The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (71 page)

“Good Lord, why scorpion?”

“So the bugs won’t eat them. And they don’t. But we do, all of Polyssya has been planted over with those potatoes. Western importers are dumping all this shit on us with no restrictions or controls whatsoever; another generation—and we’ll have the same problems with obesity as Americans do today. And in a few more generations on such a diet we might very well start growing tails, or, say, hooves, no one can tell for sure which in advance.”

“Come on, that’s straight out of Hollywood!”

“Yes!” Vadym responds, inexplicably encouraged. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You were so full of fire and brimstone when you were talking about reality and how one doesn’t kid around with it, you almost had me. You’re good! You nailed it, as if from the screen. But what is it—this reality? To listen to you, it’s a...a...” he hesitates for an instant, uncertain outside his regular vocabulary, “a fetish. As if reality existed separately, all by itself.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

“For some village grandma—it may very well indeed. But you, of all people, ought to realize that reality is manufactured by people. And you can’t draw the boundary anymore between what you call reality and what’s been manufactured,” he slows down again, looking for words: he is not used to abstractions, “realities that have been manufactured by people.”

“Simulacra?”

Damn that silver tongue of mine! This is not a word Vadym knows—and for a few seconds he studies me with the unblinking antipathy of a redneck whose first instinct is to suspect treachery
every time he runs into something unknown. (This momentary clash—as if he and I had rammed into each other at full tilt—makes me instantly dizzy; the world, shaken, lurches into motion like sloshing water, and a queer sense of someone else’s invisible presence flickers by, a near presence, somewhere by my side, where I don’t dare turn my suddenly aching head.)

“It’s postmodern theory,” I hear my own voice say, also as if from somewhere beside me. “Media, advertising, the Internet—they are simulacra. Phantom phenomena that do not bear a direct relationship to reality, but together constitute a parallel reality, the so-called hyperreality. A famous theory—Baudrillard wrote about it. He was French.”

“See!” hearing that he, by himself, came to the same conclusions as a famous Frenchman, Vadym regains magnanimity. “That’s what I’m telling you. Just then, when you didn’t believe me, you said, Hollywood, and that’s perfectly normal, that’s a normal reaction. It’s harder now to believe the truth than something made up. Any truth is the result of so many complicated moves and connections, with so many of those moves hidden, that a regular guy could never dream of making any sense of it. And something made up, a fiction—that’s what they call a slam dunk, every time. And the more information there is out there, the more regular people will favor simple solutions.”

“Occam’s razor?”

“That’s it. Tell the public that Kuchma ordered a journalist killed because the man had criticized him—and everyone will believe it. Because that’s what dictatorship always looks like in movies. But if you tell them it was a special operation of several intelligence services, one whose geopolitical significance for the region could be compared to that of the Balkan war—and people’ll look at you like you’re nuts.”

“So was it really an intelligence operation?”

“Doesn’t matter!” Vadym cuts me off, lips holding back a smile that threatens to slither out like a worm, and that same sensation, of a rocked vestibular apparatus, undercuts me again: a splash,
a giant mudslide, the solid ground under my feet slipping apart like fissured ice.

He is bewitching me. He is bedeviling me, like a professional seducer, so that I won’t know what to believe—this must be how he gets all the women: by robbing them, step by step, of their footing, turning the ground beneath their feet into shifting gray sand like in that dream Vlada had, and once he has, all that’s left for his bewildered victim to do is to throw herself onto his broad chest: he is a wall of a man, the solitary rock among a fog of phantoms! A powerful erotic move, to be sure, but where, damn it, have I met a man exactly like this before (
not
R., R. was simpler)—with the same calmly assaulting manner of persuading and subjecting others, even with the same cunning glint of insanity in his eye? (A patient in a faded grayish gown whom I saw looking at me, a fifteen-year-old, in the yard of the Dnipropetrovsk loony bin, grinning as if he knew everything about me—all the worst, the stuff that would never in a million years even occur to Mom who went twaddling on about something pathetic; neither would it occur to her that a visit to my father could evoke in me any feelings different from her own, and that I, boiling with tears of rage, stood there thinking that my mother was a fool and my father had abandoned me, had betrayed me for the sake of his own, terrible grown-up business that was more important to him than I was, and had become this helpless desiccated old man with murky eyes. At that moment, I hated them both, with all the fervor of teenage resentment, and that’s when it hit me, head on, blinding me—the look of that other character who grinned as if
he had read my mind
, and I went cold—and only later saw what it was he held in his hand tucked under the loose hem of his robe.)

“Take another example,” Vadym pours out more of his sand. “The White House announced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and everyone believed it. And never mind that they still haven’t found those weapons—and, most likely, won’t. They’ll be morons, of course, if they don’t; if it were the Russians, they would’ve planted some right away, and then no one would ever dig up what actually happened. There you have your reality. And you
say—bad governors. No, my dear, the effectiveness of a government must be judged according to the tasks that the government sets for itself. The stuff that goes out to the public—that’s not an indicator, you can’t pay attention to that.”

He lied to her, I suddenly realize. He lied to Vlada. I don’t know how, I don’t know what about, but I know it as clearly as if the right switch finally flipped in my mind and the light came on: he lied. And was perfectly effective at it—Vlada lived with this simulacrum for three years and did not notice it. Only close to the end did she begin to suspect something—all her works from the last year of her life were full of a growing premonition of a catastrophe. Her best works, the ones that triggered such a fit of anger in Aidy’s art-worm (I still blush at the recollection of that ugly scene). And not in him alone—few in Ukraine appreciated Vlada’s
Secrets
, something about the series transgressed the boundaries of the acceptable.

An intimate knowledge of darkness—that’s what they contained. Her
Secrets
—of darkness made home, warmed by a feminine hand—adorned with flowers and decoupage, like a wolf’s lair hung about with elaborate patchwork quilts, her
own
darkness. Mixed media, the mysteriously shimmering collages by the girl who stood at the edge of the abyss and looked down with a child’s thrill—until she got dizzy. As I am getting right now.

He is shrouding me in his language, this Vadym—it’s like a cloud of marijuana smoke. I can’t contradict him: I do not, in fact, know anything, let alone have any of the intimate familiarity, about all that hidden machinery of big politics that he keeps hinting at—with passing, shifty references I can’t quite grip; I have no logical crutch I could lean on to help myself scatter this verbal fog—I am only sensing a fundamental
untruth
hidden in it, and this hypnotic cocoon in which he is ensnaring me is paralyzing my will, as though taking away my command of my own body. The bifurcation point, a phrase from Aidy’s vocabulary, shoots through my mind: this is the point at which women undress for Vadym. Or tell him to fuck off.

And, pretending that Aidy is watching me (and I am savoring, in advance, the story I’ll have to tell him when I get home), I
improvise a husky, deep chuckle—in the big, empty dining room, it sounds more defiant than conspiratorial—“Why are you telling me all this, Vadym?”

Oh, what a look he gives me! A man’s look, sizing me up, taking direct aim—a look that’ll make your knees buckle!

“Are you bored?” he changes tack abruptly.

“No, but it’s late already.”

Music begins to play, low. “Hotel California,” an instrumental version. Mashenka must’ve put it on. Must be the way they do things here: put on music for dessert. It triggers the necessary complex emotions in the current object of wooing. Like in one of Pavlov’s dogs.

“Have you got someplace to be?”

“Just tired you know.”

“You’ll sleep in tomorrow. You’re not getting up for work, are you?”

Such a lovely place, such a lovely place, such a lovely face
...

“Pardon?”

“Didn’t you resign? You don’t work in TV anymore. You don’t work anywhere, do you?”

God! It’s like my plane drops into an air pocket. Uncontrollably, my jaw drops: what a brilliant tactician he is! One could see what got Vlada, especially in contrast to Katrusya’s father, the newly minted Australian kangaroophile who’d spent the entire span of their marriage on a couch in front of the TV.

“You are well informed indeed. So you weren’t making your inquiries only about the beauty pageant?”

“Does it bother you?” he glows modestly: it’s always nice to knock your neighbor down a rung or two, lest she think too highly of herself.

“You could’ve just asked me—I’m not making a secret out of it. Or do you perhaps think that I could have gone on working there? In full knowledge of what they were doing?”

I hear how weak that sounds—like I’m making excuses. In this game, as in any kind of business, the what is not important, and
neither is the how—the important thing is who got there first. A lead automatically means a better position. Vadym got ahead of me when he found out about my resignation behind my back—and now I’m forced to justify myself, and my obsession with that despicable beauty pageant begins to look not entirely unimpeachable (Could it be retaliation by a disgruntled employee perhaps, instead of simple righteous indignation?)—and he is looking at me like that Dnipropetrovsk nut, as if he knows something about me that’s so dirty I’ll never be clean again. As they say in American movies, anything you say or do can and will be held against you.

From this moment on, Vadym owes me nothing; the moral advantage is on his side. And all I’m left to do is applaud his brilliantly calculated timing—and prepare to hear what else he’s got in store for me: this is no longer my interview, I’m not the one asking questions, our roles have reversed.

“What are you thinking of doing next? Have anything in mind yet?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

“You better start. The clock’s ticking. The reshuffling of the media market is in full swing, the cushiest gigs are up for grabs right now. Closer to the elections you’ll be looking at leftovers and rejects.”

“Somehow, I don’t feel compelled to get reshuffled to accommodate the elections.”

“What else do you want?” he asks, surprised. “An election cycle is an injection of money! Good money, Daryna. It’s like in the ocean where at different depths different currents begin to form, some stronger, some weaker. This is your chance to ride the one that’ll take you to the top. Later will be too late. And you, I’m sorry, won’t be getting any younger either.”

Knocking the last stool from under me. Bingo.

“So, do think about it. I, by the way, might be able to put someone with your experience to good use.”

So this is what we’ve taken our sweet time getting to. All this was mere exposition for the main plot, and the plot comes now—
plain as nails: I am being bought. I am unemployed: naked and available. On the block.

And for some reason, I’m terrified. Inside, a sickening chill blasts just below my breasts—as if
they
have come for me. (Who? The human figures with wolf heads I imagined were behind the door of my bedroom when I was little, Goya’s monsters, mad paramedics, machine-gunners with dogs?) As if all my fears that until this instant had been scattered across my life like shadows on a sunny day rose at once and stood to their full height, leaned all together against an invisible divider and flipped my life to the other side—and now it seems there has never been anything in it, except these fears, not a glimmer of sunshine. Catacombs, dungeons. An artificially lit cave. (Someone will throw the switch now—and it will turn dark, and I’ll never find my way out of this darkness; I will remain here forever, for Vadym to do with as he pleases.)

“I mean that show of yours, about unknown heroes,” he says suavely. “Diogenes’ something...”

“
Diogenes’ Lantern
.”

“Oh yes, lantern. Was he the guy who went around with a lantern looking for a man? Not bad, only you got too clever there; you gotta keep it simple for the common folks. But the way you created those heroes out of nothing—that was awesome! Super professional work.”

“Thank you. Only I wasn’t making anything out of nothing. They were all amazing people—every person I ever made a show about.”

“Whatever. You know how to package a person—how to turn some Joe Schmo into a cult figure. You’ve got, as they say, the sales pitch. I still remember your show about that priest who keeps an orphanage and how those retarded kids call him Daddy...”

“Not retarded. There was only one kid with Down syndrome.”

(The boy with Down syndrome was already a grown, stout, wide-shouldered youth with the cognitive development of a two-year-old—he laughed, pushed to grab on to the shiny eye of the camera, and hooted, again and again, the same line from a VV song, “Spring comes! Spring comes! Spring comes!”—and somehow was not in the least bit repulsive to look at, made so, perhaps, by the presence
of the priest who adored his charge with a real fatherly tenderness, as though he could see in him something invisible to the rest of us. “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord,” the priest said, and it came out sounding especially beautiful somehow, so that I, the sentimental cow that I am, got all teary-eyed: every creature born to this world has the right to live and be happy praising the Lord, and what ever made us think that some of us are better, and others are worse? And then I remember that Vadym has a son from his first marriage—from that woman who lost her mind, and he sent the boy to study in England: to an orphanage, one could say, only of a different kind, a five-star one. Whom does that boy call Daddy there?)