The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

comfortable in her own body yet; she hasn’t grown out of the phase where one fits oneself into the ready TV-and movie-supplied molds—she does not know yet what she’s had taken away from her, does not feel the emptiness where the amputated part used to be. And her confessions make me feel ill at ease, as though she were brandishing at me a poorly set, naked stump of a limb—and was completely ignorant of the fact that it was not her arm.
    “When did your daddy tell you? Did you know already?”
    We have reached the square in front of the Bohdan Khmelnitsky monument, and Nika lowers her eyes, focusing on the granite squares under her feet as if contemplating a game of hopscotch.
    “It wasn’t Daddy who told me; Mom did...Daddy told me later, after Grandma Dunya died...”
    She is evading again, the question is uncomfortable—and, adapting to her, because she is now slipping from my grip, Iunwittingly adjust my step, too, and also try not to step on the cracks between the stones that pave the way to St. Sofia’s gate. No stepping, as it was called in hopscotch—it’s incredible how your body recalls—in a blink—these long-buried childhood skills: the way, on your walk home from school with the backpack on your shoulders, you hop from square to square, without stepping, and the stone squares are wide, so you have to make one big hop first and then, skipping, two little ones, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three.... And all of a sudden, Nika’s youth, with all its unspent reserve of energy, engulfs me in a searing, apple-crisp wave, the near flame of her immortal girlhood knocks the air out of me, this effervescent ripeness of hers that could burst at any moment into a leap, a laugh, a chase, a game—a revelation.
This is the reason people have children
, darts through my mind,
with them, you live through all this one more time, and nothing can replace it!
How much older than her am I, nineteen, twenty years? If I hadn’t kept safe with Sergiy back in the day, I could have had a girl like this too—or a boy—no, a girl’s better....
    And, instead of finishing Nika off with one final blow to the crown of her head (bent at the moment, as if purposely exposed, I can even see the whitish furrow where her hair is parted, like a chestnut’s raw flesh), instead of asking her, pointedly, if she really feels herself to be Boozerov’s granddaughter, and if she really never felt the urge to know what her and her father’s real name was supposed to be, I surprise myself by asking, with a hungry, almost zoological curiosity, “How old is your mom?”
    “Fifty-two,” Nika says, raising her head.
    A thirteen-year difference between me and her mother, not that much, really.
    “Are you the only child?”
    Yes, she is. I needn’t have asked. I feel more connected to her with every passing minute—like with a stray kitten picked up from the street: the longer you hold it, the harder it is to let it go back into the urban jungle. Why is it, though, that I can’t seem to findthe courage to ask Nika if she knows that her dad and I go way back—that he knew about my existence before Nika was even born?
    Because I, too, put on a show for her dad. I, too, played my capstone concert: look, here I am, the same girl you read about in Goshchynska, Olga Fedorivna’s personal case, under Children. I am the daughter, with the stress on the first syllable, no, back then, they probably had it in Russian still, dotch. Darya, born 1965—here I am, look (a turn of the head), all grown now, a well-known journalist, come to offer you a job working with me on a film I am making.... The way you show off to the doctor who put your broken leg together: Look at me dance, doctor!—or to the school teacher who suggested you take exams to film school back when you were in eighth grade, to every person to whom you owe something in your life, knowing they’d be pleased with your all-As school report, because it’s their achievement, too, they played a part in it. Played a part, exactly. If it weren’t for Nika’s dad’s goodwill, my life would’ve gone down a decidedly more crooked path. But this doesn’t mean that he, who lived his entire life under a stranger’s name, and raised his only daughter with it, should find my archival digging pleasant—why on earth should he?
    You cannot expect of people the impossible, Miss Daryna. Or, as Aidy’s dad says, “Don’t brag about your stove in a cold house.... ” Why