The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

aren’t a part of this game? We’ve no will of our own?”
    “Whose masses do, Daryna? Name one country. Or do you, by chance, believe that bullshit about history being shaped by the people? Don’t make me laugh; we don’t live in the nineteenth century! Seventy percent of people, according to statistics, wouldn’t know their own opinion if it bit them in the ass—they just keep repeating whatever they’ve heard. People are stupid, Daryna. That’s the way it has always been and always will be. People eat up what’s put before them. And you belong to the elite who have the opportunity to do the putting. So, please, do me a favor, don’t take that for granted.”
    He squints—quickly, conspiratorially—and again this flicker, like a shadow across the surface of the water (and I’m underwater; I am
under
the whole time; what gills do I have to breathe?) and a flare-up of another senseless hope: what if it’s a sign he is giving me (Before whom, in front of what third party or surveillance camera?), a sign that all this is not for real, that he is pulling my leg and I shouldn’t believe a single word he says? “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you”—was it Vadym who said that? (When?) But instead, he grows more solemn.
    “So when it comes to serious money, Daryna, only Russia is prepared to invest in us. That’s the reality.”
    In my mind, I shake off the water—droplets sit cool under my skin.
    “The foreign experts you mentioned—those are Russians?”
    “What does that matter?” he shrugs. “I am offering you the most interesting work a creative person could have, and right up your alley: take a dark horse, Vasya the gas-station-guy, doesn’t matter who, we can talk about that later.... You take him—and make him a hero! A leader! A cult figure with his own myth—you guys can figure out what that myth is, brainstorm something together. You’re creating your own hero, like the Good Lord from clay—how beautiful is that? And in the people’s memory that Vasya will remain the man you made him. It’s like a wholenew kind of art, right there! And with the widest appeal—even cinema can’t come close.”
    You couldn’t say Vadym spent four years with an artist for nothing.
    (Art, Vlada used to say, contemporary art, is first and foremost the making of one’s own territory, a discrete exhibition space where no matter what you brought in, even a urinal, would be perceived a work of art: modern civilization has allocated its artists a niche in which we can play with impunity, letting off steam, but from which we can no longer change anything in the accepted way of seeing things.)
    “That’s not art, Vadym. Art is what you don’t get paid for.”
    “Whoa there!” Vadym even leans back in his chair. “And when Leonardo da Vinci painted the Sistine Chapel—was he doing that for free now?”
    “Michelangelo.”
    “What?”
    “Not Leonardo—it was Michelangelo. You’re getting it mixed up with
The Da Vinci Code
.”
    “So Michelangelo, whatever. What’s the difference?”
    “From the client’s point of view—none. The same job could have been done by someone else. They were only paying for a canonical treatment, nothing else. That airy lightness that blows you away, and you don’t even know why—that’s just a bonus, it may very well not have been there. Art is always a bonus. That’s how you know it when you see it.”
    “Give me a break.” Vadym is visibly irritated by our detour off topic. “That was a different time, so of course the commissions were also different. The church is also a governing corporation, and, while we’re at it, it was the most powerful one of its time. Take a broader view, Daryna! Everyone does this, not just politicians—every person tries to create a legend out of their life, if only for their kids and grandkids. It’s just that not everyone can have this done professionally—that takes money...”
    And another splash, and again I am underwater. Why didn’t it ever occur to me to see things the way he talks about them? Aidy’s professor at The Cupid, the old poetess who shook her dyed tresses before me so proudly—they are losers, amateurs who simply did not have any money, and so were trying to buy me with what they had: their thinning tresses, gossip, lies, the peeling gloss of worn-out fake reputations. And there was more, more—crowds of random faces spill out of my memory as if from the opened doors of an overstuffed