The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

charges. There were special instructions about that, I’ve read those.”
    “Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Daryna feels herself blush at this memory, the way she snorted, snapped, stomped her foot like a little Billy Goat Gruff. And what do you know, Pavlo Ivanovych is basically family! Somewhere in the same archive where Olena Dovganivna’s case is buried, sit Pavlo Ivanovych’s reports about Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna, year of birth 1939, Ukrainian, unaffiliated, married, husband—no, that’s no longer relevant, it’s best to skip that field.
    “A pleasure to know that she’s raised such a famous daughter”—with the Russian stress. Because what—she might not have raised one? The retired terrorist, doe-eyed Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov with his substantial behind and liver crusts in the corners of his mouth, loving father of a Conservatory student wrote, thirty years ago, when he didn’t yet have those crusts and was making his career in the so-called field operations, a good report about her mother. Are we to understand that if he had written a bad one, Mom would’ve been, just like Dad, thrown out on the street, or, worse, would’ve gotten a prison sentence? And what would’ve happened then to her? God knows, but nothing good, that’s for sure—political prisoners’ children didn’t even get access to higher education until after the Soviet Union collapsed. She’d have landed in some horrible children’s home, most likely. Or maybe Aunt Lyusya would’ve stepped in, taken her to live with her in Poltavshchyna? Even then, her chances of growing up to be famous would’ve been zero; that’s probably why he said what he did. She’s not going to stay famous for long, though, and, generally speaking, it is not at all clear what she’s supposed to do with herself from now on—but that’s not Pavlo Ivanovych’s fault.
    And at once she’s overtaken again by that same, vestibular-like, short-circuit dizziness that happened to her once before, in the spring, the day she stayed late at the studio watching her interview with Vlada and Adrian called to tell her about his dream. For a fraction of a second—this can’t last longer, a living human being can’t take this for much longer—she is carried upwards by the speeding elevator or a giant Ferris wheel—not above space asin Vlada’s painting, but above time, above yesterday’s office with the boss’s gesticulating little shape inside it, and reflected from it, in direct retreating perspective, the other, 1987 office with fake, leather-padded doors, above the wet highlights of the Dutch tile roofs behind the hotel window, and still further, through an enfilade of rooms opening into each other, where a seventies’ kitchen boils with the pot of bubble-swelling laundry on the stove and the puddle that had been the snowman spreads on the rust-colored painted plank floor, and her young father stands on the landing with his head tossed back; from above, in bird’s-eye view, for a slipping tail of an instant, she sees it all pulse together, set into motion like cracked-off hummocks in the world ocean, plugged into some giant, boundless power field, and sees the thin—flickering and countless—dazzling threads running through it all, piercing her life—and stretching beyond it, beyond the horizon of the visible to compose a deliberate, no, deliberating, living design, Dovganivna—Adrian—Boozerov—Mom—herself—Vlada—R.—boss—captain.... Another moment, whose very imminence fills her with knee-buckling awe, and it seems they all, living and dead, will push their times together like chairs to a table, will take their places in the plugged-in map of the stars and everything will become clear—what, everything?—but nothing.
    The moment passes, the whole picture, without ever having come together, scatters into pieces, into flat shards of memories with which you could never erect the Tower of Babel, and Daryna is left sitting on her messy, crumpled bed, blinking at the curtain brightened by the sunlight to egg-yolk yellow with the shadow of the window frame on it like a cross distorted in a magnifying glass.... Threads, her mind turns over belated like a hard, sticky piece of candy that won’t crack. Threads, thready threads. Mom—herself—Boozerov. No, that’s not right: Dovganivna—herself—Aidy—Boozerov. No, she can’t bring it back; it’s all gone. Again, like that time in the