The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

from him. It’s his.
    That’s when it happened. Now she feels like she has known this from the beginning. From that very night. Oh, that night. In the mirror above the sink, Daryna sees her lips stretch in a spontaneous spellbound smile. How could such profusion of life be contained in such a short amount of time? Years packed tight, like electrons in an atom’s nucleus, something else from nuclear physics that Aidy explained....
    Love me. Love me all the time—and together, knit indivisibly into one, grown into each other, we enter the same tunnel, the same movie theater, and leave it together, too, wincing at the daylight, unable to tell which limbs are whose, and before that, you were inside me again, while I slept, thrust after thrust, the film rolls; don’t leave me; it’s moist, fertile, fecund; we melt the snow below us; the ground washes away; we are lying in a pool of tears on the bare surface of a sad planet where everything once went wrong and must begin anew—bacteria, amoebas, the first man and the first woman, a new era, did you see? Yes, I did, they all died, and we return again to the place where the same movie is being played for the two of us, the film rips into white flashes inside the single mind knit from our two minds, machine-gun fire goes right through me, the fiery bullets explode inside me, a cannonade.
    How many times did it happen that night, seven, eight? He was the one who counted, then laughed in the morning that he couldn’t keep track, either; and she remembered everything as a whole, a single roiling river, hot as lava, that rolled and rolled carrying her with it.... How much life they were given in a singlenight! Their wedding night. Their wedding, that’s what it was—the night of their wedding. Their marriage—to the toll of someone else’s deathbell.
    A family now. Forever.
    They married us
, Daryna thinks, speaks the thought to herself from beginning to end, completely, for the first time—gives voice to the idea, which, until now, merely stirred inside her, a half-guess afraid to become words: those who died that night in the bunker, married us. They
knew
.
    The tile floor feels cold beneath her feet, and she pulls her nightgown over her knees, unseeing.
    It’s pointless now, as it always is in moments when you realize that something irreversible has happened, to let her mind ramble, feverishly shuffling the deck of circumstances this way and that, to pull and tug at them like on a purse caught in the subway doors: How, why, it can’t be, how could it possibly have happened—she’s been swallowing those pills, expensive as hell, religiously, and by the calendar, too, it seemed too early? What went on between them that night could not be contained by any calendar or pharmacological formula—companies fold, factories go under.
That
was stronger.
    And now she has it inside her.
    Hello, then.
    Everything happened of its own accord. Everything has been done for her—she has no say in it, no will of her own. Someone else’s will is at work, however—whose?—and all she has left to do was to obey it. Accept it. Lie under it.
    She is a bit stunned with this new feeling—and at the same time, deep in her heart, strangely flattered: as if she’s been jerked forth from the ranks of indiscriminate figures lined up on a drilling field, pointed out by the commander in chief himself. On the other side of the field, a fire burns in a stove in the darkness, and the three Fates—Mom, Aunt Lyusya, and Grandma Tetyana—turn to look at her with the same expression on their faces: the serene, all-understanding, and unclouded look that is brought to women’sfaces by the knowledge of the hardest and most important human work on earth. They turn, peer: Is she asleep? Awake? She’s awake already—come on then, come over here, to our side...
    How many of them are out there, on the other side, disappearing into the darkness, no longer visible to her eyes? An army. An unseen, uncounted underground army, the most powerful in the world, one that pursues its war, silent and determined, over centuries and generations—and knows no defeat.
    “Women won’t cease giving birth.” That’s what Adrian wrote down on the pack of cigarettes by the light of the lamp that night. Someone said this to him, in his dream. Someone told him to remember it. He wrote it down and wondered later what this might mean and why such an obvious truth should have appeared in such a near-death dream—a