The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

you been reading that crap with a flashlight under the covers? Sure, over in that drawer—there should be a new pack. Yep, that one. Are you supposed to eat this with a fork or a spoon? Aidy, will you get a move on—I’m starving! Oh, it’s the candleholder you wanted to show me? Oops, I’m sorry, I got distracted by the candles—so, yeah, let me see...cool.... What is it, copper? Bronze, huh. And how do you clean it? Or is supposed to be this...pickled color? More like mold on a pickle, actually—that’s exactly the color, isn’t it? Super. I love it. Weighs a ton, too! Wow...it’s like in that Lesya Ukrainka story where the lady companion cracks the old baroness’s skull with a candelabra just like this! The one in the story is bronze, too. If you take a good aim, and really swing it...no kidding. A multifunctional piece. Alright, where are those candles? Let’s have the picture complete. Hang on, let me turn off the lights...uh-huh. Doesn’t go with our kitchen at all, but in a large house somewhere in the suburbs, where you could put it on a marble mantle—sure, it’ll look great. Or like, in a dining room, in the middle of an oak table the size of a tennis court....
    Have a buyer yet? And how much do you charge for this beauty? Some more, please, I haven’t eaten.... So is that what’s paying for the banquet?
Mm-mm
, this is great! Say it again? Gnocchi? I get it—it’s like galúshki, only Italian.... Thank you, that’s good for now, or I’ll get wasted on an empty stomach...
mm-mm
. Potato dough? And then what—I’ve got spinach, cheese, garlic—and something else.... Whatever it is; it’s fantastic. And you made it all yourself? With your crafty little hands. See, Aidy, it’s like I said: you onlyget better with time.... Thank you! Who’s the buyer—that big fat marmot of yours with piggy eyes? No, I actually like him—you can tell the dude’s pretty sharp and not completely without taste. He sounds like he’s really into antiques and that tells you something right there; he’s not like all the other ones, the ones that buy music halls for their sluts...yep, and TV stations. You just had to rub that in, didn’t you? Alright—
cin cin
! Nope, prosit is German, and we’re drinking Chianti, so you gotta say it in Italian.... Smell that! This wine’s alive and kicking, I tell you what.
    (Please, I can’t cry now, not now—he’s been so sweet, I don’t deserve all this—and why do I have to wind myself up like this. I’m like a vibrator, pardon my French, with the off switch busted—just buzzing, buzzing all the way home, and why, one wonders? So what, he had a dream? People dream things all the time—it’s just a dream, nothing special about it; so what if his subconscious replaced Vlada in my footage with his great-aunt Gela? Put a known entity in place of the unknown one, that’s perfectly natural—all it means is that he thinks about me even in his sleep, looks for me, feels where I am and what I am doing at the time—because he loves me, my Adrian, sweetheart, sunshine, darling.... )
    You know what? Your ears move when you chew. I swear they do! Do like this...see, see! That’s hilarious. Not true at all—not everyone. What, now you’re gonna say mine do, too? No, I don’t believe you, wait, no, let me see it in the mirror....
    (Why did I forget—how could I forget, so it only now comes back to me: Vaddy—that was how Vlada addressed her Vadym, not in public, of course. God forbid. And not when she spoke about him in the third person—she was always fastidiously proper, buttoned-up like a graduate of a young ladies’ pensione, not for her the vulgar familiarities of mere mortals—she always referred to him by his full name, and I only heard this domestic one once or twice, when she let it slip accidentally, like when you lean forward too far, and a button comes undone on your blouse, and everyone glimpses your underwear. One of those times may have been the night when the two of them came to visit, and Vadymbrought a bottle of Courvoisier, which he proceeded to drink by himself because Vlada and I preferred wine. Something irked her enough that she forgot herself for a moment and addressed Vadym as she did at home, in private—“Vaddy!”—followed by something really sharp, angry, nothing like the nice-but-firm tone that women use to put a check on husbands who may be enjoying themselves a bit too much, those half-jokes designed to preserve the