The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (11 page)

Again I washed up in her apartment just as I always did in moments of panic and confusion—I’d come looking for comfort that only she could give, in the very apartment she’d left the day before, and then gotten into her sunshine-yellow Beetle. And then slammed the door shut.

Later, someone must’ve rung the doorbell, or come in, or Vadym finally had to go to the bathroom, because I was left alone in the living room and stood next to the uncurtained window watching a dense, fluorescent Gauloise-pack blueness quicken and solidify outside; during those days, all colors appeared painfully saturated, all lenses focused in all directions at once, and my eye kept tripping on utterly irrelevant frames—on the way to the cemetery out the car window a pair of dogs, one spotted and the other black and shaggy, rolled on a pile of lacquer-glossy wet leaves; and on the subway bridge, as the funeral procession passed
under it, a homeless man with a patchwork tote, bowed against the low-hanging sky—with the kind of sharpness that also happens when you’re in love and every randomly arranged instance, once it falls into your sight, swells, rounds, and breaks off like a distinct drop of water; so, maybe it’s only in love and death that life becomes truly visible for us. Through the window, amid the fluorescent blue, I could see children playing on the sidewalk across the street, sharp moving silhouettes, black cutouts, with only their white sneakers flickering in the dusk like dying lightbulbs; in the foreground an old woman in a tiny knit hat, swaddled like a cabbage in many layers of clothes, searched slowly, with mesmerizing, dendritic stiffness, through the trash cans; and then, very slowly, as if filmed with speed-ramping, a car crawled by, a dark Mazda with blazing lynx-like headlights, and as I stood there in the raincoat that I never did remember to take off, I saw myself from outside too—someone painted into this creaking, straining, but
still unfolding
picture, and also saw, with the same piercing clarity, that Vlada was no longer part of this continuous time. We were being separated by its implacable flow; its forceful tug, so palpable at that moment, dragged me—now only me—blindly along and left Vlada behind, in the yesterday, marooned in the past as though on an ice floe, and the widening gap between us was rapidly filling with a roiling, rushing surge of new frames of life without her. I watched this flood come and knew I
would never be able to tell her about it
—up till that moment, from the minute I heard, and later with Vadym, the whole time, my mind kept addressing her, sharing its shock with her, chastising—Why did you go alone, Vlada? and a million other trifling post-factum warnings—and it was still she I entertained, and soothed, and came to ask: Were you happy with this man?—but it was already like talking into a dead phone, and all I had left to do was hang up and let this terrible, slow current carry me irretrievably forward, without her.

I understood that Vlada had died and I had remained to live.

When Vadym returned and we started talking again—finally, the cognac took effect and memories burst out of him, random
and unstoppable—I said “she was” for the first time about Vlada and was surprised at how easily it came and how easy it was to continue, from then on, in past tense.

This must be it, then—ground zero—when a new count is set to begin and a new system of coordinates takes root and reaches outward into the unknown. Time fills you in, layer after layer, like calcium encrusting joints, and the things and places that once bled with the dead person’s presence dry up and scab over with repeated daily use in this new time, the time “without”: the crosswalk, next to the movie studio where Vlada once sneaked her yellow Beetle behind me and stuck her shaggy, golden-wheat head out the window and hollered, “Daryna!” having been crossed another dozen times, sheds her presence and no longer hurts, becoming just another crosswalk; the windows of her apartment—the ones I checked for light as soon as I came out of the subway, the ones whose glow made me walk faster in anticipation of our kitchen-table talk after she’d put Katrusya to bed—first became the dark windows of an empty home, and then dissolved into a row of other windows, as if swallowed by a crowd, until one day, as I walked by, I realized I could no longer find them—was the first one the second or the third from the corner balcony?—and stood there on the sidewalk struck with my mouth open, like Lot’s wife, trying to remember the layout of the apartment, while lines from
Hamlet
swirled in my mind, “My father died within these two hours. / —Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.” (Or twice two years—does it get any easier?)

Fighting a pile of old letters at home, in another useless fit of resistance against the expanding paper chaos, I recognized the hand on an envelope with such intense emotion that it pinned me to the spot like an animal in a spotlight:
This is from someone I once loved!
And only after I read the return address did I realize it was Vlada’s writing. Is it truly not the person that we remember, but only our own feelings attached to them? Does the loss hurt because it leaves us flailing, throwing our severed emotional limbs after something that’s no longer there? Only the places that were
unsoiled, untouched by subsequent visits retained the memories they originally held: the bench on Prorizna Street, next to Yama Café, where in the fall of 1990 the two of us sat burning our palates with “the double-halves” of coffee from Soviet cups with handles broken off to discourage anyone from stealing them, while below, in front of the Central Post Office, the not-yet-renamed Independence Square roared as a single body—its low drone swelled into one explosive boom after another, reverberating off walls, running quakes and shudders through window panes, all the way across the deserted city to the old Jewish market and the striking trolleybus depots—and the empty trolleybuses, their poles lowered and wires drooping like wet whiskers, stood aligned in two rows along Khreshchatyk, as if readied to be used as barricades; our faces felt the hot breath of stormy, combustible air—the crackling air of unrest that is released from the fissures between epochs like subterranean gases from between slipping tectonic plates, the air that picks you up and carries you along, air you can walk on, run on, shouting and not hearing your own voice. Our lips, parched after a day of standing on the square, burned as we passed our single cigarette to each other; we drank the boiling-hot double-halves and Vlada talked and talked without pause, as though she’d broken through many years of silence—about her divorce, about how things can’t go on the same, how life had to change, how it had to begin, finally, for real. “We had no youth, Daryna,” she said, meaning the students who’d lain down in the square and no longer got up—the students on their backs, face to face with the sky, their features starved into seraphic transparency, their suicidal headbands with the words “hunger strike” etched meekly in white on their foreheads—and we envied them because, unlike them, “we had no youth.”

Vlada’s verdict cut me to the quick—it was so brutally true; she always possessed that unsparing clarity of vision, an astonishing degree of honesty for a comfortable Soviet girl. I felt the same as she did, but she was always first to recognize and articulate what it was, and as I listened to her then I felt, for the first time, a stab of
another thought, one that I had been afraid to acknowledge—that my own marriage had expired just like hers, and I had to find the courage to tear it apart soon, to sever it surgically before the rot infected the two souls entangled in it. The world melded into a giant, rolling mass; our lives, and the only era we’d known, were falling apart in front of our eyes, and they were being ground down to irreducible solid specs that could then be sucked into the dark maelstrom of history. We had both married very proper Soviet boys, handsome and nice, college and, later, graduate students; and it was only when time came crashing down around us that we realized that these proper Soviet boys, so handsome and nice, feared nothing more than growing up—that an insurmountable horror of the adult life in which one had to make independent decisions had lain latent in them like an incurable virus, and it took nothing less than an utter collapse of the social system that had relied on men just like them to bring it out. Vlada had sensed all this a step ahead of me and was first to jump ship, to paddle her one-woman rescue raft away, with the infant Katrusya at her breast—I don’t think I would’ve had the guts were I in her shoes, but then again, I didn’t have the guts to have Sergiy’s child either. She had not a shred of fear in the face of the unknown; her whole being hummed, aimed at the future, as though she were set atop a tightly coiled steel spring ready to pop, and the energy she contained charged me, too, giving me some of the same confidence—she was wearing a black leather jacket that day, and I remember thinking with a smile, in a sudden rush of tenderness, Biker girl! All she needs is a white helmet...

The bench on Prorizna is still there—after they closed Yama Café, they turned the place into a casino so it no longer serves as the perch for bohemian smoke breaks and now sits empty most of the time, on a blank slab of asphalt, no longer hidden by lilac bushes that were cleared to make a parking lot for the casino-bound Mercedes and Porsches—the only surviving monument to that autumn when we were, as it turned out later, still young, so young that we didn’t even know it. Because only youth, having
found itself straddling a widening chasm between two eras, can leap forward with an easy heart, away from its crumbling past, can send whatever has been to the trash, like a bad draft, and set out, at not-quite thirty, to “live for real”—it is only youth that has the arrogance to cross out the years that have not satisfied its ambition: time teaches you to waste nothing, to savor unhurriedly, like wine, things that years earlier you would’ve brushed aside on a princely whim, thinking, as young Katrusya said whenever she missed her bus, “Dey’ll send us anoter one, bettuh.” Time teaches you that no, unfortunately, they won’t.

Vlada had ten more years exactly—ten berserk years of living “for real,” at the speed of a Harley barreling down a mountain road (with Katrusya in her backpack); ten years in which she, a single mother without any material resources, except the studio on the Andriyivsky Descent that she inherited from her father, transformed herself into a truly accomplished artist, possibly the most successful painter in Ukraine—if you can measure national success in foreign sales, of course (although lately even our homegrown fat cats have begun to warm up to the idea that owning a Matusevych is badass), or in foreign sales and Ukrainian envy, because the latter is far more precise and sensitive than money alone: money, after all, is relative, and no one ever has enough, but envy always circulates in reliably high supply, and the more of it that roils around you, the thicker and more noxious its vapors, the more certain it is that you have risen, damn it, risen above the crowd.

(As if she did it on purpose, as if she’d stood up from the trenches and let the sniper’s bullet find her. As if someone up there cared that we shouldn’t rise too far above anything, that we should toe the line. Inch forward, slowly—not the way she wanted it, “for real.”)

It is always on Prorizna, when I pass the orphaned little bench on its bare knoll, that the stubbornly offended, purely childish thought—It’s not fair!—pops up like a forgotten buoy and hits me anew. If there’s still someone up there who enforces the rules, then it was even more unfair of him to rip her out of a life that she
lived full tilt (literally) like a crock dentist who pries off a good tooth—Oops, sorry, a bit of a mistake here, but you can’t put it back, can you?

Vlada herself must have been more than a little cross after she’d been deposited in the next world so unceremoniously: the very first night, while her body lay on a morgue shelf, she appeared in my dreams unusually furious—in her studio, wearing those same threadbare overalls and rummaging through drawers in search of something; she waved me off when I called out to her, desperately, with my whole being—meaning, leave me alone, I’m busy—and said something truly bizarre, something about “a bill of ward” that she urgently needed because “there are too many deaths.” I memorized those words exactly because, although the language of dreams is as impenetrable as that of prophecies, it is incapable of untruth and therein lies its central distinction from what we say and hear in daylight; it is our perception that skews the dreamt messages, “instrument bias” as scientists call it, and that’s why whenever I manage to preserve something I heard in my dreams until morning I write it down verbatim, even if it sounds a hundred times less meaningful than what I heard Vlada say to me on that first night, especially since, as it later turned out, on the same night in Vlada’s mother’s apartment, where Katrusya was staying, lights spontaneously went on and off in different rooms, doors opened and closed, and the girl cried out in her sleep, “Mama!”—apparently, Vlada was searching there too, searching for her bill of protection, but against what? And to be given to whom?

At the funeral, the teary womenfolk chatted themselves into the consensus that Vlada must’ve been looking for the lost paintings, the “many deaths” referring to her subject matter, and one gallery curator, turned irretrievably kooky on canonically dogmatic Orthodox grounds, blurted out what would feed the whispering, watery-eyed gluttons in certain circles for a long time hence: “You must not toy with a topic like that, you know?”—not without a dose of moral superiority, like someone officially tasked with watching over cosmic justice (Vlada couldn’t stand these born-again types
and called them “the church CheKa”). The men, who generally held more positivist views, found a different interpretation more appetizing right there at the wake, especially after they’d had a couple drinks and the quickest of the ladies joined in and went to work with their knives and forks. To them it was quite obvious that Vlada had been “marked,” and for quite a while, “’coz everyone knows you could hire a professional hit man for five hundred bucks on a slow day, and a single one of Vlada’s painting would fetch many times as much, enough to whack your own mama—Five hundred, ha!” “Didn’t you hear on TV the other day? Just outside Donets’k, someone dug up a grave the day after the funeral to pull ten hryvnas out of the dead man’s suit pocket that a neighbor saw the widow put there.” “No, that’s not what I’m talking about, stuff like that always happens, I mean professionals, for them to slip a car into a ditch, especially off a wet highway, is easier than falling off a log!”