The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

from my channel—why? Clearly, the media and everyone involved were low on Vadym’s priority list at the moment; the imminent election tsunami meant something different to him than it did to us, mere mortals—something hard and tangible, some stupendous redistribution of cash masses in the direction I’d be lucky to guess. Only I’m not inclined. In any case, I’ve no doubt that for him things will turn out just fine; Vadym’s not used to losing. It’s only with Vlada he got beat. Got away, that one.
    What if she did want to get away from him—only didn’t know how? What if she’d also had her own morning looking through the window onto wet roofs—when she had to force herself out of bed with the new day pulled over her head like a bag and realize that her life took the wrong exit somewhere, that this was no longer her highway, and she had to grab the wheel and twist, back up, back up. Only it’s very hard to do when you live life at the speed Vlada did. Her motor revved till the scenery flew past like a ribbon.
    She did. Of course she did—my proud girl who quivered as though set on top of a tightly coiled spring. Proud people who are accustomed to being the ones giving support to others are sobad at sending out their own SOS signals that even when they call you at two in the morning and complain about insomnia, about an irrational fear—if I fall asleep, I’ll die—you do not hear the signal. And even when you can see, having spent five hours straight under the watchful guard of her boyfriend, as if he were ordered explicitly not to leave you alone for a single minute even if his bladder should burst, that something is very much awry indeed, and things are not as good as they’d just recently appeared—you still don’t allow yourself to think that the love glow this couple radiated not so long ago could have been no more than a ghost light, leading a trusting traveler straight into the bog. You do not allow it because you know, in your heart of hearts, that to think so would be to insult your proud friend, because she herself, teeth clenched, must have fought an unimaginably exhausting, life-sucking war before she could admit it—her defeat—to herself.
    Now I am absolutely certain that’s exactly what happened.
    Now—after today’s Vadym, who has already heroically turned that page (“She was the best thing in my life,” he’d said over Vlada’s coffin, and had I died, R. would’ve said so over mine) of his life and returned to himself—the way he was before Vlada, BV, because people like him do not change and no new experience can turn things upside down inside them; now all the little incidents that had once scraped on my attention as dissonant, accidental splinters line up, in hindsight, into a regular pattern. There was one thing Vadym and Vlada had in common, and it was this thing that like a wrench thrown into a turning gear caught Vlada, brought her to a halt: they both had it living in them and motivating them their entire lives—the fear of defeat.
    It was that fear that, ten years earlier, made her break up her marriage with Katrusya’s father (who, ultimately, did not manage to do anything better with his life than to emigrate to Australia, where he, according to different sources, either worked as a night guard or babysat kangaroos). It was that fear that made her hair stand on end when, in the fall of 1990, we were smoking the one cigarette we had between the two of us inthe little park on Zolotovoritska—right here, across the street, where the casino now stands (the spot I’ve been circling since—for fourteen years already—as if under the sway of gravitational pull)—and the hot wind of tectonic shifts blew self-published (on Roto Printers back then) leaflets at us, and the bitter coffee from tiny chipped cups scorched the roofs of our mouths. “We had no youth, Daryna.”
    We did, Vlada, we did, that was it—our youth, and our country’s youth that was being born out of the tidal roar of the Independence Square, of the boys with seraphic faces and white hunger-strikers’ headbands, not one of whom, back then, had yet thought of paying for being prepared to die. And they were really prepared to die, and those who haven’t died, only got themselves to blame.
    Yes, my Vlada had that fear, of course she did, however deep it sat—a genetic fear, inherited from her mother, from Nina Ustýmivna. Or perhaps even older than that—from those grandparents of