The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

every time. But at the turn of the century it suddenly quit playing by the rules, lost its mind, and among the old, still comprehensible deaths squatted with growing impunity this new death—a death deranged.
    Young men were killed in their sleep by their hearts, which had never ached and then suddenly stopped; young women drowned silently in shallow bathtubs, under the shrouds of still-warm bubbles; a person tripped, fell on a sidewalk—and did not get up again. As if all it took were a single casual breath, a single careless tap of death’s fingers—and several lively, busy little shapes with logoed bags in their hands fell with phantom ease, like in a computer game. People did not notice that they ceased being shockedby the news of a classmate one hadn’t seen for several years no longer alive, a colleague one could finally pay back for that old loan long been buried. “Darn!” Yurko once griped. “He’d promised a tutor for my kid!” Death stopped being an event—people reacted the same as if the deceased had moved out of the country, making sure to erase the old addresses from their contact lists; death no longer demanded an explanation. Somehow, all at once, the tethers that held one to life grew loose—rotten threads that could pull apart any moment. As if in all the crowds that flowed through the streets, that flooded offices and cafés, supermarkets and stadiums, airports and subways, there was no longer, in all those people together, enough total life to require any kind of effort to pry a physically healthy person out of it. On the contrary, it took an effort to hang on to life. And to remain alive was a feat achieved by only a few.
    You prepared us for nothing!
Daryna wants to yell at her mother. You, the slave generation, submissive daydreamers with eyes wide open—what did you give us? What the hell is it good for, all your survival experience, your lifelong struggle in lines for a piece of meat, for imported boots and an efficiency flat with a separate room for your children, if the only thing with which you managed to arm us is your faith that the page had been turned—stomped out, forgotten, and now your children will have the good life, because we can earn as much as we want wherever we want, and no one will start a KGB file on any of us just for speaking Ukrainian? You couldn’t imagine a better world and so obediently buried your dead for it, without a shred of dignity, except maybe the tears you swallowed somewhere in a dark corner at night, and you did not even teach us to take pride in our dead—you silently acquiesced to the very thing that was demanded of you: to admit that they
lost
because they
perished
, and the winners were the ones who had stayed alive, with apartments, dachas, and Sochi—the successful ones, as we say, we who’d gotten this virus from you—to despise those who’d been left behind. You gave us nothing else, nothing at all, nothing but the pride in our own bank accounts and ourown faces on TV—you launched us into life, light as puffballs, and we blackened and burst as soon as our youthful vigor began to flag; you loaded us with emptiness, and now we’re passing it on to the next generation.
    All this could have been screamed blindly, with the inspiration of hatred that, once ruptured, shoots far in every direction, like an abscess that’d been swelling with pus for years:
It’s you, you; it’s all your fault!
And what a relief that would have been—to find, finally, an entity of which one could demand the account! But Daryna is silent. She resists the urge to leap upon this slippery surface and speed along with a surfer’s breathtaking ease—dear Lord, how many times has she witnessed scenes just like that between mothers and daughters? What terrible things were confided to her by the same old Irka Mocherniuk, who always said that her mother had castrated her father, and had screamed at her mother, at the peak of her own marital problems, that their entire generation should’ve been sterilized like they did in China so they wouldn’t have had any children? And Irka’s mother called Daryna and cried on the phone telling her all this, begging her to “influence” her Irochka, as if Daryna and Irochka still went to school together and sat at one desk. But Daryna herself is resolutely incapable of forcing anything like that out of her throat: it gets stuck. Unlike her friends, she no longer feels entitled to judge as she had when she was