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“Kevish,” Anusha said to me, “how to find Mona Lisa?”

“Don’t worry, we can’t miss it.”

She looked at her watch. “Kevish!” She showed me. It was 5:05 P.M.

We still had nearly an hour, and it took just a minute or two to look at the painting.

“O.K., let’s find the Mona Lisa.”

We left the Middle East and entered Europe: those darkish paintings of the eighteenth century, with thick light seeping into shadowed rooms. We didn’t stop to look at paintings that caught our eye. We just took them all in so that our scanning glances turned a whole room into a montage.

Anusha said, “My feet.”

In a small corner, she plopped down onto a bench and slung out her legs on the herringbone floor. People stepped around her.

“All this people went to see Mona Lisa first,” she said.

“The Louvre seems a lot bigger than it did in 1980,” I noted. “I mean, it was easy. I just found it, the Mona Lisa, in a room by itself, in a kind of box on the wall. It’s actually really small.”

She made a dour face, a skill of which Poles are the unchallenged champions.

“Don’t worry. We’re close,” I said.

I really felt we were. Because I noticed that I was now staring at Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait, the man coming out of a smear of shadow, angling the right shoulder toward us, his black eyes like raisins.

“I’m boring,” Anusha said. “I want sleep. Polish food,” she said. “And, Kevish, you promise me Mona Lisa.”

“Wait a second,” I said. I left her resting on the bench, and checked out two neighboring rooms—Rembrandt all over the place, but no Mona Lisa. I came back to Anusha, stood looking down at her, thinking. And a big, fairly embarrassing question climbed up in my throat.

“O.K. Did Rembrandt paint the Mona Lisa?”

“No. Da Vinci,” she said.

I knew it had been somebody in-ignorably famous. But I was tired and these were, after all, the pre-Dan Brown years.

“Well then the Mona Lisa isn’t going to be here. But we’re O.K. We’re in the Flemish lands,” I explained. “Da Vinci, see, that’s Italy. All we’ve got to do is cut south through Belgium and France, and we’re there.”

“You tell me you were here before,” Anusha said.

“I was.”

I helped Anusha up. “Come on. We’ve still got time. I’ll get you there.”

“Why you don’t ask that man who works?” Anna said. “You knew French last night in the bar.”

“I was drunk when I knew French last night.”

“Ask someone, Kevish!”

I knew I had to do it, although the embarrassment of such asking such a question still stings. I was an art imbecile. First, Mesopotamia and Islamic art had bored me. Then confusing Rembrandt with da Vinci. Now, to ask “Which way to the Mona Lisa?”—that was degrading. I could have cheerily asked for Titian’s Man Smelling Eelgrass or something esoteric, but not the most annoying FAQ in the history of the Louvre.

“Kevish! You promise,” Anusha said.

I approached a blue-suited watchman, and did it: “Excuse me, where is the Mona Lisa?”

He said, “You’re in the Richelieu wing, not the Denon wing.” He didn’t go out of his way to be encouraging.

“So…how do we get to the Denon wing?”

“The museum is closing in twenty-five minutes.”

“So the Denon wing, how do we get there?”

He pointed. We scooted, weaving through the crowd. At the Denon Wing, plaques on the walls showed a miniature Mona smile and an arrow. But now a current of bodies moved against us. Announcements came over the loudspeakers: “Closing in fifteen minutes.”

We reached an elbow in the corridor. Stairs going up. On either side two escalators. Everybody was coming down, towards us. Not a soul going up.

A blue suit stopped me.

“We have come to see the Mona Lisa,” I said in French. “By da Vinci.”

“You’re too late,” he said. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“There is no tomorrow,” I said. “We’re bus tourists.”

“On descend,” he said again, looking away. “Come tomorrow.”

“Tell him I am from Poland,” Anusha said.

“She is from Poland,” I said in French.

“I understand English,” he said.

“We have ten minutes left. Plenty of time.”

“You see that man?