Free The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko

you are looking at me, and there’s nowhere for me to go if I wanted to leave.
    “You’ll work it all out,” you say, and your certainty sounds unshakeable.
    I only now figured out why I felt so ambushed by your Ukrainian when we first met: you move through life with toomuch confidence. You’re too calm and composed, as if you have not the slightest inkling that one could be otherwise. Among those of us over thirty, who grew up with the constant awareness of our Ukrainian-ness, such natural, unconstrained dignity is rare: composure like yours, even posture like yours, requires three to four generations of ancestors unfamiliar with any kind of internalized social humiliation—not something possible yet in post-twentieth-century Ukraine.
    Give me your hand. So hot.
    You have wonderful hands; the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen on a man—strong, finely sculpted, with long, well-bred fingers. Why am I not Rodin, or at least someone in marketing? I’d put your hand on a woman’s knee and hold the shot. Buy Hanes hosiery. This must be the limit of my imagination, the best I can do—commercials.
    Don’t let me go, you hear me? I know nothing—I don’t even know if this is what people call love, or if I’m possessed again by someone else’s will. Sometimes I think I am. I don’t know what to want from the future and whether we even have a future. I don’t know anything. Just hold me, okay? Don’t let me go. Just like this.

Room 2. From the Cycle
Secrets
:
Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident
    Daryna Goshchynska’s Interview with Vladyslava Matusevych
    [T he scene is picture perfect, as intended: Two women, a blonde and a brunette, are sitting at a café table in the Passage on Khreshchatyk. Both are stylishly dressed and well groomed, both sport bare tan shoulders. It’s the end of August, when everyone returns from summer vacations. In the background, a waiter appears every so often, dressed in a white jacket and wearing the mysterious smile of unspoken understanding that is the trademark of all Kyiv waiters and the reason they all look like low-rank Hindu deities, while the truth is that few of them really know what they’re doing and most are deathly afraid of running into an unusual client—say, someone accompanied by a TV camera that’s currently installed between the tables. One notices the lovely play of light as it filters through the blonde woman’s hair, making it golden and translucent; in fact, it is darker than it appears but streaked with highlights the shade of ripe wheat to give her pale face, with its masculine cleft chin and small birdlike features, a brighter frame, without which it would certainly disappear in a crowd, despite her wide-set eyes. The colors have been chosen perfectly, and no wonder—she’s a painter. In the foreground, more colors contrast with the white of the tablecloth: a glass of dark-ruby wine, a voluminous tankard of Obolon lager with its bridal-veil cap of froth, an ornate pack of Eve Slims—the white-jacketed deity brings an ashtray as big as a soup bowl, but it’s black, better to move it out of the shot, take it off the table altogether, it draws the eye too much.] “Does anyone mind? Okay, this looks good; let’s roll.”
    “Vladyslava, we’ve known each other long enough that I can address you in informal terms even in front of the camera—and take great pride in that.” [Both laugh the conspiratorial laughof women who take pride in their age and are connected by something utterly inaccessible to men, which always inspires a vague unease in the latter.] “First of all, let me congratulate you on your remarkable accomplishment, especially uncommon for a Ukrainian artist—the Nestlé Art Foundation Award for your solo show in, correct me if I’m wrong, Zurich?”
    “Zurich, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne,” lists the blonde. [She has the businesslike intonation of someone long and well used to remarkable accomplishments.]
    “You