The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

the same as her father’s when he avoids giving a direct answer. The whole situation strikes me as pretty stupid: here we are, standing in the middle of the street, lined up against St. Sofia’s wall, investigating the genealogy of Veronika Boozerova’s musical talent! But no, there’s something else going on, a different story that involves me, too: back in the ’70s, when Pavlo Ivanovych curated Mom’s museum, they didn’t suffer Jews in the security services, not even half-bloods—by then the USSR was fighting Zionism, and those few-and-far-between Jews who remained in the corps had to have been so select and proven that they wouldn’t cast a shadow at sundown—men like that would sell their own mothers to keep their positions, never mind some Olya Goshchynska, and Pavlo Ivanovych doesn’t fit the type, something’s not right here.... And Nika, although a product of a different epoch, also backpedals, tries to take her Jewish grandmother back, awkwardly, like a child pulling back her doll.
    “Well, I don’t really know for sure...probably...Gramps died before I was born, and Grandma didn’t know either. They were pure Russians themselves, born and raised, from somewhere near Kuybyshev...Samara, as it’s now called.”
    “Oh,” I say, totally lost now.
    “Only we’re not related,” Nika says. “They adopted Dad from an orphanage.”
    Mowgli bursts in my mind, like a bubble, the spur of the old guess cutting in again. “Your matinka still alive?”—“And well, thank you, and yours?” Oh God...how he recoiled—so obviously!—when I shot it back at him, so casually, back then, when we first met...Mowgli, an orphan, so that’s what it was, who’d have thought?
    “Oh,” I repeat, as if dazed. “I see.”
    Well, at least I—owing to Pavlo Ivanovych—was spared a similar fate...
    “What if we took a little walk, Nika? I was about to go into the grounds, see if the lilacs have opened...”
    Nika, instantly relieved, happily trots beside me, hanging devotedly on to my every word—now she’ll tell me anything I want and will go on for as long as I want. Along Striletska, the puddles spread resplendent as lakes and pigeons totter across them in pursuit of females, cooing just like Nika into my ear. I’m getting a bit lightheaded.
    “Daddy was adopted from an orphanage in Lviv when Gramps worked there”—I decided not to seek Nika’s clarification of the exact nature of Gramps’s work there—“Daddy does not remember his biological parents, he was too little.
    “He doesn’t even remember Lviv, he grew up a Kyivite—the Boozerovs were given an apartment in Kyiv when Gramps was discharged. In the heart of downtown, not far from here, on Malopidvalna, it’s now worth half a million dollars,” Nika brags—she doesn’t really care what she is talking about as long as it’s about her: she is showing me her life like her school report full of As;, she is playing her capstone concert for me alone, with a single piece on the program—The Boozerovs. From the top, one more time, please, Nika—one and two and...on Malopidvalna?
    “How convenient, that’s really close to work for your father, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, Grandma said that she wanted to move to Crimea, to the south shore, to Yalta or Simeiz—the Boozerovs could choose.Crimea was just being resettled at the time, but Gramps picked Kyiv. That was after the war, in ’48. In Stalin’s times,” Nika clarifies.
    Yes, I understand. Her biological grandparents—the ones Daddy doesn’t remember—a Lviv Jewish couple, most likely, fell victim to repressions. And, most likely, they were executed, because had the mother still been alive, no one would have taken an infant from her—Nika’s familiarity with contemporary penitentiary procedures is also a legacy, although she is not aware of it.
    Nika always feels like Lviv is her native city; she’s felt it since the first time she set foot there, back when she first went there on a school-group tour. She felt as if she had lived there before. Now she’ll start telling me how much she loves Lviv; I bet this number of hers plays especially wells with boys—even in the Soviet days, Lviv was our last symbol of Europeanness, and today the admiration of Lviv coffee and what’s left of its Renaissance architecture is a bona fide prerequisite for all intellectually ambitious boys and girls.
    So, that’s who Nika would like to be—a Lvivite with a pedigree, and one and two