The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

much more honorable than to outplay a bunch of slackers) and, most importantly, the voice of
expert
support, which Pavlo Ivanovych swallows with a neophyte’s thirst. It must be, Daryna intuits, that he himself doesn’t know much about music; it’s just a status symbol for him, like the directors in Soviet movies who inevitably had Red Army officers of purely proletarian pedigree play grand pianos as a sign of their complete triumph over bourgeois culture. And in this unfamiliar world into which his child has set out, Pavlo Ivanovych looks at every initiated person like a new recruit to a colonel. The men exchange a few more lines—of co-conspirators, accomplices, members of the same club—and Daryna, relieved that Adrian has taken charge of the conversation, recalls suddenly her own appearance, thirty years ago, at a school performance: dressed as a snowflake, she danced and sang a song in English, “The snowflakes are falling, are falling, are falling,” and her daddy, young, strong, and handsome, sat beaming in the first row, nodding his head in time with the music. Back then, when she was eight, she was still trying her best for Daddy, and the world was warm and cozy. What a pity that it all came to an end so fast.
    Why did she come here? What does she have to do with these people?
    She no longer knows. Why does this aging SBU-type, who has all but unraveled with the solemnity of the moment (just like a bad-mannered teen who doesn’t know how to behave in public!), keep insinuating himself into her and Adrian’s family? (At the moment, he is standing at a bad angle to the light, and she can see the white streaks of saliva, like colostrums, in the corners of his mouth—have your liver checked, or something, will you Pavlo Ivanovych?) He is comical in his inflamed paternal incarnation, like a yiddishe mame of Odessa jokes. Of course, how else? He’sfrom a “home,” a foundling: people, who were themselves deprived of parental love when they were children, will never learn to love their children naturally; they will forever swing between extremes like the color-blind forced to paint with colors, and what the hell does she want with this stranger’s life? Another life that she for some reason has to fit inside her?
    Doesn’t she have enough of them already—other people’s lives stashed inside her, like in a safe to be kept in perpetuity. She’s done nothing but muddle around in other people’s lives, and they tramp all over her like on this square, demanding that she produce from their strife and failure a spark of meaning they cannot seem to achieve themselves; she has borne all this happily; she’s liked it, although there were some interviews after which she spent the rest of the day in bed, feeling like she’d been run over by a tractor. But for these two—Boozerov and his defenseless (like a snail without a shell) Nika, with her childish worship of Daryna—she has no more room, sorry, that’s it. It’s too much!
    These people have no connection to her; she has nowhere to store their problems—and fails to see why she should be compelled to do so. At this instant, Daryna thinks her mother did the wisest thing of all: what had been is gone; it’s closed, and stored up in the attic, and really what point is there in dredging back up what’s been buried for years? You can’t go your entire life pulling everyone who’d appeared in one or two episodes of it behind you; no one’s life is big enough for that!
    She looks at Pavlo Ivanovych unable to overcome her sudden dislike—those streaks in the corners of his mouth are especially disgusting. Doesn’t he understand that his girl has already grown beyond the age at which one tries one’s best for one’s daddy—and that no matter how much he fusses and beats his wings he can’t keep her under the glass dome of his warm and cozy world? At her age, Daryna thinks angrily, I was already living with Sergiy—and thank goodness, she, Daryna, chose well, because at the time there were many more men eager to live with her than is recommended for a young fool, feeling abandoned by her dead father and livingmother at once, who would have plunged into bed with anyone who’d mistake her for an adult.
    Nika still has all these problems ahead of her, and one can be sure things will not go smoothly for her either: such unhinged daddies guard their baby girls like bull terriers, another year or two and it’ll be Nika’s singular dream to be