The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

once, playing a sopilka fife on the escalator landing. Never heard anything sadder in my life. Our folk music is not especially happy to begin with, and underground, laid bare by that frightful resonance, it cut like a knife, like the wail of an abandoned child. The voice of people that cryeth in the wildernesse. An abandoned sound—exactly what I feel like right now. Where the heck is that ocarina?
    Let’s get married, I said to her. I’m thirty-four already, and I’ve never said this to any woman before. My dad, in his day, tookMom out to a restaurant expressly for this purpose, and Mom got so emotional she splashed wine on herself. But on Lolly it made no impression at all. Meaning, she snorted, the way she does, like a filly, and tossed her head just like that and said, “So that what? There’ll be the stamp in the passport? So I’d be officially a home-maker instead of unemployed?”
    I was going to protest—what’s that to do with anything? Sure, I understand—what happened to her on TV affected her much more deeply than she admits even to herself: she has no concept of herself outside of her work. She simply doesn’t have an alternative role at hand; shake her awake in the middle of the night and ask, “Who are you?” And she’ll say, “Journalist!” She’s got all her eggs in one basket, as they say, and now that she’s had the basket taken away, my girl feels like she’s had her whole life stolen and can’t think about anything else. I understand exactly how she feels; I’m not an idiot. How could I not, really, after I’d gone through the same agonies myself—alright, maybe not exactly the same. I was twenty-five then and it actually seemed kind of cool to try something new, dabble in antiques—why not (just for the time being, I thought!)? Lolly’s situation’s totally different, and when you’re staring down forty there’s nothing cool about it.
    But only when she snorted her filly’s snort and said the thing about the stamp, which she’d already had in her passport once before, and then what am I doing (she didn’t say this but she might as well have) filling my—and her—head with this nonsense when she’s got some real problems on her plate, did it dawn on me that our notions of marriage are totally different. I am a Catholic, after all; never mind I haven’t been to mass in ages. And that for her it’s like this part of life’s been painted over with oil paint—like the window in our school bathroom that was painted halfway up and we boys used to scrape out various inanities on it with our penknives; then at the university, I remember, the bathroom window, exactly the same, and someone had scratched, “God is dead. Nietzsche,” on it and below an oval that was supposed to bea head, with a humongous mustache and hair standing on end, a thicket of straight lines—a portrait of Nietzsche maybe, or maybe the God that was dead.
    4.
Two Russian copper coins, “denga,” 1708, and “altyn,” 1723, both in good condition.
    Jeez. How’d I fall for this junk? Hoboes do better picking through trash—they’d laugh at this “business” of mine....
    I should’ve explained to her, like to a child: I’m not after the stamp, Lolly—I want us to be wed. In church, at the altar. I, Adrian, take you, Daryna, as my wife; I, Daryna, take you, Adrian, as my husband. In sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, till death do us part. That’s it, and what’s so fucking mysterious about it? And I would also like it, I would, Lolly, to be totally honest, like at confession. (Which you also did not understand that time I’d gone, why I’d done that, and kept asking like an anthropologist: What does it mean that you felt the need to go to confession? Did you mess up somewhere?) I’ll tell you straight, I would, in fact, like to have a little Lolly-tot race a tricycle around our place raising a ruckus and looking like you and me both at the same time—doesn’t matter a boy or a girl. I would like to hold his little hand in the street, and help him collect his toys scattered in different rooms, and sit at his little bed and read to him, and teach him everything I’ve learned in my life—even if I haven’t learned all that much. And that’s it. And Nietzsche, if I’m not mistaken, died in the loony bin after he’d first spent ten years eating his own shit.
    What are you afraid of? You tell me. What?
    You little terrified girl with tight little fists, determined to