The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

and you petrify, becoming one with it, becoming it—this insupportable sorrow, a boulder, a pillar of salt.
    I have seen women like that—among the mothers who lost their children, the ones who got them back from Afghanistan as “Cargo 200,” in coffins welded shut and who fell against the zinc boxes, scratched them with their fingers and begged to know, “Baby, baby, are you in there?” They are the women who, twenty years later, remember their vigil at their sons’ faceless coffins and their urge to throw themselves atop them as they were lowered into the ground as their last hour of being alive.
    Nina Ustýmivna, it appears, is at no risk for anything like this; she said she’d cried out all her tears already, but she still drips periodically, still has to put a hankie to her reddening eyes every now and then when you’re talking to her—so she mustn’t have cried herself dry yet. She’s still got plenty of liquid, even her Zodiac sign is Aquarius, the life-giving element. And Vadym’s not even worth mentioning—he is not the keeper to something that’s gone to the ground. But Goddammit, shouldn’t someone make it her work to find a story in Vlada’s life? You can’t just let it break and scatter like a string of pearls from a torn thread, can you? No human life should scatter like that, because it would mean that no life was worth anything, not anyone’s; if that’s the way it is, then why are we all still taking up space on the planet?
    Again, this taste of insoluble sorrow on my lips—the same as three years ago—and tomorrow the hungover heartburn willparch my lips just like it did then—soda and salt. And this recasting, three years later, of the same plot with different actors in the original roles, strikes me, for some reason, as something incredibly significant, filled with an all but mystical meaning. Lord, what if our whole lives are made up, without us ever noticing, of precisely such repetitions, like a geometric pattern, and that’s where the answer is—the main secret locked in every human life?
    Two brightly lit episodes, like windows at night, three years apart, as though placed on a twist of one invisible spiral that links the “then” and the “now” with a single, pervasive meaning. Throngs of other encounters and episodes huddle in the time between the episodes, and maybe some of these will also repeat someday just like this, and pushed by the invisible coil to the top, will flash with the same searing intensity of memory revealing their, as yet indiscernible, meaning—the way a dark shard of bottle glass flashes when you hold it up to the sun: the effect Vlada sought to achieve in her
Secrets
—amber, thick as buckwheat honey, stitched through with a pulsating golden thread. The world, after you’ve seen it like that, appears at first gray and faded like in an X-ray room. Now I could tell Vlada what she’d spent ten years searching for: not a technique, not a color—but this unseen coil that threads through time.
    But Vlada is gone, and there is no one to tell. In that gray and faded X-ray–room light, Aidy and Baldy, cowled in bluish drifts of smoke, nod their heads like puppets in an animated film and pursue their incredibly boring, hiccup-inducing, vacuous game—rolling words to each other like balls on a pool table.
    “You, Mykola Semenovych, absolutely must write about this.”
    “My dear boy, I’ve long had all the preliminary research completed, all that’s left to do is sit down and write. But
you
know how busy I am.... ”
    “Uh-huh, and here I am taking up
your
precious time! But I must, and you must forgive me—where else would I find an expert like you? And, actually, that’s all I’ve come with, I won’t delay you any longer—I’ll just leave you the documentation so you can takea proper look at it later, and just write your conclusions whenever you have a spare minute.”
    “You’re leading the old man astray, you realize that?”
    “Why astray, Mykola Semenovych? You’ve said it yourself—the possibility of Novakivsky’s authorship is fifty-fifty, the experts’ opinions may very well conflict, some will say yes, and others will say no. What’s so wrong if saying yes, in this case, happens to benefit you and me directly?”
    “Oh, I’ve long known you as the demon of temptation; ladies must find you irresistible.... Speaking of which, why haven’t we toasted the fair lady at our own table yet?”
    The fair lady—that