The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that—they were all supposed to be plain nobodies...unrecognizable.”
    May Pavlo Ivanovych hiccup gently over his lunch.
    A pigeon lands, shakes himself, businesslike, and scampers between the tables looking for something to eat. Must be local, this is his spot. Them pigeons, they must have the place divvied up like the mob—who gets the park, the square, the café. You could make a separate map—the pigeon Kyiv—with flight trajectories, high points where a decent pigeon can take five, and, of course, the places where they can always find some grub. Plus the warning signs: cars, cats—you see so many dead pigeons in the streets, so lazy they can’t even bother to lift their butts from under the wheels.
    “Still,” Aidy says, shaking his head stubbornly as if trying to chase off a fly that’s buzzing inside, “I’ve seen him somewhere before, I swear.”
    “You’re just like Mykolaichuk’s Vasyl in
The Lost Letter
: ‘Listen, dude, where’d I see you before?’”
    All of a sudden Aidy slaps himself on the forehead, and his eyes light up with mischievous little sparks.
    “And what did we forget, huh?”
    “What?”
    “Des-sert!” He makes horrified eyes. “We forgot about dessert!” And, twisting, he waves at the waitress. “What’s on the tray today?”
    ***
    The phone rings. (Not a bad opening for a script, Daryna thinks, half-asleep, anchorwoman at a still-independent TV channel—wait, nope, no longer independent, two days already not “in-”—and here a hot twist, a turn of the corkscrew in the pit of her stomach wakes her up completely. The previous day’s conversation with her boss rises in her mind. She didn’t dream it—but her train of thought keeps rolling, automatically, on its no-longer-necessary filmmaking track, not a bad opening for a script: it’s dark on screen, and in this darkness, the phone is ringing, an antique, prewar sound,
tiling-tiling-tiling
, like Alpine cowbells—you’re the cow, stupid, what antique sound? Those are the bells from the Milka commercial. Shit, brain’s stuffed so full of rubbish she can’t dig up what she’s really thinking from under all that. And why, in the name of grace, would anyone rouse a person at this ungodly hour—crap, it’s not early at all, ten o’clock already!)
    The phone is ringing, and she slowly forces her foggy head to face it with a sense of deep hatred for the whole world—whatever that world may have contrived for her during the night, she does not expect it to be anything good: it hurts everywhere her thoughts turn. Like she’s been beaten. Well, isn’t that what they did? Stripped and pummeled her like a no-good, truck-stop whore and tossed the body under the trees in the windbreak. Only there isn’t a dog out there who’d call the police if he saw it.
    The number comes up: it’s Mom. Oh no. Please, not this, not now. With Mom it’s even worse than with strangers: she has to parade in full splendor of your success the same as for everyone else, but somehow feel vulnerable as a cornered rabbit the whole time. And it doesn’t get more vulnerable than this, now.
    Nonetheless, she picks up obediently and presses the answer button: filial duty, nothing to be done about it. Hasn’t called her mother for three days—pay up.
    “Hi, Ma.” (God, just listen her voice—she sounds like a crow!) “How are you?”
    This question always elicits the same response: her mother starts talking about her husband’s complaints—Uncle Volodya is slowing down, little by little. He’s got arthritis, can’t really bend his knee anymore; he’ll need surgery; his sugar is elevated, needs another round of IVs—aging has recently become an all-consuming topic for the elder Goshchynska, and the younger treats it with the sympathy of a devoted sports fan, albeit one currently following a different league. It is really not unlike a match—only drawn out in time, with its own rules, which no one explains ahead of time, and, unfortunately, with a predetermined outcome: you’re being shoved, at first with small, and then increasingly more debilitating blows, off the highway and into that same windbreak. Your withering body, as it prepares to become earth, rehearses its decomposition through a collection of infirmities, sore spots, and affected organs; breathing and moving become tasks that demand undivided attention; the morning evacuation is an event that sets the tone for the rest of the day; and all this makes the