The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

the outfit triggering Vadym’s Pavlovian reflexes, engaging subconscious machinery of memory and guilt? What an idiot!—like men even notice what a woman is wearing unless they intend to rip her clothes off.
    God...it’s too much for one day—feels like this morning was at least a week ago. And the intoxication’s passed, blew clean out, and I’m cold. I’ve got this chilly shiver running down my back—I might be getting sick; it’s flu season, and there’s this draft from the doors.... And, please, there’s no need to be yelling at me—I’m already tired beyond belief, and can’t possibly muster the effort to react to any stimuli, except maybe if he picked up a knife and went ahead and sliced me into halves like the circus woman in the box, only I doubt I’d come back together again—Aidy, can you do something about this? Why won’t he stop yelling at me?
    And look how red he’s turned—crimson, poor thing, the whole bald spot flushed like a jug of cherry liquor split under his skin. God forbid he “took a conceit,” as Aidy likes to say, meaning, had a stroke.... Only separate phrases break through to my awareness. (“Who’s the injured party here? What, was anyone injured because of me? No, no one can say that; go look as long as you want, you won’t find anyone!”) His monologue refuses to coalesce in my mind; it splits and shatters. Plus he is yelling, and I have trouble with yelling even when I’m fully awake—yelling in falsetto now—no longer a baritone—with hysterical girly modulations, which are also somehow fake, as if he’d memorized in advance the right way of screaming his indignity when he is suspectedof collaborating with the KGB. Or maybe, in all those years of leading a double life, he lost the ability to speak spontaneously altogether—just forgot how you do it, say what you think, without prepared notes in your mind? (“It was me they threw out on the street like a dog, and it’s your Ninél’s fault! Hers and hers alone! You can’t ever deny it!”)
    Aidy coos something soothing to him, as he’s done the whole evening—now would be a good time for me to make amends, curtsy peaceably, maybe even apologize, say I didn’t mean anything like that at all, tell them I want to go home now—stop, enough, enough of these memories, the ripping open of old wounds, of this eternal Ukrainian self-destruction. Aidy slaps his hands on the table like he’s slamming all the demons I’ve summoned back into the boards—enough, time to step out; it’s stuffy here, the ventilation’s crap, and it stinks like dirty socks—he can be squeamish, my Aidy, only it’s not socks, I think, detached as if in someone else’s mind: it’s the stench of decomposing souls. I’ve been reeling them in all day today, drawing them in like a thread on a spool—first Vadym, now this character, and if this is the new journalistic investigation that I’ve assigned myself to, I don’t want to touch it with an ten-foot pole.
    And that’s when Baldy bursts open with a new, no longer false, undeniably honest sound: hurried, the last blubbering argument from the shut-off tap, the triumphant cry of well-aged hatred. “But God sees it! He sees it all! Walked over dead bodies she did, and dead bodies she got—or did she think it would always turn out her way? Thought she’d have her bed of roses—first with her husband, and once she drove him to the grave, then with the daughter she’d make into a Big Artist? Vladusya the genius. Yeah right—stamped out a bunch of those folksy paste-jobs of hers, Ms. Cookie-Cutter. Sure they played in Europe, what doesn’t? It’s been a desert for God knows how long. The Brits give out their Turners for shit you wouldn’t believe, and everyone here’s just happy to play along—fancy that, a world-famous artist, drives a sports car! Not very far she didn’t! Now her old matinka gets what she deserved!”
    The next sound is that of a chair falling. It’s from under me—and I, on my feet, loom over the defiled table, like Lenin over a pulpit in an old Soviet movie, and yell, choking, at the lenses of those Beria glasses, something barely sentient and incredibly pitiful, something that begins with “How dare you” and instantly makes me want to disappear from the face of the earth. And when Aidy emerges from the ensuing brouhaha, from the snowstorm of the waiters’ white shirts and the dense smatter of faces that have turned to look at me, when he