The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

would anyone expect the man who still goes by the name of Pavlo Ivanovych Boozerov to help me find my, e-er, relative if he never looked for his own birth parents?
    And—what right do I have to judge him?
    Nika, having broken free of the direction of my imaginary conductor’s baton in our little conversation, is back on the subject of music, cooing about her studies, bragging about her piano professor—of course, I see: she, too, is reporting to me. I, too, am somehow, tangentially responsible for the choice she made. A living mollusk in a shell cracked open: naked, defenseless, its flesh soft and runny (on a plate, in a seaside restaurant; when was that?). And a kind of new, unfamiliar sorrow floods me—not the bitter-scorching kind that parches you into a salt flat; no, thisone does not scorch, it is moist, and it makes me grow weak, soft like earth under rain. I heave with it; I swell to the very edge of my vision, another instant—and I’ll burst with it, and it’ll come pouring out through my eyes, nose: Nika, Nika, you poor girl, what have they done to us all?
    We cross the square before the monument—pausing for a second, as always, where the urban axis reveals the sight of two constellations of cross-topped domes with the fortresses of bell towers, St. Sofia’s and St. Michael’s, and your breath, no matter how many thousand times you’ve seen it, explodes out of your chest in an uncontrollable
A-ah!
(the awkward upright trunk of the future Hyatt in its green mesh of scaffolding does not, fortunately, fall into the same line of sight)—and step into the gates as if into a pocket of silence sewn into the very center of the city: behind the ancient walls, the street clamor fades, and here even Russian tourists grow sort of subdued, as birdsong emerges, loud and triumphant, and the babbling, the crystalline babbling of dozens of streams from invisible gutters—you hear it so much more here than outside...
    One’s gaze flies up of its own accord, climbing the eastern wall of the cathedral spotted with patches of pink plinthite; Nika pauses for an instant, too, and then starts back on her topic again: the Germans swindled Gubaidulina out of the rights to all her works, got them virtually for pennies, but Nika will play the piece anyway, even without permission. It’s not a big deal at a student concert, who’d ever find out, right? Of course. And we’ll go this way, now, Nika—through the back, past the public restrooms, toward the old seminary: the old monastery orchard glows from afar with the softly goldenish froth of just-opened buds and the ant-like mesh of sunspots on the new grass.
    On the corner in front of the restrooms a young Japanese woman, like a doll with an unbending back, is setting up a camera with a timer on a tripod, and we stop to let her take the picture—the woman turns to us, bows smiling like a cork-tumbler toy, thanking us with a mouthful of vaguely English mush and takes off at ateetering trot toward the clump of other cork-tumblers lined up against the cathedral wall. They all also mewl something, smiling with their mush-filled mouths, a red light blinks in the camera, the ballerina-backed lady gives a high-pitched yelp, must be to say, one more time, and trots back to the camera. And Nika and I walk on, as huge and awkward among these delicate creatures as a mama bear with her cub. It seems that for every square yard with a view there’s a Japanese person with a camera, I tell Nika, but she couldn’t care less about the Japanese, or their super-hitech machines (and our Antosha dreamt for so long of having a camera with a timer!).
    Nika stares at me, lower lip bitten down, and I can again see on her large, childlike incisors the traces of the lipstick she’s eaten. “Miss Daryna!”
    I stare back at her: What now?
    “Will you come to my performance?”
    She is not all that self-centered, this girl. Not all that insensitive...
    “I will.”
    It comes out unexpectedly solemn, a line in a sugary melodrama.
    And I know that I will, in fact, go.
    ***
    “Why,” Adrian asks, “did Olga Fedorivna not want to come?”
    At the intermission, they opened the main doors, the ones that lead to Independence Square via a columned porch, and the thin crowd—looking more corporate than bohemian, made up mainly of the insiders, family dressed up as if for a wedding and friends and who keep excitedly calling out each other’s names in the foyer—spills outside in two separate