The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

so you can’t even see what color they are, and someone beside me (a woman’s voice) prompts with the name Mykhailo! and in this single glimpse—because in the next instant, the ocean’s smooth surface closes back on itself, and the dark mass of the whale’s body vanishes below it—I
recognize
him. I recognize what I’ve known ever since that night:
this is the man who caused Gela’s death—just like Vlada’s.
    This is what she wanted to tell me in that old dream of Aidy’s, my radiant girl, my radiant-eyed Gela Dovganivna—when she took Vlada’s seat at the table in the Passage. They
knew
, Vlada and Gela both, what I did not know: they had been cheated the same way—by loving the force that destroys life while that force pretends to be the power that rules it.
    And just as I grasp this, it’s gone. What’s left is Vadym turned the color of a beet in his sloppy sportcoat and droopy lilac tie—there he sits, chair turned sideways, holding his snifter of cognac in his hand, and breathing over it so hard you’d think he were waiting for something to hatch from it. And that’s it. And even my head—thank God—does not ache anymore, is clear as a bell now. And neither do I feel tired, not at all—although it must be bloody late by now, close to one in the morning...
    And with the lightest touch, very gently, so as not to alarm him, I push, just as he recommended, the button he was trying to buy from me—he must be vulnerable to this pressure now; he is without defenses, without his usual inch-thick armor.
    “Vadym,” I am not asking—I’m pleading; not a prosecutor—an accomplice: “Why do you think she died?”
    He startles, blinks at me, and looks down right away.
    “Don’t torture me, Daryna. I’ve racked my mind thinking about it.”
    “Were you fighting?”
    Despite what I feared, he does not bristle or go on the defensive—he is subdued like a little boy before his mom, when he knows he is in trouble. (So my warning did scare him; so he does have something to be scared of.)
    “That’s the thing...if only I’d gone out with her that day...or sent a driver at least...”
    But she didn’t let him. Maybe she didn’t even tell him where she was going. Maybe they were no longer talking as friends, were not talking to each other about anything at all—a two-level, 3,600-square-foot apartment has plenty of room to keep you from running into each other, and she left unannounced, without a “Bye, honey, be back in an hour”—just bolted through the front door, like a gunshot, and that was the last memory of herself she left him; the next time they met was in the morgue.
    “She was about to leave you, wasn’t she?”
    He looks at me with a growing alarm.
    “She told you?”
    “Yes,” I lie.
    I know how it can be; I’ve been there—with Sergiy, and with other men—know what a breakup is like when it takes you a long time to find the courage to do it. I know what it’s like when you have to force yourself to drag your own body from point A to point B like a corpse, automatically putting it through the motions it has learned by rote; what it’s like to have a heavy, impenetrable cloud of thoughts hanging constantly over your head, thoughts you’ve done laps around, the same track over and over: “How could this be?” and “What do I do now?” And then you stop suddenly in the middle of the apartment as if someone had ordered you to freeze, trying to remember vacantly, what did I come here for? Things are a little better when you lie in a bathtub and the water slowly washes away the solidity of your body together with the thoughts wedged in it. And another thing you can do is go for a drive, especially outside the city, on the highway; she used to love that—she said that was her way of resting: a monotonous motion, the even ribbon of asphalt unspooling before her eyes, the soothing flicker of trees on the sides of the road, rain against the windshield, the measured back and forth of the wipers, the rain, the rain.... Of course she went alone; she wouldn’t have taken a damn driver in a million years—one would have to talk to a driver....
    I can imagine how it was. How it all happened. I don’t even need to go there, following her tracks, as Vadym did—I just know.
    And he knows that I know.
    “Don’t torture me, Daryna,” he says. From his heart. And adds, “Life goes on anyway, you know?”
    As if he weren’t the one who spent the last two hours lecturing me