The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

a father for Katrusya, because how could the child grow up without a father, and family friendships, and group vacations that could later be talked about on social occasions, and so on and so forth; an entire carefully knotted net that, by virtue of its own gravity, shapes your life without your participation, and it is only after the net is filled and the life’s minimum passing score is achieved that a woman can allow herself to let her hair down a little—have a solo show of her paintings in a trendy gallery, say, with the requisite presentation of a custom-suited husband who gallantly refills ladies’ drinks at the reception. Vlada, however, behaved as if she’d gone to a different school where they didn’t cover such things: She came and went mercurially, as she pleased, with whomever she pleased and where she pleased, looked fantastic doing so, and painted better and better, so that people began to feel intimidated, especially after she came into money, and it got harder to wave her off, dismissively—“Who, Matusevych? Give me a break! You call thata genius?”—because money, no matter how you slice it, has a way of validating its owner’s way of doing things.
    For some reason, people had the hardest time recognizing the obvious: Vlada was born with the gift of inner freedom that usually comes packaged with talent and without which talent has no prayer—without it, you’ll waste yourself chasing applause—and this surplus freedom, like a topped-off tank of gas, let her rev through any external rules that were put in her way without a second thought; Vadym, once he entered her life, could get into the backseat or could man the pit stops and time her laps, but she never thought of their union as settling down, and was irked when her girlfriends insisted on implying precisely the opposite when they congratulated her on, among other things, making such a rich catch—“I’m no pauper myself,” she’d snarl back, incensed. Already then I could see what would be crudely and unattractively revealed after she died: that she was not the only one to whom her inborn surplus of freedom and confidence gave the strength to keep her own council—it nourished everyone around her, all of us, including Vadym. Vadym first and foremost.
    Things I wouldn’t have noticed before now ached like fresh abrasions—such as the time when Vadym, drunk, sobbed, “How am I going to live now?” like a spoiled little boy who’s used to having his every wish instantly granted, rolling in a tantrum on the floor without his pants because there’s no one to jerk him back to his feet. “She set the bar for me!” and my mind went on adding businesslike entries to its spreadsheet: Is that so, then? You too, huh? At the funeral he also said, no longer hysterical and instead with measured manly grief, “She was the best thing in my life”—as if this confession could make our good Lord suddenly ashamed of what a great personal harm he’d done to the poor man, and again the ache grated through me: What about her, how are we to make meaning of her life now, isn’t that the most important thing? I could, of course, just blame his nonsense on shock: people are liable to blurt utter insanities in a state likethat, and men especially—nothing to do about that, they know neither how to birth nor how to bury; life’s hardest, dirtiest jobs are reserved for women—and no one would expect perfect style from the grief-stricken man.
    I guess I was still storing my perceptions for later, by virtue of habit—collecting and rehearsing them so I could share with Vlada, something I would catch myself doing for months—because at that moment, I recalled, as an animate voice in my internal dialogue, Vlada telling me, way back when, about the time when she was little and her father took her to the village to attend the funeral of his mother, the grandmother Vlada had never met. Vlada remembered waking up in the middle of the night and seeing through the open door the flickering candlelight in the other room: there, people were sitting vigil with the newly departed and the candles appeared to little Vlada to be growing into the darkness of their own accord, like fiery flowers, and she thought these were the fern blooms of the fairytales she’d heard, and even made a wish, only she couldn’t remember it; that night she heard the lamentation—“Real lamentation, Daryna, you don’t hear it like that anymore, not even in the