Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

I have seen women like that—among the mothers who lost their children, the ones who got them back from Afghanistan as “Cargo 200,” in coffins welded shut and who fell against the zinc boxes, scratched them with their fingers and begged to know, “Baby, baby, are you in there?” They are the women who, twenty years later, remember their vigil at their sons’ faceless coffins and their urge to throw themselves atop them as they were lowered into the ground as their last hour of being alive.

Nina Ustýmivna, it appears, is at no risk for anything like this; she said she’d cried out all her tears already, but she still drips periodically, still has to put a hankie to her reddening eyes every now and then when you’re talking to her—so she mustn’t have cried herself dry yet. She’s still got plenty of liquid, even her Zodiac sign is Aquarius, the life-giving element. And Vadym’s not even worth mentioning—he is not the keeper to something that’s gone to the ground. But Goddammit, shouldn’t someone make it her work to find a story in Vlada’s life? You can’t just let it break and scatter like a string of pearls from a torn thread, can you? No human life should scatter like that, because it would mean that no life was worth anything, not anyone’s; if that’s the way it is, then why are we all still taking up space on the planet?

Again, this taste of insoluble sorrow on my lips—the same as three years ago—and tomorrow the hungover heartburn will parch my lips just like it did then—soda and salt. And this recasting, three years later, of the same plot with different actors in the original roles, strikes me, for some reason, as something incredibly significant, filled with an all but mystical meaning. Lord, what if our whole lives are made up, without us ever noticing, of precisely such repetitions, like a geometric pattern, and that’s where the answer is—the main secret locked in every human life?

Two brightly lit episodes, like windows at night, three years apart, as though placed on a twist of one invisible spiral that links the “then” and the “now” with a single, pervasive meaning. Throngs of other encounters and episodes huddle in the time between the episodes, and maybe some of these will also repeat someday just like this, and pushed by the invisible coil to the top, will flash with the same searing intensity of memory revealing their, as yet indiscernible, meaning—the way a dark shard of bottle glass flashes when you hold it up to the sun: the effect Vlada sought to achieve in her Secrets—amber, thick as buckwheat honey, stitched through with a pulsating golden thread. The world, after you’ve seen it like that, appears at first gray and faded like in an X-ray room. Now I could tell Vlada what she’d spent ten years searching for: not a technique, not a color—but this unseen coil that threads through time.

But Vlada is gone, and there is no one to tell. In that gray and faded X-ray–room light, Aidy and Baldy, cowled in bluish drifts of smoke, nod their heads like puppets in an animated film and pursue their incredibly boring, hiccup-inducing, vacuous game—rolling words to each other like balls on a pool table.

“You, Mykola Semenovych, absolutely must write about this.”

“My dear boy, I’ve long had all the preliminary research completed, all that’s left to do is sit down and write. But you know how busy I am.... ”

“Uh-huh, and here I am taking up your precious time! But I must, and you must forgive me—where else would I find an expert like you? And, actually, that’s all I’ve come with, I won’t delay you any longer—I’ll just leave you the documentation so you can take a proper look at it later, and just write your conclusions whenever you have a spare minute.”

“You’re leading the old man astray, you realize that?”

“Why astray, Mykola Semenovych? You’ve said it yourself—the possibility of Novakivsky’s authorship is fifty-fifty, the experts’ opinions may very well conflict, some will say yes, and others will say no. What’s so wrong if saying yes, in this case, happens to benefit you and me directly?”

“Oh, I’ve long known you as the demon of temptation; ladies must find you irresistible.... Speaking of which, why haven’t we toasted the fair lady at our own table yet?”

The fair lady—that would be me. That’s my role in their little movie. I smile and nod, my head on a hinge, while Baldy (standing up, how else, officers and gentlemen, and Aidy rises too—reluctantly, like a teen forced to entertain a small child, shooting me a look that’s both conspiratorial and indulgent), with unexpected thirst, as if he’d been kept away from it for ages and then finally set free, drains half a glass of cognac in a single gulp, displaying again the wet underarms of his unfortunate shirt; and it’s obvious that he doesn’t actually want to go anywhere—that he has none of this hyper-important business to attend to, has nothing, in fact, more important and dearer to his heart than sitting like this in the populous warmth of a café, enjoying the good food and drink someone else is buying—and having an audience to boot.

To talk and talk, that’s the most important thing. To knead his life with words, to give it shape like a thinly filled pillow. The Ukrainian underground, the little-known stratum of our culture, Myshko Grytsiuk and I. Pound, pack—stuff—his life with the meaning he’s talked into it: as long as he’s talking, and for some time afterward, the shape holds—even if eventually, inevitably, it all crumbles back into its original form. So he has to keep talking. And that old poetess hag who tossed her dyed curls at me like a starlet in front of a sugar daddy—she also wanted to talk up some other life for herself, different from the one she’d already lived, which was happy and worthless. To install in it, retroactively, the coil that it didn’t have.

Fuck, it’s not my job to be forever feeling sorry for everyone! I grab my glass again, because what else can I do? Especially since the two of them just drank to the ladies, so it’s like they drank to me and now I should respond in kind. I can’t just sit here like a log—I should drink to them, return the favor: to your health, and all the very best to you too, jolly good fellow. Shit, what jolly good fellow? This is no birthday—more like a wake. My wake for Vadym, that’s right. For Vadym who can do nothing, because he’s got the elections. No, worse: for Vadym who turned out to be Vlada’s defeat—the pothole that caught the spinning wheel of her life, a Harley Davidson speeding along the highway.

“No, no, I don’t want any cognac, thank you.”

Aidy says that he has one more little favor to ask, on the fair ladies’ topic, of this Semenovych, a matter in which he could be of great help, not to Aidy himself, but to one young woman—and Baldy pricks up eagerly, ears and nose, like a weasel smelling a chicken house. “Aha, and what is the favor?” That he is not being gotten rid of just yet, that the feast goes on, is enough to make him happy. Instead, it is me who stiffens up unpleasantly: What young woman?

Aidy’s always taking care of something for someone, always helping someone, and all these young girls who’re running loose out there, throwing themselves under every more-or-less financially secure dude, like Anna Karenina under the train, they’ve no decency, no decency or shame whatsoever; I can easily imagine a Barbie doll like that, fresh and tight, just out of the box—oh no, I’d better not! This is also new; I don’t remember having such textbook jealousy fits before, and tonight I’ve already caught myself several times being irritated by that exceedingly vociferous look-at-me soprano at the next table—with her jungle of luxurious hair that makes you want to put your hands in it—it’s a chestnut Niagara like in a shampoo commercial; at least Aidy’s seated with his back to this Niagara—but here we go, this is full-blown paranoia already.

I see—the young woman Aidy is talking about is his secretary. Sure, of course I remember her, met her once (forget princess, she’s a pavement queen, brash and wily, not his type). Secretaries, masseuses, interns, assistants—come to think of it, what a wide choice a solvent man has of young women thirsting for a better life! And what a kick I got at first from being assigned to that same market category on sight by waiters, hotel clerks, or stewardesses (I saw the way one of them looked at me when R. stroked my thighs under the tray table on that Amsterdam flight) when I appeared in public with R. somewhere people didn’t know us—how bewitchingly fun it was, God, what a turn-on! A constantly giggly, champagne-bubbly arousal: a queen at a masquerade, dressed as a shepherdess. Yes, boss, as you wish, boss—a wildly sexy game. I want you right here and right now. The silence of his driver who took us to the airport—a professional silence, impenetrable like the Mottled Hen’s golden egg that no one could break—you pay a premium for such silence, such folks don’t give interviews (and, oh, how I wish they did, and wished back then, too, the journalist in me never quit doing her job!).

When the world takes you for a whore but keeps its mouth shut, or grins politely, like that hotel clerk who presented R. with the room keys (although it was I who did the talking, while R. just breathed noisily at my side because his English is nonexistent, and there’s one more category I could be placed into—an interpreter), it sort of gives you the social sanction to do exactly what, as they believe, this breathing character is paying you to do. Your sexual act, thus, begins, essentially, at the check-in desk, and by the time you reach your room in the impatient, pulsing-like-a-bulging-vein silence of the elevator (where a Russian or a Turk, infected with the atmosphere, nails you with a fiery look as he steps out on his floor, letting it be known that he could take care of you no worse than your companion—it spreads like electricity, men always flare up like lights on a string when they see a woman being led to a good fuck, and this erotic illumination is also part of the show), you quite simply must, as soon as the door closes, drop onto the bed and get to business. So, you’re an interpreter now, let’s see you interpret this.

There’s something of an orgy in this almost-public sex that is being watched through the walls by dozens of eyes—the sex of the information age, sex without privacy, as if at a stadium with crowds of fans: floodlights on, olé-olé-olé-olé, go-go-go, and sco-o-ore! And the result: a couple of vacant, mechanical orgasms and the inevitable popping up of the same postcoital question in your mind. Why the hell am I doing this, exactly?

And on the flight back—already knowing, after that morning with the hotel-window view of the wet roofs below, that I urgently need to break things off with R.—I just had to spot one of those tight Barbie dolls, not long out of the box but already not quite fresh, slightly spoiled by a touch of second-handedness, turned out as unambiguously as if she were wearing a uniform: loose, tar-black hair down to her buttocks, gold chains, silver stiletto heels that made her a head taller than her companion, who looked like he could be thrice her senior. They took the seats immediately behind us, and the man—also, I figured, a big wheel that flies everywhere with his own masseuse (the doll didn’t quite have the goods for an interpreter)—instantly dove into some Russian pulp, some Hitler-Stalin-Zhukov potboiler with a hot-red cover. (Bright, they like everything bright, pop-your-eyes-out bright; they are forever hungry for bling, these children of gray factory developments and mining towns.)

He spoke to his companion exactly once during the entire flight, when the stewardess came by with the drinks. “You want a beer?” The way I talk to Barsik, “You want some scraps?” And it was as if I’d seen myself and R. in a distorting mirror—aped by this couple who embodied the essence of the rich-man-and-his-slut genre so much better than we; they were almost kitschy (for what is kitsch if not a genre’s essence stripped of any individuality?) and seated right behind us, as if to fulfill the express function of visual aid, illustrating the next step on the evolutionary ladder.

Unlike myself and R. (whom I intentionally allowed to pay for that whole trip, so I could wallow in the feeling like the proverbial pig in mud), the kitschy couple was not playing a game, was not pretending to be a boss and his sex servant—that’s actually who they were, and no erotic sparks flew between them. Zilch, nada, you could see nothing, flying or otherwise, aside from vacant, self-congratulating vainglory: the boss took pride in his young mistress, decked out like a Christmas tree. She—in her gold chains, silver stilettos, with her shopping bags in her luggage, a whole trip she could boast about to her friends, eliciting their unending envy; the two had no other motivation for copulating. Sex, at their evolutionary station, was dead—as ours would have been, too, if I didn’t insist on playacting someone else’s life.

I understood then what R. meant when, elated after one of our conjugal acts, which, as far as I was concerned, did not command any special elation at all, he allowed himself to venture into a frankness that was not, generally, characteristic of him, saying in Russian (he always slipped into Russian in intimate situations), “You are so...bright—in everything. I’ve never known a woman like you.”

But Vadym did, didn’t he? He did live for more than three years with Vlada; that’s not counting the months she waited, however taken she was with him—forget taken: she was head-over-heels in love with him. (Somehow, after everything that’s happened, I’m loath to acknowledge that part of her life, as if I’d be humiliating her by doing so. But back then, even the way she moved changed, became more cat-like; it was as if she were stroking everything she touched, rubbing, with an inaudible purr, against the air itself as she walked, as though against a man’s bristly cheek—when such an invisible soft cloud of someone else’s touch envelopes a woman’s every motion, it is the surest proof that she is most certainly loved and in love, and not merely physically sated, and Vlada laughed then and said, happily, that being in love, as it turns out, is a rather deleterious condition for making your way in the world, because instead of telling the extorting cops off like they deserve, you smile a languorously tender smile and they rip you off like their own mothers.) Despite all the feverish heat in her actions back then, she hesitated long and hard, before she finally took the step of transplanting herself and Katrusya into Vadym’s newly acquired apartment.

Vadym had just divorced his previous wife (whose tender mind ostensibly cracked under the weight of the wealth that descended upon it without any warning, and she went cruising for a safe harbor from one shrink’s office to the next—well, why not, it does happen to the wives of the nouveau riche) and bought himself the entire topmost floor in a noble old building on Tarasivska, with the mind to build a penthouse on the roof.

I think what finally swayed Vlada was the chance to play with that big space: Vadym had agreed to let her decorate the entire two-floor apartment according to her own designs. And now Svetochka makes her home in that apartment, decorated by Vlada’s designs. Svetochka goes to the same bathroom where Vlada once sat me down and made me up (“Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do!”), and I saw myself in the mirror as I’ve never known myself and grew scared. (It was too unlike my image for the TV screen—that strange and ominously beautiful, vespertine face, as if carved out of the night by the light of a bonfire, with long, Egyptian eyebrows, and lips that were ultra-dark, as though sated with blood—a face you instantly want to put out, like a fire. It’s suicide to take it out in public. This can’t be. Matusevych, what have you done to me? I’m not like this!) And on the same shelf where Vlada put down her brush (“Wait, don’t wash it off just yet, I’ll take a picture”), Svetochka now keeps her toothbrush and contraceptive cream. Although, no, a Svetochka like that probably has an IUD installed, to spare her man any inconvenience whatsoever. And a dolphin laser cut into her pubic hair—wasn’t it yesterday I saw an ad for a beauty shop on our station? Fifteen minutes of airtime, welcome, fellow Ukrainians, for a mere 500 Euro, and no problem: a dolphin forever.

That is really mean of me to think.

And unfair on top of that: How could I possibly know what’s going on between them? I’ve never laid my eyes on that Svetochka. She may be a perfectly kind and generous soul. Poor Svetochka—sucked into the vacuum of the just-renovated, nouveau-riche apartment: an apartment like that simply cannot stay deserted for long; it must inevitably, sooner or later, draw a body into its orbit—to root around, move from room to room filling in the excess of space, to clatter cups in the kitchen, turn on the TV in the living room, forget to raise the lowered seat on the toilet, and leave, in the mornings, in the bedroom with drawn curtains, the pungent whiff of female genitals, so sharp against the smell of sperm (of which quite enough has already spilled onto the lonesome bed). Nothing wrong about it, it’s quite natural; this is merely the law of large apartments. These are the apartments themselves, by virtue of their gravity, commanding people and fates: a home, once it’s built, always places its own demands on whoever inhabits it; and he who remains to live alone in such a big dwelling finds himself in an undeclared war with the place, in which he sooner or later will be defeated (because dwellings last longer, they outlive people), and then compelled to get out, and should thank his lucky stars if he manages to do so in one piece.

Why did I never make a show about this? It would make a great show, even a series, and it’d have been a piece of cake to find a sponsor, a construction firm, for example. I could call it Personal Interiors or, say, The Personal Home—about how our homes rule our lives. Now that we have crawled out of our Soviet-brand hives and begun cocooning ourselves into our own nests, it is the perfect time. It’s too bad I didn’t think of this earlier, and now it’s too late. Your whole life can pass like that: blink—and you missed it. Those evacuees from the Chernobyl zone, the villagers who went back against orders—they still knew what a home meant, and probably could have told the rest of us, but I, when I made my Chernobyl film, didn’t appreciate this angle, missed it, wasted it. Moron.

I know another home like this—endowed with its own will—that would be worth telling people about: it’s in Lviv, the townhouse that used to belong to Aidy’s grandfather, the one where his granny and Gela Dovganivna grew up. Aidy told me how when he was little his granny took him across the entire city from their neighborhood of proletarian high-rises to what used to be the professors’ colony up the hill behind the Vynnyky Market, to show him—look, Adrian, this is our home; these were the windows of the girls’ room; this is where Great-Aunt Gela and I used to sleep. After the war, the house was given to some KGB type—a “liberator” and, I bet, “a fighter of the OUN gangs,” who eventually drank himself to death, fell out of a second-floor window (the girls’ former room perhaps?), and broke his neck, ostensibly in a fit of delirium tremens. Only I believe it was the house that spat him out—chewed him over for several decades and finally spat him out—the liberator’s children made short work of selling everything off and emigrating when the Soviet Union fell apart, but by then Aidy was studying in Kyiv and had no intention of returning to Lviv.

Aidy (who has long completed his studies) raises his eyebrows at me sensing a shift of mood: Is something wrong? (He and Baldy are swilling their cognac in masculine seclusion now—they’ve come to an agreement and it must be toasted.) No worries, everything’s fine, I reassure him with a silent nod. Everything is really perfectly fine; oh, if only you knew how perfectly fine you are, my beloved snow leopard—what a joy it is to watch you and be ravished by your calm, unhurried confidence: the poise with which you move through life has nothing in common with the impenetrable daftness of those who turn over big money in full certainty that they make the world itself turn. And I know now, I figured out what it is that makes you so unlike all those types. I could stand up tall and declare it to the whole café—listen up; Daryna Goshchynska’s had a revelation: it’s your home giving you shape!

That house in Lviv, lost three generations ago. It’s like those little metal molds—fishes, stars—that I used to pack with dough to make cookies with my mom when I was little: you were packed into the house just like that—when you were still pliable, at an unconscious age, and the hardy frame of that house, where you always knew you could go and see the windows from which your young grannies once gazed at the street, is there, invisible inside you. It keeps your spine upright, that’s where all your grace of natural—unrestrained—dignity comes from. This can’t be bought, or cultivated, or trained—this is given like a problem’s condition, there are things in this world that a person can only get this way—by being given them. Or not. One can build a house, top it with a penthouse even, but it takes more than a single lifetime to learn how to carry that home with you.

You are shit, Vadym. Good Lord, what unadulterated shit you are.

This sentence comes together in my mind suddenly and of its own volition, like a barrel lid rumbling shut. (At the next table, the high-pitched soprano squeals again—damn, she’s loud, should be singing Mozart or something.) I have to smoke. The curious part: no more internal squishiness, none of that drizzly whining of the drunken French fiddler. It’s all gone, shut off. Like a sudden change of weather. Simply: the man with whom my friend had once fallen in love turned out not to be the person she’d thought he was. A crappy and rather trivial turn of events, basically. Of which the crappiest part is that the friend has moved on to a better (one hopes) world, and the man who had once babbled to me incoherently in an empty apartment—“I killed her”—goes on presiding over great flows of money from his office and responds to my claim that his class brethren, his fellow minders of, perhaps, the very same cash flows, intend to use television as a means of netting girls for the sex trade, by telling me he has more important affairs to attend to. Affairs of state, damn it. Of the state.

“Fuck this state, Vadym” (and representatives therein, I added mentally) “if things like this can be the norm!” At this, Vadym, sniffing offendedly, advised me to be realistic. Translated from representative-speak: quit being stupid. But—that’s a chore, as Aidy’s dad says. Once a person’s stupid, you can’t do much about that. One could, I imagine, have put her wits to work and figured out, in advance, that the sex business, for Vadym, does not constitute a good enough reason to rush to anyone’s rescue. That, when he himself needed rescuing from the Misfortune-That-Had-To-Be-Endured that had so unfairly befallen him, he must have tried, besides Svetochka, any number of professional masseuses for his orphaned dick, and found them precisely on the same market that the Miss New TV show is intended to supply.

Everyone makes use of prostitutes, sure—that is to say, everyone who can afford to—why should our elected representative be any different? Is he a man or what? It’s a man’s world, sweetie, nothing to be done about that, nothing to be done, and you just have to be realistic. The more Svetochkas out there, the easier it is for solvent men to endure everything they are supposed to endure. To bear their cross and be pillars of the state—the poor thing’s about to keel over, like the tower of Pisa.

I’d better stub out this cigarette. I’m getting lightheaded.

I asked him about Katrusya after he said that—how’s she doing at school? Does he keep track of that? Vadym thought it was my way of changing the subject and started telling me, happily, how he picked her and some friends of hers up from school just the other day. Quite a sight for a pervert’s imagination: this big-screen, well-massaged, tightly fleshed at the nape, and everywhere else, Humbert Humbert in his Land Cruiser, smack in the middle of a whole flowerbed of sweetly aromatic Lolitas—girls at that age still smell almost as divine as babies, of vanilla or something like that. I’d give anything to know if fathers ever get erections at the sight of their pubescent daughters. Right, like anyone’d admit to that...Vadym believed (and if Vadym believes something, then that’s the way it is) Katrusya had an easy time with her studies; she could get all As if she tried just a bit harder, but (he believes) it’s not the most important thing. Of course not. And does she watch TV? Vadym still wasn’t catching my drift. You know—what would happen when Katrusya watches this beauty contest, girls, you know, need such things, especially at her age: to have a universally accepted standard of beauty before them, something to aim for—and then around eighth grade or so, she’ll want to send in her own picture to be considered for the contest.