The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

from somewhere else as further proof, while she, the mother, has already told her everything essential. “It’s not like hallucinations or something, God forbid!” (Oh yes, Daryna recognizes this, too; it’s their family legacy, the fear in their blood: it only takes one certified nutcase in the family, with a firmly affixed label—never mind that’s it’s fake—to keep them forever spooked, seeing the menacing shadow of insanity at every step. The “acute paranoid psychopathy” label they’d affixed to her father may not have implied any hallucinations, but “having obsessive ideas” was certainly enough for a diagnosis; and the kind of ideas considered obsessive were the ones you wouldn’t give up, even with such persuasive entreaties as a blow to the head on a dark stairwell.) “It was just me, thinking up this beautiful, beautiful fairytale for myself, just like the ones I used to tell you before bed when you were little. And I got so used to it sometimes, even at work during the day, I’d catch myself thinking that something really nice was waiting for me at home that night—the way it had been with Tolya.”
    Oh, so that’s the way it had been with Tolya. Daryna knows well this joy of a day brightened through, in every detail, by the anticipation of a night of lovemaking—only for some reason her mother’s naïve confession (which instantly opens the door to a whole pressing mass of other far-reaching speculations about her sexual life, with Uncle Volodya included, and her mother obviously doesn’t know how much she’s just revealed about herself, more than in the whole twenty years of their diplomatic negotiations) instead of moving her, reverberates in Daryna as a dull pain: an echo of her old filial revolt, perhaps, from which she emerged armed with an unassailable youthful certainty that she would never, under any circumstances, let any man dominate her, or maybe a vast, accumulated sympathy for her mother then and pity for her now, all at once.
    Daryna’s always known that she was a love child, and, as she got older, in her own relationships with men stumbled upon just such pieces of direct evidence, loosened up from the depths of herchildhood memories, that her parents had been very happy together. For decades, those childhood impressions lay preserved inside her, waiting for the searchlight of adult experience to bring them out of the dark: here’s their family, coming home from a walk, and Dad lets Mom go ahead of him on the stairs, remaining to stand, with the little Daryna, below, his head thrown back, looking up, and then rushes, laughing, to catch up with Mom, jumping over two steps each time, and they tussle and giggle somewhere up there, on the next floor, forgetting in that moment about her completely. The way Adrian loves chasing her up the stairs now. Though it’s Sergiy to whom she owes this discovery; he was the first to confess he couldn’t help himself when her watched her move from behind (back then, before she knew men, she received this information with acute curiosity, and instantly recalled the expression on her father’s face when he stood on the landing with his head tossed back).
    It took her until about second grade to wrap her mind around the notion that Mom and Dad at one point actually met each other as complete strangers, who may not have met at all, and then she wouldn’t be here—and then she set to deposing them with a prosecutor’s persistence about exactly how they met. You could say it was her first interview, and she remained quite unhappy with it as with all her interviews before today (yesterday, yesterday!). She was after nothing other than a ready-made story that would have shown conclusively that Mom and Dad did not meet by accident at all, that it couldn’t have been otherwise, and that they’d fallen in love at first sight and for all time. And Mom and Dad, like a pair of high-school punks, stole the initiative and took the game in their own direction, incomprehensible for an eight-year-old. They goofed, shot, outdrawing each other, completely irrelevant, as they seemed to her, details, like snowballs, interrupted each other gleefully, mocking.
And you said...
—No, it was you who said...
—Pish, I’d never. Who d’you think you are
?—Yeah, right, you just keep saying that after you couldn’t take your eyes off of me! Mom giggled like a girl who got a note from a boy in class—something she had no, in little Darynka’s