The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (36 page)

Once upon a time there had been a love in this world, Olya and Tolya—“Otollya” as they used to sign postcards to friends—had been and then stopped being. Just stopped, for technical reasons—in conjunction with one signatory’s departure. And
that’s it? Just like that? You leave life, disappear from the screen, and that’s all it takes for your love to vanish, too? The love that had buoyed you up for years?

She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t know how to ask her mother: What did she do with her love? Did she archive it somewhere inside, tying the strings into a dead knot? Or, did she switch its tracks like Kyiv’s streetcar drivers used to do back in the in the seventies—by hand, with an iron hook—and set to finish loving Uncle Volodya with the same underlived, interrupted love that was so cruelly mangled halfway? Was it really possible that it was
the same love
that still went on for her? Because all that savage energy of the soul that is called love—the one that can cut you down with the force of a direct blow when you’re dusting the desk on which he used to unroll his blueprints, or when you find in a drawer an old scarf that still holds his smell, or simply anywhere, for no visible reason—cuts you down, the tidal wave of it knocks you off your feet and all you can do is fall where you stood and howl like a beast without words: Where is he? Why is he gone?—all this energy cannot possibly just disappear, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

When she was young, Daryna did not think about these things, of course; back then, her only desire was to escape as soon as possible from her crippled family, which couldn’t do better than to hatch Uncle Volodya and his moronic medical jokes—one big taunt like a fart into navy sweatpants. And without any of that “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively” that once caused her departed father so much trouble. Unlike Hamlet, she acted, for being only nineteen, rather decisively. (Told herself as soon as she spotted Sergiy—this one!—and when, the following night, he, inflamed by her hurried, eager availability—take me, I’m right here!—drilled into her, thrown onto the sand, with his unexpectedly hard and hot member, she couldn’t help herself, even though she’d squeezed her eyes shut like she was at the dentist’s—so as not to see the instruments—and yelped with pain. Poor Sergiy all but got a stutter from the shock of this being her first time,
enough to traumatize the boy for life. She was lucky it turned out okay—Sergiy was very moved, stroked her hair, and whispered “my baby” to her, and that’s when she burst into tears, burying her face in his gray, as she clearly remembers, T-shirt, into his chest, because after her father this was the first man’s hand that had stroked her hair.)

Hamlet, to be totally frank, had a much easier time being decisive. After all, his father died a king, and the son had all the right to shove the two portraits into his mother’s face and point out: this had been your husband, and this is your husband, and tut at you, dear Mother. What assets did she, Daryna, have, except perhaps these memories of her early childhood, still warmed with love, elusive and tingling like a dream you can’t remember in the morning but that makes you ache with the sense of irreparable loss? And then, right away, the next frame: the yellow knobby bones with the feet sticking out from under the robe, the permanent, inextinguishable smell of urine around the home where you couldn’t invite any of your friends. (In the first months after the asylum, Father could only talk with great effort; his speech later returned, more or less, but the unpleasant strain in it remained until the end, like a person who’s crawling above an abyss and is afraid to lose his footing.) Nothing regal, nothing heroic at all—only the long, inescapable shame of a repressed teenager. And in this version of the play, Gertrude then tried, in vain, to make her daughter understand how much Uncle Volodya sacrificed when he left Father to die in the hospital and spared no painkillers for him: usually such patients were discharged, so they wouldn’t spoil the hospital’s stats with another exitus letalis. A perfectly fraternal act on her stepfather’s part, nothing like Claudius’s: all men of the same woman are in a way brothers (oh no, not all, she refuses to imagine R. and Aidy have anything in common; Aidy’s done nothing to deserve that!).

“Mom, what if I asked you what Dad and Uncle Volodya have in common?”

“He’s kind,” Olga Fedorivna responds instantly, as if she’d been waiting for this question for twenty years. “I’ve always told you—make sure a man’s kind, that’s the most important thing. Seriozha was kind. And Adrian, too.”

For the first time this morning Daryna can’t stifle a smile: the ease with which her mom ties into the same circle her own and her daughter’s men—the ones she knows—makes her forget, for an instant, the bottomless bog her boss had tried to drag her into last night. Images of her life’s kind men spin before her like in the Hutsul arkan dance—they’re all brothers; they all must be introduced to each other, so they all become friends. The circle flickers gathering speed, faster, faster, as it blends into a single being, a collected radiance of a single gaze that glows with tenderness—this lasts no more than an instant, and the vision disintegrates, but, how strange; she feels ever so slightly better, consoled. Somehow, her mother has managed to break her out of her gloom, alleviate the fear of loneliness. No, she won’t bend over for them, hell no. What her boss offered last night was more horrible than solitary confinement. Much more.

***

Once, in Polissya, Daryna got to see a quag—an unnaturally, acidly bright, motionless pool the color of light pickle mold in the middle of a marsh. From the distance, its utter stillness awed her: a blind, piercingly green eye of death. She remembers her sudden, intense urge to throw something into it—anything, just to break the spell of that uncanny stillness, to see, with her own eyes what it was like, what an end like that looked like, when the darkness sucks you in and there’s nothing to grasp on to; the mere thought of it makes everything inside go numb with terror, but still it lures, beckons to peek in.

There was a moment in the conversation yesterday when she felt that same mucid disorientation. For as long as her boss kept trying to appeal to her ambition, the only emotion she felt boiling inside
her was rage. Her ambitions were on a completely different plane, and the boss, while he may have been using the same word, had something completely different in mind. It was as if he stubbornly insisted on calling, say, a table a glass (like the one into which he kept pouring himself cognac, while she barely tasted hers, only felt a headache coming on) and expected her to do the same. He tempted her with access to a humongous—at least thirty percent!—audience, bragged about the channel already buying meters to measure ratings in cities of a half a million people and up—and that’s just to start with, the one hundreds were next—and all she wanted to spit back was: What the heck for?
Ukraine’s Got Talent
?

He was burying all her professional aspirations alive and had not the slightest inkling of what he was doing. He never felt the studio darkness expand into infinity on the other side of the cam-eras; there was no one sitting in fear for him, ready to cough and creak their chairs in response to any falsity; he couldn’t care less about what he put on the air. Professionalism, for him, meant how, not what, and if the Insurgent Army theme was better left alone for the time being, then it wasn’t worth bothering with at all, and anyway, entertainment programming was the safest niche—he said it exactly like that, using that word, and it made her cringe, and then laugh with all the spite she had in her: ah, the niche again!

Nose already twitching with the nonexistent roach whiskers, he assured her she would be protected from politics, all that dirt, he gave his word. Sure, she’s “the face of the channel,” and it was never her business to care about the provenance of substances that bubble in its guts, so why should it start being her business now? That’s only logical. And then he told her—intimately, a little wearily almost like he’d had enough of her tetchy jibes, her crooked half-grins, and her little bitten-down lips, all of which had the singular purpose, as any idiot could see, of drumming up her price, a pretty woman’s usual ritual resistance before she gives in and takes the hardened dick into her mouth—how much she would be paid. Cash, of course, in an envelope, off the books.

She gasped silently, unsure of what face to make so he wouldn’t notice anything: she felt naked—no one had heard of such salaries in Ukrainian television before; the ceiling was five grand a month, unless, of course, you count those who got their kickbacks in envelopes, directly from their political clients, and their channel was never among the wealthy ones. She’d been getting two, and was fine with that. That’s when it went to her head, spinning, dizzying, for an instant: they could buy an apartment downtown if they sold Aidy’s digs—and better still—oh the impossible dream!—a small house in the country, in some near-Kyiv quaint alpine hamlet; it’s all “Alps” around Kyiv, everywhere you turn—hills, meadows, lakes, ponds, and not everything’s sold yet, although the prices are stratospheric indeed, but all they need is a little patch of land, like in Roslavychi, where Vlada had been planning to live with Vadym. And right away, with dazzling, sobering clarity, it occurred to her that Vlada’s death was also connected to this hidden churn of financial flows—with the invisible gigantic intestine where blood and oil mixed in the same pipe: Vadym was into oil, and Vlada was into Vadym, and she got the blood. What was it she said in that dream—“too many deaths”?

Frozen, Daryna felt the breath of the subterranean bog—its invisible vapors rose against her skin, fogged her mind. Bank accounts’ credit columns endowed with cell-like, self-replicating ability, the flickering of mysterious numbers on computer screens and stock-market monitors: all this was alive—it rose, throbbed, grew, moved. “I’d be curious,” she said to the boss, “I’d be really curious to know—where’s the mother lode?” Boss took it as an expression of admiration and winked, with bravado, just like that time at his housewarming party. “I mean,” she said, not yet aware of how close she’d come to lifting the manhole cover and seeing the blind acidly greenish glimmer below with her own eyes, “don’t get me wrong; I know I’m an expensive woman,...” (he gave her a sleazy snigger) “but I’m also aware that free cheese is only found in the mousetrap—braids don’t fetch that kind of dough!”

That was her swerving off road and cutting straight through the rough—she no longer cared; she knew her cause had already been lost and wanted to have one last satisfaction: to know the mechanism that was behind this, let it be her last journalistic investigation; she’s a professional after all, isn’t she? (For the fall, the anniversary of her friend’s death, she’d planned to make a separate film about Vlada, for
Lantern
—and for Vlada, too. Yep, and apparently Vlada’s no longer in touch with the times, and Vadym’s been showing up on TV more often, generally looking like he’s got his act together and is doing pretty well;
why
should we mess with the dead if we’ve got living people lining up, cash in hand?) The Donets’k surgeon, Vlada, Gela Dovganivna, whom she kept postponing, unable to find the key to her story—Lord, how proud she was of her show; how much she loved her heroes, always had butterflies in her stomach when she went to the website to read the viewers’ comments the morning after a new episode had aired. What’s happening to us, how low can we fall, what are we letting them do to us?

No, she did not burst into tears right there, in the boss’s office; she’d held her face screen-proof—like a cream puff, because fury was boiling inside her, and fury demanded action, immediate action. She interrogated; she went on the offensive; she cornered him; she didn’t know she had such breathless pace in her; she rode it like a witch on a broomstick, and he did not realize that this was merely a doomed man’s attempt to extract from his executioner the law that had sent him to the gallows—no, he looked at her with growing respect, as at a woman who was expertly, professionally raising her price. Good job. (She’s run so many times into this astonishing shortsightedness in otherwise intelligent people that she long stopped marveling at it: it was like a virus, increasingly widespread, that affected not only politicians, businesspeople, and members of her own journalistic tribe, but also artists of whom one commonly expects a more complex spiritual organization. Instead of living, people were scheming, playing out their combinations, and anything that was not part
of their scheme was simply blocked in their consciousness, as if they had a blind spot.)

Boss really valued her, even the tip of his nose was all sweaty with tension she noted gleefully—she wasn’t the only one on whom the conversation was taking its toll! Alright, he sighed, about to slap his last ace, the joker up his sleeve, onto the table in a grand, bighearted sweep—cards down! He might be able to negotiate a bigger sum for her, he said, he’d do his best—if it works, they’ll “take her in” (he said this in Russian, when the talk turned to money, he switched completely into Russian) on the profits from the
Miss New TV
show. Is that so? It’s a very serious project, he warned, nervously twitching his sweaty nose (and
Diogenes’ Lantern
was NOT serious, she dictated mentally to her invisible attorney—the boss’s every word scorched her like a flame), only this must remain strictly between the two of them, okay? (This reminded her of someone else—oh yes, her captain from that office with fake leather doors of 1987 vintage: he also asked with the same sepulchral import for the conversation to remain between them.)

This was in her own interest, by the way, because he had Yurko pegged to host the
Miss New TV
pageant (Yurko!—she yelped inside—and Yurko will agree?), but only on an official salary—Yurko’s not in on the profits. How about that? They do value her!

“And what kind of show is that?”

“The usual kind, just another show, the main thing’s to select and sort the girls who applied, and then they’d be passed on to a different agency.”

“Meaning what?”