The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

teach them in KGB school—that any relationship between people is merely barter: an exchange of favors. But what did he find, what is it?
    “Did you really? Pavlo Ivanovych? You found what I thought might be there, didn’t you? The anniversary liquidation report?”
    “Not exactly,” Pavlo Ivanovych says reluctantly: he is letting it out slowly, pulling their guts out, the sadist. “But I can shed some light on the matter. Choose a time...”
    “I’ll come whenever you say.”
    “No, don’t come to the office, that won’t do.” This now sounds abrupt, sharp, like a cry of alarm. “It’s more of a private conversation. You know what?” He turns to Adrian, one man to another, as though struck with a sudden insight. “Do you by chance fish?”
    “Should I?” Adrian responds.
    Daryna laughs and listens to herself laugh from aside: no, everything’s okay. Simultaneously, she realizes that the lions at the next column are not discussing the just-heard Liszt interpretation, but are talking about someone’s recent concert tour—to Japan, it sounds like. “They have fish in abundance, whatever you like!” She hears distinctly the same dramatic baritone that’s “been in art since 1956.” “But it’s pricey, more expensive than meat!”
    She looks back at Pavlo Ivanovych—did he hear that or not? She knows it can happen like this: when life, either under the pressure of your own efforts or on an incomprehensible whim of its own, clicks on to an invisible track and rolls off all by itself, and it takes all you’ve got just to keep your feet moving fast enough to hang on, this is what happens—everything you run across, down to accidentally overheard snippets of conversation and advertisingslogans, hammers home the same message from every direction, confirms the rightness of your course, as if put there on purpose, to make sure you get it. And sometimes, this can be funny, even very funny: the director with the full version of the script in his hands certainly does not lack a sense of humor. Fish, then. Alright, let it be fish.
    “I, you see,” Pavlo Ivanovych shares, “love to get out on the Dnieper when I have a chance, when I have time...on a weekend...to fish at night—it’s the best kind of rest, you see.”
    Adrian nods thoughtfully. At the worst possible moment, the bell summoning the audience for the second part of the concert rings out from the foyer, and the whole of Pavlo Ivanovych comes into motion—from his rearing Mosaic forelock to the hem of his Voronin suitcoat (the bottom button, Adrian observes, unbuttoned, very civilian-like: did his daughter teach him?). He roils with impatience like an electric kettle, flares his nostrils, and turns for the entrance at full steam; he waves with a sudden unmanly, country-fair fluster at someone in the crowd that is rapidly congealing into a clot by the door, and instantly loses any resemblance to an SBU officer, or even just to a grown man, that he may have reclaimed in the last couple of minutes. I wonder where his wife is, Daryna thinks—she wouldn’t have missed this, would she?—and manages to find, directed at them from the crowd, a frozen, even it seems, a bit scared (fish-eyed, of course!) look from an inexpressive lady, clearly not one of the musicophiles, dressed in a fashionable pink-tweed, fringed jacket that nevertheless does not look good on her at all; Pavlo Ivanovych, however, does not lose professional form and demonstrates appropriate vigilance just in time, managing (he’s burrowed himself between the two of them again, and they are moving, three abreast, in the reversed current, back inside) to touch both Daryna and Adrian with his elbows and to nod, with every sharp angle he has in his body at once.
    “My wife.”
    They acknowledge each other over the distance, mutely, as if underwater, and the pink, fringed fish stretches her lips intoa smile the same way Nika does, only the mother, unfortunately, bares her gums when she does it—not the most photogenic sight. It would have been just fine if Mom had come, Daryna concludes, feeling somehow comforted. But then, on the other hand—why should she have?
    And then she hears Pavlo Ivanovych’s rapid-fire muttering above her ear—hypnotically similar, this time, to his daughter’s dove-like cooing, “Come this Saturday to the South Bridge...from the left, the Vydubychi side...right around midnight, fish bite really well there...and no one will bother