The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (45 page)

The city they were building was later called a Komsomol project, like all Soviet cities built by prisoners, and it’s still burning up the sky somewhere in the middle of the Kazakh steppe with its forest of yellow smoke plumes—“foxtails.” Temirtau, the city of metallurgists, with the highest cancer mortality rate in the world. “Some get medals, some get proud, some get the city Temirtau,” Grandpa often repeated the local saying, and might as well been reading his obit, because thirty years later Temirtau cancer caught up with him, too—but at least in his own bed, and not in a ditch on a foreign steppe.

I don’t even know how Granny had come up with this name, Adrian. It wasn’t in the family—in the whole last century I don’t know anyone who was called that. Dad was named Ambroziy in honor of Grandfather Dovgan, Granny’s father and my great-grandfather, who in the Polish days was a rather famous doctor in Lviv—one of the few Ukrainian doctors whom the Poles, like the Russians, otherwise big fans of the “blending of the people,” never did kick out of the city and into some ethnically Polish lands—he must’ve really known his doctoring stuff, that gramps. Accordingly, the second son should have been named after the grandfather from the other side, Iosyp. Iosyp Vatamanyuk—sounds fine to me. Or, did Granny think that was too plain, too country? On the Vatamanyuk side, all men for generations have been Mykhailos,
and Grytskos, and Vasyls, like Grandfather’s younger brother, the one who perished in Kolyma.

Grandfather was the first in his family to go to Gymnasium; he passed his exit exams, the matura as it was called—“done turned a gentleman” by the standards of the day—ironically, the same year the Soviets came. He was a good student, but did not receive a distinction because of this one Polish professor, he said, who couldn’t stand the sight of Ukrainian students, and humiliated them every chance he got. And Grandpa, on top of that, once openly refused to sing, at some official occasion, the Polish military march from 1918—and at this point in the story he’d always whine, incredibly off-key, “We-e-e the first briga-a-de, ri-i-flemen campa-aign,” making the march sound like goats bleating to illustrate his point more convincingly.

Were I in that Pole’s shoes, I’d get mad, too, when I heard that. Although the thing that stunned me most when I was little was how one could just declare to the teacher, out loud, “I won’t sing the occupier’s songs!”—and only pay for it by losing a stupid A somewhere on your atestat. (In second or third grade, I spent some time seriously contemplating repeating this experiment on our choir teacher, who called us up one by one to squeal without accompaniment before the whole class, “Vast is my Native Land,” but I ultimately decided not to venture beyond shooting spitballs through tubes—really disemboweled ballpoint pens—during her lessons, all the rage at the time.) And when in ’39 the Soviets came, that very first autumn in Grandpa’s town they put to the wall everyone who graduated with distinction, line by line according to the Gymnasium’s rosters—Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, not sorting who was “genteel” and who was “peasant,” everyone whose atestats had that summa cum laude that Grandpa, thanks to his Ukrainophobe professor (I wonder if they shot him, too) never got.

As Granny Lina used to say, there’s no bad that doesn’t come to good. Had Gramps kept his peace and been a good boy, he, too, would have gotten a dose of lead from the Soviet government
for his distinction, just so he wouldn’t go around being smart. Go figure, then, how you’re supposed to live—singing like they tell you to, or, better, putting your foot down, saying, I won’t and you can all go to hell?

He and Granny met later, under the Germans, when Grandpa was already in the underground—but they were still kids, basically. Although, people back then seemed to mature sooner than we do now. Such a romantic story it was, like in a movie: Grandpa with a briefcase full of OUN leaflets got caught in a raid, and Granny Lina just happened to be there, in his way; he whispered, “Help me, miss!” and she got it, instantly, and threw herself into his arms, pretending to be his girlfriend, and, before the Germans got him, took his briefcase and got home without any trouble at all. Germans didn’t search girls, wasn’t their custom. Granny used to say she didn’t even remember what he looked like really—only that he was decent and had brown eyes, which turned out to be blue. How, one has to wonder, did a seventeen-year-old girl know how to act in that situation, who taught her? Gramps, never one to gawk, managed to ask for her name before they hauled him off, and found her after they let him out. By ’45, they already had little Ambroziy, my dad.

But still—why am I Adrian?

It’s sort of disturbing to think I will never find out. That I don’t have anyone left to ask. That there are things people didn’t tell you before they ran out of time—departed for destinations much more distant than Latin America, way beyond the coverage zone, and the church in its role of mobile service provider has long thrown in the towel: no hints, clues, or leads—you’re on your own. They abandoned you, the keepers of your secrets—naked, not a thread to cover yourself with, and you’re just doomed to spin in this world, your whole life like shit in an ice-hole, basically knowing and understanding nothing about yourself. They did deal you a few cards beside what’s written in your medical chart under Family History (cancer—well, at least it’s not schizophrenia), and you play life the best you can, but blindly because most of the cards
come face down, and you never know if the one you’re drawing next will be an ace or a single six. Come on, man, come on, you hear from all sides, knocking on doors, breaking through your windows, come on, no time to think.

“Adrianabrozich!”

The knocking—it’s Yulichka. Does a man here ever have a chance to focus and finish a decent thought? What’s that goose screaming about?

Yulichka stands at the door, holding on to the frame like she’s being pursued by gangsters in an action flick—spooked, her face drooping, and for that reason really resembling a goose.

“What happened?” I ask as sternly as I can manage. “What, are we being raided? By the Red partisans, perhaps?”

Yulichka stares at me with her yellow goose eyes: she’s lost. Of course, she never met Lyonchik Kolodub; she came later, when he was already gone. For an instant, I feel intensely sorry that no one remembers him anymore—the last romantic from the tribe of Komsomol rats, and I don’t even have anyone with whom I could share the insight that just now occurred to me: that Lyonchik must have run all the way to Latin America, not after cocoa-skinned mulatto girls, but after the shadow of his Gypsy grandfather, the unfortunate partisan chicken thief. To seek there, among the slackers just like him, blissed out on the world’s best pot, his lost ideal motherland: red-cockaded soldiers, Kalashnikovs over their shoulders, firewater at their belts, and Lenin so young and so fair. All good Komsomol men go to Latin America after they die. Shit, am I getting so old no one in my circle remembers the friends of my youth?

And only then do I grasp the fact that someone has really scared Yulichka, and I finally rise from behind my desk—crack the ceiling of my own thoughts with my head. (Mom once taught me that a man must always rise in the presence of a woman, but seven years in Ukrainian business relieved me of all the good manners imparted to me in childhood.)

“What’s going on?”

“Telefon!” Yulichka exhales noisily, and it scares her even more: the word drops too inappropriately for her stormy entrance, and I’ve already put her down on the appropriateness front today. “I don’t knou, Adrian Ambrozich...Veri strendzh kolls...”

“What do you mean, strendzh? Like threats?”

It appears I still have a pretty good grip on my voice (the slight hoarseness can be written off to my sleepiness)—enough not to betray a sickening shift in my stomach—with a chill filling the gap that’s opened up. That’s the last thing I need today. Could I really have crossed someone? Me, barely a stringer in the bush leagues? I’m just the dregs, a bottom-feeder not even worth the bother.... But how, what could they want?

“Yulichka.” I come around the desk, take her hands (icy cold, like a frozen chicken) into mine; I’m all shelter in the storm now, her good daddy. “You just calm down, okay? Everything will be fine,” I assure her, already with complete certainty, and believe it myself—as if I were casting, through some incomprehensible leap in space, my protective spell on Lolly, not on her. “Let’s take it slow: Who called, and what did they say?”

“I...I don’t knou.” Yulichka makes a visible effort to focus. “I don’t anderstend, it’s oll so strendzh.... Several taims in a rou—it ringz, and wen I pick ap—hissin, very laud, Adrian Ambrozich, I’ve never herd anysin laik zat! Crackle, haulin, laik wind in ze wires.... Clicks, and somesin laik,” she looks at me cautiously, “laik mashin gun shutin.... ”

“And do you know what mashin gun shutin actually sounds like?” I ask lightly, to calm her down, while my mind quickly cycles through the possibilities. Doesn’t sound like wiretapping—and who the hell would ever want to bug my phone, what am I, some political bigwig? Although I wouldn’t put it past those bastards, they’ve all gone insane with the elections now. They say every summer camp around Kyiv is packed with hired guns from Moscow that our mobsters have brought in to have them win the elections for them. So what if one of those “working groups” that sits up all night hatching increasingly outlandish scenarios suddenly got the
itch to tap, say, every tenth name on the voters’ list? Or maybe, hmm, what if it’s Yulichka’s nerves? That’s weird, I never noticed any trouble; she’s such a sensible miss, always has a plan for ten steps ahead, an ideal secretary really.

“Zose were gunshots, Adrian Ambrozich.” Yulichka pulls back her thawed little paws and fixes her skirt, apparently recalling the talking-to she got earlier today. “Don’t iven sink, I’m not gallucinatin. And I knou wot gunshots sound laik—mai first boifrend worked for Savlohov.”

Whoa now! Now it’s me who feels like a total moron: this fact of Yulichka’s biography is news to me. A gangster’s mistress, no shit. Surprise, surprise. How old was she then—seventeen?

“And where’s that boyfriend of yours now?” I ask, very nicely.

“At ze Woods Cemetery,” Yulichka answers politely, like at an interview.

Of course, where else? I’ll have to give her a raise—I’ll never find another secretary like this, that’s for sure. A floozy who, having come to Kyiv from Melitopol (or Mariupol—where
is
she from?—it’s all the same anyway), lands in a gangster’s bed—that’s nothing unusual, even, in a certain sense, quite natural; but that after all the shoot-outs back then, when, sometimes, you’d go to a store for a loaf of bread and it’d be full of cops and dudes in black face masks lying on the floor, and some of them ain’t moving, those were the days!—that she didn’t end up at “ze Woods Cemetery” or walking the streets herself—that takes some serious wits. And luck, too, and that’s not the least important thing in business, not least at all. So this means Yulichka, too, got lucky. Like me, like all of us. Except, of course, those who didn’t.

For the first time I notice that Yulichka, under her highlighted, porn-starlet bangs, fluffed like cream for cappuccino, has the face of a dramatic actress—someone for heroic roles, big-boned and willful, the Cherokee-cheekboned face of a mature woman. It’s as if she’s been out of focus for me before, and now everything’s come into place. She’s a trooper—one of those who’d chew through a steel wire, if need be.

“Okay, so what you are trying to tell me, my heroic Melitopol princess, is that someone was trying to get through to us while semiautomatic weapons were being fired off behind his back? A client calling straight from a hunt, perhaps, from a reserve or something?” They’ve carved up the whole country into those reserves already, the bitches—we almost drove into one with the guys once, just outside of Trahtemyrov, ten miles from Kaniv. Had a mind to check out this one bay on the Dnieper. Vovchyk raved the whole way about how he’d gone there back in the day for hippie camps, and how it’s beautiful, out of this world, and what insane energy it’s got—Hetmans’ old lands! What we found was a wire fence and turnpikes welded shut, and gorillas with AKs over their shoulders who sullenly grunted at us to “Keep drivin’!” Only in the next village, which looked like something from a nightmare—graveyard quiet, not a thing stirring—a permanently terrified woman whom we barely got to talk to us, finally whispered that it’s now a preserve where they breed wild pigs, and where “the bosses” come in black jeeps to hunt, and that those pigs dug up her whole vegetable garden, and we should go drive out of there as fast as we could “or they’ll kill you and no one will find you.” And now some assholes like that scared my Yulichka, too—“Must’ve called straight from the pigs’ den, no?”

“If it had bin laik zat, I wudn’t hev got scared.”

Yeah, that sounds about right. She doesn’t look like she would.

“Adrian Ambrozich, I anderstend you don’t beliv me.... Zis was somesin else.... Zere were voices too.”

“That must’ve been at the station. You just got connected into someone else’s call.”

“Like hell I did!” Yulichka explodes in the unmistakable tone of a truck-stop girl. She can’t help it; we all, in moments of emotional upheaval, revert to our native vernacular, and no secretary course can fix that. “Zat was no fuck—” she slams on the brakes at full tilt, correcting herself, “no conversashen et oll—voicez laik militari orders, dogs, a mashin gun burst, and in ze end a blast.... And it waz laik wind houlin ze hole taim, we never had such horribl connection, even wiz Avstralia wen, remember, zat avstralian
Ukrainian bot an aikon from us? It did zis three or for taims in a rou, I can’t even tell how much taim passd. And zen—zen a woman’s voice, right in ze reciver, straight into my ear, veri cloz.... Zat’s wen I got scared. In Ukrainian...”

I give a purposely loud whistle (don’t whistle indoors, Grandpa used to say, you’ll call up the Devil!). “Well if it were ‘in Ukrainian’ no wonder you got scared!”

“Adrianambrozich, you shudn’t laf from me.” Yulichka looks at me with unfriendly coolness, like at a sick man who might be contagious, and I decide not to make fun of her “from me.” “It’s non of mai biseness of course, and I don’t really anderstend wat I hev to do with zis at all.... I didn’t recognaiz ze voice, but it waz completely clear.” She belligerently thrusts her Cherokee chin at me. “Forgive me, Adrian.”