The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

hers, the Komsomol activists who, in 1933, lit out for the city from the famished country and became teachers at a workers’ night school, and thus did not die together with everyone else in their village—and who knows at what price. And it was because of this fear, which did not allow her, in her own eyes or in the eyes of her jealous community, any right to err, that she got stuck with Vadym for so dangerously long in that stage when you work through your days as if they were wet dirt on a shovel, because in place of your extinguished love, or whatever it was that appeared to have been love, comes emptiness—and into emptiness, always and inevitably, like black water, seeps death: I’m afraid to sleep. I’ll fall asleep—and die.
    Shit, now I remember! She even told me, sometime that summer, before our interview, a dream she had—told it to me in detail. The dream was about Vadym, but I only remembered one image from it. (You generally don’t remember other people’s dreams very well; they’re like the plots of movies someone has retold you but that you haven’t seen yourself.) In the dream, Vadym took hersomewhere, to a hill, gray as the surface of the moon, and the hill began to slide from under her feet, and she saw it was a pile of concrete sand—really, what could be deader? I think there were even crows in that dream—black, fat, and glossy.
    Why couldn’t I have told her then: Vladusya, my dear, cut the cord and run as fast as your legs will carry you—exactly like you did ten years ago; follow your own design, that same mind-boggling pattern of yours. I know you can, you’ve done it before, and you know when it’s time to go under the knife—and to hell with him, this husband of yours, and with his—actually your—penthouse, with its glassed-in floating clouds, mirror surfaces, and white leather ottomans; all that, literally heavenly beauty, with the eternal view of the sky, you could charge admission to that place, that was a heck of a job you did, but to hell with it, tear it from your heart and run. Run because this man, whose one other woman has already gone round the bend, alarmingly, in the loony-bin direction, is clearly dangerous; there are men like that—packed hard inside into an unassailable mass of self-satisfaction that we mistake for strength, and everything they touch, they kill, even sex. Such men like power, and it comes to them easily, because when someone’s plowing ahead with such unassailable confidence, it is very hard not to think that he is the one who has seen the light and will, if you follow him, show it to you, too—hard to believe that such a juggernaut carries with it nothing but itself. But it’s now that I’m all wised up—I knew nothing back then; it was all before I met R., and I was as stupid and naïve as a bunch of parsley. Dara—Dolly—Folly.
    Why is the word death of feminine gender in our language; where’d this nonsense come from? Death should be a man; a woman’s death, at least. That’s the way the Germanic people have it, I think, they’ve always been better mystics than we. Spoken by a man, “I killed her”—it even sounds better, more convincing, than when a woman says, “I killed him.” When a man says it, it doesn’t admit any levity of interpretation.
I killed him with that one phrase
—men don’t talk like that. Or,
I killed him with my silent
disdain
—you’re kidding, right? He doesn’t give a hoot about your disdain, if he even noticed it. What does he notice, really?
    I know nothing about the war that may have been raging between them her last autumn, when Vlada was so rapidly withdrawing from us all, cloaked in the cold, otherworldly glint of estrangement, like an acolyte soon to take her vows—I know nothing, and will never know anything more. And Vadym doesn’t know either—I doubt he suspected even then what role he’d been destined to play in her life. (He did get rattled a bit with a chilly draft of recognition when she died—in those first weeks, when he drowned his grief in drink and, like a buffalo, stampeded at nights down the Boryspil highway as if he wanted to catch the runaway and bring her back—but he did not let that recognition rattle him any looser, and no more drafts from the other side will ever get to him again.)
    No one, except the dead person herself, can see her death in its entirety. See how it evolved, how it ripened, day by day, like a fruit. The living can only observe, from