The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

and one of the adults would always pick her up so she could peek at the pictures under the glass—there were many, immeasurably more than in any book, she couldn’t dream of getting a good long look at all of them, and the incredible riches the adults possessed made her swoon delightfully—and that’s what it meant to be an adult: to have access to all the pictures in the world, like Ali Baba’s treasure caves, and she wished to grow up sooner, faster. And, well, it all came true just the way she wished, didn’t it? Of all things, she’s always had plenty of pictures.
    And again, a wave of scorching pain swallows her, so hot she has to bite into her lip so as not to moan out loud: rot it all to pieces; she really
was
good at television! What happened, that itwas no longer important—being good? Young journalists don’t even use this word anymore; they don’t say that someone is good at what he or she does; they say successful. A thief—if he has millions in offshore accounts—is a successful entrepreneur; a hopeless talentless putz—if his face is on every channel—is a successful journalist. And it’s us they learn from, Daryna thinks dully. Boss talks like that too, and not just about shows, but about people too. And he also says professional—that’s the highest compliment from him. Alright, let’s say so-and-so is a professional—and what about everyone else? Who are they? Amateurs? Then why the hell do they still have their jobs?
    They had been a team once—when was that? So long ago. That was her real youth, first and foremost because of its sense of unlimited possibility: the wild nineties, free-sailing—just show initiative and money took care of itself; suburban mansions popped up and burst as merrily as bubbles on the puddles under a spring downpour, but the air was thick with ideas, the air swirled and roiled with them! In their old studio, their very first one, set up in a rented factory warehouse (the factory had shut down, let them have the space for a song), they’d pull up their chairs and sit up into the wee hours of the night, drafting the program grid, arguing and yelling at each other; the crumpled stubs of unfinished cigarettes spilled from overflowing ashtrays onto the table, and when the smoke got so bad their eyes watered, someone, most often Vasyl’ko in his nerdy bug-eyed, fogged-over glasses, would finally get up to open the window, throwing a jacket over her shoulders on his way back. Where are you now, Vasyl’ko? On what meager Canadian pasture do you nibble your bitter grass?
    Last she heard from him was an e-card sent in late 2002, from some total armpit, Manitoba, where in winter the temperatures fall, like in Siberia, to twenty below, and the air’s so dry your lips crack to blood. What the hell was he doing there, in that desert? What was he wasting his life on? He was a natural—no one could draw people out like he did—he’d talk to a post and have it spilling its guts before you knew it. He had that effect on everyone,even the president, or, actually, back then just a candidate. (A remarkable show it was: that redneck never caught on that he was being stripped to his dirty laundry in view of the entire country and went all soft, started bragging about his poor postwar childhood and how back in ’55, dressed in his only threadbare suit coat from his native village, he rode in a coal car to take the institute entrance exams because he had no money to pay for a passenger ticket—and he shone, glowed with the sated pride of the victor who can now show the world a whole warehouse of suits in place of that old coat he’d ruined, and fine suits indeed!)
    Vasyl’ko was the first to locate this little spring that powered, as it eventually turned out, the whole wind-up mechanism of our so-called elites—their deep, lusty thirst for revenge for all those Soviet-time humiliations, and to hell with the cost: back then, in the nineties, no one could yet see that the only thing these people desired, as they took their seats in our TV sets with an increasing sense of entitlement, was to climb Kyiv’s hills (knocking a few floors off the old buildings—so they don’t block their view of St. Sophia) and throw, right there on Yaroslav’s grave, the triumphant feast of new nomads. Vasyl’ko wasn’t after some deep social analysis, and never forced any conclusions upon his audiences—he just knew how to
listen
; really, it couldn’t be simpler; how to listen to