter?) from every pore like a miracle-working icon dripping myrrh, and suggests, with subtle didactic superiority (He’s got to be a professor!) that I consider featuring a unique subject, unfortunately not yet popularized by the media: the heroes of Kyiv’s artistic underground of the 1960s and ’70s, a whole little-known stratum of our culture, and what a rich stratum indeed! The professorial baritone assumes an elegiacally restrained tempo, as if preparing to launch into a popular lecture right here and now. (Oh, please, I couldn’t possibly take that; it’s too much to suffer in my unemployment: to listen, especially to something interesting, and not have a way of retelling what I hear. To know that I won’t be telling people about this from the screen anymore—that I’ll just swallow it all right here and here it will stay, sitting in my stomach, an undigested boulder. And instead, they’ll have the Miss New TV show steamrolling across their screens.)

“You’re right, Grytsiuk alone is worth a show,” I nonetheless acquiesce meekly: Vlada considered Grytsiuk a genius; she used to say he was one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century.

My sage gentleman darkens for a moment, unpleasantly ambushed by my omniscience—what if it’s his dearest hobbyhorse and he wishes to possess the secret knowledge alone? But he instantly regains his composure and grins indulgently, “Myshko, he-he, Myshko Grytsiuk, poor thing.... It was harder for him than for all the rest of us—he was a repatriate, after all; he was used to the free world, although he’d grown up in poverty back there in Argentina.... One had to teach him so much, and he still never got accustomed to many of our realia.”

I see, so it wasn’t so much a lecture he aimed to bestow upon us as a monument to himself, with Grytsiuk and all the other dead rolled into the pedestal. Only the TV cameras are missing (and I’m supposed to supply those). The expression on his myrrhoozing countenance, meanwhile, makes it clear without any doubt that even if one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Grytsiuk—or for my interlocutor, simply Myshko—was still predominantly a sum of endearing weaknesses (his socks stank perhaps), his weaknesses were utterly forgivable, especially among friends; don’t take it personally, bro, we’re all family....

A “generation,” sure—as that excessively fidgety painter kept saying at Vlada’s show, arranging his fingers into a teepee—only he looked more like a rat. Why is it they all look like animals to me—rats, roaches, weasels—am I going off my rocker here? A hallucination à la Goya: packs of creatures with animal heads root around, twitching their noses, peering into butter dishes—first they mauled the ones who were worth anything and now they feast on their bones.

The old poetess’s mug surfaces in my mind, the one I once had to listen to as she put curses on the terrible Soviet regime—which failed to arrange her jubilee reading the year Stus was sentenced to the ten years that would kill him. She had the same mouth—bitterly insulted, talking with slurps of spit; they passed up her bowl, too, at feeding time, only the old woman wanted no mere spotlight for her bowl, like our art historian here, but a crown of thorns, and she twisted my arm to get one woven for her. Back then I also got fiercely depressed and drank to get drunk just like this, and not very far from here, either—at Baraban, the favorite watering hole of journalists, where I won’t go again because I don’t want to run into people I used to work with and watch them hide their eyes. And see what animals they begin to resemble.

And then a very strange thing happens. Maybe I am really already drunk, but for some reason it rattles me, literally, with a shiver, this coincidence—like the repetition of the same figure in a dance: of the place, the time (back then it was also winter, there was snow on the ground), and the characters, that old hag and this bald weasel, the oppressive sorrow for the waste of my father’s life I felt then—and the sorrow for Vlada’s life I feel now. Then, as now, I carried a death for a life that no longer really mattered to anyone but me, and now, as then, I am drawn, as though by a magnet, to the same spot, the same downtown crossing, into a café where I sit at a table just as I did then, and drink in an effort to dissolve, if only a little, that indigestible sorrow (like a swallowed boulder) in a scorching torrent of alcohol—because this sorrow demands it, not for nothing do our folk songs always speak of drowning our sorrows, if not in mead and wine, then deeper, in a river or a sea—because if you don’t thin it with something, it will, by its own solid weight, squeeze liquid out of you like whey from cheese, in a quiet tear-drip without end, like an autumn mist, until it squeezes out all your life juices and you petrify, becoming one with it, becoming it—this insupportable sorrow, a boulder, a pillar of salt.