The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (81 page)

“Where did you say you saw the signature?” Aidy asks.

“Right here,” Daryna points. “She always signed this way—VlMatusevych, without a dot.”

“I see, yes...it’s cut off in the middle—you can see the ‘u’ but the ‘s’ is questionable...”

“This is hers beyond any doubt, even without the signature, Aidy. No need for an examination—this is one of the works that was flown in from Frankfurt. From the
Secrets
series. I saw them all, remember, at her workshop, before they went to Germany for the show. And there are slides; it can be identified.”

“Who has the slides? Vadym?”

“Nina Ustýmivna. She is the legal heir, until Katrusya comes of age.”

“Splendid.”

“I just can’t remember the title right now. It should have been on the other edge, there on the left, but that part has all been cut off...this used to be about this wide,” she spreads her arms like a fisherman showing off the size of his catch, “and it was taller too, I remember the composition well.”

“I cut it to size,” pipes up the wife.

Her appearance in the kitchen door has gone unnoticed, and at the sound of her voice all three turn and stare at her with various degrees of shock; before speaking, just in case, she’s crossed her arms defensively under her breasts, which are already spilling out from her overburdened bra; and her thusly proffered bust, taken together with her powerful neck and arms, looks magnificent in its way (rolls of fatty dough around the edges of her undergarment are thrown into high relief under her Lycra T-shirt). She puts this bust before her like a shield—evidently picking up on her husband’s alarm—and is rushing to his rescue before the old fool can screw everything up from here to Tuesday.

She’ll do the cutting alright, Adrian thinks, contemplating, not without interest, this menopausal socialist-realist milkmaid in front of him. She’ll cut all sort of things. He quickly exchanges glances with Daryna, and pulls out his business card.

“And you must be the lady of the house? Pleased to meet you.”

The shield is shattered—the wife takes the business card, but does not know what to do with it, and walks over to the shelf where her eyeglasses sit—to read it over. Daryna gets the chills—it’s the familiar shiver that runs through the body in the presence of death, like a short circuit—and she keeps silent, afraid that her voice will fail her.

“So where did you say you got this painting from?” Adrian casually inquires of the wife, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

“Found it
downa track
!” she cries out, almost pained that such a trifle could cause such a ruckus. “It just laid there in the mud, so we took it—why waste? And the spots that got mudded up—I cut those off. It just laid there downa track, ina rain. Been a while now, four years since—right, Vasya?”

“Could be more,” Vasya confirms with gravity, happy to have reinforcements. Might all blow over yet, and dey won’t ask too much questions.

Where?—Daryna starts to ask, but figures it out before she speaks: “Downa track” is down the road, meaning on the dirt road that runs from the main highway to the village.

“You mean, on the highway?” Adrian asks—he didn’t understand the woman either.

“Yeah...I mean, no,” the wife stumbles. “Ona turn,” she waves a mighty discus-thrower’s arm in the direction of the mirror-faced wardrobe, “dere, where you go from track to asphalt. I mean
the highway
,” she corrects herself quickly and solicitously, demonstrating the traditional strategy of Ukrainian rural politeness: adopting the language of one’s interlocutor. “Wherea tree-line ends, ona knoll, ona very turn...that’s where it all got skittered around.”

And as soon as the last words leave her mouth, she panics, and her honest blue eyes for an instant go all glassy, like a celluloid doll’s. But it’s too late: the word’s been spoken, and it can’t be put back.

“
All?
So what else was there?”

Now it’s the husband’s turn to rush to the rescue. “A bunch of stuff. A car must of crashed dere, looked like.” He does, just in case, hide his eyes.

“There’s accidents there alla time!” the wife picks up his line cheerfully. “Would you believe it, no more’n three months passes before someone gone crashed there again! And thank goodness when it’s not to death.” Judging by her intonation, she finds those accidents far less satisfying than the ones that actually are “to death.” “And this year, there’d beena crash already, not long since, a month, right, Vasya? Showed it in TV, you didn’t see it? A whole family slammed to death in a Honda, ana baby, too!” This sounds all-out triumphant, like Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
. “Ana woman, they say, she was ’specting, too, just think...coming from Pereyaslav—and hit a Mercedes...”

“Not a Mercedes,” her husband corrects her, “a Bee-Em-Doubya!”

“Same difference!” the wife laughs, flushing with excitement. No, sir, Adrian thinks, she’s not in menopause yet, she’s got all her
hormones alive and raging, just look at her go! “I don’t tell them apart, Mercedeses or Bee-Em-Doubyas, I just know was some big cheese driving!”

“Big cheese, phew!” the yokel snorts with scorn. “Sure...teenage punk more like it, one of dose that bought hisself a driver’s license but Daddy couldn’t pay for a brain to go with it. Dem, when dey drive, think dey god and king, and don’t need rules, ’coz all the right lawryers sittin’ in his pocket. Part, sea, let shit pass! He went to pass on the double and jumped into incoming traffic. Must of been in a great hurry—well, he ain’t hurrying now.”

He reports this without any glee, only with the legitimate satisfaction of a man who likes things to be fair. The woman, on the other hand, delights in the topic and can’t wait to savor more details of this reality show—it is, after all, much more interesting than any soap opera, and these visitors know nothing of it, “And two years since we had a real big crash, a whole rig flipped over! Five cars slammed to pieces, right, Vasya? Took them two days to wash alla blood off the asphalt.”

A ripple of cold shiver shoots through Daryna again. Blood, she didn’t think about blood. She didn’t go to the site of the accident, did not see Vlada’s blood....

“Dat’s a special spot over dere,” Vasya nods. “Chornovil died here at our corner, too.”

“Oh yeah,” the wife echoes, proud as if she’d personally contributed to the event. “Folks put wreaths round that cross over there, alla time—d’you see it? You came from Kyiv, didn’t you? That was a bit over that way, toward Kyiv, after a turnoff to the Kharkiv bypass.”

Time to put a memorial here, Daryna thinks. This place is like Checkpoint Charlie was in Berlin. Only this one’ll give you a real thrill—it’s still operating. And these two could be the tour guides as living eyewitnesses—they’d do a heck of a job. Again she sees, as if in rewind, the highway stretching away from her—only not the dry one she and Adrian drove earlier in the day, but the other, from four years ago, with the lonely Beetle
speeding along: the road is silky-black, flashing with the nebulae of puddles, the cloud of water kicked up by the car falls onto the windshield and the hood, streaks of rain meander down the glass. The road is empty, not a soul in sight, the signs float by—Pereyaslav-Khmel’nytsky 43, Zolotonosha 104, Dnipropetrovs’k 453, Thank you for keeping the shoulder clean—rain, rain, and tears streaming openly and freely, and the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, and back and forth again, like two scythes over a hayfield.

Adrian’s voice reaches her as though through water. “Couldn’t they put rails along that turn, at least, if that’s how things are?”

“It won’t help.” The yokel shakes his head.

“It would make it safer than it is now!”

“Won’t help,” the yokel repeats with unshakeable fatalism. “Dat’s a special spot.”

“What if you brought a priest out to consecrate it?”

“Dat’d be a whole lot of consecratin’ to do.”

There’s something about the way he says it that brings on an awkward pause, the way it happens when a conversation slams on the breaks at a crossroads trying to decide whether to go on or to make a U-turn and head back. The woman ventures, “There ona other sidea track, back ina starvation, they hada grave...drove bodies froma village there and buried em. We, when we were kids, useda run over there in spring—to look: where it’s shallow, the dirt settles and sometimes human bones come up...humongous grave, they say it was! It was later they rolla asphalt over it.”

“Over a cemetery?!”

“Dat’s no cemetery!” the man cuts in, almost as if he’s angry. “Who’d go ’bout settin’ up a cemetery back in da ’30s? Dey just piled dem all into a hole, covered it with dirt, and left no signs. Da old people, dey just remembered da place, da ones who’re still alive.”

“Yeah, the old Moklenchykh woman, who died last year, she useda go there every spring the week after Easter to light a
candle...she’d just put it down ina dirt, and it’d burn. Once it burned all day till night, remember, Vasya, we seen it alla way over here through our window.”

“You got no better business dan bringin’ dat up?”

But it’s too late to try to rein her in.

“And once, when we were kids, tha boys found a skull over there and kicked it around to play soccer...”

“Now you’re full of it!”

“Fulla what? What?” The wife pouts and again assumes her defensive position, arms under bust. “You count ’em: Lionka Mytryshyn—that’s one!”

“Lionka was drunk...”

“Were you dere drinking with him? And even if he was, then what?” she objects, not in the least concerned by the mild inconsistency of her dual objections. “Just think,” she turns back to her guests, “boy served in Afghanistan...the one who founda skull. Graduated military school, got the rank already, and no bullet could get him! And then came on leave to visit his parents—and bam! Drowned. Went to a pond for a swim...”

“He was drunk, I’m telling you—dat’s why he drowned,” her husband persists. “You people just live to wag you tongues...”

“Didn’t end with that, did it tho’? Allose boys who kicked the skull back then with him—all toa last one, none of em alive! Kol’ka Petrusenkiv smashed to death on his motorcycle; I was still in school then. Fedka got trampled over by horses one day when he was drunk—took him three days to die ina hospital, poor bastard, and Vit’ka Val’chyn—that’s way beyond even...”

“Dat’s a separate story altogether.”

“Just think—man dranka poison for Colorado beetles!”

“Drunk, wasn’t he?” Adrian inquires stupidly, having fallen, unwittingly, under the spell of this macabre graveyard litany.

“Nope, was not, dat’s another thing with him: got mighty insulted. Ninka, his neighbor, went missing a wallet, so she went after dis Vit’ka. Meaning, like he took it. And he got mighty insulted. Drank da poison at work, went home, and says to his
wife, Valya, I’ll be dying here. Folks rushed to call da ambulance, but ’twas too late, dey couldn’t flush him.”

“Ana wallet later turned up!” the wife triumphs. “Ina pasture. Ninka herself dropped it, the scatterbrain!”

Daryna feels an urgent need to sit down. Her legs have suddenly turned to straw; this has happened to her before. When? Yes, of course, that night in Vlada’s bathroom, when she was washing the warrior-maiden makeup off her face.

“So what’s dat soccer got to do with it? Like dat’s what killed dem! People talk nonsense—just to wag dem tongues!”

Somehow, the yokel finds his wife’s mystical interpretation of the story decidedly unnerving. That’s weird, Adrian thinks—he’s the one who first brought up “dat special spot.” Or, perhaps, the man himself kicked around human skulls when he was little—and, like most, remains receptive to the idea of a metaphysical payback only for as long as it is
someone else’s
—never his own car that crashes on a defiled grave? As long as it is strangers’ blood being washed off the asphalt—that’s a reality show, same as on TV. But when it’s folks from his own village who are found guilty on the same count, that means you yourself aren’t completely safe and secure either, and that is something you shall deny with vehemence, right, Vasya?

“Razing a church—dat’s another matter, I get dat,” Vasya proceeds to reason, businesslike. “Dat—yes, den—things happen. Dat’s better left alone, of course...Father said when dey had da church razed in dem village, all da ones who lent a hand dere—all were gone before da year was out! One fell to death right away—dropped off da belfry where he’d climbed to rip off da shingles. So da belfry just stood dere like dat—unstripped—no one would go up dere, until later, in da starvation already, dey trucked some soldiers in. But dat’s a church! I get dat, dat’s different. A skull—dat’s just a skull, of someone dead, and dat’s it!”

Daryna has sat down on the edge of the couch and is hugging herself to contain the trembling. “Too many deaths.” That’s what Vlada said to her in the dream, the one in which she was
looking for “a bill of ward” for those deaths. So that’s it! That’s how things are.

Another ripple of chilly shivers runs through her: the angel of death has gone by. The conversation she had with Vadym the night before, still undulled and uneroded, still living on in her memory, now stuns her with its macabre absurdity, like a madman’s grimacing or kids playing soccer with a skull: it’s cheekily caricaturish, grotesque incompatibility with everything that is now happening here in front of Vlada’s work. Daryna feels, all but physically, the dense heat the painting radiates—like a fragment of skin that’s just been ripped off a living being. Biker girl, life was her racetrack, and she was always the winner...to hell with all those victories, they’re not the point. How could all those bloodsuckers have missed the most important thing? You were a genius, baby. It came out of you with this uncontainable force; you burst with it. And how is it that no one had your back?

“Too many deaths.” You’re right, absolutely—there are too many. Perhaps, when there are so many deaths piled up in one place, and there is nothing to ward them (And what should be warding them, what kind of a bill?), their accumulated mass creates its own gravity—and draws in new ones, again and again? Like an avalanche? An avalanche—of course!—only this is from an earlier history, of the Kurenivka neighborhood in Kyiv: in the fifties, the city had Babi Yar paved over too—they built a dam and for ten years straight pumped loam pulp from a nearby brick factory into the biggest mass grave in the world, to leave no trace of it. They even built a stadium and an outdoor dance floor on top of it—and in 1961 the dam broke and a forty-five-foot wall of mud wiped out an entire neighborhood in thirty minutes, burying hundreds of people—no one had their backs, either. And the bodies that washed out of Babi Yar rushed down Kurenivka to Podil together with the living who were swept up in the flood.