The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

preparing to launch into a popular lecture right here and now. (Oh, please, I couldn’t possibly take that; it’s too much to suffer in my unemployment: to listen, especially to something interesting, and not have a way of retelling what I hear. To know that I won’t be telling people about this from the screen anymore—that I’ll just swallow it all right here and here it will stay, sitting in my stomach, an undigested boulder. And instead, they’ll have the
Miss New TV
show steamrolling across their screens.)
    “You’re right, Grytsiuk alone is worth a show,” I nonetheless acquiesce meekly: Vlada considered Grytsiuk a genius; she used to say he was one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century.
    My sage gentleman darkens for a moment, unpleasantly ambushed by my omniscience—what if it’s his dearest hobbyhorse and he wishes to possess the secret knowledge alone? But he instantly regains his composure and grins indulgently, “Myshko,
he-he
, Myshko Grytsiuk, poor thing.... It was harder for him than for all the rest of us—he was a repatriate, after all; he was used to the free world, although he’d grown up in poverty back there in Argentina.... One had to teach him so much, and he still never got accustomed to many of our realia.”
    I see, so it wasn’t so much a lecture he aimed to bestow upon us as a monument to himself, with Grytsiuk and all the other dead rolled into the pedestal. Only the TV cameras are missing (and I’m supposed to supply those). The expression on his myrrhoozing countenance, meanwhile, makes it clear without any doubtthat even if one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century, Mykhailo Grytsiuk—or for my interlocutor, simply Myshko—was still predominantly a sum of endearing weaknesses (his socks stank perhaps), his weaknesses were utterly forgivable, especially among friends; don’t take it personally, bro, we’re all family....
    A “generation,” sure—as that excessively fidgety painter kept saying at Vlada’s show, arranging his fingers into a teepee—only he looked more like a rat. Why is it they all look like animals to me—rats, roaches, weasels—am I going off my rocker here? A hallucination à la Goya: packs of creatures with animal heads root around, twitching their noses, peering into butter dishes—first they mauled the ones who were worth anything and now they feast on their bones.
    The old poetess’s mug surfaces in my mind, the one I once had to listen to as she put curses on the terrible Soviet regime—which failed to arrange her jubilee reading the year Stus was sentenced to the ten years that would kill him. She had the same mouth—bitterly insulted, talking with slurps of spit; they passed up her bowl, too, at feeding time, only the old woman wanted no mere spotlight for her bowl, like our art historian here, but a crown of thorns, and she twisted my arm to get one woven for her. Back then I also got fiercely depressed and drank to get drunk just like this, and not very far from here, either—at Baraban, the favorite watering hole of journalists, where I won’t go again because I don’t want to run into people I used to work with and watch them hide their eyes. And see what animals they begin to resemble.
    And then a very strange thing happens. Maybe I am really already drunk, but for some reason it rattles me, literally, with a shiver, this coincidence—like the repetition of the same figure in a dance: of the place, the time (back then it was also winter, there was snow on the ground), and the characters, that old hag and this bald weasel, the oppressive sorrow for the waste of my father’s life I felt then—and the sorrow for Vlada’s life I feel now. Then, as now, I carried a death for a life that no longer really mattered to anyone but me, and now, as then, I am drawn, as though by amagnet, to the same spot, the same downtown crossing, into a café where I sit at a table just as I did then, and drink in an effort to dissolve, if only a little, that indigestible sorrow (like a swallowed boulder) in a scorching torrent of alcohol—because this sorrow demands it, not for nothing do our folk songs always speak of drowning our sorrows, if not in mead and wine, then deeper, in a river or a sea—because if you don’t thin it with something, it will, by its own solid weight, squeeze liquid out of you like whey from cheese, in a quiet tear-drip without end, like an autumn mist, until it squeezes out all your life juices