The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

retelling, in being fit together; this is the only thing that’s important to her at the moment—to redub and edit yesterday’s footage in her memory into such form as can be turned into an asset and lived with from now on.) All she needs is a grateful audience with supportive oohs, but her mom keeps falling out of character and darting off track, still somehow failing to grasp into which molds she’s supposed to fitand to turn into ice. She’s getting old, that’s a fact: losing her flexibility, losing her quickness. But “roaches”—there’s something to it: Mother does have a feel for words, not for nothing did she write poems when she was young, but then again, who didn’t back then, in the sixties. The boss now strikes Daryna as not unroach-like at all, despite the fact that he never wore mustache. It would fit him. A sort of neurotic jerking of the nose, which became more conspicuous the more nervous he got yesterday—like he’s constantly smelling something disgusting. Antosha even maintained, for a long time already, that the boss had to be doing cocaine, and after last night Daryna was inclined to believe it. A man can’t just live in that cloaca; he’s got to do something at least about the smell.
    “You know what I’m really sorry about, Ma? That story I had planned for next week, did I tell you about it?”
    “You never tell me anything.”
    Here we go—the guilt trip.
    “That’s not true, I do. The story was really heroic, no spin—about a surgeon from a district town in Donets’k Oblast, one of those, you know, mining ghost towns where every living thing has fled, and three-room apartments go for three-hundred bucks, and whole city blocks stand vacant. The surgeon’s salary is two-hundred-and-forty hryvnas, less than your pension. So, he gets called to emergency surgery in the middle of the night, and runs out—the streets are dark, no lights—and falls into a hole, and breaks his leg; then crawls like that, one leg broken, all the way to his hospital somehow, where he does the surgery. And only afterward lets them take him to the trauma unit—they had two gurneys ready after the surgery, one for the patient, and the other for his doctor. Men like that still live in this country. Tell Uncle Volodya so at least his colleagues will know.”
    What she does
not
say, because it smarts like a fresh cut, is how she’d spoken to the man on the phone just the other day when arranging for the film crew. He had a wonderfully kind voice, cozy like felt slippers, and he stuttered a bit, must’ve been takenaback—imagine that, TV was coming all the way from Kyiv to talk to him.
    And right after that they called her into the boss’s office. What Donets’k Oblast? Who cares? Forget it! Boss even switched to Russian as he always does when he loses self-control. The Donets’k Oblast was now to be portrayed as a land of sweeping prosperity, practically Switzerland, or better still, not portrayed at all. And then he said that thing about her heroes—that no one needs them; the show is cancelled. How to look that doctor in the eye now?
    And Mom, having ooh’ed at her daughter’s every word with hungry attention, proceeds to rub salt into the fresh wound. She waxes poetic that exactly, exactly the people like this surgeon are the backbone of this country—like she’s tapping her pointer on an exhibit for the benefit of an invisible tour group: “These are the kind of people who hold this world together, have held it since creation, and they must be known! Because when you don’t know such people are out there, it is very hard to go on living.”
    She is speaking about herself, Daryna suddenly realizes. About how she once had to go on living without that knowledge—for how many years? Seven? No, more than that—living as the wife of a certified schizoid. Engineer Goshchynsky had also once crawled like that at night along his very dark street with a broken leg—until they broke his spine, too. And all around, everyone else was normal, and no one crawled anywhere—people bought furniture and went on vacations to Sochi. Like we go to Antalya now. Those who didn’t go did not have a voice then and don’t have it now, and we’re better off not knowing they exist at all.
    A museum worker made eighty rubles a month. Uncle Volodya, a rich man by Soviet standards, after the wedding also took his Olya to Sochi. They wanted Daryna to come, too, but back then she was so angry that she signed