Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

“What?” the cuckoo yokel replies, half-spooked.

Just about had it wit’ dem all, he did. Dey’d come and talked up such a storm you couldn’t hear your own self think. Da other ones, dose come before, bought da clock and sideboard and wanted the other clock too, dat littler one over dere dat father brought from the war, when da wife put her foot down, said I ain’t gonna let you clean me all out—dey didn’t wag dem’s tongues for nothing, one-two, counted off the dollars, loaded up da things into dem van and gone oft! Dese new ones catechize you worse than cops, God forbid.

But, he’s no fool; he’s caught on to which way da wind’s blowing, right off. If not for dis skirt he’d seen on TV, he’d of told her boyfriend to go stick it and dat’d of been end of story. Wouldn’t of listened to nothing. Clear as day, he’s that antiques-Yulka’s boozer ex who’d called here before, and tried to get him. Da one who scared the daylights out of Yulka, so she asked to not come to her work and meet up in da park instead. Looks like he couldn’t suck anything off of Yulka no more, so he’d gone found him a new one.

She’s not bad to look at, either, he’s done well.... What’d she seen in him? Tho, you wouldn’t tell he’s a boozer just by looking at him, and his hands don’t shake yet. Must be a heck of a fucker—milks ’em all dry, and dem girls probably thank him afterward.... Heck, I got nothing to complain about either, thank God. Do one a good turn myself if da chance arose.... No helping it—he squeezed the antiques-Yulka in the mudroom after she’d let him pinch her tit. She’d of let him hold it and ball it, too. She clucked right back at him, and stuck her hand into his pants, and said, Wow! You could tell she’d took a shine to him right off, back when he first came to her store and she took him out to an expensive diner, said, if my boozer turns up now we’ll have no peace....

Young girl like dat, they always got eyes for a man with some ’sperience, ’specially if she’d got burned already once. But—dat’s all bygones, old news. And he’s a family man hisself: might get hungry somewhere else, but likes to sup at home anyhow. Dis one here—she’s quick as a fox, look at her eyes sweep over this whole place here! Now dey think I’m s’posed to tell em like at confession—who, and what, where’d it come from?

“Where did you get this?” Daryna repeats.

“What?”

Seeing the change in her face, Adrian springs to his feet, too, as if she really were a sleepwalker stepping along a ledge and could slip to her death at any second; the yokel rises after him, drawn inexorably into the same flow of motion, as though they were all in a wind tunnel. And this is how the procession presents itself to an ample-bodied wife, in a stretch T-shirt and a bra one size too small, who appears at this very instant in the doors between the room and the kitchen: the three of them, spellbound, moving in the same direction, one after another, as if in a slow-motion game of tag—and what are they all after, it’s just a wall?

“This,” says Daryna, coming to a halt against the wall and pressing her fingers to “this” like a blind man who’s just recognized a dear face under his fingers.

Adrian can’t see what it is—Daryna is standing between him and whatever object has arrested her, her hand in place, not moving. Before he got up, he was sitting with his back to that wall, and did not get a good look at what was pasted over it—a deep colorful blob, a poster or something.... As soon as he’d stepped inside the house, he quickly and professionally sized up the decor and the furnishings, and his spirits lifted: this may not be a gold mine, but there was wool to be shorn off this yokel yet.

One is surrounded in this home by such a noxiously packed and savagely motley mix of bric-a-brac from the last two generations that Adrian would not be surprised to spot an antique gramophone from a Stakhanovite grandfather or some other marvel like that. And while there is no gramophone in evidence, and neither are there any of the oilcloth wallrugs with swans on them that have recently become such a hot item, most of what is here is 1970s junk—the peak of this rural boss’s prosperity no doubt.

Displayed, museum-like, behind glass in a monumentally cumbersome hutch is a gilded Madonna dinnerset; also present are the most impractical Bohemian crystal ashtrays in the world, chaste as virgins and heavy as icebergs, and right next to them (Adrian could barely keep from smiling)—a painstakingly cross-stitched picture of hunters at camp from Perov’s painting. The hunters are draped over a Samsung TV, on top of which—now we’re getting somewhere!—stands an old stone clock, a splendid piece, a German Manteluhr with a carved oak facade, likely by W. Haid (make sure to check the back), Third Reich, 1930s or ’40s, definitely a trophy. The yokel’s ancestors must’ve done well for themselves in that war if that’s what they managed to sneak back home—as Daryna’s mother says, one man’s war is another man’s bonanza.

Experience has taught Adrian that such rural honchos (those who in the Brezhnev era had clawed their way to where they could steal)—kolkhoz administrators, farm managers, warehouse managers, machine- and motor-pool directors—did not hold on to things that were actually old and instead rushed to replace them with whatever was new and “city,” naming their daughters Ilona and Angela rather than Katrya or Mariyka. He figures the yokel had daughters by the heap of Cosmopolitans and Teens on the bookshelf and the glam advertising posters that are plastered, it seems, over every inch of bare wall, hitting one, like ammonia, with the acrid whiff of the present.

Apparently, the family isn’t doing well enough to replace all their furniture with the newest set from an Otto catalog in one fell swoop, and the most current symbols of material comfort were fit into the Gypsy-caravan density of their home bit by bit, patch over patch: a monstrous multitiered chandelier of several hundred crystals, a faux leopard skin on the floor in front of the couch. It isn’t hard to understand why the yokel decided to part with the old clock and the credenza (How on earth did it fit anywhere in here, you can barely turn as it is?), but there can be only one reason why it took him until now to do so, the one Adrian chose instinctively as he formulates the best strategy for negotiating with the man: he is loath to part with his stuff.

All these things, accumulated in his home over decades, must be, for this man, the “goods” that he would be very sorry to see go, evidence of his former special status in the village. He probably thinks that all his stuff is still worth astronomical amounts of money—the kind that, in his day, neither a dairymaid nor a tractor driver had, and still do not have today. Puckered up tighter than a snare drum, the yokel sits on his pile of junk like a gnome, imagining himself the master of treasures uncounted. A type like that would actually sooner refuse to sell anything than give an inch on the price. So in a certain sense, Yulichka did not lie, or, rather, like all competent liars, she built her lies on half-truths: the yokel really did turn her away at some point, didn’t let her strip him of everything that had any market value—he let her have only the most valuable objects, because at the end of the day, a few tens of thousands of US dollars, a few suitcases full of crisp new Benjamin Franklins present a temptation no gnome can resist (and afterward he probably whined that he let it go too cheap...).

Focused on the business at hand, Adrian missed the colorful picture in the far corner of the room, so packed with ads and posters that it looked like an iconostasis—deciding instead to ignore it and intentionally sat with his back to it. The blob held no antiquarian interest and would only distract him from the conversation, because (now, looking at Daryna’s stiffened back, he remembers this clearly) there was something about it that did draw one’s eye, much more so than an airbrushed poster. It’s not a poster at all, in fact. What is there?

“What about it?” the yokel answers cheerily. The woman’s tone got him a bit scared—she’s gone all nervous, and he’s got no desire to get mixed up in any stories or anything. “You like it?”

She turns to face him, her lip bitten down hard, and the way she looks at him scares the man for real.

“Where did you get this painting?”

“And is dat, ’scuse me, any business of yours?”

“It is, very much so,” Daryna says, hearing her own voice return to her as if from a great distance: it is calm, but quiet, and very, very slow, as if spun at a lower rpm, like on an old turntable—the last time she heard this voice was in her boss’s office.

“The author of this work is a friend of mine. The police are looking for this painting. They’ve been searching for four years.”

“It’s Vlada’s?” Adrian gasps.

Daryna nods. Her lips are trembling. “Her signature’s even on it. Only it’s been cut off...”

The movement continues: now all three of them are huddling in front of the painting, like seals caught in one net, in a narrow gap between the couch and a massive mirror-faced mahogany wardrobe, which, apparently, replaced the old walnut credenza (most likely Art Deco, but possibly even older than that; in any case, that trophy was locally sourced from a landlord’s estate and redistributed by the Bolsheviks). Each tries to push the other away or peek over their shoulder at the painting—and the yokel is the most enthusiastic of them all, as if he’s never seen the painting before and it wasn’t in his own house that it hung. Pinned to the wall the same way rural folk used to pin up their oilcloth rugs with swans on them—unframed and unmounted, a snakeskin, the Frog Princess’s pelt shed and splattered with colorful blood, used here to cover a hole in this improvised iconostasis, between the dazzle of a glossy blue seascape from a 2001 calendar and a silicone blonde, smiling a pearly toothed smile and holding, in her hand, as triumphantly as if it were the Russian flag, a toothbrush with a dollop of Aquafresh on it. That’s quite a sizeable hole, and a nonstandard one, too—the canvas is cut to size to fit over the whole gap, at once.

Daryna holds her fingers to the sliced-off edges of the canvas like a surgeon to the edges of a wound. It’s a collage, she thinks, feeling sensation drain from the tips of her fingers—they just went ahead and made themselves a collage, the best they could. In the past, rural families used to compose these using family photographs—framed them and hung them up in the main room in between the icons; she’s seen this in the abandoned homes in the Chernobyl zone: grandfather, grandmother, a group shot from a high-school graduation, wedding pictures with the maid of honor and best man in red sashes, a boy in a Soviet Army sergeant’s uniform, a whole iconostasis of the many-sized and many-colored (from black-and-white to Kodachrome) kin; and in the gaps between the pictures—which must grate on a rural eye like patches of untilled land—they would carefully paste in strips of colored paper, sometimes even decorative cutouts. That was the place Vlada’s work took here. What was left of her painting, to be exact. A piece that had once been a collage, composed according to the very same principles of this primitive aesthetic—and now returned to its source. Collage to collage. Ashes to ashes.

“Dis here?” the yokel fumes. “Come on! I can drawr better dan dat myself!”

Any idiot could, he boils genuinely, in his mind, irked that he let himself be intimidated so easily—big deal, splatter up some paint so it gets all wrinkled up on itself. Lioshka-the-tile guy, the one who did the loo, could do a better job of it—he puts his heart to it, never was dat he didn’t line it all up nice and tidy, smooth as a baby’s bottom! Dis stuff here’s all puckered, what’s dere to stare at? What’s dere to be going searching for it? Wanna play chicken? Well, I ain’t one to let anyone piss on my parade; I ain’t born yesterday, thank the good Lord!

“Hang on just a minute, sir,” Aidy interrupts, having some-how—the yokel can’t tell when—edged him away from the subject of the discussion and ceased to address him directly; were he not so consumed at this instant by going from defense to offense, the yokel would very well begin to doubt whether this character is indeed the worthless good-for-nothing the antiques-Yulka had told him he was: the yokel knows how bosses talk and ought to have recognized in Yulka’s “boozer ex’s” calm ease a boss’s professional habit of moving people around without resistance, like pawns on a board, in order to achieve a result important to all, that is demonstrated in the army by ranking officers from platoon commanders on up—but the yokel hasn’t yet caught on to what, exactly, result these two are shooting for, and this man’s question, asked of the woman, fails to sound important to him.

“Where did you say you saw the signature?” Aidy asks.

“Right here,” Daryna points. “She always signed this way—VlMatusevych, without a dot.”

“I see, yes...it’s cut off in the middle—you can see the ‘u’ but the ‘s’ is questionable...”

“This is hers beyond any doubt, even without the signature, Aidy. No need for an examination—this is one of the works that was flown in from Frankfurt. From the Secrets series. I saw them all, remember, at her workshop, before they went to Germany for the show. And there are slides; it can be identified.”

“Who has the slides? Vadym?”

“Nina Ustýmivna. She is the legal heir, until Katrusya comes of age.”

“Splendid.”

“I just can’t remember the title right now. It should have been on the other edge, there on the left, but that part has all been cut off...this used to be about this wide,” she spreads her arms like a fisherman showing off the size of his catch, “and it was taller too, I remember the composition well.”

“I cut it to size,” pipes up the wife.

Her appearance in the kitchen door has gone unnoticed, and at the sound of her voice all three turn and stare at her with various degrees of shock; before speaking, just in case, she’s crossed her arms defensively under her breasts, which are already spilling out from her overburdened bra; and her thusly proffered bust, taken together with her powerful neck and arms, looks magnificent in its way (rolls of fatty dough around the edges of her undergarment are thrown into high relief under her Lycra T-shirt). She puts this bust before her like a shield—evidently picking up on her husband’s alarm—and is rushing to his rescue before the old fool can screw everything up from here to Tuesday.

She’ll do the cutting alright, Adrian thinks, contemplating, not without interest, this menopausal socialist-realist milkmaid in front of him. She’ll cut all sort of things. He quickly exchanges glances with Daryna, and pulls out his business card.

“And you must be the lady of the house? Pleased to meet you.”

The shield is shattered—the wife takes the business card, but does not know what to do with it, and walks over to the shelf where her eyeglasses sit—to read it over. Daryna gets the chills—it’s the familiar shiver that runs through the body in the presence of death, like a short circuit—and she keeps silent, afraid that her voice will fail her.

“So where did you say you got this painting from?” Adrian casually inquires of the wife, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

“Found it downa track!” she cries out, almost pained that such a trifle could cause such a ruckus. “It just laid there in the mud, so we took it—why waste? And the spots that got mudded up—I cut those off. It just laid there downa track, ina rain. Been a while now, four years since—right, Vasya?”

“Could be more,” Vasya confirms with gravity, happy to have reinforcements. Might all blow over yet, and dey won’t ask too much questions.

Where?—Daryna starts to ask, but figures it out before she speaks: “Downa track” is down the road, meaning on the dirt road that runs from the main highway to the village.

“You mean, on the highway?” Adrian asks—he didn’t understand the woman either.

“Yeah...I mean, no,” the wife stumbles. “Ona turn,” she waves a mighty discus-thrower’s arm in the direction of the mirror-faced wardrobe, “dere, where you go from track to asphalt. I mean the highway,” she corrects herself quickly and solicitously, demonstrating the traditional strategy of Ukrainian rural politeness: adopting the language of one’s interlocutor. “Wherea tree-line ends, ona knoll, ona very turn...that’s where it all got skittered around.”

And as soon as the last words leave her mouth, she panics, and her honest blue eyes for an instant go all glassy, like a celluloid doll’s. But it’s too late: the word’s been spoken, and it can’t be put back.

“All? So what else was there?”

Now it’s the husband’s turn to rush to the rescue. “A bunch of stuff. A car must of crashed dere, looked like.” He does, just in case, hide his eyes.

“There’s accidents there alla time!” the wife picks up his line cheerfully. “Would you believe it, no more’n three months passes before someone gone crashed there again! And thank goodness when it’s not to death.” Judging by her intonation, she finds those accidents far less satisfying than the ones that actually are “to death.” “And this year, there’d beena crash already, not long since, a month, right, Vasya? Showed it in TV, you didn’t see it? A whole family slammed to death in a Honda, ana baby, too!” This sounds all-out triumphant, like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “Ana woman, they say, she was ’specting, too, just think...coming from Pereyaslav—and hit a Mercedes...”

“Not a Mercedes,” her husband corrects her, “a Bee-Em-Doubya!”

“Same difference!” the wife laughs, flushing with excitement. No, sir, Adrian thinks, she’s not in menopause yet, she’s got all her hormones alive and raging, just look at her go! “I don’t tell them apart, Mercedeses or Bee-Em-Doubyas, I just know was some big cheese driving!”

“Big cheese, phew!” the yokel snorts with scorn. “Sure...teenage punk more like it, one of dose that bought hisself a driver’s license but Daddy couldn’t pay for a brain to go with it. Dem, when dey drive, think dey god and king, and don’t need rules, ’coz all the right lawryers sittin’ in his pocket. Part, sea, let shit pass! He went to pass on the double and jumped into incoming traffic. Must of been in a great hurry—well, he ain’t hurrying now.”

He reports this without any glee, only with the legitimate satisfaction of a man who likes things to be fair. The woman, on the other hand, delights in the topic and can’t wait to savor more details of this reality show—it is, after all, much more interesting than any soap opera, and these visitors know nothing of it, “And two years since we had a real big crash, a whole rig flipped over! Five cars slammed to pieces, right, Vasya? Took them two days to wash alla blood off the asphalt.”

A ripple of cold shiver shoots through Daryna again. Blood, she didn’t think about blood. She didn’t go to the site of the accident, did not see Vlada’s blood....

“Dat’s a special spot over dere,” Vasya nods. “Chornovil died here at our corner, too.”

“Oh yeah,” the wife echoes, proud as if she’d personally contributed to the event. “Folks put wreaths round that cross over there, alla time—d’you see it? You came from Kyiv, didn’t you? That was a bit over that way, toward Kyiv, after a turnoff to the Kharkiv bypass.”

Time to put a memorial here, Daryna thinks. This place is like Checkpoint Charlie was in Berlin. Only this one’ll give you a real thrill—it’s still operating. And these two could be the tour guides as living eyewitnesses—they’d do a heck of a job. Again she sees, as if in rewind, the highway stretching away from her—only not the dry one she and Adrian drove earlier in the day, but the other, from four years ago, with the lonely Beetle speeding along: the road is silky-black, flashing with the nebulae of puddles, the cloud of water kicked up by the car falls onto the windshield and the hood, streaks of rain meander down the glass. The road is empty, not a soul in sight, the signs float by—Pereyaslav-Khmel’nytsky 43, Zolotonosha 104, Dnipropetrovs’k 453, Thank you for keeping the shoulder clean—rain, rain, and tears streaming openly and freely, and the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, and back and forth again, like two scythes over a hayfield.

Adrian’s voice reaches her as though through water. “Couldn’t they put rails along that turn, at least, if that’s how things are?”

“It won’t help.” The yokel shakes his head.

“It would make it safer than it is now!”

“Won’t help,” the yokel repeats with unshakeable fatalism. “Dat’s a special spot.”

“What if you brought a priest out to consecrate it?”

“Dat’d be a whole lot of consecratin’ to do.”

There’s something about the way he says it that brings on an awkward pause, the way it happens when a conversation slams on the breaks at a crossroads trying to decide whether to go on or to make a U-turn and head back. The woman ventures, “There ona other sidea track, back ina starvation, they hada grave...drove bodies froma village there and buried em. We, when we were kids, useda run over there in spring—to look: where it’s shallow, the dirt settles and sometimes human bones come up...humongous grave, they say it was! It was later they rolla asphalt over it.”

“Over a cemetery?!”

“Dat’s no cemetery!” the man cuts in, almost as if he’s angry. “Who’d go ’bout settin’ up a cemetery back in da ’30s? Dey just piled dem all into a hole, covered it with dirt, and left no signs. Da old people, dey just remembered da place, da ones who’re still alive.”

“Yeah, the old Moklenchykh woman, who died last year, she useda go there every spring the week after Easter to light a candle...she’d just put it down ina dirt, and it’d burn. Once it burned all day till night, remember, Vasya, we seen it alla way over here through our window.”

“You got no better business dan bringin’ dat up?”

But it’s too late to try to rein her in.

“And once, when we were kids, tha boys found a skull over there and kicked it around to play soccer...”

“Now you’re full of it!”

“Fulla what? What?” The wife pouts and again assumes her defensive position, arms under bust. “You count ’em: Lionka Mytryshyn—that’s one!”

“Lionka was drunk...”

“Were you dere drinking with him? And even if he was, then what?” she objects, not in the least concerned by the mild inconsistency of her dual objections. “Just think,” she turns back to her guests, “boy served in Afghanistan...the one who founda skull. Graduated military school, got the rank already, and no bullet could get him! And then came on leave to visit his parents—and bam! Drowned. Went to a pond for a swim...”

“He was drunk, I’m telling you—dat’s why he drowned,” her husband persists. “You people just live to wag you tongues...”

“Didn’t end with that, did it tho’? Allose boys who kicked the skull back then with him—all toa last one, none of em alive! Kol’ka Petrusenkiv smashed to death on his motorcycle; I was still in school then. Fedka got trampled over by horses one day when he was drunk—took him three days to die ina hospital, poor bastard, and Vit’ka Val’chyn—that’s way beyond even...”

“Dat’s a separate story altogether.”

“Just think—man dranka poison for Colorado beetles!”

“Drunk, wasn’t he?” Adrian inquires stupidly, having fallen, unwittingly, under the spell of this macabre graveyard litany.

“Nope, was not, dat’s another thing with him: got mighty insulted. Ninka, his neighbor, went missing a wallet, so she went after dis Vit’ka. Meaning, like he took it. And he got mighty insulted. Drank da poison at work, went home, and says to his wife, Valya, I’ll be dying here. Folks rushed to call da ambulance, but ’twas too late, dey couldn’t flush him.”

“Ana wallet later turned up!” the wife triumphs. “Ina pasture. Ninka herself dropped it, the scatterbrain!”

Daryna feels an urgent need to sit down. Her legs have suddenly turned to straw; this has happened to her before. When? Yes, of course, that night in Vlada’s bathroom, when she was washing the warrior-maiden makeup off her face.

“So what’s dat soccer got to do with it? Like dat’s what killed dem! People talk nonsense—just to wag dem tongues!”

Somehow, the yokel finds his wife’s mystical interpretation of the story decidedly unnerving. That’s weird, Adrian thinks—he’s the one who first brought up “dat special spot.” Or, perhaps, the man himself kicked around human skulls when he was little—and, like most, remains receptive to the idea of a metaphysical payback only for as long as it is someone else’s—never his own car that crashes on a defiled grave? As long as it is strangers’ blood being washed off the asphalt—that’s a reality show, same as on TV. But when it’s folks from his own village who are found guilty on the same count, that means you yourself aren’t completely safe and secure either, and that is something you shall deny with vehemence, right, Vasya?

“Razing a church—dat’s another matter, I get dat,” Vasya proceeds to reason, businesslike. “Dat—yes, den—things happen. Dat’s better left alone, of course...Father said when dey had da church razed in dem village, all da ones who lent a hand dere—all were gone before da year was out! One fell to death right away—dropped off da belfry where he’d climbed to rip off da shingles. So da belfry just stood dere like dat—unstripped—no one would go up dere, until later, in da starvation already, dey trucked some soldiers in. But dat’s a church! I get dat, dat’s different. A skull—dat’s just a skull, of someone dead, and dat’s it!”

Daryna has sat down on the edge of the couch and is hugging herself to contain the trembling. “Too many deaths.” That’s what Vlada said to her in the dream, the one in which she was looking for “a bill of ward” for those deaths. So that’s it! That’s how things are.

Another ripple of chilly shivers runs through her: the angel of death has gone by. The conversation she had with Vadym the night before, still undulled and uneroded, still living on in her memory, now stuns her with its macabre absurdity, like a madman’s grimacing or kids playing soccer with a skull: it’s cheekily caricaturish, grotesque incompatibility with everything that is now happening here in front of Vlada’s work. Daryna feels, all but physically, the dense heat the painting radiates—like a fragment of skin that’s just been ripped off a living being. Biker girl, life was her racetrack, and she was always the winner...to hell with all those victories, they’re not the point. How could all those bloodsuckers have missed the most important thing? You were a genius, baby. It came out of you with this uncontainable force; you burst with it. And how is it that no one had your back?

“Too many deaths.” You’re right, absolutely—there are too many. Perhaps, when there are so many deaths piled up in one place, and there is nothing to ward them (And what should be warding them, what kind of a bill?), their accumulated mass creates its own gravity—and draws in new ones, again and again? Like an avalanche? An avalanche—of course!—only this is from an earlier history, of the Kurenivka neighborhood in Kyiv: in the fifties, the city had Babi Yar paved over too—they built a dam and for ten years straight pumped loam pulp from a nearby brick factory into the biggest mass grave in the world, to leave no trace of it. They even built a stadium and an outdoor dance floor on top of it—and in 1961 the dam broke and a forty-five-foot wall of mud wiped out an entire neighborhood in thirty minutes, burying hundreds of people—no one had their backs, either. And the bodies that washed out of Babi Yar rushed down Kurenivka to Podil together with the living who were swept up in the flood.

As a girl, Daryna had heard her fill of horror stories of the kind this woman loves so much: about a child’s hand torn off and left in her mother’s grasp when the child herself was ripped away by the avalanche, about a pregnant woman, trapped alive in a cement bubble. Babi Yar rebelled, adults said, only back then one said such things in a whisper. In a whisper and with a pillow over even one’s cradled phone: Soviet superstitions had it that you could be listened to through your phone even when you weren’t talking on it. And then the stories of it slowly faded—survivors dissolved in the masses of newcomers, the city grew, and the newcomers never learned about the flood. They just went to play soccer in that same stadium, Spartak, which was so quickly built up again.

The dead were the ones who took you, Vlada, weren’t they? Other people’s dead—exactly when your own life shifted and slid, losing its footing? They are strong, the dead; they can do things. Oh yes, they are strong. Lord, how strong they are. We couldn’t dream of matching them.

This jolts her again. The woman will think Daryna’s got the hiccups. Or a concussion. One thought follows on another’s heels, in a series of spontaneous discharges, uncontainable like labor contractions or vomiting; after another surge, Daryna’s mind suddenly achieves final clarity: she knows now how it all happened then on the highway, “downa track,” at the Pereyaslav exit. She knows what the yokel’s afraid of—because he is afraid, has been the whole time, from the moment she recognized the cut-down canvas, glancing at her when he thinks she doesn’t see it, and then looking instantly away, like he’s been burned. Even though she, with no qualms whatsoever, does not take her eyes off him, as if they were each other’s dearest people in the world about to part, as if she were hoping that at any moment he might work up the courage to tell her everything he has to tell her, to the end, even though she’s already understood everything and does not need his explanation. It’s only Adrian who hasn’t yet figured out how Vlada’s painting found its way to this home—so she wills herself to knock down the barrier of disgust, releases her jaw, which has been clenched the entire time, and asks the yokel, unexpectedly loudly, as if speaking on camera, “Did the two of you search the car together?”

Now it’s the yokel’s turn to be jolted by electricity. For a second, he’s covered in a cold sweat: Moderfucker, he thinks; now I’m fucked! And—for what?! Dat’s da worst of it—get caught over nothing! Go ahead, be a good dad, give your daughter a house-warming present, damn it! And said to da wife—don’t take it. It’s not worth da trouble, but no, she’d put her foot down—it’s pretty, she said, real pictures, in frames, like they sell in stores in Kyiv for big money, put it up nice in Ruslana’s new flat. Dey all gonna be sitting pretty now, and Ruslana, too, when dey get us for robbery—hell on a fucking stick, to get caught on such crap!

And such an intolerably bitter sense of resentment for this outrageous injustice fills the yokel that instead of defending himself, he shouts out, straight at Daryna, almost desperately, as only an innocently wronged man could shout to a woman with such maternal eyes, “Like dere was anything to look for in dat car of yours! Nothing but dese here pictures!”

In the silence that follows, a fly buzzes loudly somewhere under the ceiling: it’s spring, Adrian mechanically observes, as he regards the yokel with new curiosity. The spring will show who shit where. What is it that the cops call the dead bodies of the missing they find in the spring? It’s something lyrical, oh yes—snowdrops. Goddamn, the dude sweeps crashed cars, then. And this mustn’t be his first time either. And really, no reason for good stuff to go to waste—and the dead don’t care anymore. That’s why he went into such a huff over the tale of the avenging skull, the delicate soul that he is. Impressive. No wonder he and Yulichka reached an understanding.

“Where are they?” Daryna’s voice trembles. “Where are the rest of the paintings? There should have been five—where are the other four?”

Their hosts glance at each other: a pair of schoolchildren who’ve been caught smoking in the bathroom. Adrian wonders if the dude has connections among the local cops. The cops might be in on the action, too—the law doesn’t require photographic records for highway accidents, so they’re free to pick over the fresh carrion. Why not? It’s their loot—money, jewelry...one man’s war, after all. Adrian blinks automatically at the Haid mantel clock on top of the TV (quarter to noon): a respectable, well-made clock, straight from somewhere in bombed-out Königsberg or Berlin. Let anyone try to prove, after the fact, that the victim was wearing jewelry. And who would try to prove that—the victim’s grief-stricken family? Time to reclaim initiative, Adrian decides.

“A bad story you got yourself here, Vasyl Musiyovych.” This time Adrian leaves no doubt about his police-inspector intonation, and the yokel, who’s been half ignoring the “boozer-ex” all this time, experiences a stab of confusion. “A really bad story. The police have been looking for these paintings for four years already; the accident made quite a stir in the news; it was on every channel. And the painter, the one who died, was not only a close friend of Miss Daryna,” the pair of schoolchildren obediently, as if following a teacher’s pointer, move their eyes to Daryna, “but also the wife of an elected representative.” Adrian says Vadym’s last name and watches, not without glee, an intense—he’s all but got steam coming out his ears—thought process manifest itself on the yokel’s face before being replaced by an expression of genuine pain: aha, he’s getting it—he’ll have to kiss the pictures goodbye; no way around it, no matter how loath he is to part with them.

But the wife reacts faster.

“Well, who knew what was ina car! It sat turned upside down...”

Daryna freezes. Adrian can feel her thoughts as clearly as if it were his own brain being bombarded with electric shock; another instant and he’ll lose it, let it rip; only his worry for Daryna helps him to keep his cool.

“But don’t you know that you had the duty to call the police and the ambulance? What if she were still alive, inside that car? Consult the Criminal Code, ma’am!”

At the mention of the Criminal Code the woman shudders but does not back down.

“Well, it was all just skittered ina mud!” She takes a new angle, now pleading. “Just think, that’s a whole load of trouble. If we hadn’t took it, it’d of been ruined anyhow!” she’s finally found her lifeline. “It was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand, right, Vasya? If it’d laid there some more, the paint would of come straight off. This way, I saved them pictures, you see.”

She steps up to the canvas and runs her hand over it, with a sense of ownership, as if smoothing out a rug she’s selling, and shoots Adrian a sly sideways look (unlike her husband, she intuited Adrian’s status right away). In different circumstances, Adrian would have smiled at this—just watch her go!—but at the moment he is in no mood for comedy. The yokel catches on, too.

“If you want to take this picture, I won’t mind...what about you, Galya? Let ’em take it, right? We don’t need it dat much. Only how do I know you’re telling da truth? Can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies.”

Adrian understands they’re now haggling. The pair has realized they’re in trouble, but will keep kicking until the end, to try to get out with some sort of gain for themselves—if I can’t eat it, at least I’ll bite it. They don’t know how to be any other way; otherwise, they’d be as “mighty insulted” as that poor bastard that drank the poison for Colorado beetles. Only these guys won’t go drinking poison—they love life too much.

And that’s when Daryna begins to laugh. She is not hysterical, nothing like that, she just can’t help it: the redneck’s last sentence, together with his offended look, gets stuck inside her and keeps spinning there, producing, with every turn, a new wave of raging hilarity—“can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies”—and she is shaking with laughter like a loose-bolted old truck on a dirt road; she is a rattletrap of unglued muscles and tendons, oh my goodness, wiping tears—rewind and rewind, again like contractions or vomiting, “can’t just anyone come over”; she can’t breathe, and the thing is the phrase loses none of its effect with repetition; it remains, to Daryna, insanely funny, and she cannot stop, even though no one else is laughing, and she herself could not possibly ever explain what’s so funny about it, but God, she’s about to burst—her panties are wet already, and tears are running down her cheeks like streaks of rain down a windshield; the redneck and his wife are a blur in her eyes, “can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing”—and she jumps to her feet, shaking her head and choking on a new fit of laughter, waves at Adrian, meaning, it’s fine, she’s fine, she’ll be back to rejoin the company in just a minute, she just has to laugh it all out....

At this moment, the one who cannot not be watching the two of them through the mangled, swollen, and poster-clogged eye of her painting on the wall must clearly see Adrian and Daryna caught together, at once, in a lightning-quick flash of déjà vu.

As Adrian watches Daryna dash out the door, grabbing her purse on the run, he recalls a recent scene exactly like this one, at The Cupid—a stunning coincidence, like a repetition of the same movement in a dance, almost a rewind, but not quite; something has changed, because something always changes, and the elements of “then” and “now,” so brightly lit in our awareness, though they do call back and forth to each other with all their apparent congruity, like a repetitive geometric design, are still never one hundred percent identical. This time, Adrian realizes, there’s no need for him to run after her—she really will come back in a minute, as she said she would; she is fine.

Daryna’s déjà vu, however, comes to her as a direct extension of her negotiations with Vadym the night before—still warm, still swirling in her mind in shreds of dirty foam: in the yokel and his wife’s naïve determination to bite off a piece of the action, no matter how small, and hide it in their cheeks, even when backed into a dead corner, Daryna recognizes the same element of a behavioral matrix she encountered the day before, the same “election platform”—to get off the shoals in a way that allows one to keep the controlling stake. And in this very instant, as Vadym and the cuckoo yokel become in her mind a single entity, the laughter that took her over lets up like a sudden spring downpour—as if she’d heard a joke that stopped being funny after it was explained—and Daryna, still shaking her head in amazement (Can you believe this?) feels for a pack of Kleenexes in her purse, sniffing, and pushes at a white plastic door, decorously hidden in a niche, on which a stenciled peeing boy glows proudly like polished brass on a military uniform.

The bathroom smells of sweat and perfume: this is a well-off home, built to every city standard. From the mirror above the sink a woman she has seen somewhere before but doesn’t recognize right away looks back at Daryna: a clown or Lady Dracula. No—rather, a silent movie actress washing her face in the dressing room: the shoot is over, the role’s been played. (The terrifying beauty with fire hidden under her skin who once flashed up from under all that artful makeup is not coming back—and there isn’t anyone left to make her up anyway.) Her mascara is smeared into dense, predatory black fans around her eyes, and those eyes themselves, still not quite conscious, as if drunk with laughter, radiate, in contrast with their grotesque frames, a glowing, uncanny detachment, as if focused on something unseen. Something beyond reach.

A sudden understanding intrudes upon Daryna: I am not alone, she thinks. Who else is here? Who is with me?

She runs the water and puts both hands under the icy stream. What bliss, what boundless joy—just water, even when it’s merely coming from the tap, like this. The living water, the same as that which flows in the Dnieper. Or do they have their own well?

She bends over and catches the stream with her lips, drinks, swallows, and drinks more as she once saw a pigeon drink from a fountain where he perched: beak open hungrily, his whole body feasting on every sip. Or was it a dog? Lord, there’s so much life all around, and—dear Lord, what unthinkable things we do to it.

She raises her head and looks at the woman in the mirror: the Revlon lipstick smudged around her mouth as if she’s been kissed—like on a compact mirror in a purse found on the scene of the accident. That was a painting, that was a photo, I’ll use this somehow, I just don’t know how yet—wet streaks run down her chin, hang there like tiny stalactites of sweat, her wounded lips move, and on her skin, she somehow feels her own breath as she whispers, “I did everything as you wanted, Vlada. Everything. I will take them back. You go now.”

“I got him to sell me the clock, too!” Adrian announces.

“You should be in the right lane,” Daryna advises, focused on the road. She’s allowed him to take the wheel because he is now in better shape than she is, but she hasn’t relaxed; she’s alert; two heads are better than one, and the Lord helps those who help themselves. “What clock?”

“The one that they had sitting on top of the TV, you didn’t see it? A prewar piece, German-made—a trophy! He said his father brought it back from the front.”

“Sweet. And my gramps brought back a piece of shrapnel in his chest, which killed him within a year. And two cans of American meat stew from his rations—he didn’t eat it, saved it for the kids, as a treat.”

“You can’t compare. Didn’t you see, they have a tradition? Runs in the family.”

“Oh, look, another cemetery!”

“That one’s new, clearly.”

“Yeah.... Look, gas and food—do we need to fill up?”

“You know I wouldn’t mind filling myself up with something. How about we stop after Boryspil somewhere? All these Petrivna’s-and Mariyana’s-type places don’t inspire much confidence in me; there’ll be better places closer to the city.”

“After the interchange? Sounds good. I’m hungry too. Could eat a horse, actually.”

“That’s from an overdose of emotions in a single twenty-four-hour period.”

“If you say so. But you know, I’ve still got no clue what got me back there—what was so damn funny about anything?”

“A normal defensive reaction. But you wouldn’t believe how agreeable they got after that! All warm and fuzzy. The wife started asking me right away if you were the one she’d seen on TV. They were so scared; they must’ve thought you were about to broadcast them to the rest of the world. It worked even better than Vadym’s name. They cracked on the paintings without any fuss—said their daughter has them. So you, my dear, basically made the breakthrough in high-level negotiations. For which you shall receive a special commendation.”

“In the form of a big smooch? Hey—you should go ahead and just hire me as your secretary! At least I won’t rob you.”

“Can you start today? If you really mean it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

“But I know nothing about antiques, Aidy.”

“I’ll train you. No problem. You won’t even have to go to college.”

“I see you’re skimping on me already.”

“I’ll be your dream boss! You’ll see.”

“I don’t remember you ever propositioning me like this before...”

“Do you now appreciate the seriousness of my intentions?” He smiles but receives no smile in return. “Do you know, by the way, how Yulichka got him? He told me this at the very end, when we stepped out for a smoke—turns out she claimed that she was the owner from the beginning. Like it’s her gallery, and she’s this hotshot businesswoman who’s being stalked by her ex-husband, an alcoholic maniac. Meaning, me.”

“I’ve always suspected she was a crook.”

“But not this big! And I kept wondering why the dude disappeared and how she, with her bulldog grip, let him slip away. First she called me to say we got this diamond in the rough—and I, naturally, squealed like a little girl, said I was on my way and she should keep him there—and by the time I swooped in, the dude was gone. She told me this whole story about him being late for his bus. And proceeded to handle him behind my back from that day on.”

“Why did she call you at all?”

“She must have wanted to make sure that this particular hide was worth tanning, you know? That this was the right moment for her to go in on her own. And I was so thrilled, I blurted it all out—that we’d never had such luck before...which, by the way, is the sacred truth: that yokel’s cuckoo clock, turns out, was also from his father, and also a trophy—from Schwartzwald! That’s the top manufacturer, goes back to the eighteenth century. That’s where they all came from, the cuckoos—Schwartzwald in Germany; it was only later they got called Swiss clocks, after they started making the body in the shape of a chalet...”

“Watch out! He’s got his turn signal on!”

“Yeah, I see him. Come on, jack, turn already!” Adrian honks at the gray Mazda in front of him. “And the yokel, when he decided to sell the clock, just went from store to store and asked—to see who’d pay more. That’s how Yulichka got him.”

“Well, they’re meant for each other. A fine pair.”

“Indeed.”

“You got the daughter’s address, right?”

“Yep. And I got the number in my phone too, the dude called her on the spot. She lives on Berezniaki, Davydov Boulevard. Name’s Ruslana. I thought it’d be Lolita or Angela or something.”

“Ruslana’s not much better...and Aleksei Davydov, by the way, was that Kyiv city administrator who was in charge of liquidating Babi Yar.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Not even a little. They just never got around to renaming that street from the Soviet days.”

“No shit. So it was on his watch that the dam on Kurenivka broke?”

“His alright. The project, of course, came down from Moscow; he was just the one who implemented it...for which he was recognized accordingly. That’s how it goes, Aidy.”

“Makes me wonder—is anyone ever gonna set this country straight?”

“’Tis a chore, as Ambroziy Ivanovych says.”

“And Granny Lina used to say, call it a chore and treat it like your job. I called him yesterday, by the way. My dad. He sends regards.”

“Thanks.”

“He is still putting together materials for your film. He’s dug up some interesting stuff. I didn’t tell him that the film won’t happen...”

“The film will happen, Aidy.”

He looks at her sideways, blinking.

“It will,” Daryna repeats, with the unshakable certainty of an ancient Sibyl in her voice, so much so that Adrian gets goose bumps. “I have not a shred of doubt about that now.”

Adrian doesn’t say anything. He keeps his eyes on the road.

“You don’t see it yet, do you?” she says softly.

“Don’t see what?”

“Remember the tape of my interview with Vlada? The one in the Passage, the one you dreamed later, only starring Gela?”

“Not very clearly. Why?”

“In that interview, Vlada promised to give me one of her paintings as a present. From this very cycle—Secrets. You’ll just come over and choose one you like, she said.”

“And then she died. And you didn’t have a chance to go and choose one. Lolly, I understand how much you regret not having a single tangible memento of her. Pictures or video—that’s totally different, it’s not the same as the things a person leaves behind that she made with her own hands. I understand this very well.... ”

“You don’t understand anything. I did have a chance to choose.”

He blinks at her again. This woman will never cease to amaze him.

“It was this very work, Aidy. This one, the one we took back from them.”

“Can’t be.”

“This very one. Only intact, not cutoff, of course.”

“Are you certain? Are you sure it’s not just something you think now, in retrospect?”

“No, there’s no mistake. I recognized the painting right away, the moment I saw it. It’s her present. Vlada’s. She’s the one who brought me there. To the place where her Secret was buried. Except for the two of us, no one knew about the painting she’d given me.”

“God almighty.”

“Nah, it’s simple, really. She was a very neat girl. You know, one of those people who always picks up after herself and hates to have unpaid debts. I think she is closing her earthly accounts. She is fulfilling all the obligations she took on. Apparently, she cannot leave until she’s done. I mean, leave for good. You see?”

“Uhu. Looks like she’s not the only one either.”

“Yeah, I can’t get these 1933 dead out of my mind...”

“A road over a mass grave, how about that?”

“Well, almost every village this side of Zbruch had a pit like that, but not every one of those has cars driving over it, thank God.”

“Horrible story with that skull.”

“You know what occurred to me as she was telling that story? The place of the skull—that’s Calvary in Latin!”

“Lolly. My Lolly.”

“What?”

“And we’ll go around together buying up trophy mantel clocks from the descendants of the ‘liberation army’ and selling them to the new breed of pillagers?”

“Nope, wrong answer. Try again.”

“Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, Aidy, but that’s what it looks like to me...”

“You know what I would really like to have?” Adrian says. “What kind of a shop?” he is not looking at Daryna; his eyes are fixed on the road. “Not a boutique—boutique is a bad word, too glam, something for the new little Russians—a shop. One that would carry things that are no longer made. Good, necessary things—from a Singer sewing machine to a hand press for rolling your own cigarettes. Clever everyday things that one could use today. Things that were meant to serve a long time but have been made redundant by industrial production. You would agree with me, wouldn’t you, that tons of women out there would be thrilled to make clothes for themselves and their kids instead of wearing something made in China. And how many people would smoke honest tobacco instead of this trademarked trash!” He nods at the pack of Davidoffs next to the gearshift. “And so on...that sort of thing. And next door to this shop, right behind the wall—I’d have a few repair shops. Like the ones on Khreshchatyk, you know, in the courtyard next to the McDonalds, where we went to have the clasp on your necklace fixed last autumn. Good, honest repair shops. Staffed with serious men who’d spend their time giving new life to all these things. So that people would buy them not just to show off, but because they want them. And would go on using them.”

“A store called Utopia, no?”

“Let it be a utopia. Let it be a dream. Call it what you want.”

“And put up a handloom in there, would you please? That’s for me, personally. I’ve always wanted a real homespun dress.”

“No problem. I’m ordering it as we speak.”

“I like this game.”

“It’s not a game. You said it yourself—it’s a utopia. That’s better.”

“Actually, I think you’d pretty quickly attract your circle of dedicated customers.”

“I think so, too.”

“And you’d find other followers, too. Maybe you’d even start a brand. Like those Swiss Freitag guys, only yours is more ambitious.”

“See now?”

“And then one night, a bunch of boys would roll up in SUVs and burn your utopia to cinders, with all its wonders inside. As soon as their sales of made-in-China shit drop.”

“Eh, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. You don’t know until you try, right?”

“This is a very nice idea, Aidy. I mean it.”

“You like it?”

“I do. And you know who else would’ve liked it? Vlada. She’d have been insanely in love with it. It’s her style. She brought me a Freitag bag back from Switzerland, as a present, that big black one...”

“Are those the ones they make from old truck tarpaulins?”

“Yeah. Vlada loved them so much, you’d think she made them herself—it wasn’t so much the design for her as the idea. The rehabilitation, as you put it, of honest craftsmanship. She considered herself a craftsperson. She always said so, even to the press.... Oh, Aidy, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to know her!”

“I am sorry it’s impossible to know all the good people who are already gone.”

“The two of you are very much alike in a way. Very much. You both have an abundance of some essential spiritual vitamin that I chronically lack.”

“Man, you must be hungry. We’re almost there; just a bit further there’ll be a nice little place. In a forest, under pine trees.”

“I’m serious! I may not have put it the best way; I’m sorry, but that’s only because there’s too much stuff coming at me all at once...”

“Try not to fuss so much. You’re vibrating like you’re plugged into the wall. You’re jumping up at every car we pass. Baby, don’t.”

“Aidy. Listen. I’m thinking about this one thing. A bad thing, a terrible thing. I’ve been thinking about it the whole time, since that woman told us about the grave. I’m afraid to say it out loud even to you.”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s about Nina Ustýmivna. About her parents, actually. About Vlada’s grandparents.”

“What do they have to do with anything?”

“I’ll tell you. Listen. Vlada suspected that back in ’33 they worked the hunger. They were redistributing property, going after the better-off farmers, the kulaks—and it was somewhere here, around Kyiv. That’s where Vlada’s grandfather got his career started; it was only later, when the starvation began, that they were transferred into the city itself. They never spoke of it at home, of course, but Vlada accidentally overheard something somewhere once. And it matched their bios. She said her grandmother, when she was already a distinguished—for outstanding service to the country, what else?—pensioner chasing kids from the apple trees in their yard would, if she got really angry, call them kulak spawn. That was her worst cuss word.”

“You’re a two-faced and evil folk, you the kulaks who’ve been thrice-cursed!” Adrian recites with pathos.

“Good God, where’s that from?”

“Ukrainian Soviet poetry, of course. Stuck in my mind since high school, I don’t remember who wrote it. Didn’t you guys cover that, too?”

“Jesus, Aidy, don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

He puts his hand over hers.

“Of course I do, Lolly. Don’t think about it. You shouldn’t.”

“But it’s unfair!” Daryna all but moans. “Why did she have to...? Why did it have to be her? That she’d be the one, on that very spot...Aidy, she was so full of light, if only you knew! One of the best people I’ve ever met in my life...”

“That, Daryna, is not for us to know,” he says, flipping on the right-turn signal, causing Daryna to glance back instinctively to make sure the road is clear. They turn off the highway and, kicking up gravel with a great noise, pull up to a small roadside restaurant. “You’ve said it yourself—Golgotha,” Adrian says as he pulls the key out of the ignition, and in the silence that descends upon them, like a healing compress on a burning forehead, they remain, her head on his shoulder, his lips touching her hair. “And Golgotha,” he utters, barely audibly, “is, among other things, death for the sins of others. Also, you could say, a way of tidying up, of leaving things clean. Someone has to do it when too much stuff piles up. A way of purifying the system, according to the law of large numbers: many, many small Calvaries...”

He kisses her behind the ear and raises his head.

“I tell you what, Lolly. Think simpler: a deeply depressed woman went for a drive, not even knowing where, on an empty road, just went for the sake of going. Her reactions were dulled, the road was wet, it was raining, and then a critter ran across the road in front of her, a dog or something.... She slammed on the brakes at great speed, the car swerved, it was probably pretty slippery too—and that’s it. Shoulder, ditch. The end.”

She raises her head, not taking her eyes, wide and childlike in their incredulity, off him. “Is that what you really think?”

“No,” he says. “But it doesn’t make the least bit of difference—neither what I think, nor what you do. Or anyone else. The statement is unprovable within the system. It’s a Gödel theorem. And now, let us go and eat something. As long as we remain within the system, we certainly have to keep doing that.”

Finally she smiles—he’s managed to make her smile for the first time after that fit of hysterical laughter.

And only on the path from the parking lot to the porch does he notice that she is carrying a white plastic bag bulging with the edges of a canvas rectangle wrapped in several layers of newspaper.

“Oh no.” She shakes her head when she sees him looking at it, and smiles, a bit sheepishly this time. “Say what you want, but I’m not leaving it in a car again.”