The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (95 page)

“Meaning what?”

“I’m just a go-between, Lolly. Like a semiconductor, you see? And occasionally, a catalyst. And that’s how it’s been for me the whole time, from the beginning: I function as an add-on to your project.
Your
project that involves
my
family and for which you needed a guide. A go-between...”

“Weird...”

“No shit.”

“No, it’s weird because sometimes I feel precisely the opposite. That it’s my project that functions as a go-between—between you and me.”

“And I’ve had enough of this going between. I want there to be the two of us, together, and no one else. I want to be your man,
period. Your husband, not a go-between. Do you see the difference, or do I have to explain that too?”

“You goof...that’s who you are.”

“I’m not sure, baby. I’m not sure.”

“I am. You cover me. You have my back, all the time; you don’t even notice it because it comes so naturally to you. This is why you got so worked up, too—because you took the whole Pavlo Ivanovych, the brunt of him, and now the aftershock of it is rattling you.”

“Hm. You think?”

“Can’t you feel it yourself?”

“I don’t know.... He really got under my skin, that’s for sure. Like I got some virus from him and it went running through my bones—smashing everything in its way...bowling. And on top of that, I had to swallow it all as I listened. Just think: I’ve been working like a fucking ox for seven years, kissing up to God-knows-who, fighting for every little old tchotchke tooth and nail, trying to save at least a bit of our past, and underwriting the SBU’s fucking budget with my hard-earned coin on top of that; and there he sits, paid, again, with my hard-earned coin—after he burned the archives! And the thing is—he’s still convinced he did the right thing, and you can’t get through to him!”

“Leave him alone, Aidy, others have gotten through already—left plenty of holes in him. He’s a colander.”

“Sure, someone tells you a sob story about his difficult childhood, and you’re ready to feel sorry for him!”

“Someone has to do that, too, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, yeah. Alright, don’t take it the wrong way.”

“I’m not. All I’m saying is he didn’t have any other choice. None of them did—those who were raised on lies, with the natural course of life violated. Arbitrarily warped. Can you imagine what a flimsy existence he must lead—without roots, up in the air? A sort of a show that he plays for himself over and over and over. And there’s no way to keep it going other than to guard, sledgehammer in hand, against the natural order of things reasserting
itself, because if you miss a blink—it’ll break through, like mud through that dam.... ”

“Yeah.”

“His dam will break too, one day...and sweep away the whole house of cards he’s worked so hard to build around his child. It’s leaking already—first his mother-in-law, then it’ll be something else: the further his child ventures into the world, the more risks there are. That’s why he’s so afraid.”

“So much wisdom. So much understanding. Where can I get myself some of that?”

“Why? You disagree?”

“You women just kill me...just sit there, philosophizing, like it’s all water off a duck’s back!”

“It’s all because you covered me. Shielded me bravely with your own body, you could say. Took the brunt of the negative-energy assault. Or, maybe more appropriately, of the informational assault?”

“You just keep kissing up to me...”

“I’m not kissing up; I’m telling you like it is. You are my hero. My knight in shining armor. My Chip and Dale. My Ninja Turtle.”

“Shut up. You’re mean.”

“But wise—you said so yourself.”

“You know I’ve got a whale of a headache...from back there, on the water.”

“You poor thing. Take an Advil.”

“Nah, a cup of hot tea—and off to bed. Lord. Some freaking day we had...I have to say, you seem to be just generally super calm recently. Sort of distanced...”

“I must be slowly developing the ability not to give a damn. What else can I do?”

“No, I’m serious. I noticed it back when you came home from your meeting with Vadym, and I was telling you about Yulichka. Things don’t seem to get to you the way they used to; they don’t affect you as much.... ”

“Is this a bad thing? That they don’t?”

“Hey. Kiddo. What if you are pregnant?”

“Oy!”

“What’s to oy about? What would be so terrible about that?”

“My dictaphone!”

“What about it?”

“I just saw this...apparently, I left it on—after I erased the stuff.... Or did I not lock it, and it came on accidentally in my purse?”

“You mean, it was recording the whole way home?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, look, it’s on! It’s still rolling...”

“No shi—”

CLICK.

***

Daryna is sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding the test stick in her fingers—carefully, like a rare insect, a wingless dragonfly with a delicate blue fuselage. She sits and looks, unable to take her eyes off of it: to her, the strip seems to be alive. About to move. Or do something else to reveal itself, something completely unpredictable. Especially since, as the instructions claim, after ten minutes, the reading can disappear. Still, what she is seeing is beyond doubt.

It is real. It exists.

Two lines. Two blood-red vertical lines, exactly in the middle. Like a pair of tiny, very straight capillaries that have swelled up and begun to pulsate, instantaneously, and of their own volition.

Over 99% accuracy.

This has happened. And it cannot be undone. She can close your eyes, flush away the test, not tell anyone, and pretend for a while (How long?) that this did not happen; it was just an illusion, a mirage, a sudden instance of astigmatism, double vision. No one else has seen this; no one could testify that there were
two
lines.

But two is how many there are.

And this is indisputable. Regardless of whether anyone else has seen it. It just—is.

This cannot be replayed. She cannot delete it from her computer, she cannot set the clock back to the “time before,” she cannot say to the darkness, where she cannot see either the director or the cameraman, “I’m sorry, I misspoke there, let’s go back and record again from this point, here, yes.”

It
is
.

Well, hello then, she thinks—a single breath of her entire being.

And instantly feels terrified.

Who are you?

Somewhere there, inside her, in an invisible cranny, in the self-propelling churn of her hot cells. (Are they actually hot? What is the temperature, pressure, the relative moisture of air in there? Is there even enough air?) Still no one, still not an existence. No machine can find you. But you already are; you are already there. Here.

Like looking into the wrong end of a telescope—a dizzying flight, an immensely long, spiraling tunnel with a golden speck of light at the far end, and coming from there, a moving black dot. She can’t see its shape yet from this far away, but that’s just a matter of time: its approach is irreversible, its velocity known.

Two red vertical lines on the narrow strip of the test stick. The first portrait of a future person.

Of her child.

Ripened: the word surfaces in her memory, something dropped there like a seed from what seems like a thousand years ago. No one speaks like that anymore—ripened—who spoke like that, Grandma Tetyana?

And right away—the next frame, scorchingly vivid, as if it’s just been digitally remastered (Where does it all lie hidden, in what vaults?): little Darochka, Odarka, as her grandmother called her (and she didn’t like it, pouted at Grandma: how crude!), listens, with a massive down blanket pulled all the way over her head (when you dive under a down blanket, you must tuck your feet under you right away and pull your nightdress over them, so as not to
lose the warmth: the sheets are stiff and cold, the bed boundless like a snowy desert; in daytime a fluffed-up pyramid of sundry pillows towers on its expanse, pillowcases decorated with strips of embroidery and openwork, whose patterns are also imprinted in her memory as they were on her cheek when she woke up in the morning—you could run your finger over every stitch). The doors are open from the dark around her (a tunnel) to where the fire glows in the stove, where they are talking: her mom (she is the one who brought Darochka to visit Grandmother), Grandma Tetyana, and Aunt Lyusya. Grandma talks loudly as rural people, unaccustomed to whispering so as not to wake someone else, usually do, and Mom keeps shushing at her—every time she does, all three peer from their end of the tunnel into the room with the enormous wooden bed, where Darochka has hidden. Then Grandma Tetyana inquires—loud as a churchbell—“Is she asleep?” and the conversation resumes at the same volume as before.

Darochka is waiting for Mom to come to bed with her (then it’ll be warm), and words she doesn’t quite understand, the resonant and mysterious
ripened
among them—at first Darochka thinks it’s about a plant, but then realizes it is not—waft toward her, churning her sleep like oars beating on water: “When I was ripened with you, it happened to me too,” rises Grandma Tetyana’s voice (a contralto), and Darochka wishes desperately that her eyes weren’t so heavy and that she could grasp what it is they are talking about, but she can’t—all she gets is a tinge of something unattainably mysterious and solemn, so solemn that Mom has forgotten about Darochka and says something to Grandma Tetyana in a lowered voice, while tossing one new log after another into the stove, to keep the fire going, like in Darochka’s fairytale rhymes, burning high and bright, and Grandma goes on “and I knew I’d have a girl because I had a dream.... ”

A dream? She’s had no dreams. No special dreams at all—except
that one
, Adrian’s last dream in which they were together, in the same movie theater the whole night—breaking out of it, every so often, as if for a smoke out in the darkness, surfacing
to the light of the nightlamp. She remembers that light shining on Adrian’s head as he bent over the bedside table, the hair at the nape of his neck, a few backlit ruffled strands of it when he sat up to write himself a note, barely awake; and the recollection instantly makes the room go misty before her eyes, as they swell with tears of tenderness, and without realizing it, she spreads her knees like a cello player and touches herself where her yearning furrow took the fallen seed: it’s Aidy’s; it came from him. It’s his.

That’s when it happened. Now she feels like she has known this from the beginning. From that very night. Oh, that night. In the mirror above the sink, Daryna sees her lips stretch in a spontaneous spellbound smile. How could such profusion of life be contained in such a short amount of time? Years packed tight, like electrons in an atom’s nucleus, something else from nuclear physics that Aidy explained....

Love me. Love me all the time—and together, knit indivisibly into one, grown into each other, we enter the same tunnel, the same movie theater, and leave it together, too, wincing at the daylight, unable to tell which limbs are whose, and before that, you were inside me again, while I slept, thrust after thrust, the film rolls; don’t leave me; it’s moist, fertile, fecund; we melt the snow below us; the ground washes away; we are lying in a pool of tears on the bare surface of a sad planet where everything once went wrong and must begin anew—bacteria, amoebas, the first man and the first woman, a new era, did you see? Yes, I did, they all died, and we return again to the place where the same movie is being played for the two of us, the film rips into white flashes inside the single mind knit from our two minds, machine-gun fire goes right through me, the fiery bullets explode inside me, a cannonade.

How many times did it happen that night, seven, eight? He was the one who counted, then laughed in the morning that he couldn’t keep track, either; and she remembered everything as a whole, a single roiling river, hot as lava, that rolled and rolled carrying her with it.... How much life they were given in a single
night! Their wedding night. Their wedding, that’s what it was—the night of their wedding. Their marriage—to the toll of someone else’s deathbell.

A family now. Forever.

They married us
, Daryna thinks, speaks the thought to herself from beginning to end, completely, for the first time—gives voice to the idea, which, until now, merely stirred inside her, a half-guess afraid to become words: those who died that night in the bunker, married us. They
knew
.

The tile floor feels cold beneath her feet, and she pulls her nightgown over her knees, unseeing.

It’s pointless now, as it always is in moments when you realize that something irreversible has happened, to let her mind ramble, feverishly shuffling the deck of circumstances this way and that, to pull and tug at them like on a purse caught in the subway doors: How, why, it can’t be, how could it possibly have happened—she’s been swallowing those pills, expensive as hell, religiously, and by the calendar, too, it seemed too early? What went on between them that night could not be contained by any calendar or pharmacological formula—companies fold, factories go under.
That
was stronger.

And now she has it inside her.

Hello, then.

Everything happened of its own accord. Everything has been done for her—she has no say in it, no will of her own. Someone else’s will is at work, however—whose?—and all she has left to do was to obey it. Accept it. Lie under it.

She is a bit stunned with this new feeling—and at the same time, deep in her heart, strangely flattered: as if she’s been jerked forth from the ranks of indiscriminate figures lined up on a drilling field, pointed out by the commander in chief himself. On the other side of the field, a fire burns in a stove in the darkness, and the three Fates—Mom, Aunt Lyusya, and Grandma Tetyana—turn to look at her with the same expression on their faces: the serene, all-understanding, and unclouded look that is brought to women’s
faces by the knowledge of the hardest and most important human work on earth. They turn, peer: Is she asleep? Awake? She’s awake already—come on then, come over here, to our side...