The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

flows, for a break. Daryna and Adrian move along with the crowd; she’s got her arm hooked through his elbow and holds on as though she were afraid of being left alone in this strange milieu.
    “I don’t know,” Daryna answers, scanning the crowd distractedly. “She just said, ‘I’m not going,’ and that was that. Very resolutely, too, I didn’t expect it...”
    Daryna imagined the outing as a family affair: Mom, she thought, would enjoy going out with her and Adrian for an academic concert, albeit a student one—she doesn’t often get a chance to do something like that with Uncle Volodya; he is one of those people who always coughs in the middle of a most delicate pianissimo at the Philharmonic, and if he makes it to the opera, he always tells everyone how the box stank of socks (at our opera, the boxes do stink of socks)—and on top of that, or actually, most importantly, Boozerov is here, which, in Daryna’s mind, ought to have held for her mom an absolutely irresistible attraction, greater than Ravel, Lyatoshynsky, Britten, and Gubaidulina put together. Daryna thought her mom would be as curious to see Boozerov face-to-face again after all these years as Daryna would be to watch them: a scene in a script written by life itself, only the camera is missing (she—daughter, witness, and accomplice—would act as a camera).
    She liked this plot; she was already thinking which dress she would suggest her mom wear. Despite the extra weight that so vulgarly deformed her once-trim figure, her mom could still look quite presentable if properly packaged. The fact that Olga Fedorivna rejected the idea as soon as she heard Boozerov’s name—I won’t, I don’t want to, end of discussion—that she refused to be cast in this film, Daryna thinks, with the bitterness of self-irony, in a way, did more to align her mother with Boozerov, in Daryna’s eyes, than if the two of them were now standing here in the foyer exchanging polite small talk. Essentially, both had told her to get lost. Both refused her demand that they look back.
    “That boy who played Liszt—I liked him,” Adrian observes when they, having found a spot by a column, get busy puffing on their cigarettes.
    “Liszt? Oh, that one...”
    “You could see he was really into it,” Adrian elaborates. “The rest of them are so stiff, like they’re in a military parade, these kids. But that one was different, he had the spark...
Paa...ba-ba-bam...Paa...ba-ba-bam
,” he sings in a nasally sorrowful voice, rolling his eyes, to the tune from “Years of Pilgrimage,” and Daryna can’t help chuckling, looking at him with tenderness.
    “Remember I told you about my trip to the Zhitomir region? To see that man whose address Ambroziy Ivanovych gave us?” she asks, seemingly out of the blue.
    “That old geezer who was in the Kengir uprising?”
    “Yeah, that one, but the uprising is not why I bring it up.... It took us forever to find his place, it’s way out there in the boondocks, out beyond the village—so we were driving around, stopping at every corner, hell knows where we’re supposed to turn, and there’s no one to ask—and here comes this little old lady in a padded coat, just marching across the field, at a good clip.... We ask her, where does so-and-so live around here? And she goes all suspicious: and what do you want with him? And we say we just want to talk to him, about the Kengir uprising. And she goes—hard, you know, like she slammed a door into our faces: That was ages ago! And marches off, without looking back. And later it turned out that old lady was his wife, the one who was also in the Kengir camp, and that’s where they met each other, tossed one another notes from the men’s barracks to the women’s; you remember that, don’t you? You saw the footage...”
    Adrian smokes and looks at the lights on the square—as if it were from there, through the noise of the traffic, that Liszt’s lost tune were wafting over to reach him, a soundtrack. Years of pilgrimage, the very beginning.
    “‘That was ages ago!’” Daryna repeats with the old lady’s intonation.
    “Uhu,” Adrian nods, and it is not clear what he is thinking about.
    “That was how my mom said it: ‘I’m not going.’ She sounded almost angry. I asked, ‘But why not, Mom?’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to’—and that’s the only explanation she gave me.”
    “It’s only fun to go back to places where you won. Who wants to go back to where