The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

in that story, all over the place really.
    Boss had made his name with that horror clip about bald children, but no one remembers this fact anymore, and he himself never brings up his early days. Another man died then, his body the roadblock to any further independent investigations. Another man paid for the boss’s career.
    But she didn’t even remember this, wasn’t thinking about that story at all during their conversation! The precision of her aim was something akin to what a body does in a moment of danger, when it knows which way to duck, all by itself. You just poke with your finger, not looking—and lose the whole arm to the gooey mess with the requisite dose of someone’s blood in it.
    That time in Chernivtsi, Daryna explains to her mother, it was, presumably, an accident at a military plant to which the authoritiesnever granted access. Moscow managed to close the case just before the Union fell apart. A rocket fuel spill, most likely. Who knows whose security services were involved—Moscow’s or ours—the fact remains that someone badly needed to have the whole story hushed up, whatever it took.
    “So what you are saying,” Mom says, straining to digest the information, “is that the gentleman who was investigating the case was, in fact, murdered? And that your producer knew about it—and kept quiet?”
    Why is it, exactly, that she finds this so hard to believe? Daryna feels something like her old filial exasperation.
    “Mom, you’re like from Mars, or Venus, or something! What, Father’s colleagues didn’t quietly make their careers on someone else’s blood? When they’d driven the architect to killing himself—and then made him the scapegoat—and they all, except Father, signed the denunciation like good boys.” Now, wouldn’t it be interesting, flashes through her mind, to meet with those people now, whoever’s still alive, and see who they’d become. Do they also moonlight in human trafficking when business is slow? And while we’re at it, let’s see how their kids turned out, an instructive little show indeed—and suddenly she sees what she could’ve done with her father’s plot in which she could never find the story. Now, when she can’t make anything, barn door closed and no horse in sight, as Aidy says. “You’ve lived your life with all that, and now you’re surprised?”
    “Yes, but that was
then
!” Olga Fedorivna protests. “Times have changed!”
    It’s like generational egoism in reverse. Everything bad has already happened to us, and our children start from a clean slate. And the children cheerfully trot off into the world convinced that that’s exactly how things’ll turn out, and the parents egg them on: go on, kiddo, we’ve done our time, but you’ll have the good life now—lots and lots of it, all you want. And the kids, aside from this blessing, are armed with nothing, go bare as a bone. Stripped naked, that’s the thing.
    “We all thought so too, Ma.”
    If only one could know where “then” ends and where “now” begins. And how stubbornly blind this self-preserving human faith is—the faith that a clear watershed divides them. That it’s enough to turn the page—start a new calendar; change your name, passport, seal, and flag; meet and fall in love with a new man; forget everything that had once been and never (even alone with yourself) remember the dead—and the past will be made null and void. But there is no watershed, and the past pushes at you from every pore and crack, mixing with the present into dense inseparable dough—and you have very little chance of flailing your way out of it. Only we keep on consoling ourselves with our childish illusion that we can control the past because we can forget it. As if our forgetting would make it vanish, go away. Like Irka Mocherniuk’s rug rat when he got angry at her for slapping him and threatened, “I’m gonna make it all
dalk
for you now!” squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could.
    Still, Mom can be forgiven, Daryna thinks—she did spend her working life in a museum, after all, got used to a cataloged kind of past, ordered and pinned to the corresponding dates, like a collection of dead butterflies: here’s “then,” and beginning from this point it is “now,” all nice and tidy. When Daryna was little, she loved visiting her mother at work. Back then, all the exhibits in the museum’s halls were above her head, glassy glimmers up there, mysterious and unattainable,