The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

finally, for real. “We had no youth, Daryna,” she said, meaning the students who’d lain down in the square and no longer got up—the students on their backs, face to face with the sky, their features starved into seraphic transparency, their suicidal headbands with the words “hunger strike” etched meekly in white on their foreheads—and we envied them because, unlike them, “we had no youth.”
    Vlada’s verdict cut me to the quick—it was so brutally true; she always possessed that unsparing clarity of vision, an astonishing degree of honesty for a comfortable Soviet girl. I felt the same as she did, but she was always first to recognize and articulate what it was, and as I listened to her then I felt, for the first time, a stab ofanother thought, one that I had been afraid to acknowledge—that my own marriage had expired just like hers, and I had to find the courage to tear it apart soon, to sever it surgically before the rot infected the two souls entangled in it. The world melded into a giant, rolling mass; our lives, and the only era we’d known, were falling apart in front of our eyes, and they were being ground down to irreducible solid specs that could then be sucked into the dark maelstrom of history. We had both married very proper Soviet boys, handsome and nice, college and, later, graduate students; and it was only when time came crashing down around us that we realized that these proper Soviet boys, so handsome and nice, feared nothing more than growing up—that an insurmountable horror of the adult life in which one had to make independent decisions had lain latent in them like an incurable virus, and it took nothing less than an utter collapse of the social system that had relied on men just like them to bring it out. Vlada had sensed all this a step ahead of me and was first to jump ship, to paddle her one-woman rescue raft away, with the infant Katrusya at her breast—I don’t think I would’ve had the guts were I in her shoes, but then again, I didn’t have the guts to have Sergiy’s child either. She had not a shred of fear in the face of the unknown; her whole being hummed, aimed at the future, as though she were set atop a tightly coiled steel spring ready to pop, and the energy she contained charged me, too, giving me some of the same confidence—she was wearing a black leather jacket that day, and I remember thinking with a smile, in a sudden rush of tenderness, Biker girl! All she needs is a white helmet...
    The bench on Prorizna is still there—after they closed Yama Café, they turned the place into a casino so it no longer serves as the perch for bohemian smoke breaks and now sits empty most of the time, on a blank slab of asphalt, no longer hidden by lilac bushes that were cleared to make a parking lot for the casino-bound Mercedes and Porsches—the only surviving monument to that autumn when we were, as it turned out later, still young, so young that we didn’t even know it. Because only youth, havingfound itself straddling a widening chasm between two eras, can leap forward with an easy heart, away from its crumbling past, can send whatever has been to the trash, like a bad draft, and set out, at not-quite thirty, to “live for real”—it is only youth that has the arrogance to cross out the years that have not satisfied its ambition: time teaches you to waste nothing, to savor unhurriedly, like wine, things that years earlier you would’ve brushed aside on a princely whim, thinking, as young Katrusya said whenever she missed her bus, “Dey’ll send us anoter one, bettuh.” Time teaches you that no, unfortunately, they won’t.
    Vlada had ten more years exactly—ten berserk years of living “for real,” at the speed of a Harley barreling down a mountain road (with Katrusya in her backpack); ten years in which she, a single mother without any material resources, except the studio on the Andriyivsky Descent that she inherited from her father, transformed herself into a truly accomplished artist, possibly the most successful painter in Ukraine—if you can measure national success in foreign sales, of course (although lately even our homegrown fat cats have begun to warm up to the idea that owning a Matusevych is badass), or in foreign sales and Ukrainian envy, because the latter is far more precise and sensitive than money alone: money, after all, is relative, and no one ever has enough, but envy always circulates in reliably high supply, and the more