The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (48 page)

Vadym wouldn’t have given me the meeting if he had known what I wanted to talk about. No doubt about it: he’d have hidden and wouldn’t have answered his phone. He’s been avoiding me lately anyway—did he possibly think that I hold him accountable for Vlada somehow? Right away, as if to justify himself, he rushed to tell me about Katrusya—that he’d seen her just the other day,
and had taken her to Switzerland for a skiing vacation; how nice of him. As if I didn’t know about this already, from Nina Ustýmivna. He just kept on talking, as if afraid I’d interrupt him. About what a big girl Katrusya is already, and how one German boy had a crush on her up there in the Alps. Only N.U. had told me other things, too: that, besides Katrusya, he’d also taken his masseuse, Svetochka, on the trip. Well, life goes on, you can’t mourn forever, can you? A man accustomed to a monogamous relationship would perish like a zoo animal set free in the wild—someone has to take care of the orphaned guy. Fine, let him have Svetochka. Although I don’t think she makes appropriate company for his stepdaughter. (I generally try to avoid thinking about what kind of creature Nina Ustýmivna will raise that child to be—I know all too well what it took Vlada to get out from under her mother’s influence back in the day. If she actually ever had—if it’s even possible.)

For God’s sake, what, what did this Vadym have that put such a spell on her?

Aidy, noticing that my glass is empty, wordlessly refills it from the bottle—Aidy knows what to do around the sick, a rare gift for a man. No, he just loves me, my sunshine, my bunny rabbit, and I’m an ungrateful beast. I’m so sorry that tears of contrition suddenly well in my throat, tickle inside my nose: Aidy, my love! What’s this threadbare old weasel still doing here? When’s he gonna go already? Shit, what am I—how’d I get drunk so fast? And the roof of my mouth is already numb, as if cowled with a metallic film; I need to get a bite, I do, a piece of bread with butter would be best—the fat neutralizes the alcohol, which I learned from Sergiy way back when. Or was it someone else?

The worst is that now I can’t get rid of this wretched, rotten thought—like when you snag your hose, and it runs and runs, and you can’t put it back together—what would Aidy be like if I died suddenly? Would he go feral, look for a replacement, too? Well, at least I don’t have a child, that’s a plus. And I wouldn’t leave paintings behind—it hasn’t occurred to anyone yet to do a televised retrospective, and thank God for that: a TV show dies
the second the credits end and the commercial rolls. It’s the same with a person: as soon as the grave is filled, commercials start rolling, the recently departed becomes an information product, and there’s no way to tell truth from lies anymore. And the more time passes, the less hope there is. Like finding those paintings of Vlada’s, from the Frankfurt flight, something for which Vadym, in his own words, “doesn’t have time right now.” Of course, the elections are around the corner, don’t I understand? No, I don’t. Kill me, I don’t; and I shall not: How could you have lived four years with Vladyslava Matusevych and not have the slightest idea who you’d lived with?

To be fair, Vadym did sponsor the posthumous show at the National Museum, hired a curator—the best one, he bragged (according to Vadym, he always gets the best of everything!), but, in this case, actually just the most famous. I tried (and failed) to convey to him that the two were not the same. It was at that show where I first caught the whiff, like stale breath from a painted mouth, of this vulgar, mercantile tang that had never clung to Vlada when she was alive: the thunderous rock band at the entrance was out of place, all those musicians in aviator helmets, who later cruised through the galleries with benevolently stoned grins; and so were the Gothic-looking damsels with baskets of roses, which they, for whatever reason, strew all over the floor (a creative touch of the fashionable curator who knew how to blow up a budget); and the video, sliced like salami from the footage of the various European museums where Vlada’s work had appeared, was also somehow distastefully pretentious, like a promo for a travel agency. And that’s exactly how it played: “Where is that? And that?” the ladies inquired of their companions, with lively interest—much livelier than for the canvases displayed on the walls—as they crowded before the screens, lined up as if for a glamorous photo shoot, some with feather boas draped across their shoulders to match their gowns. As is always the case at art shows, there were among them a few truly beautiful women, and everyone singled out a model with her linen-white hair in a pony-sized tail as a real,
honest-to-goodness prostitute from Crimea, from a Yalta hotel, or so they claimed.

The prostitute, or whoever she was, quickly got drunk on the free wine and danced a solo for the helmeted rockers—she was marvelously supple, as though performing a pantomime. I really liked her, actually, and I think Vlada would’ve liked her too: the prostitute was, in fact,
real
. Otherwise, it was a bizarre audience, like a mixed salad of diplomats, politicians, officials, bankers, artists, journalists, who filled the rooms and melded with the paintings on the walls in a colorful shimmer that seemed to produce a new chemical compound, an amalgam with the paintings, and in this way seemed surreptitiously to
displace
, to falsify, Vlada. Vlada who was no more, and about whom this audience, truth be told, couldn’t care less. I saw almost none of her friends there, none of the people who simply loved her—perhaps because they were not VIPs—but I did see a few of her artist colleagues who would’ve gladly drowned her in a puddle with their own hands while she was alive—and enjoyed every second of it—and who now were just as happy to be talking to the proffered dictaphones about their many-year friendship with Matusevych, cropping the edges of their verbal group shots to make themselves appear not only of the same stature as the deceased, but also just a little taller. And someone had already uttered—and kept repeating—the word “generation,” and a thing repeated enough, as everyone knows, ceases to be a lie.

Not to be found among the guests was the aging Rita Margo, “Saint Rita,” the universally known concierge at the studios on the Pechersk hills who was always ready to entertain little Katrusya while Vlada painted, or to run to the store for milk for Vlada herself—anyone who accomplishes anything in art has a guardian angel like this one. Mostly invisible to the public, they are unfailing, self-denying shadows, all those editors–makeup girls–gaffers who are rarely mentioned in brochures and catalogs except in tiny print somewhere in the back where no one would ever look, while in fact they are the ones holding it all together, the ones who glue
together, like swallows with their own spit, the whole edifice with the glorious name in foot-sized letters on its facade. Vlada always said that Rita Margo was the ideal “artist’s wife”—apparently comparing her to her own mother, who had spent her whole life in that role never having had any particular qualifications for it; while Rita Margo, with all her qualifications, did not have the fortune of an artist husband and was not, it seems, fortunate with men in general, except for her blind son who sewed or glued something in the invalids’ co-op.

At the show, N.U., although much withered after Vlada’s death, still looked presentable: a black dress, black lace shawl, the wife and mother of artists—alas, both dead. She, for one, liked everything; everything was exactly the way she’d wanted it: “Dara,” she exhaled at me in the bathroom with sincere elation. “Just think, we’ve got
six elected representatives here!
” I was just dabbing my makeup with a napkin in front of the mirror, and pitied her as much as one would have pitied Rita Margo’s blind son had he appeared suddenly among the guests, but at the thought that in these six damn elected representatives (Vadym’s legwork!), she saw the meaning and justification not only for her own life, but also for Vlada’s, I wanted to cry. Such a feeling of desolation swept over me; I wanted to cry, not to unload it, but to wash it all out, just as I wanted to cry now—without any hope of ever stopping, a quiet drip, like drizzle “Les saglots longs / des violons / de l’automne,” pardon the French, Nina Ustýmivna. Ever since I left Vadym’s office, I’ve wanted to cry exactly like that—like the long sobs of autumn violins—and that cannot be allowed under any circumstances. Better to drink.

Oops, looks like I just devoured the butter meant for the whole table—how rude of me!—the weaselly looking gentleman makes for the empty butter dish with his knife, and his shiny physiognomy, which could also stand to be dabbed (Why is he perspiring like that when there’s such a draft from the door, I shiver every time it opens?), spells blatant disappointment: something’s been snatched from right under his nose again, as has happened to him
throughout his life! Aha, so that’s where this mournful mouth of fortune’s redheaded stepchild comes from—been getting the short ends of sticks all his life. But why sweat like that, I wonder? His hands must be moist, too. Now I recall I didn’t shake hands with him when we were introduced; instinctively avoided him, only nodded. I see I get sort of mean when I’m drunk. This is new; I don’t remember being like this before, but something in me, I swear, has quit feeling sorry for everyone—my sorry-meter must be busted. Aidy waves at the waiter; Baldy sits back in his chair and laughs—a piddly, weaselly sound,
he-he-he
. As our cameraman Antosha used to say, run for your life ’coz you’re getting sober.

Back then, at the show, I couldn’t shake off the sense that Vadym actually couldn’t care less about all those paintings, since the woman who’d made them was no longer there. He needed Vlada alive and warm—and Vlada was gone, and the works that were left behind must have caused him pain just like her clothes in the closet. All those whimsically artistic dresses that she, when she’d had more time, made for herself, and the later ones, hand-picked from designer boutiques, a whole flock of chic outfits in diverse styles—traditional, sporty, avant-garde—but all belonging together by virtue of something elusively Vlada’s own, like exotic birds that alit in Vadym’s apartment on Tarasivska from places she went without him: the pale-pink Milano flamingo with large gold buttons; the blue-black Parisian blackbird of a short trench; the stern, closed-neck, cardinal-red Ralph Lauren dress from the other side of the ocean, bought when she had a show in Chicago; and something else unendurably, tenderly blue, tropically undulant that looks so great on a blonde and instantly fired off the flash of her hair in one’s memory. How could a heartbroken man ever live with that menagerie, which, as soon as one opened the closet door, screamed the absence of its owner at him?

This belonged to the Problems-That-Had-To-Be-Solved category, and Vadym solved it in one fell swoop—called a team from a thrift store and, in a matter of hours, they packed up
the whole flock in plastic bags, like a dismembered corpse, and hauled it all away to an undisclosed locale. “You must always give the deceased’s clothes to the poor,” Vadym declared didactically when I gasped at the news, “You...what...gave it all away?” “And you...what...wanted some of it for yourself?” he shot back with morose scorn—meaning, do I also count myself among the poor? (Vadym enjoys disarming his opponents by humiliating them—he is good at it.)

“There were dresses she designed in there, Vadym, that’s also her legacy; they could’ve been exhibited.” (I purposely deployed an argument that ought to have sounded convincing to him, used the language of tangible reality, a language I learned long before I met R. and could be quite fluent in if need be.) A show of her designs—why, what’s wrong with that?—and if I did secretly
want
not just “something” but her entire wardrobe to be kept intact, so what? What if I did want to put glass over it and bury it, dig a little hole in the ground just so I could know that the feathers she dropped do exist somewhere, are kept safe, and that one could come to that place, slide open the door to the ground, knock-knock—and the revealed secret would shimmer, its colors playing in your eyes, a living smattering of brilliant shards: here is Vlada like a bird in the red closed-neck dress, face half-turned; and here’s the lilac dress, and there was a little amethyst-studded hat to go with it; and that’s what she wore when I saw her for the first time (I remember I’d had time to think, who’s this Snow White? And in the next instant she was stepping in close to me, uncoiling from the bottom up with her head tossed back, like a cat about to leap into a tree, “Good evening. I am Vladyslava Matusevych.”); and here’s the chiffon scarf that flies off in a gust of wind, gets tangled in her hair (it’s August, the café in the Passage, and her pale face opens up in the piercing nakedness of a leafless tree, like that of a monastery novice about to take his vows)? Even if this was what I truly wanted, I was not about to advance such arguments to Vadym, and he didn’t know me well enough anyway to take them seriously: such arguments, pulled from the totality of our inner
lives, always sound unconvincing and pitiful; Aidy’s the only one to whom I could ever confide anything like this, with others it’s better to swim closer to shore. How far did Vadym swim out, one wonders?

“That’s not how you do a show,” was all he grumbled at me then; he was obviously not going to admit that there was anything offensive, as far as Vlada was concerned, about so categorically getting rid of her things (out of sight, out of mind!). He organized
his
show not long after—the way
he
saw fit. Much to Nina Ustýmivna’s delight. Maybe he should’ve married her instead of Vlada?

They do now make a kind of a family, with Vadym cast as Katrusya’s weekend dad. And Svetochka cast as his help. Katrusya does with Vadym exactly what she does with her labrador, Putty, named after the Russian president: makes a show of jerking his leash—his tie—in public so as to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that this massive and, as she sees it, all-powerful dude is hers alone; she calls him Vaddy the way her mom did and teaches him various useful tricks, such as toting around her skiing gear or anything else she wishes to have toted. Not bad for a teenager—one day, when she grows up, this damsel will avenge us all.