The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

attract your circle of dedicated customers.”
    “I think so, too.”
    “And you’d find other followers, too. Maybe you’d even start a brand. Like those Swiss Freitag guys, only yours is more ambitious.”
    “See now?”
    “And then one night, a bunch of boys would roll up in SUVs and burn your utopia to cinders, with all its wonders inside. As soon as their sales of made-in-China shit drop.”
    “Eh, maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. You don’t know until you try, right?”
    “This is a very nice idea, Aidy. I mean it.”
    “You like it?”
    “I do. And you know who else would’ve liked it? Vlada. She’d have been insanely in love with it. It’s her style. She brought me a Freitag bag back from Switzerland, as a present, that big black one...”
    “Are those the ones they make from old truck tarpaulins?”
    “Yeah. Vlada loved them so much, you’d think she made them herself—it wasn’t so much the design for her as the idea. The rehabilitation, as you put it, of honest craftsmanship. She considered herself a craftsperson. She always said so, even to the press.... Oh, Aidy, I’m so sorry you didn’t get to know her!”
    “I am sorry it’s impossible to know all the good people who are already gone.”
    “The two of you are very much alike in a way. Very much. You both have an abundance of some essential spiritual vitamin that I chronically lack.”
    “Man, you must be hungry. We’re almost there; just a bit further there’ll be a nice little place. In a forest, under pine trees.”
    “I’m serious! I may not have put it the best way; I’m sorry, but that’s only because there’s too much stuff coming at me all at once...”
    “Try not to fuss so much. You’re vibrating like you’re plugged into the wall. You’re jumping up at every car we pass. Baby, don’t.”
    “Aidy. Listen. I’m thinking about this one thing. A bad thing, a terrible thing. I’ve been thinking about it the whole time, since that woman told us about the grave. I’m afraid to say it out loud even to you.”
    “Don’t be.”
    “It’s about Nina Ustýmivna. About her parents, actually. About Vlada’s grandparents.”
    “What do they have to do with anything?”
    “I’ll tell you. Listen. Vlada suspected that back in ’33 they worked the hunger. They were redistributing property, going after the better-off farmers, the kulaks—and it was somewhere here, around Kyiv. That’s where Vlada’s grandfather got his career started; it was only later, when the starvation began, that they were transferred into the city itself. They never spoke of it at home, of course, but Vlada accidentally overheard something somewhere once. And it matched their bios. She said her grandmother, when she was already a distinguished—for outstanding service to the country, what else?—pensioner chasing kids from the apple trees in their yard would, if she got really angry, call them kulak spawn. That was her worst cuss word.”
    “You’re a two-faced and evil folk, you the kulaks who’ve been thrice-cursed!” Adrian recites with pathos.
    “Good God, where’s that from?”
    “Ukrainian Soviet poetry, of course. Stuck in my mind since high school, I don’t remember who wrote it. Didn’t you guys cover that, too?”
    “Jesus, Aidy, don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
    He puts his hand over hers.
    “Of course I do, Lolly. Don’t think about it. You shouldn’t.”
    “But it’s unfair!” Daryna all but moans. “Why did she have to...? Why did it have to be her? That she’d be the one, on that very spot...Aidy, she was so full of light, if only you knew! One of the best people I’ve ever met in my life...”
    “That, Daryna, is not for us to know,” he says, flipping on the right-turn signal, causing Daryna to glance back instinctively to make sure the road is clear. They turn off the highway and, kicking up gravel with a great noise, pull up to a small roadside restaurant. “You’ve said it yourself—Golgotha,” Adrian says as he pulls the key out of the ignition, and in the silence that descends upon them, like a healing compress on a burning forehead, they remain, her head on his shoulder, his lips touching her hair. “And Golgotha,” he utters, barely audibly, “is, among other things, death for the sins of others. Also, you could say, a way of tidying up, ofleaving things clean. Someone has to do it when too much stuff piles up. A way of purifying the system, according to the