Room 2. From the Cycle Secrets: Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident
Daryna Goshchynska’s Interview with Vladyslava Matusevych
[The 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 laugh of 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 must forgive me; you know what it’s like for Ukrainian journalists: any foreign cultural coverage comes to us secondhand.”
“If not third,” the blonde interjects.
“Exactly!” the interviewer agrees. [She’s a little too eager, and both women laugh again, this time with a tinge of unanimous menace that suggests a history of shared grudges against various things national.] “There’s nothing we can do about that, so you have to tell your story yourself if you want motherland to be informed.”
“Remember the old Soviet joke,” the blonde says. [She leans over the table, so that her whole upper body faces her interviewer, and she resembles a cat about to leap into a tree. Now the cameraman can appreciate the resolve of her small, sharply featured face with its cleft chin, and he zooms in for a close-up.] “Why is there no meat in the stores?” [The reporter raises her eyebrows in exaggerated curiosity, bursting with a barely contained giggle.] “Because we’re making leaps and bounds toward Communism, and the cattle can’t keep up. It’s the same with artists who gain international recognition—the country can’t keep up.”
“And not just artists,” the reporter agrees, after she stops chuckling. “The same is true for our scientists who get hired into Western universities when their ideas don’t interest anyone at home, and for our intellectuals who follow grant money abroad because they’ve got nothing here. The country’s best minds are leaving in droves, and I’m afraid if this goes on at the same rate for another ten or fifteen years, we’ll all be running around on all fours by then. Still, Vlada, you and I are optimists, aren’t we?”
[The blonde narrows her eyes skeptically, taking aim at the next statement, which will determine whether she will, in fact, remain an optimist. This causes tiny creases to shoot across her temples, and for an instant, her face gains the heartbreaking sculpted perfection that will become fully hers in a few more years—the perfection of character manifest, which makes some women more striking in middle age than they ever were in youth—another two, three years and the blonde, if she remains a blonde will grow into her own and become perfectly, dramatically beautiful.]
“So what if the recognition you’ve achieved in the West today translates into little more than envy at home? Objectively,” [The brunette’s poppy-red, Guerlain-lipstick-stained mouth enunciates the last word with a sexy air-kiss, draws it out as if in bold italics—she is addressing an imaginary TV audience, not just her friend.] “you still work for the benefit of this nation, even when it can’t, as you put it, keep up, and in particular, loses track of its own rapidly changing ideas of itself which, to me, is an important issue.” [The blonde murmurs something affirmative; she must find the didacticism boring.] “Ukrainians are known to suffer from chronically low self-esteem, so every time one of ‘us’ is recognized by ‘them,’ it’s salve for our long-cherished national wounds. So, let’s talk about this thing, your show. First, could you explain the title, Secrets?”
“Well, the whole idea grew out of a game we played as kids: remember, back when we were little, in the sixties and seventies, all girls made ‘secrets’?”
“Of course I do! And here’s something—only girls did, no boys allowed, right?”
“Nope, strictly no boys, not even friends, I remember that.” [The blonde pushes away a strand of hair that’s fallen into her face and with it, it seems, thirty years worth of memories.] “I had a friend like that; we played house. I was Mom; he was Dad, but even he was not privy to secrets…”
“Not to change the subject, but I’d like to ask—when you were little, did you play more with boys or with girls? Because there’s this theory that all socially successful women are products of what’s called masculine socialization, meaning they were raised more like boys.”
“I don’t know…. No, I wouldn’t say so. No, we girls played like we were supposed to, dolls, clothes for them—I was the prime seamstress in our yard, I liked that a lot…. No, I think something else is important.” [She thrusts up her chin resolutely; her eyes flash, cat-like, and change color: a minute ago, as she was searching her memory, they were infant-like, watery-gray, but now, powered by a fully formed, ready-to-roll idea, they oscillate with a piercing steel-blue current—the cameraman must be in heaven. It’s not often that you find a face as expressive as this one, whose surface, like clear water, shimmers with light reflected off every motion beneath.] “You know what really made a difference? Being a Daddy’s girl. Dad was the key figure for me. He was the one who taught me to draw, you know, then took me to art school every morning; his word was law for me, for a very long time. I still consider him a much-underappreciated artist; some of his pieces are terribly interesting, especially his non-figurative works, but you know what the official take on abstraction was in Soviet times. Actually, this is insanely interesting when you think about it—I think you’re onto something here, with what makes women successful. All the girls I know, the ones who got somewhere, they’re all Daddy’s girls, and you are, too, aren’t you, Dar?” [The brunette nods silently.] “ You can find this even in folktales: it’s always the wife’s daughter, Mommy’s girl, who loses out, and the man’s daughter brings home a treasure—ostensibly because she works hard and the other girl is lazy, but what if the wife’s daughter just doesn’t know any better? Hasn’t been properly socialized, you know? She’s got no clue how to behave among strangers, what to do to gain their confidence, how to work behind the scenes toward her goals—she just blurts it all out, like to that sorceress…”