The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

forget?) “after I make it all clean, and you’re already asleep—that’s when I was fit to climb up the wall! And no sleep, none, no matter how much I’d worn myself out. I better figure something out lest I lose my mind, I thought. So I thought this up: I’d lie down and close my eyes, and start playing movies in my head. I’d lie there and imagine Tolya’s come back already, so handsome, finer than before, and that they restored the Palace Ukraina the way it was at first—I’d see every little piece of parquet in my mind, how they’re laid out, like shadows, this chimerical optical effect it made—and that they’re giving Tolya medals up on the stage, everyone thanking him for saving such beauty, saying it’s all his work, he did it.... Everyone rises, and applauds, and they bring in flowers, big basket arrangements, and set them on the proscenium like on an opening night—and I’m sitting in the box, in an evening gown with open shoulders; Tolya used to say I had Bryullov shoulders and it was a sin ever to hide them, they were a national treasure...” (Daryna remembers her mom’s bright yellow dress, also, yes, with a portrait collar—her high neck, hair done up; the dress had lasted until she met Uncle Volodya, who must have also decided that such shoulders shouldn’t go to waste—Mom must’ve worn that dress for at least ten years, not much room for new clothes in eighty rubles a month with a teenage daughter.) “and I’d lie there like that, and dream, and dream, all so nice, like I’m putting a spell on myself—until I fall asleep. All the while knowing perfectly well, crystal clear,” Olga Fedorivna chuckles again, as if confessing to some childhood mischief, “that I’m making it all up, that it’s not there and won’t ever be—but it still feels better. Like a sort of drug.”
    “Daydreaming,” Daryna squeezes out, trying to make it sound considered (all diagnoses always sound considered, even the deadly ones). “It’s a term in psychology.”
    “Really?” Olga Fedorivna responds absentmindedly. The fact that a secret game she’d invented for herself and never told a soul in thirty years (One wonders, what does she talk about with her current husband?) has apparently been classified, named, andfiled in the corresponding drawer with a label on the front, fails to impress her.
    Generally speaking, Olga Fedorivna has little patience for generalizations, an instinctive distrust of them whether they are scientific terms or political concepts—she doesn’t hear them, doesn’t remember them, still doesn’t know the difference between liberalism and democracy or what a civil society is—they’re all men’s games for her, only relevant to her own life inasmuch as they can one day ruin it.
    It occurs to Daryna that she’s inherited from her mother much more than she’s used to thinking she has. Her ability to play movies, too, it would seem—only Daryna’s movies have always been played for a wide release, always with the question of how to transfer them to the screen and show others, and her mother’s were produced for an audience of one.
    Now that’s a show she’d love to make: Wouldn’t it be something to capture on film all those fantasies people spin inside their minds to help them survive? Daydreaming on screen—television of the future! A great project, one has to admit, especially for a retired anchorwoman. Well, now that she’s been retired (No, after she has retired herself; let’s be clear about that!), she’ll have plenty of opportunity to dream up, without any constraints, like her mother once did, as many wonderful, sleep-inducing projects as she pleases, never worrying about bringing them to life. She’ll be the creator of her own private virtual reality, protected from everyone’s dirty hands. Clean ones too, unfortunately. A magnifi-cent prospect—might as well go hang herself right now. Really, not that different from getting on the needle.
    Still, something in what she’s just heard gnaws at Daryna, something’s stuck, like a fish bone between the teeth, and she stubbornly keeps pushing her tongue there—to pry it out.
    “Daydreaming can be dreaming while awake. Or dreaming with one’s eyes open. Dreaming in a conscious state.”
    “Of course it’s conscious, that’s what I’m telling you,” confirms Olga Fedorivna, as if she’s surprised that her daughter hasn’ttaken her words on faith and needs to have something translated