The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

and...stop, stop, let’s go again from the beginning: it’s 1948—how could there be any Lviv Jews left? There were still those who hadn’t managed to escape to Poland, Nika explains. But the Lviv Jews were wiped out by the Germans, back in the ghetto, during the war, and when, did she say, was her daddy born? January of ’48? So how?
    “Well, many of them returned later, in the Soviet times already,” Nika says lightheartedly—many of those who had fled at the beginning of the war. Well, okay, that could be, all kinds of things were known to happen—must have been a couple of poor souls with pro-Communist ideas, and that was their undoing.
    As far as I’m concerned, let her have her Lviv Jews if she wants. “And the Jews, you know, they’re all musical,” Nika repeats with an unsophisticated and totally goyish proclivity for superficial generalizations. Well, certainly not all of them? Doesn’t matter, she and her daddy got their musical gifts from the Jewish side, Nika insists—on her mom’s side of the family everyone’s tone-deaf,not one of them has any ear-to-voice coordination. Is that so, well, then, of course.
    Her daddy, Nika coos melodically, in tune with the pigeons, had actually suspected he was adopted ever since he was little, because older boys in the yard had often mocked him as a little Yid. Really, what a keen phenotypic observation for a child to make. Nika nods, missing my irony—“Grandma Dunya, actually, was also a brown-eyed brunette, but she looked different; they had Tatars in their family...”
    In a fit of generosity, Nika is ready to throw in Grandma Dunya as a bonus, but I delicately steer the kid back a couple measures: and one and two and...“And how did you find out for certain?”
    “And for certain,” (Nika repeats this phrase with visible gusto, it must be new to her in Ukrainian and now she’ll trot it out whether it’s called for or not) “for certain Daddy learned when he was an adult already, in his thirties. Sometime around then. Someone at work, who envied him—because Daddy was moving up quickly and many envied him—wrote a complaint to the higher-ups alleging that he had relatives in Israel. This made quite a stir,” (her speech more and more wiggles free of the school textbook’s manacles) “for a while there it looked like Daddy would get fired.” Oh, I can certainly imagine that, I remember those times. Yep, so they were running background checks on him and stuff like that—Nika gives her shoulder a disgusted jerk, as she walks, as if to shake off stuff like that, and bites her lower lip again: a very sexy little mannerism she’s got. “Fortunately, Gramps was still alive then, and went to the appropriate offices and set the record straight. And for Daddy, too, while he was at it.”
    “And Pavlo Ivanovych,” now it feels sort of weird to say his name like this, knowing that he is not Ivanovych at all, and maybe not even a Pavlo: the name, gray as a KGB suit, is instantly stripped of its living bearer, and becomes a handle one hesitates to repeat, like something indecent. “Did Pavlo Ivanovych ever try to find his biological parents?”
    “Oh no!” Nika is shocked by my ignorance. “How could he?”
    “Well, of course, but I don’t mean back in the day, in the Soviet times...now, after the independence; he could’ve done it, couldn’t he? Especially since he works in the archives...if they really fell victim to the repressions in ’48, there might be a record, a trace?”
    “But what’s the point?” Nika objects sensibly, clearly rehearsing the arguments she’s heard from someone else—from the adults. “They are not alive anyway; if they’d survived, they would’ve found him at some point in the last fifty years. People who came back from the gulag—they looked for their children...”
    But no one looked for Boozerov. So there wasn’t anyone left to look. And if they had found him? Would it have made Pavlo Ivanovych, a KGB officer, happy?
    “And those relatives in Israel—is that true, or...?”
    “Oh please!” Nika snorts. “They just made it up to derail Daddy’s career. What relatives could there be if we don’t even know the last name he had when his biological parents surrendered him?”
    This strikes me as strange, but I know very little about orphanages; I’ve only made one show on this topic—the one about that village priest who adopted a few dozen homeless children, and those weren’t cute and