The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

your own problem)—no man, let him be ten times Julius Caesar, your namesake, by the way, could ever dream of keeping track of as many things at once as do you, my priceless, for which you earn my awe and respect!
    Uf-f
—the emperor’s namesake, lips still pressed into a displeased crease, slips back out the door where the bell just happens to have announced someone’s arrival (probably just a stray window-shopper). Thank God. Now I can loosen my tie and gulp some water straight from the pitcher.... What I’d love to do now is my yoga routine, the best thing for restoring composure—just to drop into forward bend and hang there a good five minutes or so, like a shirt on a clothesline with arms hanging, so that blood comes back to my head and my mind becomes correspondingly clearer. Doesn’t look like I have time for the whole routine—how long do I have before the meeting with my so-called art consultant? (Another lummox who can’t focus on one thing, never mind he’d spent his whole life waiting for the chance to do just that. Dabbling in freethinking in other people’s kitchens, amassing in his mind a veritable archive of rare and arcane knowledge, and collecting in his tiny Khrushchev-era apartment the complete set of albums published by the “Art” press that’s not worth shit to anyone now. A guy who wanted to write, one day, once freedom rang, a fundamental work on the history of the Ukrainian underground,and when said freedom finally did ring, boomed, in fact, louder than anyone had ever expected, the only thing he turned out fit for bragging was a treatise for students about his friendship with dead Grytsiuk and Tetyanych. And if small hustlers like yours truly weren’t tossing him bones every so often, he’d still be walking around with kefir in his net sack. All of them, those Soviet-bred “brilliant intellectuals,” turned limp and shapeless on the free range, like jellyfish taken out of the water. In bright daylight all their submarine gloss turned out to be a mere optical illusion, a side effect of the atmosphere of social paralysis so prevalent then, which was the only thing that made it possible to mistake impotence for a kind of spiritual aristocratism. So we’ll have our half past five today—a meeting of impotents from two generations.)
    At our modest dinner, I will ask the professor to certify with his distinguished signature the authenticity of a pretty dubious Novakivsky. (I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the work is not by Novakivsky, but by one of his students. It will do just fine for the rake who’s got his eye on the piece—he’s already abused his privilege to move half the National Museum into his lair, enough’s enough!) And once the dear professor, after a bit of posturing, agrees (he’s never once refused), I’ll also ask him, for dessert so to speak, a little extra after the main business of the day, to find Yulichka a spot as a distance student in his art history BA program (which is why the poor thing’s been lunging at the end of her leash with diligence—reminded me five times about this meeting!).
    This entire, well-rehearsed ritual of ours, in which he acts the impoverished aristocrat who’s bringing me, the obtuse nouveau riche, the light of science and knowledge, and I pretend to eat it all right up, is in about forty minutes. I’ve time to spare, only it’s already rush hour; the streets are jammed, Kyiv’s been choking like a deathbed asthmatic lately. The way you have to crawl through downtown now, you’d rather run cross-country in a gas mask; and what the fuck, I ask you, are we feeding a mayor for? A cell phone, obviously, is not something the professor would have, can’t warn him if you run into a jam, so it’s better not to be lateand not to make the old man nervous, the easier to work him at dinner. Alright, he-rre we go, back and up—temples tingle pleasantly as if filled with champagne, the dark wave falls noisily away, rings fade from before my eyes. Consider me fit to roll out in public—triumphantly, like a brand-new BMW from the garage.
    See you later, Yulichka. (Yep, gawkers—a young couple, the miss in a muskrat fur coat, welded to the cabinet with the Soviet porcelain, and Yulichka, like a Cerberus-bitch, looming nearby, acting the guide but actually watching they don’t steal anything. I don’t need to stay; if they feel like buying a porcelain vixen or a young pioneer in shalwar, Yulichka’ll handle