The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

company—he naturally has a wonderful tenor, Nika asserts so fervently as if it made all the difference in the world to me. As if I had visited her dad for the express purpose of assessing his natural vocal abilities. Now it is
my
turn—I recognize these notes in Nika’s voice with unerring precision, I can’t be fooled: Nika is making excuses, she is ashamed of her father’s profession—she would much rather see him an opera tenor, even of the second or third roster. Really, how did I not think of this before: at the time of her childhood, in the ’80s—and even of mine, in the ’70s—the acronym Kay-Gee-Bee spoken out loud was already likely to elicit from other kids the same snickering as names of certain hidden parts of the human body, so standing up and announcing to the whole class where her daddy worked could not have added to little Nika Boozerova’s popularity among her peers. It wasn’t all that cloudless, then, her childhood....
    “Your father’s trepidation can be understood.” I smile at her maternally. “Art is an uncertain business; only a few make their way to success, and law school at least guarantees a living. Especially when, like in your family, it’s a legacy...”
    To this mention of family legacy Nika darkens and bites her lip—it must be a nervous habit she has, because her front teeth have traces of the lipstick she’s swallowed.
    “Well, not really...Daddy, when he was young, wanted to take the entrance exams to Mechanics and Mathematics, he was really good at math, but Gramps didn’t let him. And the musical talent—that comes with the Jewish blood...”
    Jewish?
    At first, I don’t know what to say: Nika and I truly belong to different generations—the freedom with which she speaks of her Jewishness can serve as a line of demarcation for an entire era. Among my peers, being Jewish was still a mark, something profoundly ambivalent and vaguely shameful, something even those with last names ending in -man and -stein were loath to admit to, and half-bloods hid like syphilis under the covers of their Slavic last names. And there was no game better loved by KGB-paid informants than teasing a Jewish grandma’s grandson with anti-Semitic innuendo and watching him go pale, change in the face and chuckle along stoically like the Spartan boy with a fox cub chewing at his stomach—the other extreme from the opposite camp was an urgent, tentative, roundabout confession, to everyone suspected of being Jewish, of one’s own Judophilia and love for the state of Israel (about which at the time absolutely nothing was known but which was loved anyway, long-distance, purely for the fact that it was not loved by Moscow).
    And in my student years, I often said such things myself—feeling, however, every time, a slight awkwardness at this forced demonstration of basic human solidarity, like the feeling one gets from demonstrating one’s health at a gynecological exam. To Jewish people, I think this must have been as offensive as any anti-Semitic barb. But the problem, as Aidy says, did not have a solution within the framework of that system and instead took care of itself later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I simply stopped noticing who was Jewish and who was not, and what kind of Jewish they were, and who was whose grandma’s sister’s husband, and have internalized this not noticing so deeply, it would appear, that I now stand before Nika Boozerova feeling like the world’s biggest idiot for the second time in five minutes: oh, so they are Jews!
    So that’s where Pavlo Ivanovych gets his Arab look, his near-Eastern charm, some of which, in a diluted form, has trickled down to his progeny—and when Nika turns her head, the magnificentprominent eyes, the tucked-up nose, and the plump-lipped mouth assemble instantly, like a 3-D image behind a stereoscopic picture, into a new kind of person: a Jewish girl, a mixed-blood—and what a comely mix it is!
    “So, your grandmother must have been Jewish then?” I ask, now with genuine curiosity: this must mean that Gramps Boozerov managed to get married before 1937, before the great Jewish purges of the Party and NKVD. Afterward, Jewish wives were no longer fashionable among the fighters of banditism, and after the war, when they went after the Jews almost as zealously as in prewar Germany, a wife like that was a downright liability.
    Something makes the girl hesitate before she answers, the expression on her cute face