The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (41 page)

The moment passes, the whole picture, without ever having come together, scatters into pieces, into flat shards of memories with which you could never erect the Tower of Babel, and Daryna is left sitting on her messy, crumpled bed, blinking at the curtain brightened by the sunlight to egg-yolk yellow with the shadow of the window frame on it like a cross distorted in a magnifying glass.... Threads, her mind turns over belated like a hard, sticky piece of candy that won’t crack. Threads, thready threads. Mom—herself—Boozerov. No, that’s not right: Dovganivna—herself—Aidy—Boozerov. No, she can’t bring it back; it’s all gone. Again, like that time in the spring—it flared and died.

But she does retain one thing from this flare: the being above—in relation to what happened the night before as well.
She’s broken free of the boss’s yesterday office; it doesn’t oppress her anymore. She does, in fact, feel better.

“Thanks, Ma,” Daryna says into the receiver she is still clutching in her hand; her knuckles stand out as if made from mother-of-pearl. “I know now what I have to do.”

She’ll go to Boozerov herself. And she will bring Gela’s case to light—to heck with the film, if that’s how things turned out, it’s not about the film—she needs to find out where these threads that run through her life come from, whence this capillary lace of human destinies. And she’ll also meet with Vadym: he’s the only elected representative with whom she could be considered almost friends—they have Vlada in common. He is her only immediate chance of undercutting those bastards’ show with which they plan to cover up someone else’s slave trade. This is what’s really important.

And what she’s to do with herself, where she’s to look for work, and whether she’s to look for a job at all—that’s all like scree underfoot, the common rubbish of life’s prose, in the same department as what to make for dinner tonight. That’s how she is seeing it at the moment—in big, clear terms, with her vision corrected—and she knows it’s the right way of seeing.

“See, I know you’re my smart girl!” her mom brightens up. “You’ll see; it’ll all turn out okay.”

“How else, Ma?”

“Only do be careful!” Of course, Mom is Mom.

Daryna barely contains herself before she responds the same way as to her boss last night, and can’t help but smile, “I’ll do my best, Ma.”

“Alright, you take care of yourself now!”

“You too, Ma. Call if you need anything.”

That’s a ritual phrase between them, and it means if you need money. This time, for the first time it doesn’t sound completely heartfelt: her savings, Daryna hopes, will last her a while, but how long can they actually last if she also needs to help the old folks? Aidy, after all, also has a dad on an engineer’s salary—it’s enough for the
food, but not for the medication he needs. That’s how it all begins, that’s how they leak and flood, our little cardboard houses. Nah, to hell with it, she doesn’t want to go slopping around in all that again.

After she puts down the receiver, Daryna rises and, just as she is, in her flimsy nightshirt, goes to the window, throws the curtains open, and gasps with surprise. So that’s where her clarity came from, that’s what lit the curtain with the yellow light that she barely noticed for the entire hour she was on the phone: It’s the snow! The first snow came in the night!

Spellbound, she looks at the instantly lightened street, at the heavy white lashes of trees in the park next door and the roofs turned white, turned Christmas-y, like a picture in a children’s book: smoke is rising from one chimney, and the whole view looks as though the city had drawn a deep breath and stayed still in the blissful smile of relief. Her city—they can’t take that away from her, either.

“So,” Daryna says out loud, addressing no one in particular. “Let’s fight back, shall we?”

Half Past Five

A
CQUIRED THIS MONTH:

1.
Polish military cross for Monte Cassino (inscription on the medallion “Monte Cassino Maj 1944”), bronze, with suspension ring, no ribbon, award document missing.

Could send out a feeler to our military collectors about this. Be better to find a Polish contact, though—for them, it’s got historical value, too.

2.
Commemorative badge issued on the 150th anniversary of Skovoroda’s death, made from tank-grade steel, with the philosopher’s portrait and inscription on the medallion (“Grigory Skovoroda 1794-1944”)
.

More from ’44, huh? Bulk supply. Must be a sixty-year cycle or something. I’d read something once about the cyclic model of the universe—not much of a scientific hypothesis, but it does make you wonder sometimes how history makes itself known in roundabout ways.

3.
Tin-glazed earthenware ocarina, Kyiv region, mid-20th C.

I don’t remember this. Where’zd it come from? What does it even look like, this ocarina?

I’ll leave my office, go sit in the subway, and play my ocarina...make this pitiful sound—there was a little old dude I saw in the subway once, playing a sopilka fife on the escalator landing. Never heard anything sadder in my life. Our folk music is not especially happy to begin with, and underground, laid bare by that frightful resonance, it cut like a knife, like the wail of an abandoned child. The voice of people that cryeth in the wildernesse. An abandoned sound—exactly what I feel like right now. Where the heck is that ocarina?

Let’s get married, I said to her. I’m thirty-four already, and I’ve never said this to any woman before. My dad, in his day, took
Mom out to a restaurant expressly for this purpose, and Mom got so emotional she splashed wine on herself. But on Lolly it made no impression at all. Meaning, she snorted, the way she does, like a filly, and tossed her head just like that and said, “So that what? There’ll be the stamp in the passport? So I’d be officially a home-maker instead of unemployed?”

I was going to protest—what’s that to do with anything? Sure, I understand—what happened to her on TV affected her much more deeply than she admits even to herself: she has no concept of herself outside of her work. She simply doesn’t have an alternative role at hand; shake her awake in the middle of the night and ask, “Who are you?” And she’ll say, “Journalist!” She’s got all her eggs in one basket, as they say, and now that she’s had the basket taken away, my girl feels like she’s had her whole life stolen and can’t think about anything else. I understand exactly how she feels; I’m not an idiot. How could I not, really, after I’d gone through the same agonies myself—alright, maybe not exactly the same. I was twenty-five then and it actually seemed kind of cool to try something new, dabble in antiques—why not (just for the time being, I thought!)? Lolly’s situation’s totally different, and when you’re staring down forty there’s nothing cool about it.

But only when she snorted her filly’s snort and said the thing about the stamp, which she’d already had in her passport once before, and then what am I doing (she didn’t say this but she might as well have) filling my—and her—head with this nonsense when she’s got some real problems on her plate, did it dawn on me that our notions of marriage are totally different. I am a Catholic, after all; never mind I haven’t been to mass in ages. And that for her it’s like this part of life’s been painted over with oil paint—like the window in our school bathroom that was painted halfway up and we boys used to scrape out various inanities on it with our penknives; then at the university, I remember, the bathroom window, exactly the same, and someone had scratched, “God is dead. Nietzsche,” on it and below an oval that was supposed to be
a head, with a humongous mustache and hair standing on end, a thicket of straight lines—a portrait of Nietzsche maybe, or maybe the God that was dead.

4.
Two Russian copper coins, “denga,” 1708, and “altyn,” 1723, both in good condition.

Jeez. How’d I fall for this junk? Hoboes do better picking through trash—they’d laugh at this “business” of mine....

I should’ve explained to her, like to a child: I’m not after the stamp, Lolly—I want us to be wed. In church, at the altar. I, Adrian, take you, Daryna, as my wife; I, Daryna, take you, Adrian, as my husband. In sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, till death do us part. That’s it, and what’s so fucking mysterious about it? And I would also like it, I would, Lolly, to be totally honest, like at confession. (Which you also did not understand that time I’d gone, why I’d done that, and kept asking like an anthropologist: What does it mean that you felt the need to go to confession? Did you mess up somewhere?) I’ll tell you straight, I would, in fact, like to have a little Lolly-tot race a tricycle around our place raising a ruckus and looking like you and me both at the same time—doesn’t matter a boy or a girl. I would like to hold his little hand in the street, and help him collect his toys scattered in different rooms, and sit at his little bed and read to him, and teach him everything I’ve learned in my life—even if I haven’t learned all that much. And that’s it. And Nietzsche, if I’m not mistaken, died in the loony bin after he’d first spent ten years eating his own shit.

What are you afraid of? You tell me. What?

You little terrified girl with tight little fists, determined to betray none of your fear—I saw you. I knew you to be that girl from that first moment, as soon as I’d spotted you among the backstage chaos of the TV studio that looks like a factory floor and a fossil dig at once—among turned-off cameras, dead like pterodactyls, and the twisted cables underfoot that slithered out of nowhere like pythons in the jungle—where, on the brightly lit stage familiar from your broadcasts, you, just done, were unpinning your microphone and talking to your crew, and all of you
steamed with a kind of hot, feverish charge—as if you’d all just tumbled out of a nightclub and didn’t know what to do with the rest of your artificially pumped-up high.

Back then I didn’t know yet that this was the condition required for creating any virtual reality, and the one on the screen above all: to be real, it demands from its creators a constant energy feed, new logs for the fire, new kilocalories of living exhilaration—same as with a lie that has to be refreshed, fed all the time, even if it only means keeping it at the front of your mind with a constant mental effort because left to its own devices it would instantly deflate like any parasitic form of life, like mistletoe when the tree it sucked dry finally falls.

You belonged to the army of those who feed it—with their own blood, the gleam of their eyes and the freshness of their skin, and with time I learned to detect in you and your crew this short-lived, drug-like, camera-induced high; I watched you all come down from it outside the lens’s reach—some faster, others slower, and still others, after several years on TV, turned lethargic and limp, like they’d been unplugged, and came to life only on camera; under the lights, they’d flip their tail a few times, like a fish thrown back into water, and then go back into suspended animation.

Back then I knew none of this, and the only thing that stunned me, blinded me, was your sharply lit shape, like an Egyptian figurine in tight black jeans. Before, I had no idea how blatantly the screen can lie: how close-ups make everyone’s faces look equally wide, when in real life you are so fragile and fine—delicate, as Granny Lina liked to say, the highest compliment she could pay a woman. And you seemed to me then not the queen of that other-side kingdom but the opposite—the girl sacrifice, a lamb with your eyes and lips blackened à la Monica Bellucci, like a child who’d painted herself with her mother’s makeup. When I came closer, the crown of your head came exactly up to my lips, and it was like someone gave me a push in that instant, saying into my ear,
Here, Adrian, is a woman made to your measure
.

I should protect you now, but I don’t know how. That’s the thing, my girl. More important—don’t know if that’s what you really want. In all your childhood photos that I have seen—from the little Lolly with a big bow perched above her comically Socratic forehead, to the teenager with mouse-tail braids, who is, everywhere, shying away from the camera like a small animal wanting to hide (as if you could sense, even back then, that the camera lies)—your little hands are squeezed into fists. As if you did all your growing up like that—in the constant state of red alert. My little warrior. These fists of yours—thumbs tucked under the folded fingers—are all I see these days: you’ve squeezed yourself into a fist, just like that, folded yourself in, and locked me out. Some work is being done in there, inside you, and I am not privy to it.

Can anyone ever understand a woman completely? And do women even understand themselves?

It’s not like you’ve deliberately pushed me away from your problems—no, you told me about what happened in great detail, and you listened very intently, without your usual “contortions,” when I tried to demystify for you how business works in our godforsaken country where government itself is merely a kind of business, and television is also business, and your entire journalistic guild serves, as even I can see from the sidelines, as a mere tip of the iceberg, one of the many means the real players have of laundering their dough—a plug, in a word. A gag. You didn’t like that word; you bit your lip, winced with a pained expression, and recoiled too abruptly in the next instant, when I, stirred by tenderness, reached out to stroke your cheek. You were already closed before me, tense and cocked like a gun, and this short wordless exchange cut me to the quick, almost as if you’d rejected me as a man. And maybe even worse.

There’s one thing I realized, Lolly: you’re a strong woman—much stronger than you appear and you think yourself to be. It is only people of real strength who, on the ruins of their lives’ script, do not rush to grasp the hand extended to them but instead react the way you did: instinctively isolate themselves, escape inward, like a sick wolf that leaves the pack and runs into the forest—to
find the herb that can heal him or to die trying. You poor little wolf, what are we going to do with you, huh?

I know you need to find new footing, build your razed little hut anew, from the foundation up. If I hand you the building materials you need, you’ll take them, of course—from me and from anyone else, from anywhere, as long as you can make use of them. And any other kind of help I can offer you’ll also accept gratefully: you’ll drink, say, the bedtime tea with honey I make you, nuzzle my shoulder, and tell me I’m sweet. But you won’t come to
my
little hut, which, by the way, wasn’t built overnight either and took just as much work as yours—you won’t come live in it. Mine or anyone else’s.