The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

black-eyed like the baby the Boozerovs must have chosen one day—like a shiny tchotchke in a store window—but ones that truly no one else wanted, defective ones, born with handicaps. But this was in an independent Ukraine already, and who knows what kind of laws they had back in the USSR; I haven’t researched that, so I better not say anything.
    Nika and I turn the corner onto Rylsky Lane and walk past the windows of Kyiv’s most expensive boutiques, under the eyes of bored security guards who stir to life when they see us—just enough to follow us with their eyes—the two women, one older and the other younger, one slim and the other plump—and decide which one they like better—the same way I use my eyes like fingers to feel out each pebble of leather on the purses in the window displays as I walk by (even the cheapest of them costs a third of my former salary!). And under the leers of this sleepy fight clubthat’s pulled itself outside for a gulp of fresh ozone, Nika, a true straight-A student, instinctively straightens up, pulls her stomach in, and reaches to her temple to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear...looks like she’s still a virgin, or at least really inexperienced. An obedient, diligent child, and that’s the way she’ll be in bed, too: tell me what I should do, and I’ll be the best at it.
    It’s what they told her, I think to myself, vaguely—she hasn’t decided anything for herself yet. She is still stuffed full of what the adults have packed into her, and it’s Daddy who told her, Daddy has decided for her: the child doesn’t need her biography burdened with some lost-without-a-trace Jewish grandmother. Or a grandfather, or whoever it was, so biblically ox-eyed. And at some basic level, one can understand Daddy’s decision—when one remembers how thick the miasma of anti-Semitism was within those walls on Volodymyrska: that was the atmosphere that shaped him, and it must have been the same in the home where he grew up.
    Gramps Boozerov, if he was a captain by the end of the war, must have been shipped in from someplace near Samara right at the peak of the purging of the Jewish elements, and from that point the orders stayed the same until 1991, so Nika could not fail to inhale some of that miasma herself. That’s probably why the possible relatives in Israel hold no appeal for her; it’s no asset. An exotic Lviv backstory—now, that’s different: for now, it’s just an ornament, body glitter that gives her extra charm in the company of her peers, but later, if her musical career takes off, she’ll be able to put her lost-in-the-depths-of-the-gulag, Polish-Jewish ancestors to much better use, and better yet, because they are unknown, she could claim whatever pedigree she wishes—she could hint, perhaps, to a Western impresario, at possibly being related to Arthur Rubinstein, or any other famous musician who might have been a Polish Jew. It’s an inexhaustible resource! She could choose from thousands of lives that were slashed short, just as Gramps Boozerov could choose from any one of someone else’s suits in the wardrobes of Lviv’s emptied apartments, any one of someone else’s cities, homes, and even children—could choose
someone’s life, already made
, and wear it as his own. She wouldn’t even need to hire promoters or convert journalists to her cause: Jewish ancestors, vanished without a trace in Lviv under Stalin’s rule, are ready capital. You just have to know how to collect your dividends. I could clue her in right now (she herself, of course, hasn’t thought about it yet)—I could tell her about all kinds of our movers and shakers who are doing very well for themselves in the West peddling their freshly pressed Jewish pedigrees, the way Russian White Guard emigrants used to sell their estates, supposedly left behind in the old country, to the gullible French, and every Georgian in the camps was called a Count.
    This must be the natural course of things: it is not the antiquarians or museum curators, but swindlers and profiteers who are first to descend upon the ruins, and they are the surest sign that life, as Vadym preached to me, goes on.
    It’s stupid, but I sort of resent Nika for her biological grandparents—for her not having gotten curious about them, not having made her dad untie a few of those dust-covered archival bags. It’s stupid, she is still so young—her life still revolves around herself. She isn’t even quite