The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (37 page)

“Well, only a few finalists will appear on the show, you know,” he explained.

And where would the money come from?, she almost asked like the last idiot—and that’s when it finally dawned on her.

“Motherfucker,” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

She thought she was smiling as it sometimes happens to people in shock. Boss’s face hung still before her in close-up, as if someone had hit the pause button (he’d never heard her
utter such profanity; the words popped out by themselves, as if they were the last pieces needed to complete the puzzle). And under her gaze, this face, confirming her guess, was collapsing, slipping like a wall in earthquake coverage—from his eyes, where the inquiry (Is something wrong?) was replaced by the flash of realization (She won’t be his accomplice!) to the fright (What has he done?!), a moving shadow, to the deathly bleached wings of his nose, and then to the chin that somehow instantly lost shape and dropped like a clump of wet spackle. In the fraction of a second that she experienced as endlessly long minutes, this man seemed to have disintegrated right before her eyes, and she saw clearly what he would look like in his old age—if, of course, he lived that long. She could smell his fear as one smells the odor of a long-unwashed body. No, this is not a mistake, there’s been no mistake; she understood everything correctly—what kind of “a different agency” it was, and from where the profits were planned to come.

“So, we’re retraining into slave traders?”

“What are you talking about?” Eyes skittering, gathering his face back into a fist, “I haven’t told you anything.”

“And will you tell the girls? Will you tell them what kind of show they’re being invited to?”

“Oh please, give me a break,” he snarled, happy to find himself on solid ground again, on well-trodden territory. “What, you think those girls are all unspoiled goods? Half of them are turning the same tricks for free in their shithole towns and can only dream of being paid for it. They’re the ones signing up in droves in response to those ads for dancers in Europe. You think they don’t know what kind of dancing they’ll be doing? Those floozies’ll be thrilled to get out of their pig farms...”

She didn’t listen after that, something clicked in her ears like when the reel gets chewed up in a tape recorder. He sounded as if he’d memorized this text in advance and had only been waiting for a chance to unload it on someone—after all, one always needs
to justify one’s own actions, and blaming the victim is always the murderer’s simplest excuse.

Yurko once managed to interview a professional hit man; they ran the footage with the man’s face hidden, but the killer was unexpectedly articulate, and when Yurko asked what it was like to murder people—what it feels like in action—the man responded with the same memorized preparedness, took it straight out of the gate: “I am not a killer; I am a weapon; I am simply a gun in other people’s hands.” She was astonished, then, to learn that a killer, too, could have his own brand of morality. Did Yurko know what role he’d been assigned? Or, would he repeat, when he found out, his usual joke about “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four”?

They say this legendary Petrenko does, in fact, exist, and appears every so often, like a ghost, on the Boryspil highway where he actually introduces himself that way to the drivers he pulls over: “Sergeant Petrenko, father of four!” Looking on, expectantly, as his victim opens his wallet.

Yurko actually has four kids from three (Isn’t it?) previous marriages, and supports all of them as a decent man should—always looking for side gigs. So does she really have the right to pin him against the wall and force him to choose by revealing the origins of the windfall that’s about to drench him? She tried to remember how many of Yurko’s kids were girls—three, or all four—but for some reason could only recall one of them, the fifteen-year old Nadiyka, who once came to the studio—perfect age for the sex trade, and also with braids, a blonde little thing...a sweet child.

Easy for you to say, Daryna, Yurko might reply, and if he didn’t say it, he’d still think it: you’ve got nothing tying you down; you do with your life as you please; you can slam those doors behind you whenever and wherever you want—and he’d have a point, of course; they’re far from being in the same boat. Still, something has to be done—not police, perhaps, but she’s got to find some resources to publicize this information—to make sure that the fifteen-year-old twits who’ll rush in herds from Zhmerinka and
Konotop tomorrow to send their bikini shots into the contest on TV will know what kind of show, damn it, is planned for them!

The boss repeated again that their conversation had to stay inside the office. “And that is something I cannot promise you,” she said—still compelled by her team instinct, her atavistic reflexes, a recurrence of a partner’s duty: cards down, fair play.

“I would not advise you to make a fuss,” the boss answered, with unconcealed hostility. “I rather strongly would advise you not to. Trust me at my word.”

“Or else what?” she said cheerfully. (Looking him straight in the eye, straight in the eye just like dog trainers tell you not to do—as if for seventeen years she’d been spurred on by that captain’s elusive look, which hemmed her in, stitch by quick stitch, in another office, the look she never managed to crack, no matter how much she wanted to peek inside it, see, touch whatever it was that stirred in there, underneath.) “You’ll whack me, too?”

He recoiled as if she’d struck him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, flashed in her mind. She herself would not have been able to explain why she blurted it out—like a line from a long-accumulated case built for the prosecution. At that moment, she was not thinking at all—forgot all about—that old case in Chernivtsi that had launched the boss’s career, about the uninvestigated death of someone or another. She just flipped open, automatically, in response to his threat, her own hidden blade: pure bluff, improvisation in a fit of inspiration. Her advantage lay in the fact that during the entire conversation she’d felt surreally fearless—as if all this were happening to someone else, as if she’d landed inside a sci-fi movie, no, a Russian gangster miniseries, where she moved with dreamlike lightness.

And that’s when the boss began to scream, as is the custom of all weak and frightened people when they are defending themselves. In the first instant, she wondered if he, perchance, had lost his mind, raving that she ought to know better than to come here and lecture him all Mother Theresa–like...as if
they’re all in shit and she’s the only one white and pure, as if she doesn’t sell the goods just like everyone else...when all it took for her was to bang someone like R. and voila, she’d won the channel a lump-sum loan that went, to the last penny, to underwriting her show, so that she could fuck it all up and leave them to clean up the mess...
aha
, and don’t look at him like that, fucking princess, some star she is...the nation’s conscience, is it?...cunt...he’ll have her know he’s just as good a professional as she!

Have some water, she counseled through her teeth. The sight of a man’s hysteria prompted in her nothing but a cold repulsion, and the drivel he was sputtering at her appeared at that moment so outrageous that it didn’t affect her at all. She had long ago relegated her short, wild affair with R. (who at the time had a seat on their sponsoring bank’s board of directors) to the archives and wished to recall none of it—neither their heavy, dark lovemaking that filled her body with a dull and joyless, bovine satiety (like the feeling one got sometimes after anal sex, only with R. it was every time), nor its worst final chapter when she was doing everything in her power to get away from him, and it was proving to be not at all as easy as she’d thought.

As soon as R. caught a whiff of her intention to desert, he turned aggressive like a bulldog with a bone. Once, he caught her arm and, with a lupine grin, squeezed it hard with two fingers, leaving a bruise that she had to cover with a tennis sweatband for a week afterward.

He hunted her, caught up with her in the worst possible places, brandishing his owner’s right to her to everyone around (he knew this infuriated her the most and hit where she was most vulnerable), ambushed her after work, took her “home” from receptions, where he arrived with the resolute look of a husband who’d come to make a scene (and she tottered out after him, choking on her hatred, like an obedient heron in her high heels, to assault him in the car, later—with her fuming tirade, breathlessly gulping her cigarette, the classic domestic horror).

Weeks after, exhausted and edgy, she finally yelled at him, in a kind of a haze, right in the middle of the street, everything she thought about him and ran in tears into the subway (for some reason the subway seemed the safest place to her—it was impossible to picture R. there). For months she was afraid, when she came home at night that she’d see his Grand Cherokee with its headlights turned off, like a sleeping brontosaurus in the darkness, next to her apartment building’s door.

Her initial infatuation, short-lived and addling like a jinx, took root in her acute curiosity about a breed of men she’d never encountered before: the ones who turn over big money and for that reason radiate an unassailable certainty that they’re also the ones who make the world itself turn on its axis—men of Vadym’s type; she thought she’d finally understood Vlada then.

She probably wouldn’t have fallen for R. so hard if it weren’t for Vlada. As though by doing so, she was walking in her tracks, following her, posthumously. Vlada lay in the overcrowded Baikov Cemetery, where one had to squeeze between graves to get to her like on the subway at rush hour—and Daryna, heart pounding and no underwear in sight, sped in the studio car to the meeting at the bank (back then, the boss always took her to these meetings with him), took a seat next to R., found his hand under the table and pushed it discreetly under her skirt, and listened, giggles and arousal swelling inside her, to his breath change as he fought to control himself so that no one would notice. (Once, finding a moment, he ran after her, shoved her almost brutally into the bathroom, threw her, breasts down onto the sink, and, entering her from behind, roared out like a sea lion in heat, “What a bitch!”)

This game was much more addictive than anything at a casino (where R. had also taken her), and in the early days she was pretty strung out—high on the ease of the power she had over this man, at her bidding to run after her, nose to her crotch like a dog, mowing down, like roadside markers, all the rules that had taken him to the top, and she thought she’d discovered for herself the same feeling that must have attached Vlada to Vadym—the joy
of giving a man who used to think himself omnipotent a taste of freedom he had never known before. Only that was as far as any joy went for her with R.: she could never feel herself as just a woman, as one should in honest sex—just a woman, and just a man, the same thing for thousands of years, and new every time. R. never reached that level of freedom.

In a sense, he remained for her as he had begun: a specimen of a different species. At first, their feverish coupling—in his jeep, at his dacha, once even at his friend’s house, in a dark room lit only by the porn flickering on the TV screen—dazed her like a kind of a perversion, like sex with King Kong or Bigfoot, although there wasn’t really anything perverted about it, unless one counted his habit of photographing her in various intimate poses. (She asked then, half-kidding, whom he intended to blackmail with those pictures—because she didn’t give a damn. She was free to sleep with whomever she wanted and didn’t plan to run for Parliament; R. answered, unsmiling, don’t be so sure, leaving her with an uncertain suspicion that he was not, in fact, just shooting his own porn, but planned to keep a file on her just in case, to give him control over her, and in this there was also something acutely arousing, sinfully titillating.)

The turning point came in Holland, where she’d agreed to go with him on a two-week vacation and every morning, when she woke up next to him, felt like she was sticking her head into a bag—and neither the museums, nor the sea, nor the wonderful little seaside restaurant with lobsters, nor the low Rembrandtesque, phantasmagoric light of that country, reflected everywhere by water, could rescue her from that bag: R. loomed before it all—a heavy, dark mass without air holes.

One morning, having climbed out of bed before dawn and smoked a cigarette, on an empty stomach, by the window open to the gentle glimmer of the wet, scaly tiled roofs in the fog, she realized very clearly that she needed to excise this man from her life immediately—like a rotten tooth or a malignant tumor. R. was simply emotionally obtuse—packed hard inside, like dry ground.
You can’t tell such things by sight; they only really come to light in bed. This must be the fate of many of the nouveau riche, and generally anyone who spends too much time with the same kind of pressure applied on the same, very narrow range of emotions: it’s as if parts of their soul atrophy. Life had pressed R. into a total spiritual impermeability, a chronic constipation of sorts—and she, Daryna, was his laxative.

He needed her because he needed the aerating, the breaking and turning of his petrified soil, both in sex and in his everyday life: that’s what casinos were for and racing his car, cutting lanes on the Zhytomir highway, and saunas with masseuses and sex-tourism to Thailand and a whole repertoire of other aids, all at the client’s disposal, that could stimulate the emotional peristalsis—having acquired estates, people now spend them on anything that makes them feel alive. She was for R. just such an aid, and that’s what she felt herself to be, after all their mechanical orgasms, she felt it in her ass, like she’d been screwed there.

This was, give or take, what she yelled at him in the end in the middle of the street, seeing nothing around her, and she knew she hit the bull’s-eye, that he’d disappear after that, excise himself from her life like a cankered growth—men like him did not go back to the site of their defeat. The thing is, though, that they don’t ever forgive those who were there to witness it.

And this was the fact she had overlooked: R. wasn’t simply her past, wasn’t simply a lover she’d left—much more brutally than she would’ve preferred. (She couldn’t stand violent breakups with sordid scenes and did, in fact, nurse at the bottom of her heart that idiotic notion of all her men somehow constituting something like a single extended family—she was, for instance, frightfully pleased to introduce Aidy to Sergiy and watch them shake hands; she loved them both at that moment.) He wasn’t someone with whom you could part and not see again for years in a city of three million, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a banker, or a journalist, for that matter (and they didn’t, fortunately, all frequent the same watering holes); R. was her enemy.