The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

this? Her film. And Antosha, he is right: the film is his, too, and not only because he worked on it. It was Antosha’s eye, always, no matter how hungover, that unerringly found the best angle, that was hiding behind the camera during every one of those twenty-four hours—Vovchyk, her show’s director, had also done a ton of work on this, but what happened to his work has always been, for Vovchyk, “not his problem.” He didn’t have any trouble letting his employers have the final word about that. Antosha has not betrayed his work. He just hasn’t, and that’s it. Is this what Aidy, when he’s appraising all thatantique workmanship, calls, with such purely masculine, guild-like pride (we women can never quite say it the same way)—a master?
    “Of all the shit to worry about right now, why would you pick whether anyone’ll buy the thing?” the master grumbles. “I was just so happy, you know, when I heard you got the footage out of there. Good job, Dara, I thought, you stick it to those bitches...’cause I’m telling you I’ve had it with them. You know me—I’m basically an ox: you can hitch me to the plow forever, and I won’t even moo; I’ll just swish my tail at the flies...the Ukrainian temperament, we’re all like that. Until they bend you beyond the breaking point. And then it’s the end of the line: the ox stops and you can forget your plowing. If you’d just told me you already had someone else lined up, I would be quitting the studio anyway. I’d go wherever, to hell and back, doesn’t matter. ’Cause what these bitches are cooking up there, it’s fucked up, I’m telling you. And the people have no idea, they don’t get which way the wind’s blowing.”
    “You did. And I did. And I know others who did. And how many are out there that we don’t know about? It’s a big country, Antosha. They can’t just bend it however they want.”
    “I’m sorry about
Diogenes’ Lantern
,” Antosha suddenly says. “Real sorry.”
    “Uhu.”
    “You were holding it, you know. The lantern. And one could see there were people in this country.... And now all you see is shit crawling out from the woodwork and nothing else. Why should it be so, Dara? Why are they always putting us down? All the time, look at any time in history, it’s the same thing all over again—someone’s stomping us into shit, so deep we can’t even see ourselves. Is that some fucking karma we got, or what?”
    “Devil’s Playground,” she recalls. “That’s how someone put it to me recently. I mean, he said God’s, but it’s actually the Devil’s: he’s one of those people, you know, for whom these concepts are interchangeable, God-Devil, up-down, left-right...depending on the situation, what kind of a hand they get.”
    “Uhu, and they seem to be fucking everywhere...and what are you gonna do about it, huh?”
    “Make a film,” Daryna says. “Make a film, Antosha. What else would we do?”
    ***
    It will be a film about betrayal, she tells Adrian when they are walking back through Tatarka from the restoration workshop. Daryna asked to come with him to see how they cleaned old icons.
    “About betrayal? But we still don’t know the identity of the man who led the raid to the bunker; we only have our speculations—so whose betrayal, which?”
    “Any. Of one’s country. Of love. Of oneself. Betrayal as a road that leads to death, but we’ve talked about that already—someone has to pay for every betrayal, one way or another, to restore the cosmic balance of forces that it violated. The greater the betrayal, the greater the sacrifice.”
    “So when are you starting?”
    “Tomorrow. I invited Antosha to have dinner with us, to discuss the changes to the script, he might think of something—there’re three of us now! There
were
three of us anyway. Without Antosha. Well, the little one hasn’t made the team yet.”
    “Is that why you turned the place upside down today—you were going through your stuff?”
    “Yes, and you know what I found? On my dictaphone, remember, it kept rolling in my purse on the way back from fishing with Boozerov, it recorded our entire conversation—at the very beginning, there’s a bit of Pavlo Ivanovych talking.”
    “For real? How could that have happened?”
    “Beats me—maybe the button got pressed, inside my purse, all the way back at the river, when he kept trying to send all that fish home with us. You can’t hear exactly what he is saying, so it’s