The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

can feel how hot I am, how your penis instantly hardens pressing against my buttocks—my dreams will be here cut short and will later resume at the same point; the mechanic from the ancient club of my youth will glue the film back together, and on this parallel reel that has been running before my eyes the whole time, without ever obscuring the room around me, with its shifting light, the breath of the man I love and the rain outside, there will be Gela—it is with her I most want to share this; she is the one I want to call and say: come—
    and now she finally will come to me—by herself, without any go-betweens: now, that I can finally understand her, now that it’s not only she who needs me, but also I who need her—need her more than my mom, more than a sister or friend, more than any other woman in the world—
    I will tell her she carries no blame. That she is now free. And also will tell her the war goes on, that the war never stops—now it is our war and we haven’t yet lost it—
    and will ask her: Gela, you see things better from where you are, tell me—it is a girl, isn’t it? Will she be happy?)
    “You know,” Daryna says into the phone, “she was pregnant.”
    “Who?” Antosha’s voice asks, startled.
    “Olena Dovganivna. She was pregnant when she died.”
    “For real?”
    “Uhu.”
    “Get out. How’d you find out?”
    “From the son of the old GB man who was in charge of the raid.”
    “Fuck me. Pardon the discourse. His old man told him? I thought they’d signed papers like in Afghanistan—not a peep about combat operations, if anyone asks—you brought candy for the kids...”
    “No, you’re right. It is the same with the GB, but his kid dug it up on his own. As an adult already.”
    “Wow. Where did you find this guy?”
    “Right here in Kyiv.”
    “Mind-blowing,” Antosha says. She can hear him light a cigarette; his excitement spreads through the network. “Awesome. Shit...listen, Sis, so I was right? You’re gonna finish this film? By yourself?”
    “Already got incorporated. As my own—don’t laugh at me—film agency. Am now hunting for cash.”
    “I knew it! I knew it. I know you, you old witch...you! I’d smother you. In my arms. Tenderly. No. Hats off. Kiss the fair lady’s hand, my respect, my total respect. Goshchynska, you sly wench, take me in, will ya?”
    “I...”
    “You know you’ll have to shoot more footage! You got that offspring on record yet?”
    “No, he refused. It was a private conversation.”
    “All the more so!” Antosha exclaims, delighted: he is comforted to hear that she hasn’t recruited a new shooter. “D’you think those twenty-four hours we shot are gonna do it? Fat chance!”
    “Twenty-three forty,” Daryna corrects automatically, not yet believing her own ears.
    “All the more so! Doesn’t matter. How much of that is rough, come on, turn on your brain now, how much of that will end up on the floor? And now that you’ve dug up how it all ended, with that firefight in which she died, you can’t do without that scene—with or without the dude, you’ve got to show that somehow. Never mind all the other stuff.... How are you going to patch it all together,without a cameraman, who are you kidding? Meaning without me, the magnificent; it’s basically my film as much as yours! Come on, Dara, what do you say?”
    “Antuan, have you not heard me? I’ve got no money to pay you!”
    “You mean, like, at all?” he sounds unapologetically sarcastic: the fact that she was able to get twenty-four hours of footage back from the channel appears to have instilled in Antosha a rock-solid faith in her omnipotence, the financial kind included. “Hon, you just think, how much do I really need? It’s not like you’re starting from scratch. I’ve got my own camera, and for editing I’ll talk to the boys at Science and Nature, they’re living on bread and water there and would make us a great deal. You do have to cover travel, to shoot on location, somehow, but that’s not much.... You’ve bought the footage out of there—that’s the thing, and you did it!”
    This is precisely what she’s been missing—words of support from someone who knows how it’s done from the inside out, first-hand—professional support, the guild behind her, the brotherhood. Their company. Their community.
    I’m gonna bawl, Daryna thinks. How deeply, it turns out, this got wedged inside her—the resentment from last fall, the insult of the