The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

high-pitched soprano squeals again—damn, she’s loud, should be singing Mozart or something.) I have to smoke. The curious part: no more internal squishiness, none of that drizzly whining of the drunken French fiddler. It’s all gone, shut off. Like a sudden change of weather. Simply: the man with whom my friend had once fallen in love turned out not to be the person she’d thought he was. A crappy and rather trivial turn of events, basically. Of which the crappiest part is that the friend has moved on to a better (one hopes) world, and the man who had once babbled to me incoherently in an empty apartment—“I killed her”—goes on presiding over great flows of money from his office and responds to my claim that his class brethren, his fellow minders of, perhaps, the very same cash flows, intend to use television as a means of netting girls for the sex trade, by telling me he has more important affairs to attend to. Affairs of state, damn it. Of the state.
    “Fuck this state, Vadym” (and representatives therein, I added mentally) “if things like this can be the norm!” At this, Vadym, sniffing offendedly, advised me to be realistic. Translated from representative-speak: quit being stupid. But—that’s a chore, asAidy’s dad says. Once a person’s stupid, you can’t do much about that. One could, I imagine, have put her wits to work and figured out, in advance, that the sex business, for Vadym, does not constitute a good enough reason to rush to anyone’s rescue. That, when he himself needed rescuing from the Misfortune-That-Had-To-Be-Endured that had so unfairly befallen him, he must have tried, besides Svetochka, any number of professional masseuses for his orphaned dick, and found them precisely on the same market that the
Miss New TV
show is intended to supply.
    Everyone makes use of prostitutes, sure—that is to say, everyone who can afford to—why should our elected representative be any different? Is he a man or what? It’s a man’s world, sweetie, nothing to be done about that, nothing to be done, and you just have to be realistic. The more Svetochkas out there, the easier it is for solvent men to endure everything they are supposed to endure. To bear their cross and be pillars of the state—the poor thing’s about to keel over, like the tower of Pisa.
    I’d better stub out this cigarette. I’m getting lightheaded.
    I asked him about Katrusya after he said that—how’s she doing at school? Does he keep track of that? Vadym thought it was my way of changing the subject and started telling me, happily, how he picked her and some friends of hers up from school just the other day. Quite a sight for a pervert’s imagination: this big-screen, well-massaged, tightly fleshed at the nape, and everywhere else, Humbert Humbert in his Land Cruiser, smack in the middle of a whole flowerbed of sweetly aromatic Lolitas—girls at that age still smell almost as divine as babies, of vanilla or something like that. I’d give anything to know if fathers ever get erections at the sight of their pubescent daughters. Right, like anyone’d admit to that...Vadym believed (and if Vadym believes something, then that’s the way it is) Katrusya had an easy time with her studies; she could get all As if she tried just a bit harder, but (he believes) it’s not the most important thing. Of course not. And does she watch TV? Vadym still wasn’t catching my drift. You know—what would happen when Katrusya watches this beauty contest, girls,you know, need such things, especially at her age: to have a universally accepted standard of beauty before them, something to aim for—and then around eighth grade or so, she’ll want to send in her own picture to be considered for the contest.
    “But you’ll warn her, won’t you?” Vadym smiled with the charming immediacy of an adult talking to a child, and I was simply floored—floored, and for a moment fully capable of believing women could find him attractive, even a woman like Vlada. The smile was absolutely genuine, a good, beautiful smile. He wasn’t being dishonest or cunning—he really did not see here a Problem-That-Had-To-Be-Solved situation. And if Vadym doesn’t see it, then it’s not there at all.
    I did not ask him, after that, who would warn all the other Katrusyas around the country—the ones who do not go to the British Council School and for whom television is their only window to the world. And I did not even tell him that I resigned