The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  I am ready. Ready to do it all over again if they kill me now.

  You still have time. And you have all eternity before the heavenly sky. Because the Lord gathers all who’d been killed in one place where the living cannot go—turns their shoulders to the sky and their faces to the earth from which they’d been torn too soon—and from that secret place of our Lord they watch over you: they war when you go to war, make sure you don’t stray from the path, and send you letters you don’t know how to read…

  So they’re watching me right at this moment? Igor, Nestor, Lodzio, Roman, Ash, Myron, Lisovyi, Ratai, Legend, all the boys who left me here alone—I can sense their silence as it fills the air, it hangs above the ground as though a whole platoon is studying me through their optical aims from an invisible cover, and when I raise my arm to fire my weapon they all hold their breath as well, so that my arm steadies, and when my voice warns me an inch before death—is that they, too?

  They, they… but you already knew it. Ask something you don’t know—you have time for one more question.

  Okay then. I’ve never said this to anyone. I would like to fall in Kyiv, like Lodzio. On the apostolic hills where my nation began. Where the Dnieper’s blue and the churches’ gold are our ancient colors before the heavenly host. Where the glory of our princes and hetmans roared—and from where our forefathers marched to the peal of St. Sophia’s bells to defend it. I never came that far—and I so yearned to go there, to see it all with my own eyes, that’s why I chose Kyi as my alias—

  Your blood will be in Kyiv. You don’t need to know more.

  Who are you that you say this to me?

  Black furrows plowed, plowed, hey, hey…. Black furrows plowed, seeded and plowed, and the bullets sprout, sprout, hey, hey…

  I know you: You are Grandma Lina! Oh, Grandma, I am so happy it’s you—only where are you, why can’t I see you?

  I’m no grandma, man. I am the land.

  The land? Yes, I see it—black dirt, not furrows—just mud, you leave tracks on it, too, so I must watch my step, step so the snow won’t creak underfoot, rouse neither men nor dogs, leave no trace on softening, rich soil. I see my breath knit through the air before me; I cover my mouth and nose with a wool scarf, and it’s instantly wet inside it; now tears brim in my eyes, my ears are full of wind, my eyes and nostrils full of moisture, the thaw, the thaw, everything runs, everything drips, champs, slips, screams—what?

  It is the land bubbling, soaked with blood—heavy, swollen with blood like the walls of a woman’s womb: fecund, brewing, gurgling bog; she can’t take any more blood; she oozes it like black beestings—she is asking to rest; she is asking for winter…

  Like a woman who bleeds in vain and bears no children? Yes, I see—it’s the time before winter, the darkest of seasons, and the land although wet, has no smell; it is going numb, entering sleep…

  The winter that’s coming shall be long, so long it will seem eternal. Only the women won’t cease giving birth. Remember that.

  I don’t know who you are, but listen—I cannot remember things I do not need! I have a mission, and I must come back alive, and no one will write down for me what I am soon to hear. I will have to archive it all in my head, down to the last comma, the dots above the i’s…

  What you are soon to hear you will no longer need. And what you might need you will not hear.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  You’ll understand when the time comes. And now the wattle fence will end, and you’ll hit your knee on a stake.

  Bugger! There it is, a stake alright. How did I miss it?

  This will be a sign for you. So you would remember when you wake up on the other side of this long winter.

  So I am asleep?

  No, soldier. You are already gone. Look—

  The earth! Sweet beloved God, have mercy on us—the earth is falling from above. Is it the bunker or the world that’s collapsing? So much of it, Lord, I can’t get out from under it; it is heavy; it stifles me, covers me. I can’t see the light! It is dark… dark…

  Sleep, soldier. They’ll call for you when the time comes.

  * * *

  Written on a pack of cigarettes on Adrian Vatamanyuk’s bedside table:

  Blood will stay in Kyiv

  Women won’t cease giving birth

  You won’t need

  * * *

  Two policemen in winter shearling coats passed him by without a second look. For a minute, he was overcome by the sense of being invisible—as though he’d been transported, in flesh, through a well suddenly opened in time, into a different November morning, where another, German, patrol passed just like that, not seeing him, as if through thin air, and the feeling made the world around him shift and begin to slip, a door taken off its hinges. This didn’t last long, two heartbeats at most, but he flushed: it’d been too long, darn it, he’d forgotten how to walk in the city.

  The city, however, had not changed—those who now ruled it by day knew only the work of ruin. In the cities they took—just as in homes abandoned by owners on a moment’s notice, with embroidered tablecloths on the tables and family silver in the drawers—they repaired, fixed, or tidied nothing; they didn’t love the cities they took and didn’t understand that any place, be it a city, a home, or a bunker needed someone’s hands and heart to live. All they knew was how to wield their threatening presence to paralyze anyone who had hands and heart to put to this task, and wherever they made camp they brought with them, like rot, a cheerless air of unsettledness, discomfort, and poverty.

  The heap of rubbish where the Germans had blown up the synagogue hadn’t been cleared—only sagged a bit since he was here last summer: people must’ve been stealing the excellent Austrian brick from it, pilfering it piece by piece. In the window of the pharmacy on the corner, a bust of Stalin had appeared: a sign that the local pharmacist who had supplied the underground with medicine was gone, arrested. Closer to the center, there was more Stalin: a portrait on the former German administration building, a portrait on a school—and everywhere the eye tripped on red streamers and lengths of red fabric with white lettering, strung across streets for their holiday tomorrow: “Long Live the Great Socialist October Revolution!”

  The most notable change was the construction of a jail—the only project the new power had begun: through the gates, opened to let in a five-ton truck loaded with bricks, he hooked, out of the corner of his eye, and reeled into his memory a sliced-off view of the yard, and deep in it, under the dirty pink wall, the color of Soviet ladies’ undergarments (the Poles at least had better taste and didn’t adorn either women or jails in such a nasty color!), lined up in rows, like piglets at market, were reddish sacks of precious cement. Uncovered, he noted with spite: everything with them louts is like that—just dropped in the middle of the yard, under rain and snow, can’t keep things straight even around their prison! Not for naught it is said—if it’s everyone’s, it’s gone. Like what happened around Drohobych to the cattle left behind when they’d shipped everyone off to Siberia. Six thousand head, with nowhere to keep them and nothing to feed them, because the silage they’d also left under the rain all rotted—they rounded them up in the district center and slaughtered them, as if enacting some ancient nomad funeral rite in which the animals shared the fate of their owners….

  But they are nomads—the voice inside his head reminded. Of course, who else—Batu Khan’s horde come to ravage our cities and villages, exactly like it happened a thousand years ago, only this time it’s reached far beyond the Carpathians, across the Vistula and Oder… Flagellum Dei, Scourge of God. The man walking toward him on the other side of the street, dressed in a civilian gray Mackintosh and a hat with a navy band, seemed somehow familiar to him; he turned his face to the wall and crouched to tie an ostensibly untied shoelace, turning—to no avail—that vaguely familiar face over and over in his memory, as if straining to push through a locked door that refused to budge. He could feel with his shoulders that the man o
n the opposite sidewalk also slowed down, and he regretted his slipshod disguise, resented Anton Ivanovych Zlobin for not wearing at least a mustache like all Soviet military men, even retired ones (it would appear that the shaving of one’s face and the perfuming of oneself with chypre constituted their entire repertoire of personal hygiene, since, according to our girls who worked in their military hospital, they didn’t have much use for toilet paper, as the scraps of newspaper that hung on a nail in the water closet there remained undisturbed for days on end). As he assessed the distance to the closest doorway into which he could dash, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a dark spot on the sidewalk, but then his Voice gave the order “Go!”—and when he turned his back to the wall again, the man in the gray Mackintosh was no longer there. Instead, a single crow stood on the sidewalk, covered like a brand new gun with a moist oily gloss, and leered at him saucily, askance—as if she had something to say to him.

  Pish! He almost spat as he would have in the forest (the Soviets, though, spat in the streets openly, right where they walked, and equipped their official offices with a fixture never seen in the Austrian or Polish days—special bowls for spit, like at a dentist’s!). This was the second time he saw this crow—no, couldn’t be, this had to have been a different one—the bird had greeted him at the edge of the city, on one of those boggy little lanes lined with thoroughly country-like homes behind wattle fences. His attention, strained to its limit, fixed every little detail—yet he still couldn’t identify the man in the gray Mackintosh: had they really met before (Where?) or was it merely an illusion, a coincidental similarity of facial features that raised alarm in him?

  This was why the city was dangerous—it was a bottomless and unpredictable reservoir of the past. The woods—they were the opposite. The woods had a short memory; the woods, like the partisans, lived in the streaming moment; every storm that blasted through erased the contours of the land you knew by touch just a day before, blocked your path with a fallen tree, a slipped slope; a twig you broke as a sign was torn off by deer or bears; cuts you made on tree trunks scabbed up like blisters on your own skin, and went black, blending into the landscape; heavily trodden campsites were soon overrun by shoots of new grass, studded with a generous sprinkling of buttercup and anemones; blood you spilled seeped into the ground without a trace. Adrian would be hard-pressed to find the bunker where he’d spent the previous winter although he dug it, as conspiracy rules prescribed, himself, with his own two hands; perhaps only the peasants who’d grown up grazing their cattle in those woods and knew the area’s topography like their own homes in the night—just as he, Adrian, could take apart and put back together a Mauser in three and half minutes without light—could etch into their memories, without fault and for all eternity, a spot at the edge of the village where someone made a money cache or buried archives in milk cans. Except no one ever divulged such information to peasants, and those who did know how many steps to take north by the azimuth from the dried-up hornbeam tree or the third rocky outcrop from the right often perished before they could pass the secret on to another confidante. How many of them were already there, slowly rotting underground, our abandoned secrets?

  The city was a different beast—inside its walls, the city closely guarded the entire mass of time lived in it by its people, stashed it, generation after generation like a tree growing new whorls. Here your past could pounce at you from behind a corner at any moment, like an ambush no reconnaissance could ever warn you about. It could explode in your face like a time-delay bomb—with an old Gymnasium professor of yours, miraculously not exterminated by the Germans or the Soviets, or with a former friend from the German Fachkursen, later recruited by the NKVD, or simply with someone who had once been a witness to an old fragment of your life, which was, at the moment, of absolutely no use to you and thus subject to being expunged from your memory—but not from the city’s. Because this was the city’s job—to remember: without purpose, meaning, or need, but wholly, with its every stone—just as to flow is the job of rivers, and to grow is the job of grass. And if you take the city’s memory away—if you deport the people who’d lived in it for generations and populate it, instead, with relocated squatters, the city withers and shrivels, but as long as its ancient walls—its stone memory—stand, it will not die.

  Adrian walked down the street and felt the city oozing the past from every pore, sap from a pine tree. It trapped him like a fly with his little feet sinking into sticky amber goo—he felt as if he were walking on the bottom of a lake, against the resistance of many atmospheres. It may have been because at the moment he wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as he could. His time, tied to the time of the one who was fading like a dying candle and who waited for his friend Kyi to whom he could pass on the secrets he’d guarded until his last breath, was running out. But friend Kyi could not run. The city hung on him, weighed him down with stone on all sides; it clung to him with the tar of dozens of eyes he could see, and hundreds more he couldn’t. Lord, how much easier things were in the forest.

  I’ve done become a woodsman, he thought with a city dweller’s instinctive pride in this accomplishment and with a growing anxiety about how much of it was apparent to others (so far, he checked, there was no tail). And right away, the next idea caught up with the previous one, clicked against it, like balls on a pool table: so, they’ve really driven us from our cities, from our memory’s terrain—into the underground of history, the twilight zone….

  “Documents!”

  “Please.”

  A captain and a lieutenant, well-fed and also in good shearling coats; another fifty meters behind them, a woman with a market basket approached. The rest of the way was open; the space he left between them as he handed over his documents—piece by piece, not all at once—would be enough for a freely swung cross-in, edge of hand against Adam’s apple above the collar, the two of them at once; he punched equally strong from either side.

  “Looks like he’s on a road assignment, tovarish Kapitan…”

  “Last name?” verifying the papers actually belonged to him. “Zlobin, Anton-Vannych.”

  At the sound of his undeniably Russian pronunciation—a local could never fake that!—both finally, as if on command, relaxed, brightened up.

  “Where are you from?” the captain asked with unexpectedly human curiosity; Adrian saw in close-up, as if through a Zeiss telescope, his pale eyelashes and thin, watery skin grained with freckles, breathed his smell—shag, leather shoulder belt, chypre…

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  “Lvovzagotzerno, tovarish Kapitan.”

  “That’s not what I mean! Where’d you fight?”

  “First Ukrainian front,” he said, icing with hatred, feeling the pistol against his side under his overcoat, and in his stomach—the tightening knot of anticipation, because at any moment, any moment now the alien past could rush at him, and he wouldn’t know what to do with it: he was confident in his Russian only with short, chopped-up sentences, even though the original Anton Zlobin, known by the alias Lisovyi in the Insurgent Army, always praised his pronunciation.

  “And I was at the First Byelorussian!” the captain said, thrilled for no particular reason. “Did we cross paths in Berlin, by chance? It’s just your phiz looks so familiar.”

  “I was done fighting at Sandomierz.”

  The woman with the basket passed them and, not looking back, hurried along as if someone were after her.

  “Got laid up in hospitals for a while after that.”

  “Well, it’s no picnic here either,” the captain said by way of boasting—or maybe complaining. “The banderas are keeping things hot alright.” He clearly wanted to add something else, but stopped and waved Adrian off with the carefree, comfortable gesture of a person not afraid of leaving himself open to a throat jab. He offered Adrian’s documents back as if to say, sorry, brother, just doing my job, and in a flash of sudden insight that is the sole provenance of ancient, well-tempered hatred—the
kind that doesn’t fog your mind with black madness but hardens, year after year, into a heavy amalgam that melds you with the one you hate like two lovers to death—Adrian realized that the captain also longed for the old warfare. For his First Byelorussian front, the brotherhood of battle that he must have experienced there, and that the reason he tarried with needless yap was that he felt much better then and there, than now and here. And now he would remember him, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin wounded at the First Ukrainian front; now Adrian would have one more person who knows him in this city. Rot your bones to pieces, tovarish Kapitan.

  He kept walking, and about ten meters before the intersection he needed, that same crow materialized on the sidewalk before him. Turned her head every which way and stepped from one foot to another like a whore in high heels. He didn’t give a doggone about signs and such nonsense, but this was a bit too much.

  “Shoo!”

  The crow bounced once, heavy and awkward, like a woman at term, then again, and lifted into the air, wings rustling, and then landed, a few steps ahead, atop a cracked mascaron head above a doorway. Adrian thought he saw the mascaron wink at him. Was it just a tall tale or can crows really live to three hundred years old? And this same one could have flown above the battle at Berestechko? The ominous bird stared down at him as if it knew something. Where had he seen this unmoving gaze before? Like a snake’s, the Queen of Snakes…

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  As he turned the corner, he spotted the gray Mackintosh at the other end of the street again (Could it be the same one?) and made a sharp turn into the first available gateway, and stood still, waiting. A woman dressed in a whole pack of silver foxes walked by with a small boy—“How many times do I have to tell you—No!” scorched her high, screeching, self-assured voice. Must be a commissar’s wife. Claws clicking on the cobblestones, a dog ran by—there’s a creature that doesn’t need to be afraid anymore…. Minutes dropped, loud as drumbeats; somewhere in the building a radio came on. The gray Mackintosh still did not show. If he was a tail, he was an incredibly sloppy, amateur one.