The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (6 page)

this!!!
—a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase—turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul, and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed. His only place in any historical narrative was that of a nameless extra, a statistical value—one of the myriad, if they could ever be counted, whose names were not listed by Amnesty International, who had
not been arrested or sent to prisons, but who succumbed, slowly and quietly, in their own beds, to legitimate cardiac arrests and kidney failures, and other disorders, whose causes were clear only to their families if they had any. We could also add those who drank themselves to death and those who killed themselves—the only meaningful history we can craft for the future is the history of numbers, and the more zeros—the better. Six (Or more?) million dead Jews equal the Holocaust. Ten (Or fewer?) million dead Ukrainian peasants equal Holodomor. Three-hundred-million refugees equal the fifty-six local wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. History is written by accountants.

During the Khrushchev thaw, officials who issued belated death certificates to the families of those executed in the NKVD prisons came up with all kinds of diseases to fill in the “cause of death” field—thus erasing zeros from the number of executions. Another twenty years later their fictional cardiac arrests and kidney failures became real, as is commonly the case with useful inventions, and literally killed people whose fathers and grandfathers they could beset only on paper, post-factum. Another number was made unreal, and with it, an entire generation lost its common story, leaving its descendants no means of detecting a shared fate—from here, they all look discrete, just people who lived, died, things happened, you know...this one was a decent engineer and a talented lecturer who died from the side effect of a drug, having done his time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis—and that’s it, go ahead, tie those little strings into a dead knot. I needed the inadvertent insight to make the puzzle pieces fall into place—the triumphant snap of fingers, the blue bunny in a school sketchbook, the catchy, generous laugh, the charge of energy that filled the man—to see him from inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that drove him, had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black: his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul (and the soul has its
own physiology that does not always agree with that of the body) to reject this fear that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA. If you spend years carrying around something you cannot live with, it might just become easier to crash upon the water than to stop diving.

In the time I spent with the crumbly book, I experienced a rush of fierce, bone-piercing bliss, as if soaring on a glider: I could be proud of him. Not as my father—he had been gone too long for that—but as a person I could admire had I met him now. It seemed forever since I’d actually met anyone like that (Did they really all die out?), and the unfulfilled need to be around them—not even to be close; I’d be happy to admire my heroes quietly, from the crowd, if only there’d been someone to admire—pulled on my insides, like hunger, like vitamin deficiency or sexual dissatisfaction, and the discovery splashed my face like life-giving water: How could this be, I muttered half-consciously? How could this happen? I put down the book and stumbled around the room, blindly, as if feeling for something I had lost there, then fell back onto the chair and stared, just as blindly, at the same page, while my thoughts looped on themselves, tangled into knots, refusing to register the real shock: How could it be that I really know nothing about him? And won’t ever know—won’t ever find any other evidence of his life as he lived it? He didn’t write private letters, didn’t keep a journal, didn’t leave a single impression of his internal self in any material substance I could find, pick up, turn over—nothing, except a random remark in the margin of a random book.

this!!!

***

Since then I have more faith in misplaced trifles than in rehearsed stories, which always feel like something gutted, stuffed, and roasted before being served for me to gobble up. I believe in remembered mannerisms and scribbles in books, accidental scowls
caught by a friend’s camera, and strange tooth marks on cigarette holders. I am the detective Columbo of the new century—and please don’t laugh at me! I know that these excavated remains of vanished civilizations, the many, many civilizations that had once existed under people’s names, do not lie. If we have any hope of understanding anything about another’s life, this
this!!!
is it. We’ve heard all the other stories before, thank you very much, and we’re sick of them.

I can no more pass up these scattered shiny beads than a raccoon can ignore a broken mirror. And I mean literally: I pick them up and drag them to my lair. I have a whole collection of them already: my own disordered notes in various notebooks, on random scraps of paper, on festival booklets and concert programs, on the backs of press releases, on any other printed matter, and lengths of film from the cutting-room floor, twisted and kept, for reasons unknown, in an old computer box—all in utter disarray. Why, you could very well ask, am I holding on to this poorly scanned drawing by a little girl from Pripyat who died of leukemia and whose strangely unbrokenhearted parents were convinced she’d been destined to artistic fame? It’s hard to tell whether this really was the case: all children’s drawings are interesting, and, in this one, a brown hippo stands on the shore of a blue lake, rounded toward the horizon. The picture didn’t make it into the Chernobyl show (I remember I wanted to keep the program austere, somber, inexorable, no sentiments, no snivels), and the girl’s mother was upset with me: I had taken away her role of the tragically lost young genius’s parent, and what could I give her in return—a dead child? Still, even if there hadn’t been the upset mother and my guilt, I wouldn’t have it in me to kill the picture—so I’m keeping it, as if hoping to find, one day, the proper place for it.

Essentially, none of my shows ever grew out of the themes that I so thoughtfully pitched to my producers and colleagues. They were all conceived out of just such small details, some hook that caught my attention and teased with the promise of inaccessible secrets, like a distant glowing window seen at night from a passing
train: Who lives there? What are they doing? Why is the light on so late? As a rule, such things did not make the final cut, either remaining somewhere beyond the scope of the lens, or making a brief appearance in the background, so inconspicuous that I alone could find them, like a signature hidden in the corner of the picture. Or, to be completely honest, like a note acknowledging another defeat, equally private, because I hadn’t once been able to make something—something I felt it was possible to make if only one had the lost secret code—of my pile of beads and gravel, hadn’t managed to turn these pieces so that a single change of light could illuminate someone’s life completely, totally, all pieces in their places, hadn’t once created
this!!!
.

Which does not mean that one should stop trying.

I have no other method—if this even counts as one. I don’t believe in other methods—I think they all have been milked dry. And to do things any other way would simply be no fun.

I don’t know what drew me into the photograph where, among five Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers, second from the right, stood a young clear-eyed, bareheaded woman (“A unit,” Artem whispered, pushing the print across the desk toward me, careful to touch it very lightly with his fingertips as if the picture, if not handled with caution, could explode with a gunshot) with bangs curled into a Hollywood roll, as was the wartime fashion. She seemed to smile at me, this lady whose small waist was cinched so smartly, even whimsically, with the uniform canvas belt, and whose entire posture exuded a calm, self-possessed confidence—not of military discipline, but rather fox hunting on a family’s grand estate: here’s the young mistress waiting for her horse to be brought up, the pack of purebred hounds straining their leashes and whimpering excitedly just outside the frame. She would look perfectly complete with an English riding crop and a pair of white gloves, and yet her sophistication (so out of place in the middle of the woods) also had a wondrously feminine quality—consolingly cool, like a strong, kind hand against a hot forehead—that must have had a soothing effect on horses
and hounds, and young men with automatic weapons. She was the only one among them who smiled, her lips drawn in a barely discernible curve.

“What a beautiful woman,” I observed, for some reason in a whisper, although she was not so much beautiful, in the usual sense, as radiant: even in the faded picture, she was surrounded by a visible halo of light, like an Old Master painting of an angel sent to deliver the glorious word—“Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard.” Artem blinked sideways and grunted either in agreement or, conversely, was simply shocked by my silliness, as any historian would be after he’d just shared a prized archival document with a total philistine—all she can think of is pretty women!

Nevertheless he responded, with his thin, crooked grin that seemed to mock preemptively what he was about to say, somewhat lewdly, “So which one of the four do you figure she slept with?”

“This one,” I said, without hesitation, pointing to the guy on the far right, with wolfishly close-set eyes and a crooked nose, letting Artem’s transparent implication slip without acknowledgment. (By then he and I hadn’t had sex for at least three months; I saw no reason to galvanize our naturally ebbing liaison and found a new excuse every time we ran into each other so that he may well have begun to suspect that I suffered from a mysterious chronic illness, a constant menstruation or something.) The wolfish guy posed with one foot forward, as if on the move, hand securely clenched around the hand guard of his rifle, which he used to balance himself like a walking stick, and my certainty about him was all the more puzzling because had I been that woman, I would have chosen another—that one, standing most apart, the last on the left who looked to the side, as if the whole photographing business had nothing to do with him. Of all the men in the picture, with simple, peasant-looking faces, chiseled by many generations of hard physical work (And isn’t war, too, hard physical work?), he alone was truly handsome, a dashing brunet, a perfected and ennobled clean-shaved incarnation of Clark Gable with unaffected, long-buried sorrow congealed in the dark eyes.
Clark Gable couldn’t muster such sorrow for the most lavish fees; this was something cultivated for years, not gained in an instant. This was the sorrow that filled our folk songs, all, it seems, in minor key—marches, ballads, doesn’t matter, the words don’t matter because they can’t contain this sadness or explain its origin, only music can—and the brunet had
musical
eyes, eyes that
sang
.

Artem’s hand carefully, solicitously stroked my thigh through the slit of my skirt, climbing higher and higher above the knee, and I automatically thought, as I always did, about his wedding ring: I worried about it snagging my hose. I could have just moved away—after three months, that would’ve been enough—but I remained transfixed, bent over the table and riveted to the picture, where, I was now convinced, a silent secret drama played out between the woman and these two men. Artem breathed harder; his thumb found the crease between my legs and went to work on it through the hose and the panties. He was always a very diligent lover: a scholar and a bibliophile, he did everything as if armed with a solid list of reference materials, which sometimes made me feel like I was a rare artifact equipped with an invisible user’s manual, and other times like he was mortally afraid of me, and I’d rush to his rescue, ignoring the taste of long-refrigerated cheese that would linger in my mouth afterward—Artem’s beautiful penis, for some reason, was always cold, and so was his whole body.

But in that instant, eyes locked on the picture and nails cutting into the table, I suddenly felt a fierce arousal, much more intense than if I’d been watching porn—unfamiliarly menacing, desperate, and predatory, as if this were going to be my last time, as if a spotlight had found and blinded me, leaving nothing of me but a base, well-deep scream that did not sink, but instead rose, climbed as through a narrow shaft, pushing aside my aorta, breaking through my clenched teeth, and it didn’t matter anymore who—or what!—jerked up my skirt from behind, ripped down layers of fabric, faster, faster, I focused myself in the point where my salvation would come—and it came, instantly, like a summer storm—and someone’s paw closed over my mouth, and I
realized that the scream that thundered in my ears had come from my own throat. I shook my head, refusing the paw, and blinked slowly—murky yellow smears swam in front of my eyes, and the first thing I could see clearly when they began to dissolve was the photograph with the five figures in it: their silhouettes burned with sharp white light, as if on a negative. I had to blink again, and a few more times—until the photograph cooled to its normal condition—and then observed that it wasn’t the picture that was shaking but the table, for the important reason that I was folded onto it in a rather uncomfortable pose, with Artem studiously pounding me from behind, while also attempting to keep one hand over my mouth—this was all happening at his workplace, after all, in the library storage basement, and could have turned quite piquant if a coworker peeked through the door, except that he always locked it as soon as I arrived.

It occurred to me in that instant—an inanimate and vacant blob of cognition, not even a real thought—that this was the only thing that attracted me: the unheated basement with its linoleum floors, the soporific yeasty smell of rotting paper, and the conspiratorially locked shabby door lent our pitiful little fling the exciting air of delinquency, like when you’re students and fuck like rabbits in every suitable nook, and quite simply erased from my memory whatever attempts Artem may have made to transplant the action into a regular apartment, with a regular bed.