The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (96 page)

How many of them are out there, on the other side, disappearing into the darkness, no longer visible to her eyes? An army. An unseen, uncounted underground army, the most powerful in the world, one that pursues its war, silent and determined, over centuries and generations—and knows no defeat.

“Women won’t cease giving birth.” That’s what Adrian wrote down on the pack of cigarettes by the light of the lamp that night. Someone said this to him, in his dream. Someone told him to remember it. He wrote it down and wondered later what this might mean and why such an obvious truth should have appeared in such a near-death dream—a dream about war, to boot.

Here’s the answer. In her hand.

An army, yes. A second front. No, the
other
front—so much stronger than the first.

The two red (growing darker already) vertical lines on the test strip—this is her draft notice.

The only thing she can still do—the only thing still within her power and under her control—is to desert. This option is always available, with every draft. The black dot’s movement from the distant light at the end of the tunnel can be stopped; there is a way—she could blow up the tunnel.

Even a year ago that’s what she probably would have done, Daryna thinks, deeply moved, as if in response to events happening to someone else (“distanced” she involuntarily recalls hearing Adrian say, and this additional evidence of his presence inside her prompts another wave of warmth to fill her). Even six months ago, less than that—when was this?—yes, at Irka Mocherniuk’s birthday: the women sat in the kitchen, and Irka kept lighting up and then stubbing out her just-lit cigarette in alarm (“What am I thinking!”), smearing her mascara on her cheeks and telling them how she’s been trying to get pregnant with her new boyfriend, and how it’s not working,
and how she madly, desperately wants to have another child; Igorchyk is a big boy already, and she just can’t help it—she’s got this urge to squeeze and kiss every baby in a stroller she sees in the street—the same eternal female talk around a fire, where each one chimes in with her own “and that’s how it was for me” by means of counsel, and everyone wants to hear it, the principle that was borrowed and then appropriated, without acknowledgement or credit, by Alcoholics Anonymous. And all of a sudden, they all ganged up on Daryna, like a flock of hens, pecking at her from every side: What about you, Sis, what are thinking, you’re thirty-nine already, don’t you know they automatically put every baby born after thirty in the high-risk group; you don’t live in Sweden in case you haven’t noticed, so what’s the matter, what are you waiting for, what do you mean “I don’t want to,” what do you mean you’re afraid? Everyone’s afraid and everyone pushes them out, you’re just stupid!

And she, backed into a corner, answered honestly and, to her own surprise, as clearly as if she’d been reading prepared text for the sound mixer, that her own survival cost too much for her to dare take on the responsibility for someone else’s. She remembered these words because after she spoke them, for a moment, there was silence, the girls went quiet. Not because they granted her point, Daryna sensed, but because this was a line from a different script. From a different front—whose existence they, of course, acknowledged, and which they were perfectly willing to treat with due respect, but which really, secretly, somewhere in their very heart of hearts, they did not take seriously: they knew something more important.

Even a year ago—yes, quite possibly. She’d have tortured herself for a couple days, wavered, cried—and then she’d have gone to get an abortion. Although back then she had, among other things, a secure job with a full benefits package. Now she has to fend for herself. And without any especially exhilarating prospects, truth be told. She ought to be pulling her hair out: Of all things,
a baby’s not what I need right now! Forget me—hell knows what’s going to happen to this country in six months!

And yet, somehow, all this no longer seems important. Instead, it all feels exactly like lines from a different script.

This is important:
She doesn’t have it in her
to blow up the tunnel. This she knows for certain. The mere idea of it, detached and foreign, from a previous life, starts a drum beating under her skin and the wind howling in her ears, like bursts of machine-gun fire punctuated by explosions—Daryna shudders and looks at her arm: it’s covered in goose bumps. How strange that this is her arm. That these are her feet on the tile floor. That it is her thigh—so large—draped over by the shroud of her nightgown.

Her body, as her will, no longer belongs to her—it is
no longer her
. It ceased coinciding with her. It was meant for one more person, turns out, from the very beginning. A vessel. Ripened.

Because all this has already happened before—she has seen the tunnel explode. She saw it from inside, the way no ultrasound machine or any other contraption can show it. She and Adrian were shown this—no, only she was shown this that night, he did not see it—“The way you moaned...it scared me a little.”—“It really seemed a lot like dying.” No, even before that night, earlier, she was shown this right away, in the beginning, when she first glanced at the photograph in which a young woman in a rebel army uniform, squeezed between two men as between the millstones of fate she had chosen for herself, glowed at the camera with her otherworldly motherhood: a white flash like a thousand suns exploding at once or spotlights fired up in the dark of night—and the earth flies up in a towering black wave. And that’s it, the end. The tunnel is buried. No one will ever climb out.

Only the tapping from below—indistinct, uneven, going on for years, decades: someone wants to be heard, someone is not giving up, someone is calling to be let out...

I was wrong, Daryna thinks. All this time, the entire eighteen months (Is that how long it’s been already? That’s how long we’ve
been together?) I believed that Gela called me to
her
death. But she didn’t—it was the death of her child.

That’s what was tormenting her.

But eighteen, or even twelve months ago, the then Daryna Goshchynska—a well-known journalist, the host of
Diogenes’ Lantern
, a successful self-made woman who posed for covers of women’s magazines and represented a status trophy for men who are driven around in company-owned Lexuses—would not have understood something like this. She had to change first.

They, the dead, helped her.

Over on the other side of the field, where the fire burns, the darkness begins to lift slowly, and behind the backs of her three Parcae, Daryna sees Gela. She sees the women of Adrian’s line—the ones she knows only from his family photos: Mom Stefania (this is the first time Daryna addresses her that way, in her mind—up until now she was always Aidy’s mom) and Granny Lina and Great-Grandmother Volodymyra, Mrs. Dovgan, and some other ladies, from the ’30s, ’20s, teens, the beginning of the past century, with little cloche hats pulled down over their eyebrows, silk bands, tall laced boots—of course, they are all related to the one who is inside her, he or she is theirs, too, their blood; they have a claim—and they mix in with my Grandma Tetyana and Aunt Lyusya, as if for a wedding photo together.

How could it be, Daryna thinks with quiet astonishment (if it is possible to be astonished quietly—but she can; she is adapting to their ways, to the unclouded, all-understanding serenity of those dead victors who finally won their war)—how could it be? Why didn’t anyone ever tell her that it all began so long ago, long before she was born—that one famine year when Aunt Lyusya got from Great-Aunt Gela that sack of flour that kept Daryna’s mother alive, that that’s when they had met, these two women who have now become family, only Aunt Lyusya did not speak of this to anyone until she died, she had promised not to tell—and did not?

But how do I know this, where does this certainty come from, this sealed, spellbound knowledge—was this also in the dream
that
night? Gela did not choose me—Gela simply followed her flour to find me. She followed the tracks of the life she once saved—in exchange for the one that had been cut short inside her.

Well then, hello. Can you hear me? Do you have any idea in there, inside me, how many people had to work—and how hard!—to call you forth from the far end of that tunnel?

You know, I’ve seen you. That’s what I now think. I clearly remember
that
dream having a child in it—a little girl, maybe two, no more, with Gela’s golden braids. She was smiling, laughing at me, and I told Aidy who was also there to see her: I’ll have a girl.... Why did you laugh? Were you happy to see me? A blonde little girl—like the Dovgans, their blood. Aidy’s built more like the Dovgans than the Vatamanyuks, too, only he’s not blonde...
I had a dream
. Grandma Tetyana, how I wish you were still here—back then, thirty years ago, I was too young to go sit at the stove with the women, tossing logs into the fire—could Mom have remembered what dream it was you had before she was born, whether it was the same as mine? You had two little boys (“lads” you called them, Grandma Tetyana, country-style, no diminutives)—the three-year-old Fed’ko, a year younger than Aunt Lyusya, and the other son, who stayed only a few hours, not living long enough for a name—both were gone in ’33, my unrealized uncles, may they rest in peace. And girls (“gals” as you called them, Grandma Tetyana)—they’re tougher, hardier—“lustier” as you used to say, Grandma Tetyana, people don’t speak like that anymore....

Well then, hello.

Daryna puts the test aside (the lines have turned beet red, but are still there) and feels her legs: ice-cold. And she didn’t even notice when she got cold. A new, unfamiliar anxiety for her own body commands her—for this vessel’s fragility, whose full extent has been revealed to her it seems, only now, for how easy it is to harm—and she starts rubbing her stiff legs energetically:
Should she go put on a pair of warm socks, or would it better to just jump under a hot shower—and how hot, precisely, should it be? Lordy, myriad questions pop up from nowhere, stuff that’d never crossed her mind—it’s like landing in a foreign country where you don’t recognize anything except the McDonalds. She knows nothing, absolutely nothing; she needs to read up on this right away, at least look stuff up on the Internet before she goes to see a doctor, and by the way, where should she go? She doesn’t even know that—she’ll have to ask the girls.

***

The same day, around noon, while Daryna is still on the Internet (she’s had an idea for a new column in a women’s magazine—why the topic of pregnancy is so unpopular in our culture?), her cell phone rings.

“Hullo, honey.”

It’s Antosha, her former cameraman. A voice from her previous life, no longer a stab of pain but of quiet sadness that sooner or later smoothes over the anguish of any loss: that was a nice life she had....

“Hi, Antosha. Glad to hear from you.”

“You’re lyin’. What’s the joy hearin’ from an old knuckle-dragger like me? Yurko says he saw you the other day on Davydov Boulevard with some mensch—he still can’t get over it. Went off his feed.”

Kyiv—always a small town. On Davydov Boulevard—that must have been when they went to visit Ruslana, to see Vlada’s remaining paintings. Nina Ustýmivna’s lawyer came a bit later, so Yurko must have seen them when they were getting out of the car—why didn’t he call out to her? Still, it feels nice to hear Antosha’s words, nice to know she’s been seen with Aidy and the studio is now buzzing with gossip—she used to love that sophomorically careless, permanently simmering, as if on low heat, atmosphere of studio banter, jokes, flirting, “follies,” and parties people spent weeks
planning and then months remembering. Kids, she thinks. Grown, sometimes aging kids whose job is a serious game of virtual reality.

“Don’t be jealous, Antosha,” she says, surprising herself with the maternal notes in her voice. “I still love you.”

“Alright, let’s say I believe you. What are you up to these days?”

“Oh, you know...odds and ends. Whatever comes my way...”

“A decent living?”

“Still better than the nation’s average. What’s new on your end?”

“Good for you. Our chickens came home to roost. Whole flocks of them.”

“Must be a chore to clean up after them?”

“You’ve no idea, Sis. Knee-deep in guano doesn’t begin to describe it. Censorship’s worse than in the Soviet days. I’ve got the same ol’ feeling of eating shit again—got twenty years younger!”

“You’re not that old yet, Antosha,” she says, realizing that Antosha has called her to vent. “Don’t write yourself off before your time.” (I should really shut down the computer and focus on the conversation, she thinks, regretfully—but make sure to bookmark this site for future moms first.)

“Heck, I’m not the one doing it; I’ve got help. But I’m getting too old for brown-nosin’, Dara. You know what ol’ Lukash, may he rest in peace, used to say, the one who wanted to go to jail in Dziuba’s place, except Dziuba then confessed, and Lukash just got fired from everywhere...”

“Of course I know who Lukash was—what do you think I am, a total idiot?”

“Well, this was back when you were still walking under tables and I was already working, and I remember how every word he spoke became urban legend.... So when people asked him how things were going, he’d say, ‘I might be flat on the floor, but I’m not kissing any boots.’”

“Nice. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Yep. I’m feeling a little like that myself—not kissing any boots; I’m not a boy anymore to be getting bent over like that. Let their
new snot-crop do it, they’ve hired a bunch from the boonies—give them three hots and a cot and they’ll suck on anyone’s dick.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse than bad, I’m telling you. Total beck in ze Yu-Es-Es-Arr. For the news, we get instructions sent down every day: what to cover, and what words to use, and about what to pretend didn’t happen. If you’d just insert ‘our dear Comrade Brezhnev’ here and there, you could recycle your calendars.... In addition to yours, they shut down three more shows.”

He lists them and Daryna gasps—all were original programming, the kind that used to make their channel different from others, so what’s left? “Did they close Yurko’s show too?”