The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

there, on the crosswalk before Reitarska, my cell rings: Aidy.
    “It’s not here,” he says, and I’m almost run over by an especially nervous Toyota that jerks off before I quite make it all the way tothe sidewalk. (I stick my tongue out at the driver.) Their archives, turns out, are not here but across the street, on Zolotovoritska. And that’s where he is right now. And that’s where I am to go; he’ll tell me everything.
    “They’re all going to lunch now; I just made it!”
    I turn around—like the indomitable Nastya, like a tank; I dash between moving cars not waiting for the green light. Zolotovoritska is a street I like: cozy, quiet, one of the few streets in the center that retains its true old-Kyiv charm, and even the recently sprouted cohort of granite-plated bankomorphic high-rises can’t do anything to destroy its spirit. And right on the corner of this agreeable street, in front of a flowerbed, on a little knoll, in the sun, stands my good lad—like a beacon to show me the way—and it’s instant: a hot wave of utterly inane joy at the sight of his lanky-colt figure, his close-cropped head, his smile that beams from afar like a discrete source of light in the cityscape. He’s seen me!—but I did first! I did!—and while this distance between us—this bisector not found on any maps of the city, called forth for just this minute beside this flowerbed, this line that’s made this empty corner of Zolotovoritska and Reitarska alive, buzzing and pulsing for this one minute, shrinks at the speed of the intercepted glance (the knee-buckling, head-spinning kind that makes your heart drop into bottomless tenderness), while this “crosswalk,” invisible to all but the two of us (and no city in the world has road marks more important than these!)—counts down the seconds that remain between us—seven, six, five, four—I see, with peripheral vision (like a black gangster-mobile that pops up out of nowhere in a cheap action flick, and next a window’ll roll down to let out the muzzle of a submachine gun)—an incursion onto our bisector, from somewhere behind me on the sidewalk, of someone else’s black shadow. Not a casual brush but a frontal attack, resolutely aimed to wedge itself between the two of us, keeping us both in its sights. And when I step onto the sidewalk, a step away from Aidy, instead of touching him, finding him in a quick tangle of hands, shoulders, cheek, I run into the wall of that foreign look, sprungup suddenly beside us, short and hard, as if from under a frown. Prominent black eyes set in fleshy eyelids, an appraising look, but not in the usual men’s way, different, so that you want to shake it off right away, like a black spider; before this instinctive impulse can reach my brain, the look scrambles its aim by leaving only a vague unsettling residue, a slimy trail—and Aidy, taking his hand off my shoulder in an interrupted gesture, turns his head and smiles starchily in that direction as to someone he knows—barely, but enough that the person deserves a few niceties, even if he’d turned up at a bad time.
    “Going to lunch?” the man asks.
    This sounds like a send-up for a recently concluded conversation to which there is nothing to add, and it’s not hard to guess who this type, stuffed into his mass-produced suit like into a corset, might be—that very same archive’s employee who left the office on Aidy’s heels and should’ve kept going instead of coming to loiter around us. The mister’s head hovers at about Aidy’s shoulder, and the rest of him is not much to look at either—the rump significantly outweighs the top, legs sort of stubby—but his bearing and face are remarkable: a strong face, he must’ve been a real hottie when he was young; schoolgirls doodle such Mephistopheles profiles in their notebooks, only he’s not my type. I don’t like those Mediterranean-swarthy, sepia types with eyes that become more prominent and black the more white strands they get in their black wool, and something vaguely hawkish in their features—the whole aging Arab terrorist look. Or Israeli military. For some reason, I think they must be constantly sweating—like someone used too much oil paint on them and forgot to daub the painting. And he’s got military bearing alright; they all carry themselves like that—even when all they’ve got is an archive job. What’s his rank, I wonder?
    Aidy cleverly makes a point of not introducing us. A cow would