The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

rises to his full monumental height and waves his arms like a conductor over the orchestra pit where the band’s gotten drunk and is now banging out a loud cacophony, I cede my pulpit to him and flee in a most undignified manner. Tripping and painfully slamming my hip into a corner of a chair or a table, blindly ripping my coat off the hook—out, through the doors with their desperate squeal of hinges, into the rancid, soggy, oily gloom the streetlamps are swimming in, down the stairs, coughing and slipping, to the thump of my own boots—and only on the sidewalk, where I stop, do I notice the napkin clenched in my hand: When did I snatch it, and what for, I wonder—was I going to throw it into Baldy’s face?
    Night, snowdrifts, streetlamps fringed with mist, clouds above Prorizna running fast, so fast, unwinding into streaks of smoke above the bluish glow from the moon. When I was little, Mom and Dad used to take me for sled rides at nights—they’d hitch themselves to the sled and run down the long winter street, and one time I fell out of the sled on a turn and just lay there, in a snowdrift, a well-padded bundle. In the minute or two it took my parents to realize what had happened, the whole universe came crashing at me, alone—like an astronaut out of his ship, in open space. I remember the sky above—a star-dotted blackness—and the incomprehensible, cosmic silence, the likes of which I never heard again. When my parents returned, noisy and laughing, I already knew the world was different from what they were trying to make me believe it was. That a person was alone in it. And that to cry—something I remember they werevery surprised I didn’t do—was futile. There was no one to cry to under this sky.
    I don’t know how much time has passed—maybe a minute or two—when the quick scrunch of snow under a familiar step calls to me from behind my back—
slush-slush
, the thick vapor of breath, the dear smell of a tobacco-scented coat, aftershave, warmth, skin—home. Keys jingle. “Baby, don’t—here, get in the car before you catch a cold on top of everything, come on.”
    And only now—after I turn to him, bury my face in his chest, in his dear smell, clawing through the soft fabric of his scarf, between the lapels of his cashmere coat, pressing, burrowing into his whole self, as if digging deeper into the ground to escape an artillery attack—do I finally let all my tears run at once, all of them, accumulated, it seems, over twenty years—from that day when I cried into Sergiy’s chest, the first man to whom I opened up. I let loose with a single blast, as if the cork were knocked out of me with one terrible, hiccupped sob, and the weeping that had sat all day in my throat like barking, breaks out. Like dogs barking.
    Mama, Mommy. Aidy, Aidy. Don’t let me go.
    ***
    “You asleep already?”
    “Uhm-hm...”
    “You’re kind of different with me now, you know?”
    “Uhm-hm?”
    “And when you enter me...inside...it’s somehow different...I don’t wait for the climax anymore, you know? It’s just, you’re inside me, and that’s it. Like in a dream. Or like breathing.”
    “Is that good or bad?”
    “You silly. Good, of course...it’s good. Go back to sleep.”
    “Come to me.”
    “What, again?”
    “Yep. Again and always. What were you even thinking putting this shirt on?”
    “Listen, do you believe that? What he said about Vlada’s mom?”
    “That she ratted him out? I think so—why else would one hate someone else’s wife like she was family?”
    “No, not that. The part about Vlada’s father—that she killed him? Do you believe something like that could happen?”
    “Your feet are still cold, you little goose. Here, let me. All kinds of things happen.”
    “Have you ever been with a woman like that? One who is killing you, and you know it—day after day?”
    “I forgot. I forgot everything that was before. You’ve got the wrong guy to interview.”
    “What do you mean, wrong guy? Who else am I gonna ask now?”
    “You’re funny. I want you. All the time. Can you believe that?”
    “No, listen...earlier in the day even, when I left Vadym’s place, I was thinking the same thing about Vlada. That she had no other way out, with Vadym. That it was like a tunnel, you know, where you can only move forward. What if it’s always like that: When one spouse dies, it’s always the other’s fault? No wonder they didn’t much care for widows in the old days...or