The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (47 page)

Lord! You see what a fuckup I am—I’ve nothing to show You in my defense. I did not spend sleepless nights thinking of how to make this world a better place—although the world would, probably, become a better place if solar power got even five percent of the time people spent on gas pipelines (like that gas will flow forever!—go to Dashava, look at what’s left when gas wells are sucked dry). But I’m not one of those who breaks through walls. And I didn’t do much laying of life for friends—once only knocked the teeth out of a rake. Our asshole union organizer went after the weakest guy in our group and worked him over on the kolkhoz trip so hard the guy had to be taken away in an ambulance. Turned out to be a diabetic, didn’t actually have to come with us, could’ve gotten excused without a fuss, but was ashamed before a girl he liked; after they’d taken him to the ICU, I went up and socked that capo right in the mug like every one of us wanted to do, because if no one did, we’d all have felt like accomplices later. Afterward, though, I often shook hands with other scoundrels knowing full well they were scoundrels, but their scoundrelism had nothing to do with me at the moment, and what could be worse than that?

Be hot or cold but not tepid—that’s what You said, Lord, and I’ve been tepid so many times in this life I can’t stand myself. Whatever gift I had, I flushed down the toilet, and I don’t know how to love my neighbor like I should because I know I haven’t given so many folks their due that I can’t even count them anymore. And I’m not even sure that I actually love people—not friends, or family, but people. I love objects; that’s true. I love things made
by human hands—that may be the only shred of physicist that survived in me.

When I unscrew the lid from an old watch and spread it on a velvet cloth, like Grandpa used to do, the miniscule nails, perfect, like living beings, the clever mechanism carefully tucked inside, as if in a small nest, it’s like a warm soft paw touches me from inside. These things are still alive; they breathe—unlike the ones sweeping us under their mass-manufactured avalanche today. And although I refuse to change the world myself, I still love this substance that somebody else’s hands had once tamed, in which one can still glimpse the folded trajectory of another’s thought like the light of a dead star. Gold sand, a sparkling trail. Sweat between shoulder blades during a break between classes.

Look—Grandpa showed me when I was little—a transparent-blue dragonfly, a reed, a sun-drenched splash—look how perfect the dragonfly’s fuselage is, you couldn’t dream of making a thing like that! Old things still have that same thrill that rang that day in Grandpa’s voice—a human’s joy at being in the presence of the perfection of living forms. The joy of overcoming chaos. When all these things die out, crumble, move from antique stores to pressurized museum chambers, this joy will vanish from our life together with them. Then we’ll be completely stuck in a sanitized, dead space filled with radically different things—ergonomic and anonymous, like disposable needles. And what’ll be left for us to do then but eat our own shit and scream that God is dead?

Lord! Yes, I’m a fuckup, and yes, of all You’ve given me, I only managed to keep a few mere crumbs from slipping between my fingers, but if there is any truth in my life, it’s in the fact that I
did not betray
them, not one from the army of those anonymous craftsmen who had the ant-like persistence to transform the world, bit by bit, passing it on to me the way it still was when I was a child. My store is just my way of trying to keep that world alive for just a little bit longer, against the avalanche. My way of being loyal—tepid maybe, fucked up, yes. But at least in this I am not lying.

And the woman I love—and I know you see I love her, Lord. I’ve never loved anyone in my life like I love her. I really could die for her if it came to that; she feels this in me, this ability of mine—to be loyal. Maybe that’s why she loves me, the fuckup.

Keep her, Lord—no matter what happens to me, if something really were to happen to me, and all these specters storming at me from their other worlds are for a reason. If they’ve set to shake my soul (“I love you hard and shake you harder,” Granny Lina used to say to me when I was little—or was it Mom who said it?) until that poor soul drops clear out of my body like the pit from a cherry—to heck with me, whatever, only I beg you Lord, keep this woman because I love her!

How strange, moisture between my fingers.... Could I be crying?

I raise my head. It’s gotten dark, and the sky above the city went out like the screen of a giant computer—only the artificial keyboard light remains, a neon-pale blaze above the roofs—the nocturnal aura of the metropolis. And—here you go!—right before my car, two elongated golden rectangles have fallen onto the snow, stretching across the entire well of the yard from a second-floor apartment window. Like God’s smile, I swear, like a sign of consent.... If an angel in white robes had alit right now onto the hood of my car and nodded soothingly, meaning, everything’s fine, dude, don’t sweat it—I doubt I’d be happier to see him.

For some reason I am always moved by the light falling from a window at night—like a promise of a sweet mystery. Or a vision from a forgotten dream. I’ve even come to love the yard of my Troieschyna apartment block ever since I saw that lacy light from the barred windows at night—and what, you would ask, is so special about that? But there it is, glowing-laughing, and I can’t take my eyes off it—thrown onto the snow, like a stained-glass window in church, the tall gold-haloed window. It has to be tall, like in church, and in old-Kyiv townhomes, and our Lviv ones also have windows like those—and it seems any moment now a woman’s shadow would appear there as though on a movie screen, retreat,
then surface again, hold still leaning against the frame, like she’s is waiting to spot someone invisible below. And as if a trail of someone’s footprints sits darker than the night on the white steps to the building’s door, and makes my heart squeeze with something never fulfilled and so dear—my beloved yard, the rejected Kyiv Secession of the cement-boom era—no, cities, like things, also have souls, and all the generations of barbarians, our own and the ones now invading, cannot shake it loose.

For a moment, everything grows still, inside and around me. As though everything were falling into its proper place, and I, too, were in my proper place. Here, behind this dark window, also barred, facing the yard, is my little alcove; here is my store, and I am an antiquarian. And I know already that I will remember this moment forever—stopped, torn out of the current, like a swollen drop suddenly filled with weight.

Forgive me, Adrian.

I’ve forgiven. I’ve forgiven everyone. I hold no grudge against anyone. Do you hear me, Mom?

The first chords of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” suddenly thunder gravely, from here, from inside the car, and they make me jump like a blast of the archangel’s trumpet. The next instant I realize the sound is coming from my cell, which has fallen out of my pocket and is lying on the floor—I reach for it, knocking my head against the wheel, absolutely certain that I am about to hear Mom’s voice. I’m certain I will know it at once, even though the only thing I can seem to recall is an age-distorted recording on the ancient Vesna recorder’s reel. (An amazingly low, rattling contralto recites Mavka’s final monologue from Lesia Ukrainka’s “Forest Song”—“Ah, for that body do not sigh”—and unless you knew that Mom had just over a year left, that strange voice would not evoke any special emotion.)

Okay, okay, God, where’s that button—“does anybody kno-o-ow what we are living for”—at last, a direct link, at last I’ll hear what they want from me and what I have to do—a direct link to my fate.

“Puss, where’d you go? I’ve called twice already,” says my fate in the dearest voice in the world that makes everything inside me come instantly back to life, makes blood run through my veins afresh, and I giggle, consoled, but, strangely, disappointed. What a log head, how could I’ve forgotten that this is Lolly’s new personal theme song? She’s got it on repeat all day long. Although if you ask me, you’d do better climbing gallows than going to any shows to that tune—but my funny girl put her foot down, and says I don’t understand.

“I’ll be home soon, Lolly. I’ve got one more meeting to sit through. Should I buy anything? We have bread?”

This is real happiness—when you can ask her these simple, everyday things, and drive home at night with a grocery bag in the back seat, and see, still from the car, the light in the fourth-floor window (a rectangle of light on the asphalt), behind which she’s rooting around your apartment, or sitting at the computer, or listening to Queen—and at any moment her shadow may appear on the curtain, as though on a movie screen, and hold still, leaning against the frame: Did someone just pull up below? It’s me, my love. I’m here, four flights leaping over every other step—and I’m with you.

“Actually, I’m still in town myself, Aidy, just got out.” Lolly speaks as if she were walking on an icy sidewalk, looking for the right place to plant her foot. “I had a meeting with Vadym.”

“And?” But I can guess from her voice already: bad news again.

“Not good, puss. Not good at all.”

She’d thought that with his help she could put a check on those fuckers planning to sell women through TV. Did she get nowhere with him? Or was it something worse?

“Dead end, wasn’t it?”

“Yep. Deep ass. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

“Now, that’s a wise decision! Let’s do that. I’m meeting my expert at half past five at The Cupid. Just go there!”

Damn that expert, and that bloodsucker client who can’t live without a Novakivsky on top of everything he’d already stolen, and
Yulichka with her freaking career—now, when I just need to hold my girl, hug her shoulders, because she’s about to cry.

“Won’t I be in the way?”

She’d never asked that before, she didn’t have this meek—heartbreaking—resignation to being shown the door if she were in the way—the Daryna Goshchynska people recognized in the street and asked for an autograph could only be in the way when
she
chose to; she had
the right
to be in the way.... Lolly, if only you knew how sorry I am—with a lump in my throat....

“You ask that again and I’ll beat you up!”

“With a fist?” She seems to warm up a bit, sensing a game.

“Why a fist—a boot.”

“Is that, like, not to leave any bruises?”

“Sure. How could one leave bruises on such a nice butt?”

“You friggin’ aesthete!” my sad girl finally chuckles. “Alright, I’ll pop into a hunting store on the way; take a look at those boots.”

“You can’t use those. You want the military ones, tarpaulin.”

“You perv. What are they, stronger?”

“Sure. Strength and beauty. Two in one.”

Another chuckle, then:

“Puss?”

“Hmm?”

“I love you.”

And that’s it, and I don’t need to know anything else. Such a bright, solid wave of warmth. I grin like an idiot to the golden rectangles on the snow, and the grandly overturned cubes of the trash bins deeper in the yard, like a stage set for a Greek drama. And look, Lolly—too bad you can’t see this!—look at the offended dignity of that humongous black cat crossing the yard toward the overturned stage set. Who could ever make such a perfect creature go out in the cold, his whole manner begs, as clearly as if the words were spelled out in the air above in a comic book bubble? I’m so full of feeling, I honk sending him dashing away, all that dignity instantly forgotten, like a small-time thief caught red-handed. It’s so funny; I can’t help laughing. Lord, how beautiful the world
still is, and how beautiful it is to be living in it. My dear girl, fear nothing, no one can do anything to us, just keep loving me, you hear? Just don’t leave me alone.

“Who’re you honking at there?”

“I’m saluting. In your honor. Now I’ll just go twist my Mykola Semenovych into a German knot, so he won’t be in our way, and place his mortal remains at your feet.”

“You seem to be getting pretty aggressive. Is that because night’s falling?”

“Lolly. You little wonder, my Lolly, I miss you already.”

“You’re the wonder. Alright, I’m going to The Cupid.”

“And I’m flying. On wings of love. Wheels up already.”

“Wheels? Is that what they now call it?”

“Fie, you shameless wench.”

“Be careful, the roads are slick.”

“I will, I promise. Mua.”

“Same to you.”

My fingers aren’t shaking anymore—turn the key and my trusty Golf tears off the spot with a happy squeal, as if it got bored waiting for me. At the street exit, under the arch, where I have to brake, the cat, flat to the ground, like a yogini, head pulled between his shoulders—didn’t get very far!—watches me with a mistrustful gaze much like Yulichka’s. Takes all I have not to wave at him through the window: So long, beastie!

From the Cycle
Secrets: I Killed Her

T
hey’re humming along, Aidy and this weaselly looking gentleman with a mournful mouth and thin colorless hair interspersed with bald patches (What’s his name? I forgot already.); Aidy pulls out a file folder, rustles papers, and the gentleman produces his glasses and perches them atop his nose—all this as if behind a glass wall. I can’t, I don’t have it in me to listen, to participate in the conversation. I just sit here guzzling my wine like water, and every so often, when the gentleman blinks at me uncertainly from under his glasses, I convey the peaceful nature of my presence with a wrung-out smile—the habit of controlling my face for the camera helps. I wish he’d go already. His shirt collar is soiled.

“Why aren’t you eating anything?” notices the solicitous Aidy.

Why? Because I feel sick to my stomach already, and without any food. It would be just physically difficult right now to swallow pieces of another creature’s roasted flesh. Bits of some innocent calf that went under the ax in the bloom of his youth. It’d be like dropping boulders down into my stomach where they’d remain lying, dead weight forever. I smile silently, this time apologetically, and reach for my wineglass again—like for the rail in a rocking subway car (this place is just as crowded and smells exactly the same, too—of wet clothing and cigarettes). This is how people drink themselves to death.