The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

you’d been beaten, Lolly? And who wants to see the witnesses of your defeat again? That’s not much fun, either.”
    “But I didn’t think Boozerov was a witness of her defeat. Quite the opposite.”
    “It would have been if your father were alive.”
    “Exactly. I’d thought I could replace him in this mise-en-scène. I thought, for Mom, I was something she’d accomplished in her life, something she could show off to anyone. Rather self-important of me, wasn’t it?”
    “Can’t say it wasn’t,” Adrian answers, purposely in the Galician manner, as he always does when he wants to soften the edge of his words. And smiles. Their eyes meet, meld together, and for an instant everything around them fades, is switched off—everything except an invisible circle of electricity that pulsates in the space around them and welds the two into one, until their two hearts skip the same beat, tremble with the same wonder, the wonder that each feels upon waking up next to the other: what a miracle it is that I have you, and what did I ever do to deserve it? And, because such self-generating (and self-locked) circles never remain unnoticed by those around them, since they radiate precisely the surfeit of warmth that makes life tolerable, the column where Daryna and Adrian chose to stand draws glances—the two of them become
visible
, as if held in a precisely aimed spotlight, a curious silence gathers itself at the next column where a whole pride of academic lions glows with its white manes. (“I’ve been in art since 1956,” goes a snippet of overheard conversation.) And there, already hurrying toward them, across the entire porch on his stubby legs, is the one for whom Daryna kept searching the crowd—in the concert hall, looking over the orchestra-level seated heads, and at the intermission, in the chaotic churn of the crowd rushing through the doors.
    “Good evening, young people!”
    “Pavlo Ivanovych! Greetings!”
    They are no longer surprised that he spotted them first: that’s what he trained for, after all—but Pavlo Ivanovych’s current appearance cannot fail to stun anyone who is used to seeing him in what you’d call the office setting. Adrian has only seen men like this—happily shaken, drunk on their own importance—among his friends, when they became fathers and proudly took juice and jarred puree to their wives in the maternity ward. Pavlo Ivanovych is literally glowing, not just emotionally—he’s even broken into sweat in his generously cut, iridescent Voronin suit, even though the night is not nearly that warm; he’s broken into a sweat and glows, as if glazed, which miraculously makes his magnificent head (his skin, in the light of the streetlamp, has acquired a clear olive tint) even more handsome, almost perfect, like the head of a lacquered idol with a disheveled mop of hair, spiked in two distinct places like the horns on Michelangelo’s
Moses
, and his eyes burn with the inspiration of a biblical prophet: one can tell this is a big day for Pavlo Ivanovych.
    Daryna struggles to strike the right note, feeling like a stranger at someone else’s banquet: any words in such circumstances would be inappropriate, but Pavlo Ivanovych, obviously, needs no words whatsoever—their presence is enough for him to include them automatically among the circle of insiders who don’t need to say anything, because everyone knows they are all in the same boat. When Pavlo Ivanovych shakes Adrian’s hand, he does so with strong, honest, muscular gratitude, one man to another.
    “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”
    He really is moved. It’s good, Daryna thinks to herself, quickly, that Mom didn’t come: he probably wouldn’t even have noticed her, simply—couldn’t accommodate her, too. Adrian is the first to find the right tone—businesslike and sophisticated at once.
    “That’s quite a strong class your daughter’s part of.” He nods at Pavlo Ivanovych gravely, like the lions at the nearby column. As if it were a soccer team, Daryna almost snorts. But, to her surprise, the words prove right, exactly the kind that a stirred-up dad is capable of hearing at the moment: in them is not only anassessment of the first part of the concert they just heard, but also a fan’s anxiety (How will
our
girl look against such strong colleagues, will she hold her own?), a lifeline thrown to Nika in advance, in case of a less-than stellar performance (to lose out against the strong is, of course, so