The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

country!”—she said it was like singing, a single musical phrase repeating itself, rising, sweeping up, as if running uphill, then sliding back down, helplessly, worn out like the van that took her and her father to the village through late autumn mud, wheels spinning on every hill, and this monotony contained a kind of all-embracing uncanny clarity, as if only this, the monotony, could truly express the beauty, and the agony, and the vanity of human effort on this earth. Little Vlada sat spellbound under her massive sheep’s wool blanket, afraid to breathe, her every bone gripped by the universal mourn that knew no consolation, and the female voice went on singing-wailing that one phrase, brimming with words, spilling out all deeds and affairs of the departed, listing them to someone intangible who was not in that room, as if it washed over them, one by one, and by doing so transformed them into noble regalia that shone brighter than gold, so that Vlada didn’t grasp right away that the songtalked about her own grandma, whom she’d never met and who now lay there under the fiery dome of candlelight and would not rise again, no matter how she was implored, with the terrifying urgency of futile pleading that is known to men as despair, “Oh, rise, rise again, my dear, my bosom friend, my sister.... ” Vlada didn’t remember any other words—and they were not meant to be remembered, the lament an improvisation that is only sounded once and is not repeated or recalled—but she did remember a man’s low, slightly coarse voice murmuring from just outside her door in approval, “That’s some fine lamenting,” and that’s how the city child learned that the song was a lamentation and that it had witnesses other than herself, that there was an audience that had gathered to appreciate it. In that instant, Vlada said, the magic was gone: the mourner turned into a kind of an actor, and soon after she finished, Vlada caught her voice out of the general low hum of women’s voices—very businesslike, common, as if changed into dry clothes; it was answering someone or giving someone instructions about where to drape the embroidered rushnyky and how many. “I went back to sleep with this bitter feeling,” Vlada remembered, “as if I’d been cheated.”
    Now that it was she who lay there, pillowed in a heap of flowers, her name struck me anew every time it was said during the liturgy, as if jolting me out of sleep—Lord, receive the soul of Thy servant Vladyslava, and pardon her her sins, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether witting or through ignorance—Vladyslava? This is about her? Lord, Vlada! Vladusya, no!—and tears burst from my eyes like from busted pipes, as I watched them lift her coffin, the one that cost “a fortune” and looked small as a child’s—you didn’t really notice how tiny Vlada was while she was alive; there was so incredibly much of her while she talked, moved, and laughed, and maybe that is why she looked held down by force in her coffin, not just dead but really killed, beaten in, and held up to be ogled, to expose how really defenseless she was. As she lay there like that and we stood around her and tried to utter something (I did, too!), and all our words wereso small and pathetic—who could possibly give a damn about who she was to you, mister?—so ill-fitted, even if you put them all together, to measure the thing that was her interrupted life, the same words people would use to talk about other things, after they got home from the funeral and sat drinking tea in their kitchens, that’s when I could tell Vlada I’d have given anything to have someone do “some fine lamenting” over her as they once did over her grandma. I could have told her what we didn’t know before: how your throat swells with your enormous, tumorous muteness, when you don’t know this forgotten ancient ritual, the only one, as it became clear, fit for minutes like these, the one meant to wash a person’s life just as someone washes her body, as common words could never do, to wash—and raise it above the crowd’s heads to be seen above the coffin, to make it fine. This is not cheating, I said into the silence of my dead line; this was art, Vlada, only no one knew it anymore, and I didn’t either, and the only thing that would come out of me, had I dared to give my soul shape with singing, would be the half-choked mooing of a wounded cow.
    And after this—slowly, drop by drop—the