The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

did I hear this captain?) And, okay, there’s a miniscule, microscopic chance that Pavlo Ivanovych, for old times’ sake, will be moved to look in the surviving part of the archives where I so helpfully pointed him. And will, after all, produce out of its dark depths the victorious report of a certain MGB anti-banditism squad written just in time for the Great October’s 30th anniversary. And yet somehow, I find this very hard to believe. I failed to evoke in Pavlo Ivanovych the appropriate level of professional enthusiasm; I failed to recruit him....
    I wonder how many people he recruited in his day, when he was still on operational duty? And now all their cases are sitting somewhere in his stacks, and he knows them, those people; he might be following their careers and could at any time pick up his phone, call someone like Aidy’s professor who squealed at me at The Cupid, and express his wish for something practical in exchange for his silence. Not much fat to be had off an old professor like that, of course, but there’re bigger fish—tons of them, whole schools of them that rushed, like salmon to spawn, into politics and government after 1991, to build up the country that had finally freed itself. And they, too, thought they had freed themselves—from the agreements they had signed with the KGB—they were giddy with freedom.... Meanwhile, Pavlo Ivanovych just sat, like a spider, in his dungeon and spun the threads of new dependencies. Maybe his life isn’t as hard as I so charitably worried it might be, and by the time he retires he, too, will have, bit by bit, put aside enough for his own modest yacht to sail the Dnieper—and the climate here, thank goodness, is so much better than London’s. And I foolishly thought I’d tempt him with my consultant’s fees—two fifty an hour, money I don’t even have yet. Come to think of it, I don’t have any money at all. You’re such a nitwit, Miss Daryna, Daryna Anatoliivna....
    “Miss Daryna! Daryna Anatoliivna!”
    Someone’s actually calling after me, and I didn’t hear it...I feel as if I’ve been caught in the middle of something indecent—it’s always like that when people recognize me in the street: an instant transition, like being captured in the sudden light from the soffits, like being catapulted from the darkness of the audience straight onto the proscenium: Hoop-la, the thunder of the applause, you turn around, stand there like a pillar of salt, grinning a plastic grin; oh shit, are my trousers splattered with mud in the back?
    A girl—plump, dark-haired, and pretty cute, an expensive leather jacket thrown open, scarf messed up on the run. She’s breathing hard, wide-open eyes like plums, spellbound, she’s glowing, so thrilled she can hardly see straight: She made it! As if she’s run a marathon to catch up with me.
    “Daryna Goshchynska!” She is not asking, but triumphing like a soccer fan who’s spotted Andriy Shevchenko and can’t wait to shout to the whole world about it, name, exclamation mark, pointing finger—
look, look!
—before her deity disappears or changes itself into something completely different as deities in every myth are wont to do.
    “Ooff!” She’s trying to catch her breath, hand on her chest—some rack she’s got there, C-cup at least—she shakes her head, laughing at herself now—at her breathlessness, at having run, and having caught up with me, and at having me stand now here before her, and at it being spring, and at the downpour that’s just passed, and at the sun shining—and I smile, too, infected, unwittingly, with this puppy-like burst of her young youthful energy: What a funny girl! Sweaty, flushed, clothes in a mess.
    “I’m so sorry...I recognized you from afar; I’m so glad I caught you.” She’s still not taking her gawking black eyes off me, her plump-lipped mouth is stretched ear to ear; this must be the first time she’s seen Daryna Goshchynska live: “I would very much like to invite you, may I? Here!” she exhales, full-chest. “Take this, please.”
    A white, or rather, a gray butterfly—a cheap booklet, on thin paper, like all free concert invitations.
    “On the twenty-fourth...in the Grand Hall at the Conservatory...”
    “Thank you.” I react with my standard working smile now, and put the flyer, without reading, into my purse: I’ll throw it out later, I get mountains of this junk every month, and the mail’s not letting up yet—the news that Daryna