The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (75 page)

He has no idea that it is Vlada who at this instant is buying, with his hands, my film. The film I now know how to finish, by myself, no matter how much it will cost: I know now what has been missing. And Vlada’s death, too, will be in the film—it’s the only way I can tell the truth about her. And it doesn’t matter that the man who caused her death will have a different face in the film—the face of the man, the farthest on the right in the old rebel photograph. Because aside from the factual truth, grounded in names and faces, there’s a deeper truth of the stories lived by individual people, a truth invisible to strangers, one that cannot be made up or pretended. One that lies beyond the limits of pliability.

And, as if it had just been sitting there waiting for the right moment all this time, a cell phone rings. My cell, I hadn’t turned it off, and I already know who it is, and my facial muscles melt involuntarily into a smile while my lips squeeze out a mechanical “Excuse me” to Vadym.

“Lolly?”

“Aidy!” I holler, so loudly the whole room seems to echo, as I break out from the dark underwater cave into the light of day. “Aidy, I’m here! I’m here, I’m okay! Don’t worry about me, I’m on my way out already; I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”

“Thank God,” he exhales loudly into my ear, my love, my man, Lord, how happy I am to hear his voice! “Alright, kiddo, get on the road. I’ve got all kinds of stuff going on here...”

Forgive Me, Adrian

B
rew us some tea, could you please,” Lolly asked.

“Chamomile? We’ve only got chamomile left; I didn’t have a chance to buy anything today.”

“That’s fine, let’s have chamomile.” Then after she sipped it, like a gosling—hardly any, as if forcing herself to swallow—she put the mug aside and smiled: “We’re like a pair of geezers—sitting here with the wrecks of our lives drinking chamomile tea before bed. We just need some aches and pains to complain about to complete the picture.”

Had to have been that fat rat, I thought, that Rep., the bastard, who’d gotten to her with the women-of-a-certain-age talk, the whole now-or-never shtick, up or out. As a client of mine used to say: under forty, it’s enough for a woman to be pretty; after forty, she needs to be rich—and made eyes at me, even though the old battle-ax had ticked past forty back when I was in middle school. And Yulichka must have just sat there, listened, and made another mental note.

“You did everything right, Lolly. You did great; I’m proud of you.”

“You know,” she said, brightening, “my mom used to say that about my dad, in those very same words: that he did everything right. Weird, isn’t it?”

Lolly has changed. Matured? Knowing her and the way she, the straight-A student, reverberates in response to every blow life deals her—taking it as an instance of cosmic injustice—I was afraid, at first, to dump the entire truth into her lap the way it had landed in mine: here’s what happened, my love; we’re in deep shit because my secretary has taken me for a thirty-thousand dollar ride (and I’ve been an idiot; I’ve been such an idiot!). But when
my girl, with her gaze turned wondrously inward, told me about the dinner she had with that fat Rep. rat, it totally blew me away, so my own screwup instantly diminished in importance: Are you kidding me? This is
war!
Unannounced, secretly creeping, real GB war, and no one has a clue about it—everyone’s got their noses stuck in their own shit and can’t even see what’s going on out there!

I ran around the kitchen, smoked one cigarette after another, and shouted that something had to be done; we can’t just let a pack of hometown goons hand the country over to the Kremlin, lock, stock, and barrel, just because they think they can, and that this Vadym was an old Soviet rat for sure. I know his breed; I’ve seen more than my share of them—the ones who first cleaned out the Komsomol and Party purse and then made a beeline for politics where they could clean out everything that was left in state ownership. What was it you said he traded in, kerosene? You know what it’s called? Agents of influence, that’s who they are—the agents of GB influence, every last one of them, on the Kremlin hook, all these former rats, bitches, fuckers; we should’ve run the lustration back in 1991, that was the only way to get rid of these Soviet cancers, and now look how they’ve spread!

I felt a kind of uplift in my rage—a certain purifying relief from having found a more deserving object of scorn than Yulichka, who’d been running schemes with my competitors behind my back—I’d shaken off the nasty feeling of having been robbed that had burned me all day, and felt myself filling with a pure, ethyl-alcohol-like civic outrage: Who do they think we are, these bastards? Do they think they’ll get away with this? I opened my shoulders wide and stood up tall facing a
real
, worthwhile enemy, one with whom you
want
to cross swords—while Lolly, by contrast, remained amazingly composed the whole time, as if she weren’t really surprised to hear my news (I’ve always suspected that she disliked Yulichka). She asked succinct, businesslike questions and generally appeared quite calm—as if all the blows that came this evening fell, for her, onto an invisible protective pad. She used to behave differently under stress. When she was resigning from the
studio, she went around all but shaking. But something new has emerged in her; she is somehow distant: she even spoke without triumph or melodrama about how elegantly she undid that fat Rep. My poor girl’s nose has sharpened to a point and grown pink with exhaustion; the lamp above the table cuts deep, unmistakable, graphic lines from her nose to her lips—without makeup, she is always so dear, so sweet I get shivers inside when I look at her, but only now do I see how much she’s worn away in these last few days, become all ether, even her face has grown longer and gaunt. She no longer looks like a teen, I thought. For the first time since we’ve been together, I felt that she really is older than me—and not by a mere six years, but by a much greater, immeasurable distance.

“Let’s go to bed, love”—I could barely stand up straight myself, and wondered, what happened to being nineteen, when I could party all night like the Energizer bunny and in the morning grab a breath mint to blunt my hangover breath before running to class all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

“Uhu,” she nodded, “let’s,” and raised her eyes at me, and they suddenly pierced me through all the fatigue, the mental numbness of the late hour, and the burnt-to-cinders adrenaline; they went through me with a living music as though they’d gained a voice and sang—her eyes glowed with tenderness, and obedience, and sadness, and something else so inexpressibly feminine that I a felt a lump rise in my throat.

“Can we go see that man in the country tomorrow?”

“If you want to,” I wheezed in the voice of the old Mafioso from Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
. God damn it, I was so moved I just about broke down crying right there. The next morning, I planned to go to Boryspil anyway, to see that country hick Yulichka had expropriated—to find out the details and assess my losses (a cuckoo clock, a walnut credenza, what else did that witch hand over to Brey & Co. behind my back?)—but I’d intended to go alone; I’d never gotten Lolly involved in my business before.... The business, however, had never been subjected to anything like what Yulichka did to it. I’d warmed a snake on my own chest, as they say.

This, essentially, is the thing—as it became clear once the ball of initial shock had a chance to settle a bit, to steep, loosen, and unravel into separate strands of damage: where I suffered financially, where I suffered morally, where the firm’s image was damaged, what pieces I had to pick up first to try and patch at least some of the holes—this is what cut me the deepest—that I had warmed a snake. Of all the damage, of all the holes, the breach of trust is the most painful, and there’s no way to fix it. Such a great secretary, my irreplaceable assistant, my right hand! She was so perfect I wanted to pinch myself. And she was always informed of all my plans, damn it, and damn it again! How could I have missed it—the little bitch’s been swindling me for six months? And I just ate from her hand when she fed me the story about the man’s heirs, a son and a daughter, who got cold feet and convinced their old man not to sell any of his stuff. She was all seriousness, so preoccupied—“Gosh, Adrianambrozich, wat are wee goin to do, thei refius to sell nou?”

“We have to make them a better offer,” I said like an idiot. “We’ve no other choice.” And the interested parties, it would appear, made Yulichka a heck of an offer indeed: when I called the guy myself, he wouldn’t even speak to me—know nothing, sell nothing, changed my mind, go to hell—he honestly did not want to talk to me, like someone had really riled him up against me or just told him a boatload of lies about me, but at the time I still didn’t suspect anything. I’ve no idea how I found it in me not to betray myself in any way, to keep my cool today (actually, yesterday already) when my bank director, an old and loyal client, complained to me, with a veiled reproach, that he’d seen a new piece at the minister’s home, a Secession cuckoo clock, and heard that this marvel’d been found right here, not far from Kyiv, in a village next to Boryspil—meaning, how’d you miss it, you moron, right under your nose? That hit me like a truck. The trusting, softhearted Adrian Vatamanyuk, friend of small children and animals. And Melitopol prostitutes. And after I just gave the bitch a raise and got her a tuition-free ride to a degree in art history—go,
sweetie, get educated; we’ll get ahead one day...fucking A. And how, as the textbook puts it, should one go on with one’s life? How should one be building up one’s business, or anything else for that matter—if one can’t trust anybody?

And the funniest thing is that Yulichka’s whole scheme would have come to light sooner or later anyhow: a cuckoo clock is hardly a needle in a haystack on our pathetic market, where it’s a like a village, where everybody knows everybody else—you can’t keep a secret like that for long—but the greed must have gone to our little schemer’s head. The chance to bite off a piece of pie she’d never dreamed of...I do wonder what commission Brey’s people offered her, how much she sold me for?

Essentially, these two things are no different: selling a person or selling a country. Lolly’s asleep already, but I go on talking to her in my head: the difference is purely quantitative, Lolly, not qualitative. The single difference between your Vadym and my Yulichka is the scale of operations: your rat charges more. And that’s it. It’s just that there’s us, my love—and then there’s them: those who serve something greater—and those who serve themselves, trading in what’s not theirs (and I shouldn’t call them whores—prostitutes, at least, peddle their own, anatomically inalienable, goods). It’s like a pair of enemy camps, and the line between them is like the line of fire at the front. This may be the only line between people that actually matters. A division that can never, under any circumstances be overcome. A thin line, unseen to the naked eye—and there are turncoats who’ve crossed it, but also the ones who lost their lives to it, as always happens in the line of fire. And it’s not clear of whom there’s more.

This just occurs to me, a belated response to your already half-asleep confession, when we were getting up from the table: go ahead, you go to the bathroom first—no, you go; I’ll have a smoke here. You said, “You know, I understood this thing about Vlada and Gela, too, the mistake they made; it’s your dream from a year ago. I’ve cracked its code: they had the same death.”

“What do you mean, the same death?”

“Well, not literally, of course, but they both died for the same reason.”

“I don’t know, sounds to me like you’re really reaching there, toots.”

“No, it’s true, Aidy. I just haven’t figured out how to put it into words yet, but you’ll see when I finish that film; I will finish it, just let me get the footage from Vadym...”

For a moment, I confess, I thought you were beginning to ramble with fatigue, and I got scared for you about
your own
old fear, which you’d, apparently, injected into me without my noticing (because in love you exchange everything, to be sure, from sweat and microflora to dreams and fears). Your father was in an asylum. What if there really was a reason? I remember I went all cold inside—and that’s when you said this thing that has lodged inside me and goes on churning like a small engine someone forgot to turn off, propelling one new sleepless thought after another: “She, meaning Gela,” (or did you say Vlada?) “
mistook the other for one of her own
, and you can’t err like that in love. In love—it’s deadly.”

You saw it in your own way, too, in your woman’s way—this line between us and them. You saw it as it relates to men and women—where it’s like a species barrier that must not be crossed.

“Can’t do it in love,” you said. “And what about sex? Can you do it in sex?”

You see, toots, I actually have, ever since we got together, stopped seeing other women as women. I’m not kidding. It’s not like I don’t see the inexhaustible variety of women, their butts, and all the other things a normal dude sees around him—I do, and quite clearly, but none of it feels like a cause for action anymore. I just don’t want it, and that’s it. As if there were a single woman left in the whole wide world—you—and the all the other members of your sex, they’re just people. So when Yulichka paraded her G-strings and miniskirts in front of me, I sort of felt sorry for her: like a child whom some bad people taught to put on this show, and who wouldn’t get it if you tried to teach her that she’s a big girl now, and it’s not appropriate to act like that. But, to be
completely honest, I can’t be sure that if you hadn’t come into my life, I wouldn’t have done the merciful thing one day and kindly fucked Yulichka in my office—to be humane, or whatever, given that the poor thing is always begging so hard.