The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (46 page)

Has she lost it? She’s lost it, hasn’t she? What is this nonsense?

“Forgive me, Adrian,” Yulichka repeats, as if to an idiot. “And somethin about a chaild, laik she’s expectin a chaild, but I didn’t remembe, got scared, can’t ripeat exactli.... ”

“You’re sure you’re not imagining it?” I say automatically, because I know she’s not imagining it. And I can see she’s not pulling a prank on me—and I can tell she knows she’s got me, although she doesn’t know which part of what she said did it. Her eyes flash with triumphant vindictive satisfaction: this is her moment of power over me, only she doesn’t know how to take advantage of it, and how to make this moment last longer—women never know how to do that, the bed is the only form of power they know, and if a woman doesn’t turn you on, she’ll always be nowhere with all the other advantages she has over you because she won’t know how to use them—and thank God for that.

What if she’s shooting up in the bathroom on the sly? Or doing acid?—and then, as an ideal secretary, she hallucinates more or less professionally on the phone? Only why would her auditory hallucinations be in unison with my own thoughts—why would we be on the same brain wave, completely in sync, as if we were connected as closely as I’ve only let a single woman become
connected to me in my entire life? At first, the thought singed me, a blazing shot of horror through my brain, that it was Lolly asking my forgiveness, saying goodbye to me forever because she was expecting a child from another man (The one she’d flown to Holland with, to eat lobsters on the beach?)—a theory just insane enough to be instantly discarded. No, this was something else, something even crazier.

Yulichka broke into my thoughts as though she’d been summoned by them, as the universe’s direct response to the claims and complaints rumbling in my head like so much intestinal gas, and I believe that she really heard something and got scared because she did not know she was tuned into my brain waves, only I can’t make heads or tails of any of this either, and do not find this tuning in particularly enjoyable—the same as if Yulichka had penetrated my dreams: such things are only pleasant with someone close, and this Mariupol Amazon is no one to me, nothing, a secretary, no more. Well, that’s what you get with a perfect secretary, is the sarcastic retort that pops up in my mind: she can even take calls from the other world!

The other world? Why—the other world? Or is that Adrian who was being asked to forgive precisely the “chaild,” the one Granny Lina expected in exile? And it was Granny’s voice that materialized in Yulichka’s phone, summoned by my remembering? But how exactly could it materialize—and with dogs, machine guns, and explosions to boot? I’d forgotten my radio technology, crap. I’ll have to dig around in the literature. I wonder if sound can, say, in a highly resistant medium, get stuck in time? But, for how long—half a century? Total bull. Or maybe I’m one of those, what are they called, somnambulists, and Yulichka and I are under some kind of collective hypnosis? Like in those Moscow sessions that were all over the zombie-tube in the late eighties: stadiums full of people, a gorilla-like psychotherapist in the middle of the field, and a string of hypnotized folks before him, flailing their arms and shaking their heads like a team of demented soccer players—no wonder a country like that croaked soon after. Calm
down, Adrianambrozich, calm down now; don’t let yourself get rattled over nothing.

Easy to say, calm down: I feel like I’ve been caught in an invisible fishing net and it’s dragging me somewhere where my feet don’t reach bottom. In such cases, the only sensible way to proceed is to let go and quit jerking around, because aside from wasting your energy, the jerking does you no good. This presence in my life of some invisible outside force that keeps making itself known, like in
those dreams
, does not demand
understanding
; and that’s the thing Lolly cannot seem to recognize, my diligent toots, like a straight-A student who firmly believes that every problem has a solution and she just needs to find it. No, this force demands only
obedience
, and the best thing you can do, once something like this has claimed your life and is running some sort of a unipolar current through you in an unknown direction, is simply to submit to it and let it carry you like water, ride it like surf....

When Mom died I was too little to know anything about this, but I still remember, a whole year before her death, being gripped and torn, so I sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, by waves of suddenly surging dread that Mom would die. They say it often happens to teens, and there is nothing mystical about it—the usual prepubescent rollercoaster. But the sense, from back then, of doors opened onto the cosmic cold and the draft of a strange will blowing through them—a will stronger than anything I could have imagined then or could imagine now—I kept this feeling. I remembered it like a dog remembers a scent. And so when it comes again, when the doors creak open—I recognize it.

Only I don’t know how
to obey
.

(If back then, when I was twelve, I hadn’t let Mom go on that last trek to Goverla, if I’d latched on to her clothes and screamed, “Don’t go!”—would she be alive now? Although, on that actual day I didn’t have any sense of foreboding, no one did—not even Dad.)

I cannot let go because the fear for Lolly grips me. An irrational, instinctive fear—the dread that I won’t recognize the moment when I need to latch on to clothes—hers this time. The fear of
being under fire from all sides, like those wild pigs in the preserve: you don’t know where to aim when they come.

Or
who
is coming.

Still, what if the “chaild” is actually me? And it’s Mom who was asking for my forgiveness? (For what?) Lolly, Granny, Mom, Great-Aunt Gela—so many women already hold me in their net, ensnare me with their presence, and now Yulichka wants a piece of that action, too—like they’ve all conspired behind my back, sending each other their secret signals. Women, of course—they have to be more sensitive to any drafts stirred up in the universe; they, with their monthly bleedings, must be well familiar with this anonymous force that takes you over unilaterally leaving you to simply change your pads obediently. Women ought to be wise as snakes; they ought to be the ones showing us the right way to live, so why are they always so damn helpless?

Calm down, Adrian, keep it down man.

“Well, that’s quite a story.” I smile at Yulichka with Olympic composure. “I think I read this somewhere, or maybe it was a movie—this guy comes to a new town, checks into a hotel, and just like you, right then, overhears someone else’s conversation on the phone. And in the conversation they’re making plans to kill someone, so the guy then spends the rest of the movie trying to decide if he should go to the police—but he doesn’t know any names, or dates—so he’d just look like an idiot. Alright, sweetie, is that all? No one else called?”

Yulichka coolly flutters her heavily mascaraed lashes at me. I recognized this same tense mistrust from the guard at the Tax Inspection office the other day—a hick who’s convinced that the whole world is just waiting for a chance to rip him off—when I tried to tell him a joke. The poor sucker didn’t even smile. But the mention of her immediate professional duties produces its usual effect in Yulichka, like a “sic ’em” command to a police dog, and she sets obediently to reporting who else called while I, here in my little alcove that’s loftily referred to as the office, was indulging in my philosophical meditations instead of doing work. (Which
was, actually, the right idea: when reality starts to leak, there’s no better way to show it who’s boss than to plunge into the piddly, routine stuff, like organizing my acquisitions log—only it looks like our reality is leaking for real this time, despite my attempts to derail it.)

“End you hev a meetin et hav past faiv,” Yulichka reminds me for the umpteenth time.

I assure her, with somewhat exaggerated gratitude, that even Julius Caesar couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because while holding five things in your mind at once is pretty impressive for a man—we men are all single-taskers; we can only focus on one thing at a time, but fully and to the end (and if you couldn’t, and split, that’s your own problem)—no man, let him be ten times Julius Caesar, your namesake, by the way, could ever dream of keeping track of as many things at once as do you, my priceless, for which you earn my awe and respect!

Uf-f
—the emperor’s namesake, lips still pressed into a displeased crease, slips back out the door where the bell just happens to have announced someone’s arrival (probably just a stray window-shopper). Thank God. Now I can loosen my tie and gulp some water straight from the pitcher.... What I’d love to do now is my yoga routine, the best thing for restoring composure—just to drop into forward bend and hang there a good five minutes or so, like a shirt on a clothesline with arms hanging, so that blood comes back to my head and my mind becomes correspondingly clearer. Doesn’t look like I have time for the whole routine—how long do I have before the meeting with my so-called art consultant? (Another lummox who can’t focus on one thing, never mind he’d spent his whole life waiting for the chance to do just that. Dabbling in freethinking in other people’s kitchens, amassing in his mind a veritable archive of rare and arcane knowledge, and collecting in his tiny Khrushchev-era apartment the complete set of albums published by the “Art” press that’s not worth shit to anyone now. A guy who wanted to write, one day, once freedom rang, a fundamental work on the history of the Ukrainian underground,
and when said freedom finally did ring, boomed, in fact, louder than anyone had ever expected, the only thing he turned out fit for bragging was a treatise for students about his friendship with dead Grytsiuk and Tetyanych. And if small hustlers like yours truly weren’t tossing him bones every so often, he’d still be walking around with kefir in his net sack. All of them, those Soviet-bred “brilliant intellectuals,” turned limp and shapeless on the free range, like jellyfish taken out of the water. In bright daylight all their submarine gloss turned out to be a mere optical illusion, a side effect of the atmosphere of social paralysis so prevalent then, which was the only thing that made it possible to mistake impotence for a kind of spiritual aristocratism. So we’ll have our half past five today—a meeting of impotents from two generations.)

At our modest dinner, I will ask the professor to certify with his distinguished signature the authenticity of a pretty dubious Novakivsky. (I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the work is not by Novakivsky, but by one of his students. It will do just fine for the rake who’s got his eye on the piece—he’s already abused his privilege to move half the National Museum into his lair, enough’s enough!) And once the dear professor, after a bit of posturing, agrees (he’s never once refused), I’ll also ask him, for dessert so to speak, a little extra after the main business of the day, to find Yulichka a spot as a distance student in his art history BA program (which is why the poor thing’s been lunging at the end of her leash with diligence—reminded me five times about this meeting!).

This entire, well-rehearsed ritual of ours, in which he acts the impoverished aristocrat who’s bringing me, the obtuse nouveau riche, the light of science and knowledge, and I pretend to eat it all right up, is in about forty minutes. I’ve time to spare, only it’s already rush hour; the streets are jammed, Kyiv’s been choking like a deathbed asthmatic lately. The way you have to crawl through downtown now, you’d rather run cross-country in a gas mask; and what the fuck, I ask you, are we feeding a mayor for? A cell phone, obviously, is not something the professor would have, can’t warn him if you run into a jam, so it’s better not to be late
and not to make the old man nervous, the easier to work him at dinner. Alright, he-rre we go, back and up—temples tingle pleasantly as if filled with champagne, the dark wave falls noisily away, rings fade from before my eyes. Consider me fit to roll out in public—triumphantly, like a brand-new BMW from the garage.

See you later, Yulichka. (Yep, gawkers—a young couple, the miss in a muskrat fur coat, welded to the cabinet with the Soviet porcelain, and Yulichka, like a Cerberus-bitch, looming nearby, acting the guide but actually watching they don’t steal anything. I don’t need to stay; if they feel like buying a porcelain vixen or a young pioneer in shalwar, Yulichka’ll handle everything on her own; she’s a bright girl. She’ll be priceless once she actually learns a couple of things.) I embrace the whole group with one mighty smile as I walk by, and that’s how they remain imprinted on my retina, the trio, with three heads turned toward me, like a magnified copy of something manufactured by the Konakiv Porcelain Factory—see you later, goodbye, go to hell.

And only when I am in the car putting the key into the ignition do I see that my hands are still shaking.

“WHO ARE YOU?”

This comes out by itself, like a breath. How naïve—there are never answers to questions like these. I don’t even know if it’s a “who” or if there is more than one, maybe a whole platoon studying me through their crosshairs from the invisible afar. Before, there were only dreams. Now a phone call. That’s closer, warmer, as in the children’s game. They are coming closer, rapping on the window, breathing on the back of my head, into my face, with their dogs, their explosions, their bursts of machine-gun fire, forgive them, Adrian.
Brr.
No, warmer is clearly not the right word—the hell it’s warmer. It’s like snow poured down your spine.

Let me sit here just another minute, I ask “him”—“them,” head resting on my fists atop the steering wheel. It’s not like I’m afraid to be driving right now. I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to bore again, like a dull corkscrew, into the exhausted flesh of
this deranged, wildly sprouting city, into the falling dusk and the crawling current of hoarse cars, through the drifts of dirty snow piled by the curbs, cars sometimes buried inside them, and past the water-filled ruts splattered with flashes of reflected lights along the sidewalk, accompanied by the squealing of car horns where traffic begins to coagulate into clots, which make you squeal out loud. And all so that I can arrive on time to a place where I will lie and be lied to, so that I can later lie somewhere else and get some money for it—Lord, what a waste.