The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

all in uniform caps and with identical shifty looks of small thugs caught red-handed). They wouldn’t hear that A) no signs of any contact with another vehicle were found on the smashed Beetle; B) the investigation was able to reconstruct, rather competently, the path traveled by the car as it swerved off the highway, which C) made the crash a clear and conclusive accident, to the great relief of the police, who nonetheless purported to keep looking for the lost paintings, although you didn’t have to be a genius to guess that they’d never be found, unless, I don’t know, someone tripped over them—and what Ukrainian cop, if he still had his wits, would wear down his soles chasing after some “pitures,” no matter how many times you tell him that they cost more than some stolen Volga?;and, most importantly, that D) we do not, thank Lord, belong to the EU, regardless of how hard our anointed leaders thump their gelatinous chests to make precisely the opposite point, and one would be hard-pressed to find a decent art-thieving mafia in the deep ass that is our independent-of-any-rationality nation, where a modest bribe to a local official lets you carve out a piece of a brick wall with any Bruno Schulz fresco you fancy, or any fresco for that matter, anything, really, and the pickings have been slim ever since our last Goya and Ribera were sent to Moscow for “conservation” in the 1960s, never to be returned, just as no one intends to give us back the gems of the Tereshchenko collection that Grandpa Lenin himself traded off to Armand Hammer for his relief effort in 1921; so, no, it’s been a good half century since a self-respecting art thief could find regular sustenance on our lands, not to mention the fact that one needs a good network of legitimate art dealers to smuggle things out, and, as our cameraman Antosha puts it, Where the fuck do you find yourself some of those?
    Ukrainians, as any preschooler will tell you, focus on much simpler, homely things: arms, drugs, non-ferrous metals, poached Carpathian lumber, girls “for work in Europe”—fail-safe operations, with good cash flow, and who needs academies and shit like that; let things take their course, the country’ll find its way; let all those nutty artists and other trash feel secure as they would in their mommies’ bosoms for the simple reason that no one gives a flying fuck about them; let them live and graze, if they can find themselves a pasture.
    Vlada and I talked about all this a million times, laughing at especially burlesque episodes, such as the time she bought her apartment—a transaction that involved a change of clothes in the bathroom stall at the real-estate trade exchange to release a money belt packed with fifty thousand sweaty dollars from its rather erotic captivity under Vlada’s bodysuit; don’t let anyone tell you that money doesn’t smell, but who would have thought twice about the little woman as she marched down the street, wrapped in layers of baggy knee-long sweaters like an onion? Justlike that, Vlada went all over the city, and outside the city, alone with rolled-up canvases in her car because no one on God’s green earth would ever want them! Folks, think about it, I wanted to tell all those scandalmongers who wouldn’t give up on their murder mystery involving a famous artist and unimaginable wealth (three paintings, in fact, which together might have fetched ten thousand dollars on a good day in our kind of market): What would your hit man do with those paintings? How would he go about turning them into cash? So, of course, I laid it all out—my iron-clad logic of A, B, C, and D, and so on—as soon as anyone mentioned the topic (And the idiots just wouldn’t let it rest, would they?); for the longest time their openly disapproving response remained a mystery to me: Why did they always behave like I was taking something away from them? Like I came to steal something precious? At the same time, parallel and yet more outrageous versions seeped out of some dark corners, like water trickling from under the door of a flooded bathroom: one was that the accident was Vlada’s way of killing herself, and what shocked me most was that this version was popular not among the casual, nothing-better-to-do observers, but among her own people—the painters she knew, all of whom suddenly felt compelled to voice their personal, unique eyewitness accounts about the last time they saw or talked to Vlada and how they