The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “All his life he’d made crosses and they shoveled him in without one. Threw him into one big dump, and that’s that…”

  “The Soviets?” Adrian asked, noticing just then that Gypsy spoke without his usual “ye follow.” “Or the Germans?”

  Gypsy spat a fleck of tobacco that got caught in his beard.

  “Ours. During the hunger. The drag went around the village, picking up corpses. Mother was still breathing, but the driver said, ‘She’s got a day, no more; I ain’t making another trip tomorrow.’ So they shoveled her in, too.”

  They were silent again. Adrian wondered what a drag was. The strange word blocked his mind and didn’t let the rest through. But what about Gypsy himself? How did he survive?

  “I was gone by then,” Gypsy went on, in response to the unspoken question, as often happens between people who share the same bunker. “Grandfather, may he rest in peace, took me to the station when they drove the kolkhoz horses there, to the syndicate, for soap…. Stuffed me into the train car when no one was looking, so I rode all the way to Kharkiv with those horses. They couldn’t stand on their own anymore, so they tied them together, front to back… drove them to the station like that, tied up.”

  Suddenly, Adrian saw it with absolute certainty—as in dreams or when a difficult problem suddenly resolves itself. “Gypsy—that was a horse, wasn’t it? Your horse?” and instantly thought he shouldn’t have asked.

  The gunman’s eye turned at him, glistened strangely. A towering, black-bearded man—like a picture of a highwayman in a children’s book. Half-giant, half-bear. Adrian looked back at Gypsy and heard a rhythmic thumping in his ears—his own heart, or the wheels of the train: with a famished, half-dead boy in the car full of starved horses, skins, ribs, ribs and bones. The horses rode to their death. And the boy rode to survival.

  “They lifted them up in the kolkhoz stable,” Gypsy said slowly; it looked like he was grinning with his very white teeth. “Ran the girth under the belly, like so, and ran it through a block, then pulled to lift them…. And ours, while they still took them out to the field, every night turned to our yard. He’d stand there by the fence and look in. He knew he couldn’t come in. A smart horse, he was. I took him my bread, and Mother cried… he recognized me on the train.” Gypsy spat off another nonexistent tobacco crumb and bared his teeth. “Gypsy recognized me, ye follow?”

  A gnat buzzed thin and high in the air between them.

  “He, while he still knew himself, said he had a girl somewhere,” Gypsy said abruptly, and without any connection to the previous topic. It sounded like a question, a feeling out. “Marichka she’s called.”

  “’Round here, they’ve got two Marichkas in every yard,” Adrian grumbled, sharper than he’d meant it. Gypsy, however, nodded with almost visible satisfaction, as though it was exactly what he’d wanted to hear. As if it provided further proof for some personal theory of his: for example, that everything in the world is vanity of vanities and chasing after the wind. He must make a heck of a soldier, Adrian thought. A good—a tough—one. The angry ones—those usually burn out fast. But this guy—he’s already burned into slag; he’ll last forever.

  They were quiet for a bit longer. The wordless understanding they’d found for a moment hung between them, then passed, and both felt it go. Gypsy stood up first. “Should we go, or what?”

  When they came back, Ash was gone. He left behind his dead body, which needed to be taken out and buried.

  That day Adrian really came to appreciate Yaroslav. Without him they would’ve turned into a pack of snarling dogs—everyone’s nerves had been worn to shreds, or, as Gypsy put it, gone to hell in a handcart. The priest served the parastás and stayed with them for the wake. Outside, a generous, thick rain fell watering Ash’s fresh grave—it seemed nature itself burst with tears, mourning the boy who couldn’t be mourned by a bride or his family; the drip-drop of water into tins under the vents coalesced in Adrian’s mind into the same, repeated bit of doleful song: “Neither Father’ll cry for me, nor my dear mother, re-la-re-mi-faa-mi,” and the next line clawed its way in, “only will cry after me three fair lasses….” Of all things, he could do without wondering who would mourn him if he died—he knew, however, that others were thinking about it, too, could feel the morbid, unwanted ideas about the inevitable end to their struggle take shape in their minds; these always came when one of them perished—you bury a bit of yourself—but he didn’t know how to change it.

  He filled a barrel with rainwater simply to be doing something; Rachel boiled new potatoes, skin on, and Orko, in violation of the ban, mixed a sniff of his alcohol with water—to be drunk in the memory of the departed. Yaroslav told them the news: in such-and-such village they arrested a truck full of people who refused to join the kolkhoz, but our boys freed them in a fight around R., and there were wounded; in the other one, the turncoats wanted to ambush Woodsman, spent three days waiting for him in the village head’s house, got pissed as farts, shot holes in the ceiling, and Woodsman never came. Yaroslav purposely conveyed the simplest, most common news that everyone was curious to hear; Ash, too, would have been, had he been alive; and somehow Yaroslav made it feel as though the dead man had not left them at all, quite the opposite—could now, having been freed from the burden of his suffering body, join them at leisure and hear something he was curious to know. And Yaroslav kept talking to oblige him. In the same level, soft-as-silk voice, Yaroslav addressed the soul of the departed, inviting it to share their meal one last time; they prayed like respectful children at a village home where the oldest son had gone out into the world and learned something that they, the younger ones, were not yet to know—passed his leaving exams or joined the army.

  The candle burned evenly in the corner; spoons clacked, noses ran—from the drink and the rich potato steam savored by Ash’s soul, side by side with the living, and a heavy, complacent warmth filled their bodies; without anyone really noticing, Yaroslav tamed Ash’s death, made it into something domestic, common and obvious, and the funereal weight disappeared all by itself. They were a family again, all together and Ash with them. Adrian watched Yaroslav with an adoration he no longer felt the need to conceal; the priest’s large forehead, as though made of two separate hemispheres and appearing even bigger because of the bald spots, glistened with tiny drops of sweat, which he wiped, again and again, with a handkerchief he kept unfolded on his knee in place of a napkin. When the moment seemed right, the conversation having found, like a river on a flood plain, new, discrete paths, Adrian acted on what must’ve been a purely military urge to report observations of anything uncommon to one’s superior (regardless of any rank Father Chaplain may, in fact, have held, his seniority was at the moment beyond doubt, silently and unanimously acknowledged) and told him his dream from the night before—about Roman in the tight hovel, his “Here’s where I live,” and his strange request to light a candle for him. Yaroslav knew Roman; it appeared the man hadn’t been seen or heard from since the skirmish in which Adrian was wounded.

  “It means,” Yaroslav said, “that you were the last to see him alive.”

  Adrian realized the priest was right—and it was like a hidden light went on in his mind: he realized he had known it all along—Roman died because he shielded Adrian with his body. In the dream, he had no proper home because the boys didn’t have a chance to build him one, didn’t bury him properly, in a coffin—the NKVD must’ve taken the body. What was it he said in the dream? “They’ll all come soon.”

  “I will perform a service for the rest of his soul,” Yaroslav went on in his quiet and impassive voice, not a trace of steel—and yet it felt like he was building a fortress wall. “His soul is now passing through the twenty ordeals on the way to its judgment, so it’s no wonder it asked you for help. Thank you for telling me. May God bless you.”

  Adrian stared at the flame of the candle, unblinking. His mind, overwhelmed, sputtered random, individual visions of the day: Rachel’s ashen face with the lip bit
ten down, the water beginning to boil in the metal instrument case…. Yaroslav possessed it—this willful softness of water that swallows steel and tempers it into surgical purity.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

  His father—that’s who the priest reminded him of. His father, from whom he’d had no messages since ’44—since the day after the Soviets’ second coming, when he and his mother were taken on to the deportation echelon. Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake who will not receive a hundred times more…. Hundred-fold indeed—for he had yet to happen upon a home where they weren’t received as kin, and of brothers and sisters he gained thousands all over Ukraine, and who of them would not shield a brother with his own body? What a great smile Roman had—like a slow, hesitant glow thawed his face. Adrian turned his face away, into the shadows, and quickly drained the remaining alcohol from his cup: let everyone think that his eyes watered because of the drink to which he was unaccustomed.

  “Father, pray for my parents, Mykhailo and Gortenzia.”

  Hearing that Adrian’s father was a parish priest, Yaroslav glowed like a child, even his wrinkles smoothed out. With great conviction, he told Adrian that his father was chosen for a rare and great gift of God’s love: to provide spiritual consolation during the time of enormous trial—on the echelon, in prison, in deportation—only true shepherds merit such destiny; many are called, but few, as always, are chosen. Something personal lurked behind his words, his own long-borne plight. Adrian wondered for a few moments if he should also ask for a service to the health of Gela, but did not dare, could not let the very name of her leave his lips, as if he feared that once added—like a line to an endless list, to the myriad unknown Marias, Vasyls, Yurkos, and Stefans—it would lose not only its sovereignty but also its invincibility, fall subject to the laws of common mortality.

  Yaroslav left first, walked out into the rain without the cloak the doctor had offered him saying, “You need it more than I do,” because he had yet to stop at the warden station to tell them the sad news that there would be no surgery, and only then, after Yaroslav had left them, did Orko explain, over the minute squares of paper into which he and Rachel began sorting the powders that the priest had brought, “You know, our Father here asked to be sent with an echelon… twice. They didn’t let him.”

  “Who?” asked Adrian, confused.

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “The church authorities, the ones higher up… the bishop did not allow him, or someone like that—I don’t understand their hierarchy very well. First time in ’39, after the first Bolsheviks, when His Excellency Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself pled to take up the suffering, thinking he might save us all if he lay down his life, but the Pope wouldn’t permit it. That did make an impression on our Father here, as you can imagine: if Sheptytsky himself is not let away, what’s a mere parish priest to say? And the second time, as I heard it, he asked of one… a stigmatic here, right before the Germans retreated. This stigmatic, when he fell into ecstasy, he would go into a trance and speak in other people’s voices, so people visited him to ask about their families, if they hadn’t heard anything for a long time, and other things, too… even from the Central Command, they said. Back then I was still studying, looked at such things very skeptically, thought I knew everything—I was young, what can I say. Later I saw things—things no hypnosis-neurosis could ever explain: Why does a man, with gaseous gangrene who absolutely should die, before morning, not die? A doctor, you see, is just a tool… an instrument in God’s hand. Only the instrument’s gotta be sharp too—sharp and straight!” He lifted his head at last and smiled ruefully like the skull on a bottle of belladonna, instantly looking as tired as he really was—not with a day’s hard work but with old, chronic exhaustion that can’t be slept off in a single night. Ash’s death struck him as irrefutable proof of his own inaptitude, and Adrian had no idea what to say to him—this was an uncharted realm in which the ignorant were better to keep silent.

  “They brought him too late, Orko, that’s all,” Rachel said. “Had it been even a day earlier…”

  “We dallied plenty,” Orko said, sharply, turning to Adrian again as if he was the ultimate appellate authority now. “And what can I do, when we don’t even have a way to run a blood analysis? I don’t even know when the pyemia began! We do everything by feel, groping in the dark; you should see our girls soaking wounds with whey to get the swelling down so that we can actually see what’s going on in there! And I haven’t had one man die on me yet!” he shot angrily before falling silent, shamed.

  He shouldn’t be, Adrian thought—this wasn’t bragging—and was about to say so, but froze: Rachel, having moved between them, stood quietly stroking Orko’s hair—like a master calming a skit-tish horse, whoa, sweets, shhh—“sha” as Rachel said it. Orko let his eyes close and sat absorbing her touch. Are they… could they be together, somehow? Adrian wondered, feeling an unwelcome stab of something like jealousy on the top of his stomach. But why not, really, it would be quite natural; only how had he not seen it before? He looked around furtively—loath to be the lone witness to their unexpected intimacy, but the boys had all fallen asleep already, or were too exhausted to take part in the officers’ talk. Utterly at a loss for what to do, he blurted, finally and awkwardly (“like a fart into the campfire” Gypsy would say), “So what happened with that stigmatic?”

  One could think this was his way of calling the doctor to order, and yet Rachel did not move away—she held her place next to Orko, her hand on the back of his head. What if it’s just a kind of therapy they have, to keep each other calm? At once, Adrian felt an urgent need to feel her hand on his own head; he could sense her touch on his crown so intensely that his skin crawled, a new current running through it.

  “Tough news,” said Orko, forcing his sticky, reddened eyelids open again, and sobbed, once, like a miniature seizure. “The Holy Father said he didn’t even need to ask his question: the stigmatic knew what he was thinking as soon as he stepped into the room—that he meant to volunteer for a prison echelon when the Bolsheviks came again. So he said to him, ‘No, don’t even think about it. You must stay.’ After that, our Father finally found it in himself to obey, and joined the UIA, as a chaplain. Our gain, I say, no?” He tried again to arrange his cracked lips into a smile. “I figure it’s better to have Father here and not somewhere in Siberia…. I am sorry; I shouldn’t have said this to you.”

  “It is good when there is a priest on an echelon,” Rachel said, as if chiding him mildly for something they both knew.

  Orko faltered, and then busied his hands on top of the table, carefully folding an already folded piece of paper. Adrian looked at the woman as though seeing her for the first time. She stood there, her arms hanging limp at her sides, all of her somehow exposed, proffered, while the words she’d spoken hung in the air like a hand that’d been extended and ignored. What exactly did she mean by that? And to whom?

  He felt hot, heard the hum of his own blood in his ears. She stood before him and shone her black cabochon eyes at him, and he caught her smell in his hungry nostrils—raw, milky-fleshy, cheese-and-sour, fermenting, incredible… the smell of a woman with smooth skin and hot, creased body, rich in fragrant nooks and crannies. Lord.

  “Boys fought Rachel off a German echelon, back in the day,” Orko’s slightly alarmed voice reached him slowly, from a great distance: the voice tried to wedge itself between them, to shush, to gag them with its unnecessary explaining, to turn them back, but it was too late—the woman’s eyes revealed that. Her stilled, wide-open look, like a gate flung open—Adrian had forgotten a woman could look like that. Fort comme la mort. To hell with it. To hell with death, with its grinning rotting maw—he was alive; he had forgotten anyone could be as alive as this. Life filled him, swelled in him in one fast, incessant ascent; it pulsed in his groin and in the tips of his fingers that screamed
for a feel of that smooth, so-near skin. To hell—he won’t die. Not ever. Not now.

  Something in him shifted, a lock turned. Something that a moment earlier would have seemed outrageous, unthinkable, nigh blasphemous, now appeared as the only possible event in the series that had aspired, from the very beginning, to gain this singular point: Roman’s death, Ash’s death, the bunkers, and the raids, and the endless echelons peopled with sorrow and tears—Westbound yesterday, Eastbound today—and the fiery pine, tall as the sky, and the crackle of a woman’s hair as it curls on her temples and burns, and the struggle, to the end, no matter what lies in wait for us up ahead; everything suddenly melded together with violent, intolerable intensity like the bright daylight that blinds after the bunker gloom and scorched him, in the hollow of his aching chest, with the terrible and indomitable force of raw life, hot as a naked wire, like a woman’s body under a woolen skirt and a Soviet gimnastiorka. He could see the tiny stiff curls at her ears, could see, through the toad-colored blouse, her shoulders and her breasts, and remembered them, somehow, tightly wrapped by a white red-dappled sheet. (Was that during his surgery? But he thought he was unconscious…) Her body smelled precisely like the body of a woman who is meant for you and you alone. Everything was as it had to be because it could not be otherwise.

  He rose to his feet—her gaze his lifeline. “Could I offer you my assistance?”

  “We’re about finished already,” answered Orko, who was not addressed by the question; his voice rang with offense, but it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. Without looking away, she slowly raised her renascent arms and smoothed her skirt over her thighs: a single motion to bestow herself upon him.

  Sleep, sleep—he remembered her voice in the night.

  And it didn’t matter that the rain had stopped and that Orko stayed at the bunker having no way to go back to the village alone on a moonlit night, and whether Orko did fall asleep, whether anyone was really asleep when the two noiseless shadows, one after another, slipped into the corridor. In the dark, the heat she radiated seemed visible, and her thighs above the rubber-banded stockings were smooth like freshly scrubbed fishes, only hot; the hatch, lifted, let in a flood of moisture-laden, swooning air, and the merciless moonlight poured over the ladder above—only then did she turn to face him and he pressed her, hastily, even brutally, into the rough log wall, not even giving himself a chance to rejoice at how readily she received him, eager, as though she’d been waiting for him a long time, all her life, and had developed the best, most befitting shapes for him so that she could envelop him instantly, like a glove, to enfold him without a trace, with all her pores and orifices at once, into the pulsing fiery gorge that opened before he realized he was inside it and could only growl to suppress his moan—and then it was over. In the moonlight he could see her face, her eyes squeezed shut and her lower lip bitten, and no longer felt anything except the annoying wetness and the urge to wipe himself clean. And shame, too, the same shame as when he went with other Gymnasium boys to a bordello and also spilled right away, after a few awkward, all-but-painful spasms, and the whore turned her head and leered at him over her shoulder, with one eye, like a hen, peering from behind thin streaks of her hennaed hair that hung over her cheeks. What, kiddo, done already? He had the same empty feeling then—and this is it. The familiar pain stirred in his chest, making him anxious, and he let go of her legs. Dog your mother, you’re no lover-hero—you’re a cripple. Another moment—and she would have appalled him, like that redheaded slut. I loved one girl, then another, and a dozen after—four fair maidens, five Jewesses, and the rest with husbands…. That’s it, lady. Back off.