The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

all the way from around Sambir—they wouldn’t let him live in Lviv after the war.”
    “I am just a Sambir lad, Mother’s sick and Father’s dead. I’ll go sing, and I’ll go dance. I am here to raise hell...” my mind fires off a couple of lines from an old street song, instantly swallowed by a blast of machine-gun fire—ha, missed me, didn’t you, dog your mother?
    “No, Dad, I don’t remember.”
    “Neither do I!” he says, interpreting my answer his own way. “And it comes up quite a few times in Grandma’s notes—sometimes A.O. and sometimes Ad. Or. And the Ad. Or. is sometimes spelled without periods, as one word, Ador, so it’s like in French—je vous adore, I adore you. Same root as adoration. Doesn’t look like it’s an alias; I do think these are someone’s real initials, but I can’t remember any of their circle who’d fit. Whom could she possibly have coded this way?”
    “What if you’re thinking of the wrong people? This could have been an admirer of hers back when she was a young girl, and you’re just fixated on the war; you want to keep the shrapnel coming...”
    “Nonsense! She’s got whole chains of events spelled out with these initials! Like formulas. You just listen. I’ll read it to you...hang on; let me grab the notebook...”
    Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh
—he shuffles off away from the phone, the heels of his loafers slapping against the floor, before I have a chance to say anything. If I end up not getting any shut-eye, Lolly will have to take the wheel in the morning. We’re having some serious fun with this night, the old man and I—catching up on all our unspent hours worth of talk at once. Or, to be more precise, it’s Granny Lina who’s having fun with us. How much longer does she have in her?
    “Here.” Dad reappears noisily in the receiver, fumbling with something. I hear the rustle of pages being turned. “Here, found it! 1944—Grandma had a separate page for each year and, looks like, filled each page in gradually, as she recalled what happened that year. Here you go: Meeting Iv.—she means Ivan, your grandpa; she has him as Iv. throughout...then, capital B, Briefcase. That’s how they met, during a Nazi raid...”
    “I know. Grandpa dropped his briefcase with leaflets into her arms, and she then carried them all the way home, right under the Germans’ noses, through the streets.”
    “That’s right! And just after this briefcase, in parentheses, like a comment, she has G. with A.O. to, and then a cross, meaning death, then PZK and the date, in Latin letters—November 1943. P-Z-K—that’s an acronym, German most likely...PZ was how they referred to the police, K for Kommandant. But there’s a cross, too, which means it was a person, a Christian. Looks like a PZK died that November of ’43, maybe he was a German...they could have had a raid after something like that.... In any case, G. and A.O. were both there, and looks like it also involved a briefcase with leaflets in it...”
    “Or a gun.”
    This pops out of me totally by itself, as if someone else thought it. While Dad was talking, I was thinking of nothing, only saw the entry in Grandma’s notebook scrolling out before me like a news crawl on a monitor:
Meeting Iv. Briefcase (G. with A. O. to
†
PZK. XI 1943).
    She was going to write where she learned that trick with the briefcase: from G. and A.O. This is no cipher—just notes she made for her outline, which she, unfortunately, never fleshed out. But I have heard a story sort of like that before—about a briefcase, with a gun in it, and which, for that reason, needed to be gotten rid of, and also with the Nazis, and in the street, and in the middle of the day. Or did I see it in a movie?
    “Or with a gun,” Dad concurs, rustling pages; he is focused on his own ideas. “Or here, here’s another one! 1947, October. G.’s last visit. This has a whole string of initials, and separately, among them, Ador lives—see, here she has Ador!”
    “And who is this G.?”
    “What do you mean, who’s G.?” he’s asks, stunned, taken aback by the depth of my idiocy. “Gela, of course!”
    Sweet Jesus! Dad—he’s still working on preparing material for Lolly’s film—we never told him that the show’s over. He knows nothing—neither about the pre-election acquisition of Lolly’s channel by Russian investors, nor about Lolly’s unemployment. He only watches TV, so the only information he has is what they say on the