The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

come and knew I
would never be able to tell her about it
—up till that moment, from the minute I heard, and later with Vadym, the whole time, my mind kept addressing her, sharing its shock with her, chastising—Why did you go alone, Vlada? and a million other trifling post-factum warnings—and it was still she I entertained, and soothed, and came to ask: Were you happy with this man?—but it was already like talking into a dead phone, and all I had left to do was hang up and let this terrible, slow current carry me irretrievably forward, without her.
    I understood that Vlada had died and I had remained to live.
    When Vadym returned and we started talking again—finally, the cognac took effect and memories burst out of him, randomand unstoppable—I said “she was” for the first time about Vlada and was surprised at how easily it came and how easy it was to continue, from then on, in past tense.
    This must be it, then—ground zero—when a new count is set to begin and a new system of coordinates takes root and reaches outward into the unknown. Time fills you in, layer after layer, like calcium encrusting joints, and the things and places that once bled with the dead person’s presence dry up and scab over with repeated daily use in this new time, the time “without”: the crosswalk, next to the movie studio where Vlada once sneaked her yellow Beetle behind me and stuck her shaggy, golden-wheat head out the window and hollered, “Daryna!” having been crossed another dozen times, sheds her presence and no longer hurts, becoming just another crosswalk; the windows of her apartment—the ones I checked for light as soon as I came out of the subway, the ones whose glow made me walk faster in anticipation of our kitchen-table talk after she’d put Katrusya to bed—first became the dark windows of an empty home, and then dissolved into a row of other windows, as if swallowed by a crowd, until one day, as I walked by, I realized I could no longer find them—was the first one the second or the third from the corner balcony?—and stood there on the sidewalk struck with my mouth open, like Lot’s wife, trying to remember the layout of the apartment, while lines from
Hamlet
swirled in my mind, “My father died within these two hours. / —Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.” (Or twice two years—does it get any easier?)
    Fighting a pile of old letters at home, in another useless fit of resistance against the expanding paper chaos, I recognized the hand on an envelope with such intense emotion that it pinned me to the spot like an animal in a spotlight:
This is from someone I once loved!
And only after I read the return address did I realize it was Vlada’s writing. Is it truly not the person that we remember, but only our own feelings attached to them? Does the loss hurt because it leaves us flailing, throwing our severed emotional limbs after something that’s no longer there? Only the places that wereunsoiled, untouched by subsequent visits retained the memories they originally held: the bench on Prorizna Street, next to Yama Café, where in the fall of 1990 the two of us sat burning our palates with “the double-halves” of coffee from Soviet cups with handles broken off to discourage anyone from stealing them, while below, in front of the Central Post Office, the not-yet-renamed Independence Square roared as a single body—its low drone swelled into one explosive boom after another, reverberating off walls, running quakes and shudders through window panes, all the way across the deserted city to the old Jewish market and the striking trolleybus depots—and the empty trolleybuses, their poles lowered and wires drooping like wet whiskers, stood aligned in two rows along Khreshchatyk, as if readied to be used as barricades; our faces felt the hot breath of stormy, combustible air—the crackling air of unrest that is released from the fissures between epochs like subterranean gases from between slipping tectonic plates, the air that picks you up and carries you along, air you can walk on, run on, shouting and not hearing your own voice. Our lips, parched after a day of standing on the square, burned as we passed our single cigarette to each other; we drank the boiling-hot double-halves and Vlada talked and talked without pause, as though she’d broken through many years of silence—about her divorce, about how things can’t go on the same, how life had to change, how it had to begin,