The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

of it that roils around you, the thicker and more noxious its vapors, the more certain it is that you have risen, damn it, risen above the crowd.
    (As if she did it on purpose, as if she’d stood up from the trenches and let the sniper’s bullet find her. As if someone up there cared that we shouldn’t rise too far above anything, that we should toe the line. Inch forward, slowly—not the way she wanted it, “for real.”)
    It is always on Prorizna, when I pass the orphaned little bench on its bare knoll, that the stubbornly offended, purely childish thought—It’s not fair!—pops up like a forgotten buoy and hits me anew. If there’s still someone up there who enforces the rules, then it was even more unfair of him to rip her out of a life that shelived full tilt (literally) like a crock dentist who pries off a good tooth—Oops, sorry, a bit of a mistake here, but you can’t put it back, can you?
    Vlada herself must have been more than a little cross after she’d been deposited in the next world so unceremoniously: the very first night, while her body lay on a morgue shelf, she appeared in my dreams unusually furious—in her studio, wearing those same threadbare overalls and rummaging through drawers in search of something; she waved me off when I called out to her, desperately, with my whole being—meaning, leave me alone, I’m busy—and said something truly bizarre, something about “a bill of ward” that she urgently needed because “there are too many deaths.” I memorized those words exactly because, although the language of dreams is as impenetrable as that of prophecies, it is incapable of untruth and therein lies its central distinction from what we say and hear in daylight; it is our perception that skews the dreamt messages, “instrument bias” as scientists call it, and that’s why whenever I manage to preserve something I heard in my dreams until morning I write it down verbatim, even if it sounds a hundred times less meaningful than what I heard Vlada say to me on that first night, especially since, as it later turned out, on the same night in Vlada’s mother’s apartment, where Katrusya was staying, lights spontaneously went on and off in different rooms, doors opened and closed, and the girl cried out in her sleep, “Mama!”—apparently, Vlada was searching there too, searching for her bill of protection, but against what? And to be given to whom?
    At the funeral, the teary womenfolk chatted themselves into the consensus that Vlada must’ve been looking for the lost paintings, the “many deaths” referring to her subject matter, and one gallery curator, turned irretrievably kooky on canonically dogmatic Orthodox grounds, blurted out what would feed the whispering, watery-eyed gluttons in certain circles for a long time hence: “You must not toy with a topic like that, you know?”—not without a dose of moral superiority, like someone officially tasked with watching over cosmic justice (Vlada couldn’t stand these born-again typesand called them “the church CheKa”). The men, who generally held more positivist views, found a different interpretation more appetizing right there at the wake, especially after they’d had a couple drinks and the quickest of the ladies joined in and went to work with their knives and forks. To them it was quite obvious that Vlada had been “marked,” and for quite a while, “’coz everyone knows you could hire a professional hit man for five hundred bucks on a slow day, and a single one of Vlada’s painting would fetch many times as much, enough to whack your own mama—Five hundred, ha!” “Didn’t you hear on TV the other day? Just outside Donets’k, someone dug up a grave the day after the funeral to pull ten hryvnas out of the dead man’s suit pocket that a neighbor saw the widow put there.” “No, that’s not what I’m talking about, stuff like that always happens, I mean professionals, for them to slip a car into a ditch, especially off a wet highway, is easier than falling off a log!”
    And so the conspiracy theories spread and knotted one over another, growing more incredible the further they spun away from the actual event, and it was no use trying to talk sense into the people who’d never seen, other than on TV, either Vlada or Vadym (whose imposing representative’s figure at first thoroughly discombobulated the police; I remember seeing an inspector in the maelstrom of kin and friends, and a few others,