The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

very important business, when she said the thing about banditry and whoring—that she was not about to be part of that, and she realized that Vovchyk
would
stay, under whatever ownership, and
would be part
of that, and was offendedby her determination
not
to, by her instantly taking away his one shot at not feeling like a piece of shit while he did what he was going to do. Here’s the first person who’s
happy
to see her go; start the count, who’s next?
    Of course, she was in no danger of eating mashed potatoes for lunch and dinner—she was merely in the same danger that awaits all outsiders: the danger of loneliness. Sit at home with your man (and thank the Good Lord that you have a decent man!) and eat your moral superiority all you want, while life races on without you. As soon as you disappear from the screens, everyone’ll forget about you—better people have been forgotten. It’s not the movies, hon (as Antosha says), not some classic locked into a vault, with a small chance of coming back to light one day—this is television. The show must go on. And she’s always been in public and with the public; she loves the public and is used to being loved in return—and how’s she to endure all this now, on moral superiority alone?
    And, almost surprising herself, not thinking about the words, just the way it bursts out of her, head first into the deep end, Daryna asks her mother, “Mom, did you believe in Dad?”
    Pause.
    “I mean, when they took him away?”
    Mom understood the question—remarkably she is not surprised by this turn of their conversation; she is simply looking for words she doesn’t have readily available; she’s working through the thickets of the many years of silence inside her.
    “I knew that everything he was doing was right.”
    “Did it make things easier for you?”
    “Sweetie, is ‘right’ always easy?”
    This comes out with such overwhelming, ancient sadness that for a moment Daryna is petrified. Her mother may not be a hero, but you couldn’t call her stupid either.
    “No. Not always.”
    Both grow silent then, sensing themselves on unfamiliar territory and hesitating before the next step. Olga Fedorivna suddenlychuckles softly—from afar, as if really from the other side of thirty years.
    “You know, I never told you this...when Tolya was in Dnipropetrovsk...” (This Tolya startles Daryna like a tang of a string: usually Mother says Father or Dad, but now she is talking about a man she had once loved, and not to her daughter but to a grown woman, maybe even to herself.) “in daytime I could somehow manage to keep my mind busy—at work, the tour groups saved me, and then I had to find food; back then it was another full-time job, to stand in all those lines. I remember on a Sunday once I’d gone to every market—Zhytni, Sinny, Lukyanivsky, Volodymyrsky—no meat anywhere, they all sold out before dawn! And you had anemia then, and the school doctor said...” (How strange, Daryna thinks—she remembers none of that, only remembers that her period started later than other girls’ and for a long time she was troubled by the feeling that she’d suddenly slipped from the top of her class in everything to the bottom, and when she finally “had visitors” she was so thrilled she bragged to another straight-A student, Oksana Karavayeva, “I’m a young woman now!” and Oksana sneered into her face and said, “So go buy yourself a medal!”) “you had to have meat, even if just a little, even mixed with bread into cutlets, and it was all just empty shelves all around. I’ll try the Besarabsky Market yet, I thought; that’s a chance. So I went all the way there, and it was getting dark already—and they were locking up, right under my nose.... I just fell against a wall and wailed out loud! That I cried, that was the first time—after they took Tolya, for a long time I couldn’t. Went all hard inside, a piece of wood. At night, after I was done cleaning, washing everything...” (Daryna’s memory helpfully retrieves the long-forgotten: the humid haze of laundry in the apartment, steam from the sheets being boiled on the stove, windows in the kitchen fogged, and the wooden handle from an old butterfly net with which her mother, hair wet and face glistening with sweat, like a dockhand, turned the bedsheets, which distended into giant bubbles above the rim of the enormous pot. Did she do laundry almost every other day onpurpose back then, to help her