The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

moved, stroked her hair, and whispered “my baby” to her, and that’s when she burst into tears, burying her face in his gray, as she clearly remembers, T-shirt, into his chest, because after her father this was the first man’s hand that had stroked her hair.)
    Hamlet, to be totally frank, had a much easier time being decisive. After all, his father died a king, and the son had all the right to shove the two portraits into his mother’s face and point out: this had been your husband, and this is your husband, and tut at you, dear Mother. What assets did she, Daryna, have, except perhaps these memories of her early childhood, still warmed with love, elusive and tingling like a dream you can’t remember in the morning but that makes you ache with the sense of irreparable loss? And then, right away, the next frame: the yellow knobby bones with the feet sticking out from under the robe, the permanent, inextinguishable smell of urine around the home where you couldn’t invite any of your friends. (In the first months after the asylum, Father could only talk with great effort; his speech later returned, more or less, but the unpleasant strain in it remained until the end, like a person who’s crawling above an abyss and is afraid to lose his footing.) Nothing regal, nothing heroic at all—only the long, inescapable shame of a repressed teenager. And in this version of the play, Gertrude then tried, in vain, to make her daughter understand how much Uncle Volodya sacrificed when he left Father to die in the hospital and spared no painkillers for him: usually such patients were discharged, so they wouldn’t spoil the hospital’s stats with another exitus letalis. A perfectly fraternal act on her stepfather’s part, nothing like Claudius’s: all men of the same woman are in a way brothers (oh no, not all, she refuses to imagine R. and Aidy have anything in common; Aidy’s done nothing to deserve that!).
    “Mom, what if I asked you what Dad and Uncle Volodya have in common?”
    “He’s kind,” Olga Fedorivna responds instantly, as if she’d been waiting for this question for twenty years. “I’ve always told you—make sure a man’s kind, that’s the most important thing. Seriozha was kind. And Adrian, too.”
    For the first time this morning Daryna can’t stifle a smile: the ease with which her mom ties into the same circle her own and her daughter’s men—the ones she knows—makes her forget, for an instant, the bottomless bog her boss had tried to drag her into last night. Images of her life’s kind men spin before her like in the Hutsul arkan dance—they’re all brothers; they all must be introduced to each other, so they all become friends. The circle flickers gathering speed, faster, faster, as it blends into a single being, a collected radiance of a single gaze that glows with tenderness—this lasts no more than an instant, and the vision disintegrates, but, how strange; she feels ever so slightly better, consoled. Somehow, her mother has managed to break her out of her gloom, alleviate the fear of loneliness. No, she won’t bend over for them, hell no. What her boss offered last night was more horrible than solitary confinement. Much more.
    ***
    Once, in Polissya, Daryna got to see a quag—an unnaturally, acidly bright, motionless pool the color of light pickle mold in the middle of a marsh. From the distance, its utter stillness awed her: a blind, piercingly green eye of death. She remembers her sudden, intense urge to throw something into it—anything, just to break the spell of that uncanny stillness, to see, with her own eyes what it was like, what an end like that looked like, when the darkness sucks you in and there’s nothing to grasp on to; the mere thought of it makes everything inside go numb with terror, but still it lures, beckons to peek in.
    There was a moment in the conversation yesterday when she felt that same mucid disorientation. For as long as her boss kept trying to appeal to her ambition, the only emotion she felt boiling insideher was rage. Her ambitions were on a completely different plane, and the boss, while he may have been using the same word, had something completely different in mind. It was as if he stubbornly insisted on calling, say, a table a glass (like the one into which he kept pouring himself cognac, while she barely tasted hers, only felt a headache coming on) and expected her to do the same. He tempted her with access to a humongous—at least