The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

only menwho know the true and good price for their work can. Not the price people pay at the market, but the one that is measured by the sum of expended life: the number of dioptres added to their sight over the years, the wheezing in their turpentine-laced lungs, their skin burned from constant heat, the high-contrast map of their wrinkles. The absolute concentration and surgical precision of movement with which a restorer, looking through a magnifying glass, dabbed away layers of age-old grit from a spot on an icon evoked in Daryna a downright sacramental reverence—a feeling remarkably similar to the one Gela’s story aroused in her. But this is also something she cannot convey to Adrian—she doesn’t know how to explain to him what these images could possibly have to do with a film about resistance. Except maybe as a metaphor for her own archival work—for her method (if that’s what it was): this persistent, ant-like, unwavering, peeling off of layer after layer, inch by inch....
    This is also resistance, Adrian thinks. Daryna’s got it right. To work the way these restoration guys work—in utter self-dedication, for miniscule pay, purely out of devotion to what you do—that is resistance in its purest form, the essence of resistance, like that voice stripped of words down to a bare melodic lament. She’s got it right. An intelligent woman must, after all, have a leg up on an intelligent man because she is endowed with this additional perceptiveness, one we lack—one that stems from her sisterhood with every living thing, regardless of place and time....
    A passing trolleybus blows a used ticket at his feet, and he bends down, moved by a sudden urge to pick it up, see, as he used to do when he was little, if the number is lucky, but he misses it: the ticket flies off, mixes with other litter at the edge of the sidewalk.
There’s another thing I will never find out
, he thinks, and shrugs, surprised at himself: I must be getting superstitious, too.
    Aloud, he tells her that what he loves most about the city at dusk is its quiet courtyards—and gold rectangles of light from the windows cast onto the snow.
    “Onto the snow? Why snow?” This surprises her a bit.
    “Well, it doesn’t have to be snow,” he concedes, without real conviction; it could be on the asphalt. For some reason, he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, and she understands it—their thoughts, in the warm, exhaust-laced air of the spring evening, flowing in and out of each other, like intertwined fingers. The light turns to green and they step into the crosswalk like a pair of well-behaved children—holding hands and not even noticing they are.
    ***
    VMOD-Film
Written by Daryna Goshchynska
EXT. CITY – NIGHT.
    In the courtyard behind a city high-rise, on the playground, a girl sits—she’s squatting like a young child, but there’s already a frozen, unchildlike grace in her pose. The playground is empty: it’s getting dark; the little ones have all been taken home; the girl is already too old for the sandbox, but still too young to be part of the next shift, which will soon arrive with their glowing dots of cigarette tips in the dark, the strumming of their guitars, and the bursts of silly laughter or a girl’s squeal ripped from the hubbub, or the tink of rolling glass—the chaotic, Brownian splashes of puppy-like youthful sensuousness that will make a late passerby shy and hasten to reach his door.
    Later still, in the short hours of night, when everything grows quiet, the couples will arrive, and some retiree, kept up by his insomnia and arthritis, will come out on his balcony for a smoke without turning on the lights, and will catch below a moon-glazed glimpse of flesh freed of clothes, a white stain—a breast, a hip—and will get angry because now he won’t be able to fall asleep until morning for sure. But all this will be later sometime—it’s all yet ahead for the girl who squats very still at the playground.
    It is growing dark, the apartments’ windows light up one by one, and the girl can barely see what she’s got in front of her: ina hole dug into the ground (it rained the day before, the earth is moist and sticky, and easy to dig with a toy plastic scoop someone left behind in the sandbox); in a white frame made of apple-tree blossoms barely visible in the dark, a piece of silver foil, spread flat, catches what little light is left. What she is to do next, the girl doesn’t know. And she