The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (90 page)

“Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

He really is moved. It’s good, Daryna thinks to herself, quickly, that Mom didn’t come: he probably wouldn’t even have noticed her, simply—couldn’t accommodate her, too. Adrian is the first to find the right tone—businesslike and sophisticated at once.

“That’s quite a strong class your daughter’s part of.” He nods at Pavlo Ivanovych gravely, like the lions at the nearby column. As if it were a soccer team, Daryna almost snorts. But, to her surprise, the words prove right, exactly the kind that a stirred-up dad is capable of hearing at the moment: in them is not only an
assessment of the first part of the concert they just heard, but also a fan’s anxiety (How will
our
girl look against such strong colleagues, will she hold her own?), a lifeline thrown to Nika in advance, in case of a less-than stellar performance (to lose out against the strong is, of course, so much more honorable than to outplay a bunch of slackers) and, most importantly, the voice of
expert
support, which Pavlo Ivanovych swallows with a neophyte’s thirst. It must be, Daryna intuits, that he himself doesn’t know much about music; it’s just a status symbol for him, like the directors in Soviet movies who inevitably had Red Army officers of purely proletarian pedigree play grand pianos as a sign of their complete triumph over bourgeois culture. And in this unfamiliar world into which his child has set out, Pavlo Ivanovych looks at every initiated person like a new recruit to a colonel. The men exchange a few more lines—of co-conspirators, accomplices, members of the same club—and Daryna, relieved that Adrian has taken charge of the conversation, recalls suddenly her own appearance, thirty years ago, at a school performance: dressed as a snowflake, she danced and sang a song in English, “The snowflakes are falling, are falling, are falling,” and her daddy, young, strong, and handsome, sat beaming in the first row, nodding his head in time with the music. Back then, when she was eight, she was still trying her best for Daddy, and the world was warm and cozy. What a pity that it all came to an end so fast.

Why did she come here? What does she have to do with these people?

She no longer knows. Why does this aging SBU-type, who has all but unraveled with the solemnity of the moment (just like a bad-mannered teen who doesn’t know how to behave in public!), keep insinuating himself into her and Adrian’s family? (At the moment, he is standing at a bad angle to the light, and she can see the white streaks of saliva, like colostrums, in the corners of his mouth—have your liver checked, or something, will you Pavlo Ivanovych?) He is comical in his inflamed paternal incarnation, like a yiddishe mame of Odessa jokes. Of course, how else? He’s
from a “home,” a foundling: people, who were themselves deprived of parental love when they were children, will never learn to love their children naturally; they will forever swing between extremes like the color-blind forced to paint with colors, and what the hell does she want with this stranger’s life? Another life that she for some reason has to fit inside her?

Doesn’t she have enough of them already—other people’s lives stashed inside her, like in a safe to be kept in perpetuity. She’s done nothing but muddle around in other people’s lives, and they tramp all over her like on this square, demanding that she produce from their strife and failure a spark of meaning they cannot seem to achieve themselves; she has borne all this happily; she’s liked it, although there were some interviews after which she spent the rest of the day in bed, feeling like she’d been run over by a tractor. But for these two—Boozerov and his defenseless (like a snail without a shell) Nika, with her childish worship of Daryna—she has no more room, sorry, that’s it. It’s too much!

These people have no connection to her; she has nowhere to store their problems—and fails to see why she should be compelled to do so. At this instant, Daryna thinks her mother did the wisest thing of all: what had been is gone; it’s closed, and stored up in the attic, and really what point is there in dredging back up what’s been buried for years? You can’t go your entire life pulling everyone who’d appeared in one or two episodes of it behind you; no one’s life is big enough for that!

She looks at Pavlo Ivanovych unable to overcome her sudden dislike—those streaks in the corners of his mouth are especially disgusting. Doesn’t he understand that his girl has already grown beyond the age at which one tries one’s best for one’s daddy—and that no matter how much he fusses and beats his wings he can’t keep her under the glass dome of his warm and cozy world? At her age, Daryna thinks angrily, I was already living with Sergiy—and thank goodness, she, Daryna, chose well, because at the time there were many more men eager to live with her than is recommended for a young fool, feeling abandoned by her dead father and living
mother at once, who would have plunged into bed with anyone who’d mistake her for an adult.

Nika still has all these problems ahead of her, and one can be sure things will not go smoothly for her either: such unhinged daddies guard their baby girls like bull terriers, another year or two and it’ll be Nika’s singular dream to be abandoned by her daddy—a diagnosis completely opposite to my own, Daryna thinks—and freezes with her mouth open.
Oh shit, what if that’s the thing—our diagnoses being opposite?
What if Nika actually senses in me what she herself urgently needs to survive and lacks completely—that very vitamin of early freedom (which I have digested successfully, thank goodness!)—and that’s why she is pulled to me like an iron filing to a magnet?

Daryna feels faint, fears she won’t stay on her feet. And instantly remembers what she has been trying to forget: her period is four days late. Her breasts are swollen, can’t even touch the nipples, last night, when Adrian kissed them, she cried out in pain—but still no period. No, it doesn’t look like the men noticed her dizziness. Daryna stubs out her cigarette. I cannot hold it all, she thinks, in desperation, there’s too much of it! I can’t put this story together even for myself, can’t seem to gather up all the loose ends. Nika—my shadow, my doppelgänger, an antipode of my forced orphanhood. Yes, my orphanhood—because at fifteen a girl is still very much in need of a father, and at seventeen, too—to have him guide her into the world of men without bumps and bruises; until she herself becomes an adult woman, she needs him. Is it really possible—that Pavlo Ivanovych is making up with his own child what he once witnessed (And lent a hand to, didn’t he?) taken from someone else’s?

Now he seems to her to be manufactured from a super-hard material that does not let through any light: he has filled all the available space between her and Adrian, and stands there beaming shamelessly, like an infant in a bath—mad biblical eyes on fire, white streaks of saliva in the corners of his mouth. She wants to push him away—and in the same instant, with a kind
of lustful, disgusted terror she senses his nakedness under that luxurious suit: he is drenched with sweat and probably hairy as a baboon. She thinks she can even detect his smell: a heavy, military smell—leather, sealing wax.... It’s a dizzying, nausea-inducing intimacy—as if the three of them were in the same bed together, no boundaries between them. Is she now going to have erotic nightmares about him? Slope-shouldered, with a woman’s behind, on stubby legs? Men like that are usually good and eager at love play. Lord, how disgusting, what’s happening to her?

Finally, she catches Adrian looking at her with concern—and it’s like all her glands swell instantly with tears of gratitude: she is a little girl again, and Daddy (Adrian) is sitting in the first row nodding his head in time to the music. My man, she flares up, the dearest soul in the world, I’d give anything to touch your hand right now. But the other one—hard, dark inside, solid, with the heavy military smell—is pushing them apart with his body. He has wedged himself between them (and here a vivid physical memory flashes through her mind—that he has taken this position from the beginning, from the first time they met: wedged between them, and with such unshakable self-assurance as if
he had a right to do so
). He fixes Daryna in the gaze of his magnificent Judaic eyes, half-covered by the drooping cowls of his wrinkly eyelids, and all of a sudden says something so ill-suited to this scenario—in which Liszt’s lost measures spin and swirl around them in a neurotic dance (years of pilgrimage, Switzerland, pastoral symphony) together with the white-maned professorate that have seen better days, and the musicophile old maids who go to concerts to get their orgasms and sleepwalk through intermissions youthfully flushed—something so unexpectedly divorced from the young Nika, who is listening to her teacher’s last instructions somewhere backstage right now, that at first Daryna thinks he has spoken in a foreign language.

“Actually, I have something for you. On that case that you inquired about.”

Adrian and Daryna exchange glances quickly; the air between them crackles.

“You found it?” she asks, stunned. “You found what I asked you to look for?”

She doesn’t dare say “found Olena Dovgan,” as though complying with the rules once established by Pavlo Ivanovych: no names, no allusions, a schizophrenic secrecy, who needs it now? But let it be his way; this must be their reward—a thank-you gift for coming to his daughter’s concert, a barter. This, Daryna feverishly thinks, must also be something they teach them in KGB school—that any relationship between people is merely barter: an exchange of favors. But what did he find, what is it?

“Did you really? Pavlo Ivanovych? You found what I thought might be there, didn’t you? The anniversary liquidation report?”

“Not exactly,” Pavlo Ivanovych says reluctantly: he is letting it out slowly, pulling their guts out, the sadist. “But I can shed some light on the matter. Choose a time...”

“I’ll come whenever you say.”

“No, don’t come to the office, that won’t do.” This now sounds abrupt, sharp, like a cry of alarm. “It’s more of a private conversation. You know what?” He turns to Adrian, one man to another, as though struck with a sudden insight. “Do you by chance fish?”

“Should I?” Adrian responds.

Daryna laughs and listens to herself laugh from aside: no, everything’s okay. Simultaneously, she realizes that the lions at the next column are not discussing the just-heard Liszt interpretation, but are talking about someone’s recent concert tour—to Japan, it sounds like. “They have fish in abundance, whatever you like!” She hears distinctly the same dramatic baritone that’s “been in art since 1956.” “But it’s pricey, more expensive than meat!”

She looks back at Pavlo Ivanovych—did he hear that or not? She knows it can happen like this: when life, either under the pressure of your own efforts or on an incomprehensible whim of its own, clicks on to an invisible track and rolls off all by itself, and it takes all you’ve got just to keep your feet moving fast enough to hang on, this is what happens—everything you run across, down to accidentally overheard snippets of conversation and advertising
slogans, hammers home the same message from every direction, confirms the rightness of your course, as if put there on purpose, to make sure you get it. And sometimes, this can be funny, even very funny: the director with the full version of the script in his hands certainly does not lack a sense of humor. Fish, then. Alright, let it be fish.

“I, you see,” Pavlo Ivanovych shares, “love to get out on the Dnieper when I have a chance, when I have time...on a weekend...to fish at night—it’s the best kind of rest, you see.”

Adrian nods thoughtfully. At the worst possible moment, the bell summoning the audience for the second part of the concert rings out from the foyer, and the whole of Pavlo Ivanovych comes into motion—from his rearing Mosaic forelock to the hem of his Voronin suitcoat (the bottom button, Adrian observes, unbuttoned, very civilian-like: did his daughter teach him?). He roils with impatience like an electric kettle, flares his nostrils, and turns for the entrance at full steam; he waves with a sudden unmanly, country-fair fluster at someone in the crowd that is rapidly congealing into a clot by the door, and instantly loses any resemblance to an SBU officer, or even just to a grown man, that he may have reclaimed in the last couple of minutes. I wonder where his wife is, Daryna thinks—she wouldn’t have missed this, would she?—and manages to find, directed at them from the crowd, a frozen, even it seems, a bit scared (fish-eyed, of course!) look from an inexpressive lady, clearly not one of the musicophiles, dressed in a fashionable pink-tweed, fringed jacket that nevertheless does not look good on her at all; Pavlo Ivanovych, however, does not lose professional form and demonstrates appropriate vigilance just in time, managing (he’s burrowed himself between the two of them again, and they are moving, three abreast, in the reversed current, back inside) to touch both Daryna and Adrian with his elbows and to nod, with every sharp angle he has in his body at once.

“My wife.”

They acknowledge each other over the distance, mutely, as if underwater, and the pink, fringed fish stretches her lips into
a smile the same way Nika does, only the mother, unfortunately, bares her gums when she does it—not the most photogenic sight. It would have been just fine if Mom had come, Daryna concludes, feeling somehow comforted. But then, on the other hand—why should she have?

And then she hears Pavlo Ivanovych’s rapid-fire muttering above her ear—hypnotically similar, this time, to his daughter’s dove-like cooing, “Come this Saturday to the South Bridge...from the left, the Vydubychi side...right around midnight, fish bite really well there...and no one will bother us.”

***

From Daryna Goshchynska’s Audio Archives:
Night on the Dnieper. Boozerov.

Format: MP3
Sampling: 22 kHz
Bit rate: 88kBit/sec
Created: 04/27/2004
Modified: 04/27/2004

I didn’t want to scatter the fish—so I didn’t call out to you.... Voice, you see, it carries far at night—someone coughs on Trukhanov Island, and you can hear it all the way over here. Crawfish? Yes, boys trap them at night here...and a ways over, beyond the Paton Bridge. You can buy some; they sell them for two hryvna a piece.