The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

clattering tablewares and getting instantly drunk (many never sobering up again) were not living and—no sense denying—yet rather successful in this life, these corpses, decomposed into the already-runny, porridge-like consistency: reach out to touch them with your hand and the goo would swallow your whole arm. This vision came to Daryna more than once or twice—a hot, scorching thrust at the nape, the cerebellum, like a blast from a champagne cork (or a gunshot—straight at the nape, into the pituitary, muzzle pressed into the hollow between the hemispheres).
    Once, soon after Vlada’s funeral, it came again—at a restaurant, at some celebratory occasion, at the point when the tablesare stripped down to the soiled dinnerware, sweating waiters stumble splashing dessert onto the parquet floors, and the conversations lose coherence, scattering into a chaos of solo monologues, a lady of Balzacian age resolved to speak about Vlada and kept squawking, peacock-like, like whizzing a saw through a log, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t believe that she is dead!” And one of the men, totally wasted, grunted peaceably back at her, a deep echo rung from a bell, “Who of us is alive?” Daryna remembered the cold shiver and, at the same time, the scorch of fire that burst into her nape like a bullet, and instantly sobered her up. Pushed her, like a cork, to the surface of the general chaotic noise, as if lifting her up to the ceiling from where, as she looked disengaged at the stirred-up maelstrom of people and leftovers, she thought with superstitious horror that it’s true; he’s right—there are no living souls here—this is the underworld.
    Vlada—how did she know this? And this angle, this point of view from the ceiling? She had a painting, in the
Secrets
cycle, titled
After the Blast
. It was a view from above, and in the middle, a splattered circle of light like a multistrand crystal chandelier spun fast on its hook, shattered into animation-sliced circles like ripples spreading on water. Vlada was always fighting stasis; she used to say the Old Masters’ work already contained both animation and cinematography, and, in comparison to them, we gained in technique and lost in imagination: we’ve grown lazy and forgotten that one can communicate everything, absolutely everything by painterly means alone, even sound, as Picasso did in Guernica, the noise of the air raid brought across with dimmed lights and swinging lightbulbs. And that’s what Vlada also achieved to a degree in this painting: Her blazing circle of light was like a multilayered wheel knocked off the chariot of the terrible Advertisement God, spun with raging, blend-into-a-single-blot speed; and beneath, a field the color of rot was peppered with a dense black confetti of tiny human shapes like remnants of a defeated army—each with a logoed shopping bag (the bags were shrunken photographs glued onto the canvas). Hugo Boss, MaxMara, Steilmann, Brioni—a brand-name spill.
    The critics commented acerbically that Matusevych painted “an explosion at a shopping mall” and should demand remuneration from all those brands for advertising them. But in fact she had painted
a war
—the one we were losing every day, without ever knowing it, as we sped, helter-skelter, across that rusty rotting field. And as it turned out, it was only our bodies that kept moving. We were running in the underworld. We’d been blown to smithereens somewhere along the way. We didn’t know there were mines, no one had told us: we kept running, panting, clutching our brand names to our chests, our apartments, our cell phones and automobiles—and still thought we were alive, because no one had told us we were already dead.
    “Too many deaths,” Vlada had said in Daryna’s dream—and really, it’s like someone had knocked the bottom off the fairytale barrel, and a legion of deaths had broken free. Something happened to death itself at the century’s turn, a transformation that had gone unnoticed for too long: like a new note from the orchestra that at first seems an accidental false noise and then grows to redefine the whole symphony, a new form of death swelled and took root—death without cause. Up until then it was commonly believed that people died of illness, of old age, in accidents, or at someone’s hand—that a matter as grave as the cutting short of a life must always have
cause
and death had been quite accommodating, finding new pretexts for itself