The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

nineteen. And not because it’s been twenty years since then—there are no statutes of limitations between parents and children. It’s because, in her case—as she realizes very clearly—it would be unfair to judge her parents: they did give her something.
    She is lucky: she is “insane,” and it’s hereditary.
    She really had no inkling, before yesterday, of how powerful the instinct of resistance to evil would prove to be in her—more powerful than any desire or longing, than any possible temptation. And it wouldn’t have been this strong if her father hadn’t died because of it. And if her mother hadn’t approved of his choice.
    Incredible, but that’s how it was.
    Daryna feels a new, detached kind of respect, as if they were strangers, for this couple, Olya and Tolya. Otollya. Erased, shattered, destroyed—like the fairytale palace clad in gentle dove-gray shades of the interior, adorned by ornate shadows, the parquetry, the lamps.... Everything’s gone, nothing remains—nothing you can touch, show on TV, price out in hard currency. Utterly incomprehensible how this force could have passed into her. They didn’t even tell her anything explicitly when she was little, her parents; they didn’t exhort or admonish, just as all her classmates’ parents rarely dared confide to their children anything that did not fit with the commonly accepted modus vivendi. (Irka was only told in 1990 that her grandfather actually died in the Gulag and not at the front; and Vlada remembered, not without irony, how Matusevych Senior very secretly whispered to her, in the eighth grade sometime, that he was actually for socialism, but without Russia, but she had to keep mum about it, or else—this was enough to pack you off to the camps, people got seven years for less!) Daryna’s parents were no dissidents by any stretch either, and no textbooks would ever mention their names. They merely had the strength to do what they thought was right—and take the full measure of what one had to take in that country in return for doing so, death included.
    And somehow (How?) this strength of theirs—the one that seemed so wasted because it hadn’t translated into anything tangible—turned out great enough to confer upon their child her own margin of safety. So that in a different era, in a different country, packed with deaths like a can with sardines this child would remain alive.
    That much was true: she was alive, and no one could take it away from her.
    What was it Grandpa Nietzsche said? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger? Okay, maybe not everything. But sometimes, the thing that does kill us makes our children stronger.
    Still, she never wanted to have children of her own.
    And that’s when she suddenly remembers—all but slaps herself on the forehead, a habit of Aidy’s she’s adopted—breaking the flow of her mother’s consolatory monologue (which she hadn’t been listening to anyway, tuned it out, something about how “now” is not the same as “then,” and that things have a way of figuring themselves out). She remembers from whose lips she recently, this fall, heard that abrading, inappropriately official Anatoliivna. Amazing, actually, that she’d forgotten to ask her mom, totally crossed her out of that story with the Security Bureau archives where Aidy had gone a few more times, and all for naught: they kept saying they couldn’t locate Great-Aunt Gela’s case, and now what, no more movies for her, so what’s the point anyway? She remembers clearly, painfully, as if from a previous life, the sun-drenched corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska, their first assault on the newly built archives, her own single-minded focus on her quest and feels astounded by how happy she had been so recently—and how many unnoticed details she let scatter away from her sight in her happy single-mindedness, like pebbles from under the hooves of a racehorse barreling around the track—but there it is, the tiny rock, wedged into the cracked hoof, never would’ve thought of it if they hadn’t reined her in.
    “I’m sorry, Mom, can I interrupt you?”
    Olga Fedorivna obediently stops talking.
    “I keep forgetting to ask you about this one thing. Does the name Boozerov mean anything to you?”
    Silence.
    “Mom? Hello? Can you hear me?”
    Did they get disconnected or something?
    “Boozerov?” Mom finally responds—in a very surprised, young alto, the voice that had once belonged to a brunette in a