The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

like the Independence Square fountain.
    This one’s decked out in a Gucci blouse, a pair of Bally boots, and a tote bag to match the boots. She’s a pointy-nosed little doll with eyes like a pair of plastic buttons and a permanently gaping mouth, already marked with a pair of lines emerging on each side, a bit soon for her very early twenties, but I bet that sensuous little mouth of hers has worked over more thick masculine stubs than I have in my entire life. Unless, of course, it’s Daddy who dresses her. Actually, the two are not mutually exclusive.
    Whenever Gucci Nastya aims her moist gaping beak at me (at me!), I have to fight back a strong urge to inquire, with great concern, whether she, by chance, is suffering from severe sinusitis. Such is the new crop cultivated for the profession by the Journalism Institute right under our noses, here in the old Syrets’ neighborhood, in the snow-white sarcophagus the Communist Party built for its own spawn right before the ol’ USSR’s demise, because their old place on Rylski Street, also a not-too-shabby Secession villa with lions, which Gucci Nastya and I happen to be passing right now, was getting uncomfortably crowded for the Party’s lush cabbage patch.
    The villa is now a bank and the lions have to sit encircled by pink granite, as if in the middle of a skating rink. I ask the future Ukrainian journalist if she knows what this building housed a mere fifteen years ago—not that distant a past, really, she must’ve been going to school already—if she knows that her alma mater is genetically related in the full sense of the phrase to the establishment that used to rule from here and, judging by the prostituting proclivities of national journalism, a place’s karma is indeed something that gets passed on like genes, only I don’t tell her that.
    Anastasia (that’s how she introduces herself—by her full name) keeps me in the crosshairs of her plastic-button eyes and her blow-job-ready little maw—no, she doesn’t know what used to be here, and it is obvious that she doesn’t give a flying fuck either. But I am the one who will sign her TV-internship report, and later she’ll be telling everyone that she interned with Goshchynska herself, so, after a momentary hesitation, she dares to offer an obsequious giggle—meaning, that’s cool. Guppy. Goldfish in a bowl. Why, for God’s sake, journalism? Why not some business management, with the prospect of a job at a foreign firm where she could marry someone Swiss, or Dutch, or, worse comes to worst, American? Why’d she choose this?
    “Nastya,” I say tenderly, “would you mind me asking why
you
decided to become a journalist?”
    I can almost physically sense the balls my question sets in motion as they roll and clack inside her skull—she’s calculating which answer would score the most points. Like in a computer game. A small, agile, ferreting kind of a brain, tuned to promptly locate food.
    “I’ve always been good at writing.”
    See
Business
,
Natalie
,
Elle Ukraine
—the advice column: How to Succeed at a Job Interview. Be confident; try to convey the impression of a person who knows the value of her professional accomplishments. And, of course, the American TV shows—
Melrose Place
,
Project Runway
. And I have to put up with all this because she’s attached herself to me like a piece of chewing gum on the sole of my shoe, because I, when we left the studio together, was foolish enough to offer the child a ride downtown, and then the child climbed out of the studio car with me, and to my tactful “Where do you go from here?” twice already responded with “I’ll walk with you,” not blinking an eye. What was it that Russian said: my generation’s shit, but yours is something completely incomprehensible.
    “Writing—meaning spelling?”
    I’m not holding back anymore.
    An actual emotion finally flashes through the plastic eyes—anger, a lurking predatory enmity, even her little lip instinctively pulls up into a snarl—only the growling is missing. Alright, we’ve got contact now. In another year, armed with her diploma, she’ll write in some toilet-paper-yellow tabloid that Goshchynska hates women. Especially young ones, beautiful ones. And intelligent ones, naturally. And, if on top of that the girl gets paid a couple grand a month, she’ll see no difference between herself and me whatsoever, except the fact that I am older and thus, in her understanding, of lesser