The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  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.

  But this wasn’t all, and he knew it as soon as she lifted her heavy, puffy eyelids—slowly, as though returning from a great journey—and fixed him in her unmoving black gaze, the gaze of a snake, flashed through his mind. The Snake Queen who lives underground and guards treasures untold.

  Two narrow, cool little hands squeezed his face, “How ładny you are...,” and she corrected her Polish word, as if through sleep. “Handsome.”

  The Polish startled him—much more than if she’d spoken to him in Yiddish.

  “Are you one of those...assimilated?”

  Instead of answering, she buried her face in his chest—he felt she wanted to devour his smell just as she had swallowed his body a moment earlier—and muttered, words he could, incredibly, hear inside him, resonating off his bones, between his ribs, tickling the spot where she had extracted the bullet—“So the Lord God took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the two of them shall become one body.” The fast, chanted Jewish intonation vibrated inside him, rocked him like a bridge; this wasn’t the intonation of the marketplace as it had always seemed to him—not of trading, but of crying, wailing—how had he not seen that before? This was a dirge, a lament of garments rent and hair pulled out in tufts to fly on the desert wind: Shema, Yisrael, hear my cry! But there wasn’t anyone left to hear her, she had no one to cry to. He stroked her hair. Przemysl, she was from Przemysl, where, in the ghetto, her entire family perished—burned in fire, in ’42. That was before Germans started shipping the Jews out, before the death camps were built—so they simply set the ghetto on fire, and for a month afterward the whole city and the suburbs smelled of charred meat. And burnt hair. He shuddered—the blazing pine tree stood before his eyes again, the giant torch belching sparks into the black sky—he touched the tiny curls on her temples and found them much softer than they looked, and smelling, as unwashed hair should, of gristle and spice, a feral, raw-life smell. With her braids to a pine tree. Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Borukh, Sister Ida with her husband, little Yuzek-Iosele—all burned alive, no one escaped. And she left her own people: a Gymnasium friend’s family, Ukrainians, hid her. And then—then she was caught in a raid, the god of Israel wanted to return her to the dead, but in the train car she prayed to the Crucified like that Ukrainian family taught her to do, and a miracle came: UIA attacked the echelon.

  Finally, he grasped it: it was not herself she told him about but her god who had abandoned her. The hard and cruel Jewish god who knows neither mercy nor forgiveness and takes his revenge for disobedience on women and children—it was the place of this god, now vacant, that she offered him, the man she herself brought back to life. Her body yearned for him, begged to receive him—he was her absolution of the sin of godlessness, of the terror of empty death. He felt faint again: no woman had ever granted him such absolute power over her, there was something forbidden in it, almost terrible and therefore magnetic.... As if to confirm his insight, she kneeled in front of him, and he trembled—he gathered his essence into her soft, lamb-lipped mouth, ecstatic in her near-piety, as if performing a mystical rite of worshipping the power she herself was summoning forth from his loins, and the power came, stronger, more lasting than he could ever imagine, greater than himself.

  For a while he ceased to exist—brushing off the feeble whisper of her warnings, he passed into dark un-memory, guided by the singular, indomitable urge to move forward, deeper into the supple smelt of burning lava that lapped at the red-hot dome of his skull; and this was impossible, incredible, intolerable, an ungodly sweet dying in arrested time, where there was no light, only the fiery darkness, at which he cleaved and pounded, a subterranean smith, until suddenly the darkness squeezed itself around him into a blissful quintessence of gratitude, a tender ring, like a soul-rending kiss, squeezed—and relaxed, and again, and again, until he could not take it any longer, and at the very instant he fired his handgun with a single triumphant cry and the shot-through body collapsed onto the ground, the darkness shuddered and gathered around the two of them into a dazzling fiery contour—a ring of electricity made manifest—and he fell supine onto the bare dirt floor breathing hard, face in the moonlight, and marveled, now completely conscious, that nothing hurt. Nothing, really, she worried for nothing—a happy, acute calm made his body ring like a well-tempered bell. Gently—amazed slightly at the heretofore hidden, untapped reserves of affection inside him—he ran his fingers ov
er her shoulders; now her presence next to him was pleasant, it made him want to talk to her, stroke her, to keep what they’d experienced with them.

  “You are a sister of mercy indeed—time to request you be recognized by a Headquarters’ decree: For selfless work at healing the wounded!”

  After a pause, she answered, but not with a joke; her voice called back altered, somnambulic (a sound that filled him anew with the happy knowledge of his might), “I would like to die now...for you.”

  “Fie on you, bite your tongue—don’t say that!”

  But still he felt flattered.

  “No, love, it’s true...that would be best. Because it’s never like this.”

  He was still reveling in his new condition. “You know, I don’t feel tired at all,” he said, and then suddenly realized what she’d just said: not only he, but she too had experienced it for the first time—the fiery contour of electrical current stood before his eyes. “So you saw it, too?” He felt her nod silently more than he could see it, and instantly fretted, as men are wont to, over his newly gained property: “How do you know about this? Who taught you?”

  She understood his anxiety and whispered straight into his ear, before licking off a drop of his sweat, like a cat, which sent another luxurious tremble down his spine.

  “I haven’t known anyone for two years.”

  This made him happy—it meant Orko wasn’t a contender—but it still wasn’t enough.

  “And before?”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” she asked of him, somber like a well-mannered child. “Listen.” She sat up with a heavy sigh, smoothing her skirt over her thighs again in the dark. “I know we will all die...”

  “Everyone dies. Haven’t you heard?”

  “That’s not what I mean. The war is over. You can’t seriously believe that the Alliance will want to fight Moscow? No one can take any more war.”

  “We can,” he said. His own words resonated, made him shiver, listening, like an echo of a distant march. In different circumstances, this talk would’ve raised his suspicion, made him wonder if it weren’t a MGB provocation, but at that moment he truly loved her—for helping him articulate the simple truth, the mere knowing of which filled him with intoxicating pride, like in that Ólzhych poem he’d loved since his Youth Assembly days: “It fills you to the brim, this breathtaking thrill / Commanding your body and spirit / That death enters humbly and bows at your door, a handmaiden, baffled and timid.”

  It’s true what you say, girl, everyone’s been broken, all the powerful, armed-to-the-teeth states wet their pants halfway through, let a half-victory be their cowardly prize, the victory over Hitler, the weaker and stupider of the two, for they have no guts to finish the job—only we do, a stateless band without international support or even Red Cross assistance; we alone did not call the tyrant a victor, and that’s our truth, and that’s what we’ll die for. Sometime, in the future, the generations that will come after us will understand this. That “Westerner,” a Frenchman or a Belgian, who manned the radio transmitter up in the Carpathians, the one whose voice on the shortwave broadcast every night—“Attention! Attention! Ici radio diffusser Ukrainienne clandestine”—made us feel like the whole world followed our fates with bated breath, he said so, too: “You are the saviors of Europe’s honor.”

  He stroked her hair, comforting her like a scared child; funny, anytime a woman starts on politics, it’s like showing someone nearsighted the view from a mountain, and even in chess they don’t see beyond two moves ahead. But what is this madness—he wanted her again, more hungrily than before.

  “Come to me.”

  “Wait, love, my dear, my precious, my...my, wait, let me say this, I beg you; this is important. I’ve never said this to anyone, ever. From the minute I saw you, I knew this...I just didn’t know it would be like this, that it could be like this. Listen. If I perish tomorrow, I’ll have no regrets. Do you understand? I know now why I was spared.”

  “Sh-shhh. Don’t talk like that...”

  “No, wait...but if I shall stay alive...don’t be angry, please? I want you to leave me a son. So that you can stay inside me, and I could carry a part of you...in me.”

  He wasn’t listening—what was she saying? Madness. In his mind—like a speeding train running off a bridge, a blazing-white scream Geltsia!—Geltsia was the one he wanted to hear say that, why this other woman instead, what had he done to be punished so?—but the train flew, unstoppable, to where the tracks had been blown up, and the engineer could only squeeze his eyes shut against the inevitable, imminent catastrophe.

  “Wait, wait...don’t move, you just lie there; I’ll sit, like this...it’ll be easier for you.”

  And it was, in fact, easier—not right away, though; at first it was hot, dark, and moist, as it should be in the underground realm ruled by the Snake Queen—she was magnificent inside, a tightly coiled, elastic snake, and then it felt good, very good, unspeakably good—maybe it really never was like that and he was still dreaming? He felt himself being carried across a storming sea. No sooner did he roll off one giant wave, blissful and drenched, than he was pulled up again, raised with the next surge, higher and higher, to the desperate, intolerable zenith; he wished only that this would never stop, because with each wave he felt stronger as the new feeling took root and grew in him, the feeling that a man can only glean with a woman, and nowhere else—the joyous wonder at his own might, at his untapped capaciousness. He saw the fiery contour of the electrical circuit again, and, adrift on a calm patch between dying ripples, thought through the hum of pleasure that resonated inside his entire body, If I had been killed, I would never have known this. This was clearly someone else’s thought, spoken to him by something other than his voice, an imprint of her words, I know now why I was spared, fed him drop by drop like medicine, to be digested by his mind as slowly and gradually as his flesh soaked in her body’s juices (and he’d thought they were the only thing exchanged when people made love!), and the warning signals flashed in his dimmed mind, hissing rockets above a dark battlefield: for the first time in all his years underground, Beast had truly allowed another person inside him.

  And that put an end to it all—he returned to himself. Happiness drying him, quickly like a dog, a Beast. Sweat grew cold between his shoulder blades and the crack—the fissure just rammed in his personal wall, the lightly charted, merely suggested zone of openness to another person, a person in her own right, regardless of her service to the common cause—was filled with new, quick-setting cement. For Pete’s sake, if he can be a stud like that, what the heck is he doing on his ass in the hospital? All fat and smooth like some Red captain shagging a resort nurse—while the boys are dying somewhere? You lazy bastard!

  Before he could really feel them, he worked his limp fingers to button up his shirt. Whatever had passed between him and this woman clumped together with other events of the day and tumbled, gathering speed, into the open abyss of the past, cleaved off his existence in dense layers of wet clay—and the clay-caked pickax that the doctor and the priest had used earlier to dig a hole for Ash, stood leaned against the wall, between a barrel of kerosene and a sack of grain, smelling of a fresh grave.

  Rachel kept silent, smart girl; he did like her, but if she’d let something slip right then he was liable to cut her off, say something sharp instead of keeping his peace, and would feel guilty afterward.... But she was a good woman, very good; must’ve been with the resistance for a long time—she didn’t ask unnecessary questions. He, on the other hand, had a question for her, and then a few: First of all, why was she still illegal? Wouldn’t it work better for her to get a regular job as a nurse at the district clinic, or in Stanislav, or even in Lviv, since they needed people everywhere? No, she answered, mechanically as if being interrogated, that was not possible. She was legal already once, in ’45, and then last year the MGB arrested her, they knew she’d been with UIA before, and they ordered her to kill Woodsman. She came back with the news to Woodsman hi
mself, told him everything, and he left her underground. So that’s how it was. He didn’t ask her anything else, figuring he would have a chance to discuss it with Woodsman later, and only asked, for some reason, if they’d beaten her. No, they didn’t, only the inspector cursed and screamed horribly, a Jew, too, which seemed bizarre to her—that it wasn’t a German who promised to pack her off to the camps, but a Jew; he kept screaming at her, How could you, you’re a Jew turned Bandera’s cunt, what, they...are better than our guys? She faltered; he didn’t say anything. It was unpleasant, as if that inspector had come between them and right away found the weak spot, and this moment of hesitation was to him the final proof that they both ought to erase their weakness as soon as possible, ought to forget that desperate explosion of nature that had thrown them into each other’s arms, to edit it out from their memories, as the instructions put it: not to remember too much. At the very least, do as was done with the most important documents: put them into a bottle, seal the cork with wax, and bury it deep underground. Sometime later, perchance, he could dig it up and think about it again—not for a second did he believe he’d have that chance—but now he lived again in the fleeting moment alone. The trap of arrested time that caught him when he was wounded sprang open again. He was well.

  Already falling asleep on his cot, in the tenuous borderland between dream and reality, delicate like the lamb-soft lips of a woman brimming with love, he startled as if shoved. He could feel the fluffy cloud of her touch enveloping his body on all sides, like cotton padding a precious Easter pysanka, only his hands were tied behind his back and an irresistible, gale force pulled him into the open doors of a black Opel Kadett, the same as the one in which they’d taken him to the Gestapo on Pelchynska, and Rachel reached out her arms to him, helpless, and her face was white in the moonlight like a round of sheep cheese, and he shouted back to her, over and over, as he was dragged away, lifted off the ground, I am Adrian Ortynsky! This was what shook him awake, in terror, sent him scrambling, heart pounding, for a fingerhold in the real darkness of the bunker, where he remembered himself and breathed again: Thank God, it was only a dream—neither one of them ever did ask the other’s real name, nor Rachel for his alias.