The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (42 page)

Build Me a House of Straw but One I Can Call My Own.
That was the title of this really nice piece I found last summer, a wonderful folk-art painting—from the Cherkassy region, the traditional “a kozak and a girl near a well” subject, circa 1950. Could’ve been late forties even. I did fine with it, primitive art is in vogue these days. And the piece was a real classic, fit for a catalog: the kozak in a long red zupan, the girl wearing a wreath with ribbons, the well with a sweep, the white dappled horse, white house on a green field, and below, yellow on green, in naïve unpracticed lettering—that title. Blows your mind when you think about how people lived back then: kolkhozes, slavery, stone age; wore trousers made from tent-capes; ground a handful of pilfered grain on a hand mill to keep from starving—and when they had a free moment, they still ground alizarin crimson and ocher into thinned poppy-seed oil and painted the world that no longer existed. A world they’d had taken away from them, left only in a line of a song. The abandoned voice, the cry in the wilderness, like the fife in the subway at night. Build a house of straw. There’s some silent tenacity in that, like there is in those tightly squeezed fists: as if to say if there isn’t a way to build even with straw, I’ll at least paint that house of mine—paint it and put it up in my room. The last territory to call one’s own: 30 by 20 centimeters, in a homemade frame, from here to here—this is mine.

I know—you’re of the same ilk as those nameless village painters. You’re one of those who wish to change the world—not adapt to it.

And I, it would appear, am a conformist.

And that’s the way the toad farts.

Shit, the fuck I want those fucking coins!

Adrian Ambrozich, as my Yulichka says (She still wears a miniskirt over her G-strings. Is she still nurturing the hope that one day I will lose it and lunge at her with a hungry growl, or does she consider this to be appropriate dress for a secretary at a successful firm?), Adrian Ambrozievich, you’re an asshole. Yes, my dear, and man enough to admit it. And don’t you go consoling yourself with the fact that everyone else is just the same, or even worse. If they’re not assholes, they’re goons. Either one or the other, and sometimes both. Take your pick, as they say. And tick your ballot accordingly, damn it.

Because really, what’s this house I call my own? When the Soviet military-industrial complex went down the drain, taking all our science with it, all I managed to catch was a different train. That’s if I tell it like it is, as at confession, instead of strutting my feathers the way I keep doing for Lolly—keep fanning my tail, not too much, but who wouldn’t want the woman he loves to think him just a bit better than he really is? Praise me, Lolly, let me know you’re proud of me—such a cool cat I am, got everything running just so.

The truth is that back then, in the nineties, I simply got lucky—took me years to appreciate how lucky I got. I was lucky to have contacts among the people who later learned to call themselves art dealers, was lucky that I’d grown up knowing my way around the junk they were picking up for a song every Sunday at the Sinny Market—you wouldn’t believe what turned up, what wonders could be had for a few pennies. Back in his National Bank days Yushchenko went there every weekend, like he was on the clock, and now he’s got one of the country’s best collections of folk antiques and is running for president (and God help him because those bitches got us by the balls already!—every day a
new rule from tax inspection, they’ll squash us, small businesses, like bugs for these elections!).

And my guys dragged stuff from that weekly dump without looking, like raccoons, often not even knowing from which side to open a snuff box, or that a Secession writing table, albeit crippled into a legless bench (which was what they thought they were buying), could have a secret drawer (like the one where we found a sheaf of yellowed old letters, which I guessed in a flash to be love notes—the letters were from before WWI, written in Polish, and that’s how we stumbled into a whole other Kyiv, one the Bolsheviks thought they erased without a trace: the one of Polish nobility that had lived there since the fifteenth century and thought the city their own, and for whom, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Vladislav Gorodetsky set out to build on Vasylkivska Street a new cathedral with the fashionable concrete puffery, only they never got any use out of it. I could not really read those letters, but I had this strange feeling they’d been written to me, personally—back then I was dating Tatyana and kept getting ready to say to her what she kept waiting for me to say—that I loved her; I’d even convinced myself that I did, in fact, love her, but left her apartment every time still not having said it, and when I found the letters something inside me cracked—I got this hunch, that ran wider and wider like a fissure, that the true love of my life was still ahead, and not that far, actually: the letters promised Lolly to me).

For me, it is the world of objects I grew up with—I recognize their musty smells, the traces of tallow drips on their surfaces, the black dots on ineptly polished silver like dirt under the nails—as if I’m back in my grandpa and granny’s apartment, crowded with cracked ancient chests of drawers, and for that reason always sort of shadowy. When they returned to Lviv in 1955, they couldn’t live in the family’s townhouse on Krupyarska because it’d been taken over by a KGB mayor and his brood, but our family still managed to preserve some of its furnishings and wares—and in that, too, I was lucky.

When the university sent me, with a kick in the ass, into the big world, after the instruments at the research lab where I worked got cut off for unpaid electricity bills, never mind paying anyone’s salaries, and I didn’t even have enough for cigarettes, and one day caught myself watching for butts as I walked, it was then I got scared, scared to a cold sweat: I had no idea a person could be debased so easily and that this person could be me! The entire social matrix in which I’d grown up burst like a soap bubble, and the only solid thing I could latch on to, to keep from going down with it, was that world of old things that my ancestors had preserved—my family legacy, why not? There it is, finally, the right word: I began to live on my legacy; I am, basically, just another rat-ass rentier—not a self-made man. I was simply lucky enough to discover I had a legacy—that the knowledge and skills that had quietly imprinted themselves on me when I was little suddenly acquired real value, measured in hard currency.

Cigarette cases, candle tongs, pocket watches, lidded inkwells, and carved umbrella handles (ivory, be so kind as to observe!—I would say to customers in my grandpa’s voice)—I knew it all by touch. I could even sew on a Singer foot-pedal machine because I’d fixed one of them for Granny Lina when I was a teen; and before the market sorted itself out, in the boggy chaos of the time, I somehow came to command the reputation of a freaking guru, and once acquired, a reputation’s as hard to shed as it is to get. By the time the bog solidified and set like concrete, I was already on the inside and had my own two feet to stand on. Had I started a few years later, I wouldn’t have gotten as much as a sniff at the business without some venture capital, so yet again—I got lucky.

And I got unbelievably, fantastically lucky with one of my first partners, our department’s ex-Komsomol organizer, Lyonchik Kolodub, who out of the goodness of his big heart gave us his philandering digs, a one-room efficiency on the ground floor of an old-Kyiv townhouse. He’d bragged he bought it back in 1991 for two grand, exactly one-hundredth of what it’s worth today, but
back in 1991 two grand for a regular person was as mythical a sum as a million bucks is today; it was never clear whence it could have come to a man like Lyonchik Kolodub—rat, boozer, womanizer (or, as he would tell you—a hero of the sexual battle front), and an absolute zero as a physicist who, ever since his freshman year, had aimed at a Komsomol career for the single reason of being utterly unfit for anything else.

The puzzle solved itself when one day Lyonchik vanished in an unknown direction, taking, rumor had it, the former district committee’s till along for the ride—people said he eloped all the way to Latin America, and I’m inclined to believe it: for all his faults, Lyonchik did have a romantic strain; he had vision and a love of adventure, which, after all, were the things that made him fun. (Once, when drunk, he confided to us that his grandpa was a Gypsy who the Germans hung for a stolen chicken—at the university it was believed that Lyonchik’s ancestor was a partisan almost as legendary as Kovpak and died a hero fighting the Nazis. Lyonchik played this spiel like a saxophone for the whole five years of Komsomol meetings at the university.)

Who knows. At the bottom of his rat’s soul he may have been dreaming of a Gypsy baron’s grandeur—of having his villa, acquired with the Komsomol dues, guarded by swarthy and jolly saber-toothed cutthroats in Che Guevara T-shirts, instead of the bored and shapeless Ukrainian cops who all look like farmhands so much more than pirates. Maybe his hot blood yearned for the beat of salsa tunes, and the vision of a cocoa-colored ass barely covered with feathers beckoned to him from across distant oceans, like the longed-for reward for all of his Komsy ratting, which, as it later turned out, he could have saved himself the trouble of doing because it did nothing to help the Soviets in the end—or maybe that was precisely why he eloped: because unlike the rest of our Komsy-to-business-converts who’ve already filled our parliament, he was ashamed of his past. Whatever the reason, Lyonchik disappeared, leaving us in possession of his apartment with a Venetto mattress on the floor (so thoroughly permeated with sperm and
vomit that we had to throw it out)—a place of our own, our own house, a hundred-point lead in this crappy business, all thanks to Lyonchik, may the old goat have peace wherever he is. And if he’s still alive, may God send him a whole swarm of chocolate-skinned girls, and may the bullets of Colombian partisans miss his old goat head. (Many of them are also Marxists and fight for the Communist revolution, so if they take Lyonchik hostage, he, worse comes to worst, can always become their political commissar and recite to them on steamy tropical nights the decisions of the last Soviet Communist Party Congress if he hasn’t forgotten them all, the program of the USSR’s development to 2000 included. Or he’ll teach them to sing “Lenin Is Young Again.” As you would expect of a Gypsy, Lyonchik Kolodub was incredibly musical.)

I can almost hear Lolly’s voice right now, telling me sensibly—like a cool, tender hand on my feverish head: Why are you making such a big deal out of it? And I am, my golden girl (because you are my golden girl, have been, are, and will be, no matter what lies ahead of us), making a big deal of it, and I don’t even know why. And I can even tell myself, plain and simple (don’t know if I could ever tell you, though) if I wanted to have something to be really proud of, I should have nailed myself, damn it, like Jesus Christ to the cross, to our doomed thermionic generator seven years ago. I should have lived on bread and water, quit smoking, told Tatyana to go where the sun don’t shine with her constant whining about how she’s got nothing to wear (I hope she finally caught herself some fat dickhead after we split; she was still pretty enough for that), bitten off a piece of some foreign grant for the lab, worked eighty hours a week like a bulldozer, and forgotten about the rest of the world—but finished the project! Like that. Then I would’ve shown myself what you showed by resigning from your channel: resistance of the material. I would know then that I couldn’t be bent, that I’m capable of standing my ground. Instead, I split.

I could’ve been a scientist—a real scientist and not just another PhD in physics. But I’ve already missed the age of brilliant ideas—those all happen before thirty. Bohr developed the model of the
atom before he was twenty-eight, Einstein published “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” at twenty-six, Bell invented the telephone at twenty-nine. It’s a good age: you’re starting to know what you’re talking about, but you aren’t scared yet because you don’t believe you can lose. A constant upward ascent. I used it up on building my business. My best years, right here—in this office, in these catalogs. In this damn log: two Russian copper coins in good condition, fetch up to twenty-five Euros a piece at Russian auctions, if, of course, one gets lucky. And why shouldn’t I—I’m a lucky motherfucker, ain’t I?

What I’ve never told Lolly is that as a second-year student I caught the eye of Strutynsky himself, God rest his soul—and that was the same as falling into the hands of a living god. When the old man shuffled into the lecture hall, always in his dust- and chalk-powdered suit, everything froze as if a basilisk had just entered. We, young bucks, had no clue back then that we bored this legend, with his scornfully drooping eyelids, to tears: the distance that separated us could only be measured in light years, if at all. And Strutynsky wasn’t a teacher, and did not know how, or feel inclined, to begin to breach that distance. What he did know how to do—magnificently—was to spot, through those leaden eyelids, like a mythical Viy, those in the massive class before him who had the potential of breaching that distance themselves one day, who could rev their thought to the speed required.

There were three of us like that, that year—Gotsik, Zahar, and myself—and that’s who he taught, collecting quizzes from the rest of the class and giving them to us to grade. It was in his seminars that I first experienced that dazzling exultation that comes from the energy of a thought set free—and it’s never come back as powerfully since. The brilliance, the clarity when chaos begins to make sense under the quickening assault of your thought and finally—poof!—turns into the slim crystal of a formula—there’s nothing else like it. A complete loss of self and a sense of omnipotence at once—you step out on a break reeling like you’re drunk and feel
sweat running down between your shoulder blades. Skydiving’s got nothing on it.

So I do know how it felt to them—Einstein, Bohr, all those dudes who could. The whole thing is in not letting your assault slacken. In knowing how to keep it up. For years, if need be, that’s the thing. For years.