The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

furious opinion, mommy right to do. Exactly asAidy loves recasting their first meeting in humorous terms, loves improvising, in jest, new treatments for the same plot—how he barged into her studio, and she hissed at him like a cat, but her legs, hey, he took good stock of those legs right there and then, and resolved he mustn’t let them slip by!—and she giggles exactly the way her mom did, and tosses snowballs back at him. Now she knows what a bottomless source of renewal it is for every love to return to its origins, to the beginning, and how all this play reaffirms in you the sense of having triumphed over life (because you can only play with what’s yours, yours alone, what belongs to you and what no one can take!).
    Now she’s sorry she was such an inept interviewer back then. That in her demands for a story she failed to remember the
details
—only retained a general vague image, like in a snow globe: her parents are young; they’re laughing; and their faces, back then, half-buried in the snowdrifts of time, are like a source of light inside the glass.
    “Why are you quiet?” her mother asks, across the span of thirty years.
    Why? Because that love’s gone, and nothing’s left. Unless, of course, you count her, Daryna Goshchynska. (Who was it that just recently addressed her by patronymic, and with a kind of suggestive emphasis, too?) Daryna Anatoliivna Goshchynska, a retired television journalist, not quite forty years of age, who is languishing in bed at eleven a.m. like a log, with cheeks wet with tears, and has nowhere to go—not exactly a great, when you think about it, contribution to humankind. It is foolish to think that children set something right somewhere, do some sort of justice, supply the crowning achievement, or a purpose for anything. Love has no purpose beyond itself—every love has its own life and its own biography; it is a separate creature.
    Once upon a time there had been a love in this world, Olya and Tolya—“Otollya” as they used to sign postcards to friends—had been and then stopped being. Just stopped, for technical reasons—in conjunction with one signatory’s departure. Andthat’s it? Just like that? You leave life, disappear from the screen, and that’s all it takes for your love to vanish, too? The love that had buoyed you up for years?
    She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t know how to ask her mother: What did she do with her love? Did she archive it somewhere inside, tying the strings into a dead knot? Or, did she switch its tracks like Kyiv’s streetcar drivers used to do back in the in the seventies—by hand, with an iron hook—and set to finish loving Uncle Volodya with the same underlived, interrupted love that was so cruelly mangled halfway? Was it really possible that it was
the same love
that still went on for her? Because all that savage energy of the soul that is called love—the one that can cut you down with the force of a direct blow when you’re dusting the desk on which he used to unroll his blueprints, or when you find in a drawer an old scarf that still holds his smell, or simply anywhere, for no visible reason—cuts you down, the tidal wave of it knocks you off your feet and all you can do is fall where you stood and howl like a beast without words: Where is he? Why is he gone?—all this energy cannot possibly just disappear, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?
    When she was young, Daryna did not think about these things, of course; back then, her only desire was to escape as soon as possible from her crippled family, which couldn’t do better than to hatch Uncle Volodya and his moronic medical jokes—one big taunt like a fart into navy sweatpants. And without any of that “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively” that once caused her departed father so much trouble. Unlike Hamlet, she acted, for being only nineteen, rather decisively. (Told herself as soon as she spotted Sergiy—this one!—and when, the following night, he, inflamed by her hurried, eager availability—take me, I’m right here!—drilled into her, thrown onto the sand, with his unexpectedly hard and hot member, she couldn’t help herself, even though she’d squeezed her eyes shut like she was at the dentist’s—so as not to see the instruments—and yelped with pain. Poor Sergiy all but got a stutter from the shock of this being her first time,enough to traumatize the boy for life. She was lucky it turned out okay—Sergiy was very