“The Snake Queen,” prompts the brunette.
“Yep, the Snake Queen. The chick turns up in the palace and rattles off her list of wants, as if to her own mommy. She’s like a domestic savage, isn’t she? It’s like, for generations our women didn’t have the skills to teach their girls how to behave outside the home—you needed a man for such advanced politics.” [Forgetting herself, the painter bites her nails in concentration, but realizes what she’s doing and stops; her hand, in contrast to her petite figure, is substantial and strong, with a wide palm and unmanicured nails—an expressive hand, an honest craftsman hand. The nail-biting will get cut when the footage is edited.]
“And if we consider,” picks up the interviewer, [She works the idea like a thread, smoothing it out, reeling it around the spool.] “that the nineties gave us our first, for all intents and purposes, generation of single mothers, a generation of women who were no longer…” [She rounds her mouth again and leans into the word as if pushing against a locked door.] “afraid of raising a child by themselves, what kind of future, do you think, will their—our—daughters experience? Will you be able to ensure that your Katrusya is properly socialized? Enough so,” [A professional half-smile, caught in the corners of her mouth, puts the next phrase in invisible quotes.] “that she won’t lose her bearings in front of any snake queens?”
“I think so,” the painter answers after a moment’s hesitation, firmly and without a smile. [It is clear that this was the question she was trying to answer earlier with her fairytale ideas.] “I very much hope so.”
“Back to secrets—does Katrusya make them, like we did?”
“Are you kidding?” [The painter waves the reporter off, and laughs, with the shy pride of a parent outrun by her child.] “Kids only play computer games now. And, I must add, I think they do get worn out by being constantly bombarded with visual information—it’s like there’s this chromatic noise around them, all the time. Think of the world we grew up in—how much grayer it was…”
“Oh, yeah.” [The reporter groans from outside the frame.]
“How hungry we were for color. Remember our collecting craze—and for what? Colorful candy wrappers—the brighter the rarer!”
“And the more precious,” adds the journalist [with full professional competence, intent on getting all the facts straight]. “I remember how I envied a girl next door, whose father was one of the few people who got sent abroad every so often and brought her foreign candy—she had the most extravagant collection on our block; you didn’t know what to look at first.”
“Sure, I have stories like that too. And now, think how you made a secret. First you dug a little hole in the ground and lined it with something shiny, like a foil wrapper from a chocolate bar—and actually, such glimmering backgrounds that provide a deeper perspective are common for folk-art icons, the late ones, from the end of the nineteenth century, when they were being made by factory co-ops. You can still find some out in the country.”
“I never thought of that,” the reporter perks up. [She is like a bird dog that caught a whiff of game.] “But I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising: children’s games always retain rudiments of a vanished adult culture. Did you read this somewhere, or is this something that just occurred to you?”
“Give me a break, Daryna, where would I read this? We’re still waiting for a complete history of the Ukrainian icon and you want someone to take on little girls and their tchotchkes? But wait, the similarities don’t end there. So you have this shiny silver or gold background, and you lay out your design—with leaves, pebbles, whatever junk you could find, as long as it’s brightly colored: Candy wrappers, pieces of glass, beads, buttons—there were lots of fun buttons back then, everyone sewed, knitted, crocheted, you had to be crafty. You could add flowers—marigolds, phlox, daisies—usually to make a kind of a decorative frame, a border, which is also a common practice in Ukrainian folk art. So you had a little collage piece of sorts, whatever struck your fancy, and then you took a bigger piece of glass, like the bottom of a bottle—remember that those factory-made icons also came framed and under glass—and set it on top of the hole and buried everything again. Then, when you came back later and brushed the dirt off that spot, you’d see a tiny magical window into the ground, like a peephole into Aladdin’s cave.”
[The interviewer, who has been enthusiastically nodding like an A+ student at a favorite professor’s lecture, opens her poppy-red mouth to offer a suitably insightful comment, but the painter continues to talk, sending the reporter into another fit of vigorously affirmative miming.]
“Of course, this cannot be considered a purely artistic activity, nothing like when children draw or make up verses just because they can.”
“That’s it,” mumbles the interviewer, “that’s what I wanted to…”
“A secret’s main purpose was not to be beautiful but to be something that no one, except its creators, had the right to see. When you made one, with another friend or two, you couldn’t even brag to anyone else about how pretty it was; it was to be strictly private. The next day you’d come to the same spot—which you’d have marked with a broken branch or a rock—and check if your secret was intact. This was a ritual of the girly friendship, a sisterhood rite, something like that.”
“I remember how much drama there was around the thing.” [The journalist finally interrupts, her voice ringing dreamily with elegiac notes. She shakes her head in amazement as if she is just now appreciating the scale of a past disaster she’s survived by sheer luck.] “‘Gal’ka showed our secret to Darka!’ and for the next three days everyone’s miffed and tiffed, and it’s such a betrayal that no one speaks to anyone.”
“And the worrying,” continues the painter [with a sentimental gleam in her eyes], “when someone had come and moved the rock that marked the spot! A pack of little girls becomes wildly preoccupied: counting steps and trying to figure out if some trespasser really went after their secret.”
“And if, God forbid, someone did dig it up—well, that was a mystery better than on TV!” [Both women laugh a moist feminine laugh, low and deeply felt, as if they’d forgotten why they’d come together in front of the camera.]
[Two ladies in full bloom, well-kept, Mediterranean-tanned, and boutique-dressed (Morgan and Laura Ashley tops, silk Versace scarves, and Armani skirts, nothing showy, heavens no—not a speck of conspicuous consumption, none of the Moscow-edition Cosmopolitan brand of fashion that makes one look like an expensive whore—just pure class and apparent simplicity, the understated style of working women who know their worth and don’t need to advertise anything) with instantly younger, clearer faces and that radiant reticence in their eyes, the inwardness that women can preserve even when their souls find the most intimate concord, so that they resemble two young mothers adoring their offspring—as if watching, from the distance of many years, their children rather than themselves, or, even more than that, two suddenly ageless friends who just entered a pact over a secret, enacting an unspoken rite of sisterhood to which boys are not privy. This gives the boys at the scene—the director and the cameraman—an instant and suspiciously unanimous urge to take a break, smoke a cigarette, change the tape, do something to turn down the heat and announce their existence, to restore order to the world—as one does at home when one’s wife is too engrossed in a phone conversation with a friend, and one feels the need to let the wife know, in sign language, that she’s not the only one who gets to use the phone or, more desperately, by letting a plate crash to the kitchen floor. Take a break, girls, take a break.