The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

kissing any boots; I’m not a boy anymore to be getting bent over like that. Let theirnew snot-crop do it, they’ve hired a bunch from the boonies—give them three hots and a cot and they’ll suck on anyone’s dick.”
    “That bad, huh?”
    “Worse than bad, I’m telling you. Total beck in ze Yu-Es-Es-Arr. For the news, we get instructions sent down every day: what to cover, and what words to use, and about what to pretend didn’t happen. If you’d just insert ‘our dear Comrade Brezhnev’ here and there, you could recycle your calendars.... In addition to yours, they shut down three more shows.”
    He lists them and Daryna gasps—all were original programming, the kind that used to make their channel different from others, so what’s left? “Did they close Yurko’s show too?”
    “They changed the format. No more live air. For anyone, wholesale, even talk shows will broadcast in recording lest someone blurt something undesirable. They’re gearing up for the elections. Instead, they bought Russian programming—cop shows, soap operas, you can imagine.”
    “Are they launching the new show then? They had plans for some grand contest for young viewers—
Miss New TV
or something...”
    “Oh, the whore school? I didn’t know you’d been apprised. No, they decided to hold off in the run-up to the elections, wait until after. Rumor has it, someone leaked to the opposition that it’s bankrolled by the porn-industry sharks, and the money trail goes all the way to the top, and the administration has no interest in another scandal; they know they’ll have enough egg on their face as it is. Did you catch the Mukachevo story?”
    “Yeah, I did.”
    So, Daryna thinks, Vadym drew his own conclusions from their conversation. The opposition—of course, he is a member of the opposition, isn’t he? Probably made a pretty penny on the whole thing, too: the new owners of the channel would pay for his silence regardless of whether this came to them as a friendly warning or a piece of light blackmail. The important thing is that they’ve held off with the show: stepped on the brakes, didn’t pursue itany further—Pavlo Ivanovych’s voice surfaces in her mind (file deleted)—and the hook was already cast.
    Now she, too, has saved someone. Some nameless girls—the way Pavlo Ivanovych once saved her. Only, unlike herself, these girls will never find out what danger they were in. But that doesn’t matter—she’s done her job. In the run-up to the elections. Everything is now being done in the run-up to the elections, as if the end of the world has been scheduled for this one particular country, a plan for its final and irreversible subjugation by some dark forces. But it’s impossible, something in her protests: it’s absolutely impossible, how can anyone think this’ll happen, have they all gone insane—she’s having a child, for God’s sake!
    “And you won’t hear a peep of it from our broadcast,” Antosha drones on. “Not a word about Mukachevo, everything’s hunkydory everywhere, the percentage of fat in butter is growing daily. Long story short, Dara, tell you what: you done good to cut out when you did. You, old witch, always had a nose better than a bloodhound—for people, for situations...we were just talking about it with the boys yesterday.”
    That’s a compliment: she can almost see this conversation as it occurred in the smoking room. When you work with men, you don’t get to hope for any word of appreciation spoken to your face—they’re always watching you, waiting for you to make a misstep or just to lash out in irritation, something they can write off, among themselves, to your PMS or, better still, to your not getting any (and how would you know, she always wanted to ask these self-appointed he-men—have you fucked me?), and to restore, in that manner, their male dignity, which is chronically compromised by the presence of an independent, beautiful woman in any role other than that of an office girl. Over the years of working with them, Daryna has mastered a system of signals that must be constantly deployed, as though on a highway in hazardous conditions, to show that she is not crossing the white lines, not aiming to cut into “their” space, and depends, time after time, on their aid, being the weaker sex that she is,and only rarely, oh how rarely—she could count those occasions on the fingers of one hand—did she hear them give voice to what every last one of