The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

That’s Nusya speaking from somewhere at his side, almost out of his armpit—she’s such a little button of a girl and always when she’s nervous this awkward Polish syntax spills out of her: she bragged she’d graduated, in the old days, from the Madame Strzalkowska’s Polish Gymnasium, and it’s a marvel indeed that they hadn’t quite managed to craft a first-rate Polish chauvinist out of her—my dear pal Nusya, Nyusichka, who wouldn’t love you, you nugget of a girl? He is suddenly gripped by a wild, predatory joy, reckless, drunk, like the thrill that swells his veins in the middle of a street fight, that explodes out of his chest as song, as uncouth howling (once he caught fire as he ran through yards, balconies, and roofs, firing back, and his head roared, like a tavern band getting people to the dance floor. “Tell you once I went to L-viv! Saw me many pret-ty things!”—wzzz! a bullet zapped the tin roofing next to him, and a tambourine rattled inside him, answering, and the fiddle squealed higher and faster, rabid, presto, presto: “On a bal-cony up high sat a la-dy stool-a-stri-de! Shame to look and shame to see, but she’s right abo-ve me!”—dog your mother, missed me, didn’t you?)—he’s swollen with it; he’s lifted above the earth; he could grab both girls under his arms, like a fairytale giant, and make a game of kicking open the trap of time that has closed around them—the three of them, encircled in a single reality available to them, however you slice it: a dead body on Serbska Street, a gun in a briefcase, the briefcase in their hands, and the police will start searching the city any minute if they haven’t yet. Tick, tick goes the blood in his veins, counting seconds—they’re all tied together into this one sack, and some giant invisible magnet has pulled Her toward him and pressed Her into his chest, and their dance isn’t over until the orchestra stops.

  So, come on, whoring mother’s son, play! Play, damn it, play till your ribs crack!

  And before any gentleman who might indeed know himself has a chance to utter a word, copper cymbals slam together in his head, a deafening, thunderous clatter descends upon him, a loose ringing like the sound of a crashing crystal palace, the shattered ice palace of the Snow Queen. A streetcar pulls up, the hoped-for one—everything as it should be, yes, ma’am, everything as the good Lord ordered and the General Staff had planned, and the eye coolly counts, as though through the gun’s sight, the doors: let the front wagon pass; it’s nur für die Deutschen and almost empty at this hour; people at the stop huddle closer to the rear of the car, mostly womenfolk who can’t easily jump up into the middle while the car is still moving, let us climb in now, my girls—please, my fair ladies, go ahead—“Sir, mind your step!”—what a shame, I did step on someone’s toes—“Please excuse me!”—a wench in a headscarf, then a lady in a fox fur collar, and that’s when you clutch your purse anxiously, blocking the way for the folks behind you, nicely done, a sudden shift, a short commotion at the door—I learned this trick back in Polish times, when I did time on Lontska Street in the cell with pickpockets, but where did you pick it up, my pet, how do you know what to do next?—and it is your narrow gloved paw, not Nusya’s, in the midst of swirling bodies that takes my briefcase with the precious Walther, also corpus delicti, in the moment when I’m lifting you onto the step, and then you’re up, in the car, catching the swinging ceramic loop in your other hand and regaling the conductor with your easy, luminous smile. The way you clasp the briefcase is so sweet, so femininely helpless, but you have taken on the burden of mortal risk, albeit the lesser share of it because the police don’t stop women in the streets to search them, do not subject them to that disgusting groping that always leaves you feeling dishonored, clenching your teeth until your brain cramps.

  No, they do not touch the women and, God willing, Nusya and you will get the weapon to its secret cache without any trouble, only no one will tell me if you did, just as no one had told me that you were here—here and not in the safe Zurich where you’d gone to study before the war, and we’d never had a chance to say goodbye because I was chasing lice in the cell on Lontska when you left, and then Poland fell, and the Soviets came, and I had to flee to Krakow because the Poles handed over the lists of their political prisoners to the NKVD, most of them Ukrainians, and our boys started getting snatched again, and of those who did get snatched, none ever came back.

  All these years I kept seeing the same dream—I remember it clearly, and I’ve always thought I don’t dream; I was sure I didn’t, but maybe I just forgot my dreams as soon as I woke up because my mind, once conscious, bolted the doors to the rest of it, so maybe I did moan and call for you in that dream—the dream in which we are dancing in a great dark hall, like the one at Prosvita or the People’s House, only bigger, and at some point you vanish, and I don’t even notice how and when, just suddenly realize that I am dancing alone—an instant of abysmal cold, of sticky terror: Where are you, Geltsia? I dash around looking for you, run around the hall like a madman, and the hall is growing bigger; it’s not a hall anymore but a giant open space, a drilling field, only dark as night, but I know that you’re somewhere here, you must be here, only for some reason I can’t see you…. And now here you are, you’re found again, my girl, the gears of separated times have locked back together, and we are together and have already executed the first movement of our dance, the pas de deux with a handgun. Somewhere an invisible master of ceremonies is calling out the dances inaudibly as I lift myself into the streetcar behind Nusya, and for another ten or twelve minutes will have the pleasure of beholding your face over people’s heads, my brave little girl—this is the kind of music they’re playing for us, nothing to be done about that; we must dance until the end, until the last breath as our oath commands—we were always such a glorious couple, the best on any dance floor. They said the two of us were the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable; all your friends must have envied you, so have no cares and fear not. It’s not for nothing that I have luck, and there’s always been enough of it to go around, to cover everyone who went with me, and those who went alone and did not come back—Igor, whom the Bolsheviks tortured to death in Drohobych jail so that his mother could only identify the shirt on the body; Nestor, who perished somewhere in Auschwitz after they arrested him in September of ’43; and Lodzio, Lodzio Daretsky, the most talented of our class, who went to Kyiv last summer, after the resistance there had already fallen, and one day, God be my witness, I will find that son of a bitch who sent Lodzio there, to be shot like a rabid dog by Gestapo the day after he got there—all of them, and there’s more every day, stand in the gloom along the dance hall’s walls, or maybe in formation around that drill field, and follow us with their eyes—Igor and Nestor and Lodzio, and God alone knows how many more. In my dream, I run past them without looking because I am searching for you alone, and only now that you have come back and the dream surfaces as a drowned man comes up from the bottom of the Tysa River when the highland pipes sound their call, do I realize that it was they who filled the hall; it had to grow bigger to make room for them all, all who stepped out of the dance and will never come back—but they stand there, mute, and do not move, and watch us, and wait, and this means that our party, Geltsia, is only now beginning.

  “Grand rond! Avancez! A trois temps!”

  “Time!” the voice urges, shoves, hard, from inside his skull. Gulp, one last time, an eyeful of her face, inhale her, almost taste her on your lips—what fool said you don’t drink off a face?—and off you run, brother, à trois temps, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta; the streetcar screeches as it contorts its body through the turn; stones of nearby buildings speckle your vision—jump, you useless fool!

  Down, down the hill, ahead of the streetcar, with his hands now free and his eyes slashed raw, heavy as a pound of bleeding flesh severed from her radiant face in the gloom of the crowd, hammered now with endless rocks, stones, cat’s heads, Katzenkopfstein, run!

  Run. Run. Run. Round the corner… through the gate… park… down the path… trees… trees—black stumps. Is it someone’s labored breath behind you? No, it’s your own rainco
at, rustling. And why are your cheeks wet, and what are these tiny streams running from your nose to your lips—is this sweat, already?

  I am crying, flashes in his mind. Sweet Lord, I am crying. These are my tears.

  Without noticing, he slows his flight—à deux temps, à deux temps—and touches his cheeks with his hands, with his fingertips, carefully as though it were someone else’s face. Woe to you, Adrian, pulses in his head, woe and woe and endless woe, you’re done, you’re finished…

  Why woe?! Everything went just fine!

  He blinks at his watch again: the entire operation, from the moment his mark stepped into Serbska Street, has taken twelve minutes. Twelve and a half to be exact. Actually, almost thirteen. Thirteen.

  So what—he’s never been one for signs—what is happening to him? A premonition? A hunch? What is he afraid of?

  “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said unto him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?’ And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.”

  He never really understood that Gospel episode of healing the bleeding woman, even when he got older and learned from his friends—in lewd, draffish words that did not accord with the Holy Scriptures—what that meant, that the woman was “bleeding,” and it tormented him for a long time, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. His dad read the Scriptures out loud to him when he was little; later, he didn’t dare ask him about it. The story remained a mystery to him: how could He, without seeing, feel that someone had taken of his power?

  Now he knows. The Gospel was as precise as a medical diagnosis. You couldn’t have put it better. There are no better words, that’s it.

  That’s exactly what he felt.

  Something has changed—and he already knows what it is: of those twelve (no, thirteen, damn it, thirteen!) minutes, the last ten remain with him and do not pass. The minutes he spent with Geltsia. She remains with him. He carries her inside him and does not want to let go, not for all the treasures in the world. He knows this is how it will be from now on.

  All these years without her he sped across the surface of time as though on smooth ice—light, unstoppable—and now it has cracked, opened a hole, given under his new weight. The power that had held him above time has left him.

  Adrian Ortynsky, alias Beast, registered as a Fachkursen student at the Polytechnic, also Johannes Weiss by other papers, also Andrzej Ortynski. Twenty-three. Invulnerable. Elusive. Invincible. Immortal.

  And, in this very moment, fully and clearly conscious, he is about to die.

  His death has already set out for him; it began its countdown to their rendezvous precisely ten minutes ago. How long before it runs out—hours, months, years—doesn’t matter; he and death are out to find each other and will rendezvous as certainly as lovers who’d set a date.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… The beast inside him reaches for his throat (how defenseless the moving pulsing bulge under his fingers, how easy it would be to crush the cartilage and shred the tendons), throws his head back at the snow-swollen sky, and bares its teeth as though to show his perfect mandibles to the invisible dentist somewhere above.

  He may have seemed to be screaming—but mutely, without noise. Or laughing—also without noise. A single living soul under the war’s November sky, with his face turned up. The dead can rarely enact such a feat; only the luckiest of them fall down face-up, because, yes, even death has its share of luck to give to its chosen few. The rest die with their eyes down, into the ground. Into the ground.

  Kyiv, April 2003

  A hospital? White coats, no, not coats, more like white sheets wrapped around people’s torsos, very strange… it must be a hospital.

  A black Opel Kadett—very fancy—black uniforms, black shiny peaks on uniform caps—Where are they taking me?

  Wake up, Adrian.

  The vision slips away, as if sucked through a dark tunnel, grows smaller, shrivels into a tiny dot, and is gone.

  To lie a little longer with my eyes closed, listening to the noises around me, feeling out the room like a blind man, inhaling its familiar scents: this is my room. The bed—empty; my arm, when I reach out, falls as if chopped off onto a crumpled pillow, nothing else. I hear myself growl in protest, and the noise wakes me up completely: this is my voice. Eyes still closed, I think beyond the doors, listening in my mind to the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen. All quiet. I am alone. There should be a clock on a bedside table on the other side of the bed; I can reach it with my other hand. Wow. Lolly must’ve dashed out before dawn. Of course—she’s got the early morning show today. Which I have already missed. Slob. Darn it. What is it with me and sleeping these days?

  Inside my head like the smarting trace of a needle: the black Opel Kadett full of foreign officers (What uniform is that?), a woman in a white coat, or rather a sheet wrapped around her body; a spatula, or what do you call it, being boiled in a shallow metal dish…. To heck with it, shake it off.

  Outside it’s raining, a nice spring rain that brushes the trees and the grass with a gentle lisping noise. Open the balcony doors and breathe deeply: the air is warm, moist. Beautiful. In the yard below, a smattering of tiny bubbles spreads like a new skin over a silver Mercedes that has a tiny flag on its parliament-issue license plate; my trusty Volkswagen huddles behind it like a village accountant next to the Terminator. The Mercedes’s Representative owner lives next door—a quiet type, must be really new, first-term, not a real politician yet.

  I know where he lives because someone broke into his flat last year, and the cops went door to door, thorough as plumbers, and had everyone sign a piece of paper stating that we saw and heard nothing. They were the ones who told us, spilled the beans on the Rep., so to speak. Before, when the family from the first floor was robbed, no one came to ask any questions whatsoever; the folks simply put iron bars on their windows. Now, when you’re coming home late at night, the sidewalk is divided into regular squares of golden light from their grated windows, like a medieval fortress. You’d think kids would like playing in that light—they’d be fairies, or kings, or knights with their fair ladies—only kids don’t pretend things like that anymore. And they should be in bed anyway, which is too bad. Somehow thinking of the kids makes me feel sad—I don’t know if it’s because I’m not one of them anymore and can’t make good use of the fairytale stage, or because when I was little we didn’t have such golden-crossed windows. We had a hedge of dirty-gray, nine-floor apartment towers, tiled on the outside like the insides of water closets, the yards between them dotted with the toy-size white huts mysteriously designated “trash-collector”—they stank ferociously, but we still liked hiding there, in between the large trash cans, big enough that if you crouched, no one could find you; and it was in the dark intimacy of that stinking refuge that I learned how girls pee. The girl’s name was Marynka, and she wore bright, fire-engine red leggings. Since I could not believe my eyes, she kindly permitted me to investigate by touching the wet furrow between the tiny flaps; I must have had the instincts of an experimentalist already. Experience is experience, even when it’s gained behind a dumpster. Nothing is wasted.

  Lolly must have been running late: her cup and the spoon she used to stir her coffee tossed willy-nilly in the sink, the squishy grounds in the rusty-brown filter still warm in the coffeemaker. The bowl with unfinished muesli she left on the windowsill makes me go all warm and fuzzy, and I catch myself smiling: I know she stood here, eating, looking out the window into the well of our yard, as she always does when she eats alone. Walking around the kitchen like this, retracing her steps—it’s like pulling on a still-warm robe she’s taken off and left hanging invisibly in the air; you can wrap yourself in it, you want to rub your cheek against her, Lolly. And the smell—the waft of her perfume lifted off the pillow where she slept, warm with the sweet, yeasty, bread-dough s
mell of her body—it follows me around, grows stronger by the window where she stood, washes over me at the door where she put on her boots. I press my fingers against my nose and inhale a slightly different version of her—a sharper, saltier tinge like the smell of seaweed drifting in from a distant beach—draw it in, and hear myself moan, unwittingly. What a joke! I’m like a dog left in the house alone, nosing his way around, looking for his master. When she first began staying the night, I did exactly what a dog would do after she’d left: I burrowed into her bathrobe and went back to sleep until she returned. The only social gesture I could muster was to call the office and lazily lie to them about feeling under the weather—I’ve no idea whether they ever bought the excuse, delivered as it was in a blissed-out drone; and I didn’t care, and when you don’t care, you’re always ahead because no one can do anything to you. I’d lounge in my nirvana bed until noon—sleeping, waking, dozing off again, marveling joyfully at the change of light and the objects in the room that seemed unrecognizable once they’d responded, like salient creatures, to Lolly’s vibrating presence—and never had the guts to tell her about it. But it was then, actually, that I started having these dreams.

  In the daytime, they fade, melt, sink under the surface like shards of cracked ice floes. They’re all thin around the edges; I lose the plot, only grasp the biggest pieces, stacked on top of each other but disjointed like pages from different chapters caught by a single wayward staple: the black Opel Kadett, some sort of place like a hospital, the spatula or whatever it is, the white-sheeted torso. Normally that’s how it is with dreams, especially when your mind is stuffed fuller than your in-box, and you wake up like someone slammed your face against a table: not this again, damn it, can I please think of something else? But these dreams, they were different from the get-go. First of all, they aren’t just a fantastical reworking of whatever happened the day before; they’ve no relationship to anything I could ever have personally experienced. No déjà vu whatsoever. As best I could articulate this to Lolly—because it is always when I talk to her that I can best verbalize my ideas, even when it’s the operational principle of a thermionic generator or something else she has no clue about—these dreams feel like I’ve been put inside someone else’s closet, and I’m looking at a stranger’s clothes, hung around in strange order. What I see and manage to remember certainly means something to someone out there, but I myself feel like the person who accidentally got plugged into someone else’s phone conversation.