Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

And Mom, having ooh’ed at her daughter’s every word with hungry attention, proceeds to rub salt into the fresh wound. She waxes poetic that exactly, exactly the people like this surgeon are the backbone of this country—like she’s tapping her pointer on an exhibit for the benefit of an invisible tour group: “These are the kind of people who hold this world together, have held it since creation, and they must be known! Because when you don’t know such people are out there, it is very hard to go on living.”

She is speaking about herself, Daryna suddenly realizes. About how she once had to go on living without that knowledge—for how many years? Seven? No, more than that—living as the wife of a certified schizoid. Engineer Goshchynsky had also once crawled like that at night along his very dark street with a broken leg—until they broke his spine, too. And all around, everyone else was normal, and no one crawled anywhere—people bought furniture and went on vacations to Sochi. Like we go to Antalya now. Those who didn’t go did not have a voice then and don’t have it now, and we’re better off not knowing they exist at all.

A museum worker made eighty rubles a month. Uncle Volodya, a rich man by Soviet standards, after the wedding also took his Olya to Sochi. They wanted Daryna to come, too, but back then she was so angry that she signed up for the student harvest brigade instead and bedded Sergiy on the second night of the trip, on his windbreaker spread out on the sand. He had to throw it out afterward. From that first time, the thing she remembered most vividly was the draft between her legs, when she lay under the sky with her panties off. That, and the triumphant knowledge that she and her mother were now equals, that she couldn’t be told what to do. It’s possible that if it weren’t for Sergiy—if the wind-breaker didn’t unfold into long nights of wandering, poems on a boat, and her tears on his chest (wet stains on his T-shirt—she was marking the poor guy from all her glands)—she would’ve slept with the whole brigade that summer, would’ve erected a paling of phalluses between herself and her mother, not knowing then, in the blindness of her youth, that it’s not a way out. There is never a way out from one’s mother; it’s life without parole.

For the first time in her life, Daryna realizes she had never tried to imagine—as if she passed a door a thousand times and it never occurred to her to peek inside—how, in fact, her mother lived all those dark years that were now stored in her attic in the four bulging folders knotted shut. How did she endure, frozen into Snow Maiden’s trim, upright form, Father’s entire hopeless struggle, and the crushing bulk of her environment, and the fear creeping under the doors, the bandits in the stairwell, vans with red crosses on them, the Dnipropetrovsk asylum, and afterward—three years of wandering in and out of hospitals with the urine-soaked remnant of what once had been the man she loved, without the knowledge, back then, that he was not the only one, that others were also crawling into their own dead ends, a whole, uncountable in the dark army of defeat’s heroes?

And then she married again—and got heavy within a year, like all of her folded, suddenly crumbled, even her face. Uncle Volodya taught her to eat well, unlocked her dormant culinary talents. In the years her father was committed, those talents wouldn’t have been of any use; the two of them mostly lived on boiled potatoes. Daryna loved them when she was little, and still does—mashed, peasant-style, with sour milk, sprinkled with parsley if you have some—what’s not to like? A teenager has other problems, and adult children do, too, and you always miss your parents in time. And generally, living side by side with someone does not mean bearing witness to his or her life. But how did she endure, all the way until Father’s death, what held her?

Daryna recognizes very clearly that this question is now directly relevant to her own life: yesterday she, too, closed a door that no one will be in a great rush to open in order to find out how she’s doing in there. She’s already felt the grip of emptiness, the air of solitary confinement—yesterday, after leaving boss’s office, when she curtly informed her guys that Lantern had been cancelled and that she would not be working in the new format she’d been offered. (But nothing about the Miss New TV show!) She was not, of course, expecting the guys to rouse the whole channel to a general strike in protest. (Or did she, in her heart of hearts?) Besides, everyone’s been waiting for something nasty like this for a long time and this turbid anticipation weighed on them. Even the jokes in the smoking rooms were getting blacker and dirtier by the day, and while the storm clouds gathered on the horizon, folks began cutting out, resigning, scampering away like little mice, but something else stung her: that the guys, after they cursed and vented their shared bile (because the Lantern was their common brainchild, conceived and gestated together, a hacked-off chunk of their lives) and asked her if she was really going to leave the channel (and whether she had her eye on anything, oh yes, they were most curious about that), were suddenly no longer with her—she felt it: they withdrew inside, let her slip from the grip of their attention. Every one of them was already busy assessing his own prospects, scheming which way to paddle and how to recalibrate himself, and she was already outside the circle, standing there with everything she left unsaid scrunched into a crooked grin on her lips like one hose leg pulled on.

Vovchyk, her director of so many years that they were basically family, even he made this unpleasantly preoccupied face, as if he’d just remembered some very important business, when she said the thing about banditry and whoring—that she was not about to be part of that, and she realized that Vovchyk would stay, under whatever ownership, and would be part of that, and was offended by her determination not to, by her instantly taking away his one shot at not feeling like a piece of shit while he did what he was going to do. Here’s the first person who’s happy to see her go; start the count, who’s next?

Of course, she was in no danger of eating mashed potatoes for lunch and dinner—she was merely in the same danger that awaits all outsiders: the danger of loneliness. Sit at home with your man (and thank the Good Lord that you have a decent man!) and eat your moral superiority all you want, while life races on without you. As soon as you disappear from the screens, everyone’ll forget about you—better people have been forgotten. It’s not the movies, hon (as Antosha says), not some classic locked into a vault, with a small chance of coming back to light one day—this is television. The show must go on. And she’s always been in public and with the public; she loves the public and is used to being loved in return—and how’s she to endure all this now, on moral superiority alone?

And, almost surprising herself, not thinking about the words, just the way it bursts out of her, head first into the deep end, Daryna asks her mother, “Mom, did you believe in Dad?”

Pause.

Mom understood the question—remarkably she is not surprised by this turn of their conversation; she is simply looking for words she doesn’t have readily available; she’s working through the thickets of the many years of silence inside her.

“I knew that everything he was doing was right.”

“Did it make things easier for you?”

“Sweetie, is ‘right’ always easy?”

This comes out with such overwhelming, ancient sadness that for a moment Daryna is petrified. Her mother may not be a hero, but you couldn’t call her stupid either.

“No. Not always.”

Both grow silent then, sensing themselves on unfamiliar territory and hesitating before the next step. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chuckles softly—from afar, as if really from the other side of thirty years.

“Daydreaming,” Daryna squeezes out, trying to make it sound considered (all diagnoses always sound considered, even the deadly ones). “It’s a term in psychology.”

“Really?” Olga Fedorivna responds absentmindedly. The fact that a secret game she’d invented for herself and never told a soul in thirty years (One wonders, what does she talk about with her current husband?) has apparently been classified, named, and filed in the corresponding drawer with a label on the front, fails to impress her.

Generally speaking, Olga Fedorivna has little patience for generalizations, an instinctive distrust of them whether they are scientific terms or political concepts—she doesn’t hear them, doesn’t remember them, still doesn’t know the difference between liberalism and democracy or what a civil society is—they’re all men’s games for her, only relevant to her own life inasmuch as they can one day ruin it.

It occurs to Daryna that she’s inherited from her mother much more than she’s used to thinking she has. Her ability to play movies, too, it would seem—only Daryna’s movies have always been played for a wide release, always with the question of how to transfer them to the screen and show others, and her mother’s were produced for an audience of one.

Now that’s a show she’d love to make: Wouldn’t it be something to capture on film all those fantasies people spin inside their minds to help them survive? Daydreaming on screen—television of the future! A great project, one has to admit, especially for a retired anchorwoman. Well, now that she’s been retired (No, after she has retired herself; let’s be clear about that!), she’ll have plenty of opportunity to dream up, without any constraints, like her mother once did, as many wonderful, sleep-inducing projects as she pleases, never worrying about bringing them to life. She’ll be the creator of her own private virtual reality, protected from everyone’s dirty hands. Clean ones too, unfortunately. A magnifi-cent prospect—might as well go hang herself right now. Really, not that different from getting on the needle.

Still, something in what she’s just heard gnaws at Daryna, something’s stuck, like a fish bone between the teeth, and she stubbornly keeps pushing her tongue there—to pry it out.

“Daydreaming can be dreaming while awake. Or dreaming with one’s eyes open. Dreaming in a conscious state.”

“Of course it’s conscious, that’s what I’m telling you,” confirms Olga Fedorivna, as if she’s surprised that her daughter hasn’t taken her words on faith and needs to have something translated from somewhere else as further proof, while she, the mother, has already told her everything essential. “It’s not like hallucinations or something, God forbid!” (Oh yes, Daryna recognizes this, too; it’s their family legacy, the fear in their blood: it only takes one certified nutcase in the family, with a firmly affixed label—never mind that’s it’s fake—to keep them forever spooked, seeing the menacing shadow of insanity at every step. The “acute paranoid psychopathy” label they’d affixed to her father may not have implied any hallucinations, but “having obsessive ideas” was certainly enough for a diagnosis; and the kind of ideas considered obsessive were the ones you wouldn’t give up, even with such persuasive entreaties as a blow to the head on a dark stairwell.) “It was just me, thinking up this beautiful, beautiful fairytale for myself, just like the ones I used to tell you before bed when you were little. And I got so used to it sometimes, even at work during the day, I’d catch myself thinking that something really nice was waiting for me at home that night—the way it had been with Tolya.”

Oh, so that’s the way it had been with Tolya. Daryna knows well this joy of a day brightened through, in every detail, by the anticipation of a night of lovemaking—only for some reason her mother’s naïve confession (which instantly opens the door to a whole pressing mass of other far-reaching speculations about her sexual life, with Uncle Volodya included, and her mother obviously doesn’t know how much she’s just revealed about herself, more than in the whole twenty years of their diplomatic negotiations) instead of moving her, reverberates in Daryna as a dull pain: an echo of her old filial revolt, perhaps, from which she emerged armed with an unassailable youthful certainty that she would never, under any circumstances, let any man dominate her, or maybe a vast, accumulated sympathy for her mother then and pity for her now, all at once.

Daryna’s always known that she was a love child, and, as she got older, in her own relationships with men stumbled upon just such pieces of direct evidence, loosened up from the depths of her childhood memories, that her parents had been very happy together. For decades, those childhood impressions lay preserved inside her, waiting for the searchlight of adult experience to bring them out of the dark: here’s their family, coming home from a walk, and Dad lets Mom go ahead of him on the stairs, remaining to stand, with the little Daryna, below, his head thrown back, looking up, and then rushes, laughing, to catch up with Mom, jumping over two steps each time, and they tussle and giggle somewhere up there, on the next floor, forgetting in that moment about her completely. The way Adrian loves chasing her up the stairs now. Though it’s Sergiy to whom she owes this discovery; he was the first to confess he couldn’t help himself when her watched her move from behind (back then, before she knew men, she received this information with acute curiosity, and instantly recalled the expression on her father’s face when he stood on the landing with his head tossed back).

It took her until about second grade to wrap her mind around the notion that Mom and Dad at one point actually met each other as complete strangers, who may not have met at all, and then she wouldn’t be here—and then she set to deposing them with a prosecutor’s persistence about exactly how they met. You could say it was her first interview, and she remained quite unhappy with it as with all her interviews before today (yesterday, yesterday!). She was after nothing other than a ready-made story that would have shown conclusively that Mom and Dad did not meet by accident at all, that it couldn’t have been otherwise, and that they’d fallen in love at first sight and for all time. And Mom and Dad, like a pair of high-school punks, stole the initiative and took the game in their own direction, incomprehensible for an eight-year-old. They goofed, shot, outdrawing each other, completely irrelevant, as they seemed to her, details, like snowballs, interrupted each other gleefully, mocking. And you said...—No, it was you who said...—Pish, I’d never. Who d’you think you are?—Yeah, right, you just keep saying that after you couldn’t take your eyes off of me! Mom giggled like a girl who got a note from a boy in class—something she had no, in little Darynka’s furious opinion, mommy right to do. Exactly as Aidy loves recasting their first meeting in humorous terms, loves improvising, in jest, new treatments for the same plot—how he barged into her studio, and she hissed at him like a cat, but her legs, hey, he took good stock of those legs right there and then, and resolved he mustn’t let them slip by!—and she giggles exactly the way her mom did, and tosses snowballs back at him. Now she knows what a bottomless source of renewal it is for every love to return to its origins, to the beginning, and how all this play reaffirms in you the sense of having triumphed over life (because you can only play with what’s yours, yours alone, what belongs to you and what no one can take!).

Now she’s sorry she was such an inept interviewer back then. That in her demands for a story she failed to remember the details—only retained a general vague image, like in a snow globe: her parents are young; they’re laughing; and their faces, back then, half-buried in the snowdrifts of time, are like a source of light inside the glass.

“Why are you quiet?” her mother asks, across the span of thirty years.

Why? Because that love’s gone, and nothing’s left. Unless, of course, you count her, Daryna Goshchynska. (Who was it that just recently addressed her by patronymic, and with a kind of suggestive emphasis, too?) Daryna Anatoliivna Goshchynska, a retired television journalist, not quite forty years of age, who is languishing in bed at eleven a.m. like a log, with cheeks wet with tears, and has nowhere to go—not exactly a great, when you think about it, contribution to humankind. It is foolish to think that children set something right somewhere, do some sort of justice, supply the crowning achievement, or a purpose for anything. Love has no purpose beyond itself—every love has its own life and its own biography; it is a separate creature.

Once upon a time there had been a love in this world, Olya and Tolya—“Otollya” as they used to sign postcards to friends—had been and then stopped being. Just stopped, for technical reasons—in conjunction with one signatory’s departure. And that’s it? Just like that? You leave life, disappear from the screen, and that’s all it takes for your love to vanish, too? The love that had buoyed you up for years?

She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t know how to ask her mother: What did she do with her love? Did she archive it somewhere inside, tying the strings into a dead knot? Or, did she switch its tracks like Kyiv’s streetcar drivers used to do back in the in the seventies—by hand, with an iron hook—and set to finish loving Uncle Volodya with the same underlived, interrupted love that was so cruelly mangled halfway? Was it really possible that it was the same love that still went on for her? Because all that savage energy of the soul that is called love—the one that can cut you down with the force of a direct blow when you’re dusting the desk on which he used to unroll his blueprints, or when you find in a drawer an old scarf that still holds his smell, or simply anywhere, for no visible reason—cuts you down, the tidal wave of it knocks you off your feet and all you can do is fall where you stood and howl like a beast without words: Where is he? Why is he gone?—all this energy cannot possibly just disappear, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

When she was young, Daryna did not think about these things, of course; back then, her only desire was to escape as soon as possible from her crippled family, which couldn’t do better than to hatch Uncle Volodya and his moronic medical jokes—one big taunt like a fart into navy sweatpants. And without any of that “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively” that once caused her departed father so much trouble. Unlike Hamlet, she acted, for being only nineteen, rather decisively. (Told herself as soon as she spotted Sergiy—this one!—and when, the following night, he, inflamed by her hurried, eager availability—take me, I’m right here!—drilled into her, thrown onto the sand, with his unexpectedly hard and hot member, she couldn’t help herself, even though she’d squeezed her eyes shut like she was at the dentist’s—so as not to see the instruments—and yelped with pain. Poor Sergiy all but got a stutter from the shock of this being her first time, enough to traumatize the boy for life. She was lucky it turned out okay—Sergiy was very moved, stroked her hair, and whispered “my baby” to her, and that’s when she burst into tears, burying her face in his gray, as she clearly remembers, T-shirt, into his chest, because after her father this was the first man’s hand that had stroked her hair.)

Hamlet, to be totally frank, had a much easier time being decisive. After all, his father died a king, and the son had all the right to shove the two portraits into his mother’s face and point out: this had been your husband, and this is your husband, and tut at you, dear Mother. What assets did she, Daryna, have, except perhaps these memories of her early childhood, still warmed with love, elusive and tingling like a dream you can’t remember in the morning but that makes you ache with the sense of irreparable loss? And then, right away, the next frame: the yellow knobby bones with the feet sticking out from under the robe, the permanent, inextinguishable smell of urine around the home where you couldn’t invite any of your friends. (In the first months after the asylum, Father could only talk with great effort; his speech later returned, more or less, but the unpleasant strain in it remained until the end, like a person who’s crawling above an abyss and is afraid to lose his footing.) Nothing regal, nothing heroic at all—only the long, inescapable shame of a repressed teenager. And in this version of the play, Gertrude then tried, in vain, to make her daughter understand how much Uncle Volodya sacrificed when he left Father to die in the hospital and spared no painkillers for him: usually such patients were discharged, so they wouldn’t spoil the hospital’s stats with another exitus letalis. A perfectly fraternal act on her stepfather’s part, nothing like Claudius’s: all men of the same woman are in a way brothers (oh no, not all, she refuses to imagine R. and Aidy have anything in common; Aidy’s done nothing to deserve that!).