The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (31 page)

“Your friend...” (a blitz pause, a double take, a quick stab of eyes: How much of a “friend” is Aidy to me really?) “has my office number. Call anytime.”

I just didn’t know any better and like an idiot sent Aidy down the straight and narrow honest path, through the turnstiles and security checks up front—could’ve saved us all a world of trouble just by using my national name, and not for official business at all, imagine that! Who’d have thought that
Diogenes’ Lantern
would turn out to be Security Bureau employees’ favorite show? Or, rather, the favorite show of Veronika Boozerova (poor kid, she must’ve gone through hell in school with a name like that!)—a Conservatory student and a future musicologist. Wow. I gotta admit sometimes it is useful to work in television; it has its perks, not just irks.

Nonetheless, we shall do just fine without any handshaking (judging by his momentary hesitation, the idea did occur to Pavlo Ivanovych). His hands, surprisingly, are not plump and stubby-fingered, but quite cultured, intelligentsia hands, but still—they must sweat. And no matter how stiff and upright he stands, his body is plain unmanly—everything sort of slipping down into the hips, pear-like. Can’t find a suit coat that could hide his butt—it is too well padded, and sticks out. A woman’s butt. I must be having an expressive-butt day.

Finally, we’re alone. A few more steps toward the Golden Gates (without speaking, we both head for the café next to the fountain)—and Aidy hooks his arm around my neck and lets it ride there, heavy like a small hungry animal with a mind to dart, nip below, and just as instinctively, I hug his torso, fall into step with him, let my side gnaw into his, and feel his warmth: the law of communicating vessels, as he says. And if Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov is compelled by the incorrigible habits of his trade to watch us from around the corner (or whatever it was Shtirlitz always did), that’s his own problem. Let him go choke on his chops.

“He, when he saw you, couldn’t get his pants down fast enough!” Aidy laughs. “You should’ve heard him in his office, before he signed my request: Who are you, and where from, and what for, and who’s she to you, and where did you get this information—a proper interrogation. By the end of it I began to seem suspicious to myself...and then—what a change!”

“Behold the power of a father’s love.”

“And Lolly’s popularity, let’s not forget that!”

“Yeah, especially among the SB types. By the time I go on air, he’s out like a log, I promise you—I’ve no doubt he goes to bed right after the news. A fan—please!”

“All the same, Lolly...you’re a TV star, a celebrity, and that pulls some weight—you can’t deny it. He must’ve had to make up that whole send regards to Olga Fedorivna thing right on the fly, just to rub elbows with you.”

“You think?”

“Bet my life on it. Anything to show that he’s not some pencil pusher, a no-name mutt. You’ll see; call your mom—I bet Olga Fedorivna will be very surprised.”

“Boozerov—how would you like that for a last name?”

“I almost lost it when he introduced himself. Took all I had not to crack.”

“What’d he say back in the archive? Just stick to his Pavlo Ivanovych?”

“I’m telling you, he was too good to look at me back there. As friendly as a rhino in heat.”

“But at least he signed your inquiry, didn’t he?”

“He signed it alright, said they’ll look, but they give no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll find anything. There’s only hope for those who enter here...something like that. At least now he’ll get his ass out of his chair.”

“God, and Veronika Boozerova—who names their child like that! And what, I wonder, do they call her at home—Vera? Nika? Rona?”

“Nika probably. Rona—that’s too high culture.”

“Well, he’s not a cop, after all—he’s, like, intelligence service, no? Daughter a Conservatory student...and did you see, he’s got quite decent hands?”

“I’ve met cultured cops, too. Once...”

Aidy launches into a long and funny story—the story itself may not be all that funny, but the way he tells them, all his stories, is very funny, or, rather, he knows how to infect you with the sense of fun he has with whatever he’s talking about. He’s got the power of suggestion, the gift of puppies and small children, reserved only for the truly talented among the adults, people of beautiful and pure soul. And I am laughing my head off listening to how the charitable Aidy and his friends taught a cop to play bridge on a computer when said cop showed up in the middle of the night in response to a call from their highly obnoxious neighbor, while they were having a rocking good time, and what came of that. His stories are often raw, bratty, full of street-smart gallows humor
that’s irreverent, irresistible, and always draws you in, with its youthful excess of vitality but more with its organic innocence, its unfamiliarity with the darker sides of life, or maybe, the carefree disregard for them that borders on courage and most often turns out to be precisely that.

Somehow, incredibly, Aidy retains this purely boyish, friendly openness toward everyone he meets—as if the only things he ever expected from them were new and exciting adventures. People usually sense this, and the waitress who comes to our table to take the order, a blonde as pale as a flour weevil, also falls under his spell and begins to radiate friendliness, even throws in something in Ukrainian although the language doesn’t come smoothly from her lips. It’s always like that with Aidy, everywhere we go; I noticed this when things were just starting with the two of us, back when we were still on formal terms, and everywhere—in a line at the post office, in a taxi, at a video-rental kiosk—we goofed around and hollered and laughed out loud, and I saw the way everyone reacted, the loosened-up smiles that would spark around us, as if everyone remembered something nice, private, something long sunk in their memory; and that’s when I first realized that I wasn’t just imagining what was going on between us, that others could see it too.

The fountain splashes, drops of water fly out and land on us, the sun crawls out, adding color to the world, and the people around the other tables become somehow instantly more glamorous. Aidy finishes his story about the cultured cop, then reaches out and carefully extracts a miniscule shriveled leaf out of my hair. The weevil brings our beers, places the mugs on the dark-green rounds labeled Obolon, and timidly offers, “Nice and sunny, ain’t it?”

We unanimously decide to consider Adrian Vatamanyuk’s first raid on the SB archives a success and its unplanned finale especially remarkable. Spontaneity, Aidy declares with feeling, that’s what one needs to appreciate more in life—a deflection of an electron that determines the fate of a universe. The deflected
electron—is that supposed to be Pavlo Ivanovych? The comical Pavlo Ivanovych, the middle-aged squid drilled into military shape, with the eagle’s profile, eyes of a harem prima donna, and the name of a hereditary Ryazan boozer, a twelfth-generation wino.

“You know,” Aidy says, “I can’t shake off the feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before. Something about his face looks familiar...”

“With a face like that—you couldn’t forget the man if you wanted to!”

“It’s really something, isn’t it? Extraordinary. The eyes especially.”

“Do you think that’s why they stuck him in the archives? Couldn’t be an operative with a mug like that—they were all supposed to be plain nobodies...unrecognizable.”

May Pavlo Ivanovych hiccup gently over his lunch.

A pigeon lands, shakes himself, businesslike, and scampers between the tables looking for something to eat. Must be local, this is his spot. Them pigeons, they must have the place divvied up like the mob—who gets the park, the square, the café. You could make a separate map—the pigeon Kyiv—with flight trajectories, high points where a decent pigeon can take five, and, of course, the places where they can always find some grub. Plus the warning signs: cars, cats—you see so many dead pigeons in the streets, so lazy they can’t even bother to lift their butts from under the wheels.

“Still,” Aidy says, shaking his head stubbornly as if trying to chase off a fly that’s buzzing inside, “I’ve seen him somewhere before, I swear.”

“You’re just like Mykolaichuk’s Vasyl in
The Lost Letter
: ‘Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?’”

All of a sudden Aidy slaps himself on the forehead, and his eyes light up with mischievous little sparks.

“And what did we forget, huh?”

“What?”

“Des-sert!” He makes horrified eyes. “We forgot about dessert!” And, twisting, he waves at the waitress. “What’s on the tray today?”

***

The phone rings. (Not a bad opening for a script, Daryna thinks, half-asleep, anchorwoman at a still-independent TV channel—wait, nope, no longer independent, two days already not “in-”—and here a hot twist, a turn of the corkscrew in the pit of her stomach wakes her up completely. The previous day’s conversation with her boss rises in her mind. She didn’t dream it—but her train of thought keeps rolling, automatically, on its no-longer-necessary filmmaking track, not a bad opening for a script: it’s dark on screen, and in this darkness, the phone is ringing, an antique, prewar sound,
tiling-tiling-tiling
, like Alpine cowbells—you’re the cow, stupid, what antique sound? Those are the bells from the Milka commercial. Shit, brain’s stuffed so full of rubbish she can’t dig up what she’s really thinking from under all that. And why, in the name of grace, would anyone rouse a person at this ungodly hour—crap, it’s not early at all, ten o’clock already!)

The phone is ringing, and she slowly forces her foggy head to face it with a sense of deep hatred for the whole world—whatever that world may have contrived for her during the night, she does not expect it to be anything good: it hurts everywhere her thoughts turn. Like she’s been beaten. Well, isn’t that what they did? Stripped and pummeled her like a no-good, truck-stop whore and tossed the body under the trees in the windbreak. Only there isn’t a dog out there who’d call the police if he saw it.

The number comes up: it’s Mom. Oh no. Please, not this, not now. With Mom it’s even worse than with strangers: she has to parade in full splendor of your success the same as for everyone else, but somehow feel vulnerable as a cornered rabbit the whole time. And it doesn’t get more vulnerable than this, now.

Nonetheless, she picks up obediently and presses the answer button: filial duty, nothing to be done about it. Hasn’t called her mother for three days—pay up.

“Hi, Ma.” (God, just listen her voice—she sounds like a crow!) “How are you?”

This question always elicits the same response: her mother starts talking about her husband’s complaints—Uncle Volodya is slowing down, little by little. He’s got arthritis, can’t really bend his knee anymore; he’ll need surgery; his sugar is elevated, needs another round of IVs—aging has recently become an all-consuming topic for the elder Goshchynska, and the younger treats it with the sympathy of a devoted sports fan, albeit one currently following a different league. It is really not unlike a match—only drawn out in time, with its own rules, which no one explains ahead of time, and, unfortunately, with a predetermined outcome: you’re being shoved, at first with small, and then increasingly more debilitating blows, off the highway and into that same windbreak. Your withering body, as it prepares to become earth, rehearses its decomposition through a collection of infirmities, sore spots, and affected organs; breathing and moving become tasks that demand undivided attention; the morning evacuation is an event that sets the tone for the rest of the day; and all this makes the participants of the process members of a closed club, with its own champions and underdogs. And Uncle Volodya, by design, should’ve belonged among the former, should’ve proven a professional of aging—what else did he spend his life training for digging around in people’s innards, in the gaping flesh of rotten and damaged meaty fruits, where there should be no surprises left for him?

But it didn’t work out like that: Uncle Volodya whines like a child, resenting the slightest physical discomfort; the disloyalty of his own body, which is turning into an enemy minefield—one wrong step and you’re in the ditch—is experienced by him as a personal affront, an injustice that he, of all people, most certainly does not deserve, and in which his wife appears to be somehow complicit. He hasn’t given up enough to trust that she is on his side; he still believes he can go it alone; he is still kicking, creaking along, the old stump.

What Daryna fears and expects, with subconscious dread, to hear every time her mother calls is the news that Uncle Volodya
hustled up an affair with some young nurse or assistant, his last mad love—with the packing of suitcases and, God forbid, division of property, and her mother’s tumble into the prospect of lonely old age. These things happen more often than you think; every fading man’s battle with his own body unfolds according to the same unchanging plan, and the appearance of a woman thirty or forty years his junior in it is as inevitable as menopause is for women. And when this stage of events is late in coming, you begin to worry, against your better nature—come on, already, you bastard, go ahead and do it, and get it over with! But the bastard seems to be taking his sweet time, and for today, it appears, red alert shall also be postponed. At least that’s one piece of good news in the last twenty-four hours (if one considers no news to be good news).

Mom is babbling cheerfully as usual, rattling off drugs she’s planning to buy, and also, it seems, something’s grieving their cat (a varmit that entertains himself by leaping onto guests from the top of a wardrobe or lurching from under a couch and sinking his teeth into your leg, but Mom and Uncle Volodya fawn over him like proud parents over their firstborn). “Go have him fixed already,” Daryna drones flatly as if uttering someone else’s lines, as she always does—a certain set of phrases is repeated in every conversation with her mother as if on a recording. (Or does this also belong to the rules of aging—same words, same things, same scratchy records: avoid all changes in the environment because the ones going on inside your body are enough to drive you nuts alone?) “Cut ’im and live in peace.” Who does she have in mind when she says that: the cat, or Uncle Volodya? Or, perchance, R. and their sordid story, as a delayed reaction to what she’d heard from her boss yesterday?