The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

forgetting began.
    Lord, is this really all?
    ***
    Daryna Goshchynska gets up from behind her desk, walks to the window, and stands there for a long time, looking through the dark glass at the scattered flickering stars of city lights below. How little light there is in Kyiv—and it’s the capital. One can only imagine what the country looks like. Dark, dark. How poorly we live, Lord, and how bad we are at dying.
    “Daryna?” Yurko, a colleague from the evening news, calls out, puzzled. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
    A light switch clicks and the window pane projects—suddenly, so it gives her an unpleasant jolt—an image of a beautiful young woman; in the partial light that eats up the details, she isreally young and extraordinarily, piercingly beautiful; it’s almost frightening, this beauty, something pagan, witchy. She’s got long, Egyptian eyebrows and dark lips as if sated with blood—this is not her televised self crafted to make viewers wonder about the designer of her suit and the brand of her lipstick. This face is something carved out of the night by the light of a bonfire—primeval, elementally gorgeous. Before she turns back to the world and Yurko, who has been talking at her all along, Daryna hungrily takes in this impenetrable face, both hers and not her own: so this is what she looks like when she is alone—much stronger than she feels.
    She draws from this strength to give Yurko a dazzling smile. “I’m sorry; I was thinking...what did you say?”
    “I’m saying, a young man just called for you.” Yurko’s eyes turn silky with insinuation. For a couple years already, their relationship has been balancing on the brink of flirting, which is not much, but no man likes to find himself a herald of another man’s arrival, and Yurko lets Daryna use the small pause, if she will, to explain herself, to dismiss, if only with a twist of an eyebrow, the young man as a second-class citizen. She does not, so he grins magnanimously somewhere in the direction of this man, “He was worried about where you were.”
    “Gosh, I turned my ringer off. Thank you, Yurko.”
    She glances at her cell. Of course, it’s Adrian. Unhappy Yurko retreats out the door. How strange that she forgot Adrian existed. That she keeps forgetting about him—as one forgets about one’s own arm or leg. She picks up her phone and calls him.
    “Aidy?”
    “Lolly?” His voice bursts with unmediated delight, as it always does when they haven’t talked for a while, even for a little bit. For an instant she feels the imprint of his hard member, like a silk-covered rock, in her hand and a blast of Adrian’s smell (Cinnamon? Cumin?) hits her with such forceful nearness that she must sit down on the edge of the desk, squeezing her free hand, unconsciously, between her legs. Lolly was the name she was called when she waslittle, before she could roll the r in Daryna, but Adrian didn’t know this; he derived the name anew from doll—my doll, dolly—Lolly in keeping with the childishness of his love’s language, a characteristic shared by many openhearted men. He couldn’t conceive of being embarrassed by it either, and at first she resisted, feeling uneasy—I’m not a doll!—but the Lolly that hadn’t been heard for thirty-odd years must have worked its magic, overcoming the momentum of her experience and confirming, once again, the nearly metaphysical expedience of everything Adrian did, as if he had, in fact, possessed some secret knowledge about her, which called for respectful obedience on her behalf, and perhaps it was precisely because he sensed this, that he always called out his Lolly! so triumphantly, like a young dad who’s just picked his firstborn’s name and is thrilled with the sound of it. And still it unnerves her a little, and the thought that a stranger might witness this shameless profession of his bliss makes her want to put a hand over his mouth—he could be at his office, in a cab, or a store, or wherever.
    “Where are you?”
    The question sounds like she’s worried, and that’s how he interprets it, which makes her feel a little guilty, as if she’d toyed with him on purpose, so she tries to focus and listen diligently as he explains how he finally made it to his unpronounceable department at the university where he is still considered to be working on his dissertation, but didn’t catch the head of his committee, and the secretary promised the boss would be back soon, and he