The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

dat,” Vasya proceeds to reason, businesslike. “Dat—yes, den—things happen. Dat’s better left alone, of course...Father said when dey had da church razed in dem village, all da ones who lent a hand dere—all were gone before da year was out! One fell to death right away—dropped off da belfry where he’d climbed to rip off da shingles. So da belfry just stood dere like dat—unstripped—no one would go up dere, until later, in da starvation already, dey trucked some soldiers in. But dat’s a church! I get dat, dat’s different. A skull—dat’s just a skull, of someone dead, and dat’s it!”
    Daryna has sat down on the edge of the couch and is hugging herself to contain the trembling. “Too many deaths.” That’s what Vlada said to her in the dream, the one in which she waslooking for “a bill of ward” for those deaths. So that’s it! That’s how things are.
    Another ripple of chilly shivers runs through her: the angel of death has gone by. The conversation she had with Vadym the night before, still undulled and uneroded, still living on in her memory, now stuns her with its macabre absurdity, like a madman’s grimacing or kids playing soccer with a skull: it’s cheekily caricaturish, grotesque incompatibility with everything that is now happening here in front of Vlada’s work. Daryna feels, all but physically, the dense heat the painting radiates—like a fragment of skin that’s just been ripped off a living being. Biker girl, life was her racetrack, and she was always the winner...to hell with all those victories, they’re not the point. How could all those bloodsuckers have missed the most important thing? You were a genius, baby. It came out of you with this uncontainable force; you burst with it. And how is it that no one had your back?
    “Too many deaths.” You’re right, absolutely—there are too many. Perhaps, when there are so many deaths piled up in one place, and there is nothing to ward them (And what should be warding them, what kind of a bill?), their accumulated mass creates its own gravity—and draws in new ones, again and again? Like an avalanche? An avalanche—of course!—only this is from an earlier history, of the Kurenivka neighborhood in Kyiv: in the fifties, the city had Babi Yar paved over too—they built a dam and for ten years straight pumped loam pulp from a nearby brick factory into the biggest mass grave in the world, to leave no trace of it. They even built a stadium and an outdoor dance floor on top of it—and in 1961 the dam broke and a forty-five-foot wall of mud wiped out an entire neighborhood in thirty minutes, burying hundreds of people—no one had their backs, either. And the bodies that washed out of Babi Yar rushed down Kurenivka to Podil together with the living who were swept up in the flood.
    As a girl, Daryna had heard her fill of horror stories of the kind this woman loves so much: about a child’s hand torn offand left in her mother’s grasp when the child herself was ripped away by the avalanche, about a pregnant woman, trapped alive in a cement bubble. Babi Yar rebelled, adults said, only back then one said such things in a whisper. In a whisper and with a pillow over even one’s cradled phone: Soviet superstitions had it that you could be listened to through your phone even when you weren’t talking on it. And then the stories of it slowly faded—survivors dissolved in the masses of newcomers, the city grew, and the newcomers never learned about the flood. They just went to play soccer in that same stadium, Spartak, which was so quickly built up again.
    The dead were the ones who took you, Vlada, weren’t they? Other people’s dead—exactly when your own life shifted and slid, losing its footing? They are strong, the dead; they can do things. Oh yes, they are strong. Lord, how strong they are. We couldn’t dream of matching them.
    This jolts her again. The woman will think Daryna’s got the hiccups. Or a concussion. One thought follows on another’s heels, in a series of spontaneous discharges, uncontainable like labor contractions or vomiting; after another surge, Daryna’s mind suddenly achieves final clarity: she knows now how it all happened then on the highway, “downa track,” at the Pereyaslav exit. She knows what the yokel’s afraid of—because he is afraid, has been the whole time, from the moment she recognized the cut-down canvas, glancing at her when he thinks she doesn’t see it, and then looking