THE HALL OF SYMMETRY
Nicholas returned to the soot-black stone Ethnographic Museum for a second lecture, actually a “book presentation,” as they call it here, a book launching of one of the local poets who was the member of some underground performance group in Soviet days that had come aboveground. He was supposed to meet his curly-haired friend Raya, whom he had met in the Humanities Institute at the University of Lviv. She was late and wasn’t in the hall when he arrived. He, in fact, was late himself because of a sudden snowstorm that seemed to snarl traffic up a bit. After fighting his way onto a bus, he did manage to get a seat on it at the very back, but, regardless, it chugged along slowly through the bottlenecked rows of too many cars and too many buses in too small of a space on
