The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

their side, the result: how the overripe fruit drops from the branch under its own weight. And only the dead, herself, knows how things got that far.
    ***
    “Let me make a living portrait of you, Daryna. I’ve always wanted to.”
    The bathroom—impeccably stylish rather than luxurious, without any nouveau-riche bells and whistles, all those Roman therms and gold leaf—still smelled of recent renovation, of paint and varnish, and the smell resembled the air of Vlada’s studio a little. Perhaps that’s what put her in the working mode, made her hands itch to pick up her tools (painting, she loved saying, is first and foremost manual labor, a craft!). She worked differently from the way makeup artists usually did: seated me facing her instead of the mirror, did not talk to me, did not comment on anything she was doing, but instead brought in a tape deck and put on Queen, “The Show Must Go On.”
    The longer I sat there, offering my face to her with my eyes closed, the stronger chills that ran through my body. Brushes, multiplying against my skin like a swarm of butterflies, tickled my mouth, temples, cheeks, eyelids; I was being transported to a different place, disappearing, changing form like a sculpture in the artist’s hands. The music blared inside me, and from there, from the darkness of roaring halls, broken glass poured down my veins, a battle call breaking to the surface—like a challenge to life itself—it thundered: the show must go on! And Vlada’s breath on my face froze like the breath of a tightrope walker hovering above the abyss of a great dark hall: this was no game, no innocent playing at dress-up and do-over, but something as ominously desperate as what Freddie Mercury must have felt in the flight of his own voice—she wanted to bring something important out of me, show me something that mattered a great deal to her; and when that scorchingly bright face finally hit me from the mirror, with the long Egyptian brows, the blood-dark lips (the face of a pagan goddess of war, a priestess of a bloody cult, something about it threatening, witchy, something that made you want to stomp it out, right away, like a fire, go back to the ranks, to the polished TV-screen picture that can reassuringly tell you the brand of the anchorwoman’s suit), I recoiled, terrified. But at the same time I couldn’t take my spellbound eyes off this strange mask, marveling at how, aided merely by the masterly blended colors, it grew out of my own features. Incredible. Perhaps only in dark, low-lit windowpanes, with the texture of the details smoothed away, can human faces be as magnificent as this, and afterward it was in dark windowpanes that I’d glimpse this strange face on myself—and shudder every time. By then the emotional overload was making my whole body shake, all but teeth clattering, and all I could manage was to hide behind a nervous chuckle, like a village girl behind her sleeve: “Matusevych, what have you done to me? I am not like this!”
    “Then you were like this in a previous life,” she answered, very serious, “you just forgot.”
    “You think?”
    In response, she stepped in closer, with that balletic move of hers, upward from below—and kissed me on the lips, running her tongue between them, which brought them, with a gasp, right back to life under the rolled-on lipstick, the feeling back in them again: her little tongue, in comparison to a man’s, turned out to be incredibly soft, tender, like an oyster pried out of its shell. I forgot how long it had been since I was kissed by a woman—at school, at summer camp?—and thought to myself, stunned: so that’s what we girls feel and taste like, some lucky bastards those men! Vlada withdrew and stood in the mirror beside me—a bloody smudge stained her lips like the hand mirror in that famous painting of hers,
Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident
. “Now wait, I’ll take a picture of you.”
    And I stayed there waiting, trembling a little—had she told me to slice my wrists at that moment, I would probably have done as she said. But she only brought back her camera—and casually, without aiming, shot off, like a good machine-gunner from the elbow-grip, a whole clip,
click-click-click
. “And now, the hard-est”—and she stood next to me again, with that bloody smudge across her mouth, holding the camera aimed at the two us in her stretched-out arms,
click-click-click
. A double portrait: the artist and her