The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

abandoned by her daddy—a diagnosis completely opposite to my own, Daryna thinks—and freezes with her mouth open.
Oh shit, what if that’s the thing—our diagnoses being opposite?
What if Nika actually senses in me what she herself urgently needs to survive and lacks completely—that very vitamin of early freedom (which I have digested successfully, thank goodness!)—and that’s why she is pulled to me like an iron filing to a magnet?
    Daryna feels faint, fears she won’t stay on her feet. And instantly remembers what she has been trying to forget: her period is four days late. Her breasts are swollen, can’t even touch the nipples, last night, when Adrian kissed them, she cried out in pain—but still no period. No, it doesn’t look like the men noticed her dizziness. Daryna stubs out her cigarette. I cannot hold it all, she thinks, in desperation, there’s too much of it! I can’t put this story together even for myself, can’t seem to gather up all the loose ends. Nika—my shadow, my doppelgänger, an antipode of my forced orphanhood. Yes, my orphanhood—because at fifteen a girl is still very much in need of a father, and at seventeen, too—to have him guide her into the world of men without bumps and bruises; until she herself becomes an adult woman, she needs him. Is it really possible—that Pavlo Ivanovych is making up with his own child what he once witnessed (And lent a hand to, didn’t he?) taken from someone else’s?
    Now he seems to her to be manufactured from a super-hard material that does not let through any light: he has filled all the available space between her and Adrian, and stands there beaming shamelessly, like an infant in a bath—mad biblical eyes on fire, white streaks of saliva in the corners of his mouth. She wants to push him away—and in the same instant, with a kindof lustful, disgusted terror she senses his nakedness under that luxurious suit: he is drenched with sweat and probably hairy as a baboon. She thinks she can even detect his smell: a heavy, military smell—leather, sealing wax.... It’s a dizzying, nausea-inducing intimacy—as if the three of them were in the same bed together, no boundaries between them. Is she now going to have erotic nightmares about him? Slope-shouldered, with a woman’s behind, on stubby legs? Men like that are usually good and eager at love play. Lord, how disgusting, what’s happening to her?
    Finally, she catches Adrian looking at her with concern—and it’s like all her glands swell instantly with tears of gratitude: she is a little girl again, and Daddy (Adrian) is sitting in the first row nodding his head in time to the music. My man, she flares up, the dearest soul in the world, I’d give anything to touch your hand right now. But the other one—hard, dark inside, solid, with the heavy military smell—is pushing them apart with his body. He has wedged himself between them (and here a vivid physical memory flashes through her mind—that he has taken this position from the beginning, from the first time they met: wedged between them, and with such unshakable self-assurance as if
he had a right to do so
). He fixes Daryna in the gaze of his magnificent Judaic eyes, half-covered by the drooping cowls of his wrinkly eyelids, and all of a sudden says something so ill-suited to this scenario—in which Liszt’s lost measures spin and swirl around them in a neurotic dance (years of pilgrimage, Switzerland, pastoral symphony) together with the white-maned professorate that have seen better days, and the musicophile old maids who go to concerts to get their orgasms and sleepwalk through intermissions youthfully flushed—something so unexpectedly divorced from the young Nika, who is listening to her teacher’s last instructions somewhere backstage right now, that at first Daryna thinks he has spoken in a foreign language.
    “Actually, I have something for you. On that case that you inquired about.”
    Adrian and Daryna exchange glances quickly; the air between them crackles.
    “You found it?” she asks, stunned. “You found what I asked you to look for?”
    She doesn’t dare say “found Olena Dovgan,” as though complying with the rules once established by Pavlo Ivanovych: no names, no allusions, a schizophrenic secrecy, who needs it now? But let it be his way; this must be their reward—a thank-you gift for coming to his daughter’s concert, a barter. This, Daryna feverishly thinks, must also be something they