The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

very turn...that’s where it all got skittered around.”
    And as soon as the last words leave her mouth, she panics, and her honest blue eyes for an instant go all glassy, like a celluloid doll’s. But it’s too late: the word’s been spoken, and it can’t be put back.
    “
All?
So what else was there?”
    Now it’s the husband’s turn to rush to the rescue. “A bunch of stuff. A car must of crashed dere, looked like.” He does, just in case, hide his eyes.
    “There’s accidents there alla time!” the wife picks up his line cheerfully. “Would you believe it, no more’n three months passes before someone gone crashed there again! And thank goodness when it’s not to death.” Judging by her intonation, she finds those accidents far less satisfying than the ones that actually are “to death.” “And this year, there’d beena crash already, not long since, a month, right, Vasya? Showed it in TV, you didn’t see it? A whole family slammed to death in a Honda, ana baby, too!” This sounds all-out triumphant, like Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
. “Ana woman, they say, she was ’specting, too, just think...coming from Pereyaslav—and hit a Mercedes...”
    “Not a Mercedes,” her husband corrects her, “a Bee-Em-Doubya!”
    “Same difference!” the wife laughs, flushing with excitement. No, sir, Adrian thinks, she’s not in menopause yet, she’s got all herhormones alive and raging, just look at her go! “I don’t tell them apart, Mercedeses or Bee-Em-Doubyas, I just know was some big cheese driving!”
    “Big cheese, phew!” the yokel snorts with scorn. “Sure...teenage punk more like it, one of dose that bought hisself a driver’s license but Daddy couldn’t pay for a brain to go with it. Dem, when dey drive, think dey god and king, and don’t need rules, ’coz all the right lawryers sittin’ in his pocket. Part, sea, let shit pass! He went to pass on the double and jumped into incoming traffic. Must of been in a great hurry—well, he ain’t hurrying now.”
    He reports this without any glee, only with the legitimate satisfaction of a man who likes things to be fair. The woman, on the other hand, delights in the topic and can’t wait to savor more details of this reality show—it is, after all, much more interesting than any soap opera, and these visitors know nothing of it, “And two years since we had a real big crash, a whole rig flipped over! Five cars slammed to pieces, right, Vasya? Took them two days to wash alla blood off the asphalt.”
    A ripple of cold shiver shoots through Daryna again. Blood, she didn’t think about blood. She didn’t go to the site of the accident, did not see Vlada’s blood....
    “Dat’s a special spot over dere,” Vasya nods. “Chornovil died here at our corner, too.”
    “Oh yeah,” the wife echoes, proud as if she’d personally contributed to the event. “Folks put wreaths round that cross over there, alla time—d’you see it? You came from Kyiv, didn’t you? That was a bit over that way, toward Kyiv, after a turnoff to the Kharkiv bypass.”
    Time to put a memorial here, Daryna thinks. This place is like Checkpoint Charlie was in Berlin. Only this one’ll give you a real thrill—it’s still operating. And these two could be the tour guides as living eyewitnesses—they’d do a heck of a job. Again she sees, as if in rewind, the highway stretching away from her—only not the dry one she and Adrian drove earlier in the day, but the other, from four years ago, with the lonely Beetlespeeding along: the road is silky-black, flashing with the nebulae of puddles, the cloud of water kicked up by the car falls onto the windshield and the hood, streaks of rain meander down the glass. The road is empty, not a soul in sight, the signs float by—Pereyaslav-Khmel’nytsky 43, Zolotonosha 104, Dnipropetrovs’k 453, Thank you for keeping the shoulder clean—rain, rain, and tears streaming openly and freely, and the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth, and back and forth again, like two scythes over a hayfield.
    Adrian’s voice reaches her as though through water. “Couldn’t they put rails along that turn, at least, if that’s how things are?”
    “It won’t help.” The yokel shakes his head.
    “It would make it safer than it is now!”
    “Won’t help,” the yokel repeats with unshakeable fatalism. “Dat’s a special spot.”
    “What if you brought a priest out to consecrate it?”
    “Dat’d be a whole lot of