The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

I had not to crack.”
    “What’d he say back in the archive? Just stick to his Pavlo Ivanovych?”
    “I’m telling you, he was too good to look at me back there. As friendly as a rhino in heat.”
    “But at least he signed your inquiry, didn’t he?”
    “He signed it alright, said they’ll look, but they give no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll find anything. There’s only hope for those who enter here...something like that. At least now he’ll get his ass out of his chair.”
    “God, and Veronika Boozerova—who names their child like that! And what, I wonder, do they call her at home—Vera? Nika? Rona?”
    “Nika probably. Rona—that’s too high culture.”
    “Well, he’s not a cop, after all—he’s, like, intelligence service, no? Daughter a Conservatory student...and did you see, he’s got quite decent hands?”
    “I’ve met cultured cops, too. Once...”
    Aidy launches into a long and funny story—the story itself may not be all that funny, but the way he tells them, all his stories, is very funny, or, rather, he knows how to infect you with the sense of fun he has with whatever he’s talking about. He’s got the power of suggestion, the gift of puppies and small children, reserved only for the truly talented among the adults, people of beautiful and pure soul. And I am laughing my head off listening to how the charitable Aidy and his friends taught a cop to play bridge on a computer when said cop showed up in the middle of the night in response to a call from their highly obnoxious neighbor, while they were having a rocking good time, and what came of that. His stories are often raw, bratty, full of street-smart gallows humorthat’s irreverent, irresistible, and always draws you in, with its youthful excess of vitality but more with its organic innocence, its unfamiliarity with the darker sides of life, or maybe, the carefree disregard for them that borders on courage and most often turns out to be precisely that.
    Somehow, incredibly, Aidy retains this purely boyish, friendly openness toward everyone he meets—as if the only things he ever expected from them were new and exciting adventures. People usually sense this, and the waitress who comes to our table to take the order, a blonde as pale as a flour weevil, also falls under his spell and begins to radiate friendliness, even throws in something in Ukrainian although the language doesn’t come smoothly from her lips. It’s always like that with Aidy, everywhere we go; I noticed this when things were just starting with the two of us, back when we were still on formal terms, and everywhere—in a line at the post office, in a taxi, at a video-rental kiosk—we goofed around and hollered and laughed out loud, and I saw the way everyone reacted, the loosened-up smiles that would spark around us, as if everyone remembered something nice, private, something long sunk in their memory; and that’s when I first realized that I wasn’t just imagining what was going on between us, that others could see it too.
    The fountain splashes, drops of water fly out and land on us, the sun crawls out, adding color to the world, and the people around the other tables become somehow instantly more glamorous. Aidy finishes his story about the cultured cop, then reaches out and carefully extracts a miniscule shriveled leaf out of my hair. The weevil brings our beers, places the mugs on the dark-green rounds labeled Obolon, and timidly offers, “Nice and sunny, ain’t it?”
    We unanimously decide to consider Adrian Vatamanyuk’s first raid on the SB archives a success and its unplanned finale especially remarkable. Spontaneity, Aidy declares with feeling, that’s what one needs to appreciate more in life—a deflection of an electron that determines the fate of a universe. The deflectedelectron—is that supposed to be Pavlo Ivanovych? The comical Pavlo Ivanovych, the middle-aged squid drilled into military shape, with the eagle’s profile, eyes of a harem prima donna, and the name of a hereditary Ryazan boozer, a twelfth-generation wino.
    “You know,” Aidy says, “I can’t shake off the feeling that I’ve seen him somewhere before. Something about his face looks familiar...”
    “With a face like that—you couldn’t forget the man if you wanted to!”
    “It’s really something, isn’t it? Extraordinary. The eyes especially.”
    “Do you think that’s why they stuck him in the archives? Couldn’t be an operative with a mug like