The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

wanted to show off to her mom, and what stayed in her memory—the next frame stamped into her mind—was her mom wiping away the puddle on the kitchen floor, wringing out the rag into the sink and crying. That was the first time she’d seen her mom cry, and she didn’t grasp right away what was happening—at first it looked like she was laughing, only somehow not her usual way. What happened there, in the interval between those two frames—why was she crying?
    Mom—Retired Snow Maiden. The long-established script dictates that it is she, the daughter, who must supply prompts in their conversation—lines like ready-made molds that the mother eagerly fills, scooping up snow with both hands. And this pause that is now spreading in the receiver like the puddle on the floor (Daryna even remembers the floor: plank, painted brown with oil paint, with pale crescents of scratches where a table had been moved), while the daughter hurries to swallow her tears and mentally wring herself out into an invisible sink, regaining her abilityto pretend, this pause is like a flood, rising quickly, quickly, ever quicker under the neutral strip they’d constructed between them. Another moment and the whole pile will shift, slip, and slide, and the daughter won’t be able to babble that everything’s fine (couldn’t be crappier, really—meaning, it could, of course, but someone’d be calling an ambulance then). It’s just that she was still asleep, and she hasn’t called because she’s been busy, tons of work, barely keeping her head above the water. (No worries, she’ll soon be unemployed and free as a bird—actually, what is she going to do then? Hang out online for twelve hours a day? Have Mom teach her all her recipes and wait, dinner on the table, for Aidy to come home? Aidy told her not to worry, that he could support them both—said it with a proud note in his voice even, or at least that’s what she heard, and she got upset, because she saw the typical male egotism in it: Couldn’t find another time to boast your financial potency? Boasting probably couldn’t have been further from his mind; it’s just she, oozing her wounded suspiciousness of everything and everyone, like toothpaste squeezed from a tube—the defining characteristic of all the defenseless and humiliated. How quickly she takes on this role!)
    All of a sudden, Daryna becomes truly scared: she sees herself in the emptiness of a moonlit landscape, in the zone of absolute loneliness, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis—your misfortune isolates you, and afterward you have to learn to live anew, and with the people closest to you as well. How will she manage that?
    In 1987, during Daryna’s pre-graduation field studies, she was suddenly summoned into the chancellor’s office, and from there taken to the First Department where a shortish KGB captain with shifty black eyes (
swoosh
—the red ID fold-up card opened under your nose;
slap
—closed, no time to see a damn thing, except maybe the captain) prattled about who-knows-what for two hours straight, like wind blowing sand at her from all sides at once, and then offered her an opportunity to “cooperate.” By that time she was so worn out by her futile attempts to pin down the directionof their schizophrenic conversation—no sooner did she feel she’d almost grasp it than it slipped through her fingers again—which jumped from vague mentions of her departed father, who, it was never quite clear, was either “not guilty of anything before our government” and all but paved the way for perestroika, or somehow posthumously obliged her, Daryna, to correct his mistakes (Which ones would those be exactly?), to heavily loaded, ratty hints about her classmates, the friends with whom she hung out at Yama Café on Khreshchatyk, and then abruptly to a completely fantastical “underground organization” that the captain’s institution, ostensibly, had uncovered at the university. The captain himself didn’t even pretend that he believed any of what he was saying; it seemed his only goal was to determine how much and what kind of hogwash he could dump on her.
    In the whole two hours, she never once managed to catch his eye, as though the little black orbs moved by their own logic, different from that of regular people—the way, they say, you shouldn’t look shepherds in the eye because the dogs take it as a challenge and might just lunge for your throat. All in all, it was like having a