The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Ever since his Gymnasium years he loved no poet more than Ólzhych, his “To the Unknown Soldier”—that was about him: his life. But Ólzhych had been tortured to death in a German concentration camp by, they said, none other than Willie Wirzieng himself, whom Adrian was supposed to liquidate back in Lviv in ’43. Twice he tried, and both times something had stood in his way—that Gestapo man must’ve sold his soul to the Devil; the Huzuls say about such people that they have “help”...Adrian buried Ólzhych for himself then, together with the guilt about the failed missions; nothing in the world could make him recite one of his poems now. Even to Her. No, especially to Her.

  De-vil’s winds. At least it’s safer to travel in this wind: his steps cannot be heard in the woods. Although it’s not just his steps that cannot be heard—those other ones, if they came, wouldn’t be heard either.

  He once had the alias Beast—a long time ago, back with the Germans. Later, when Beast got on the GB wanted list, he had to change his alias, but, thank God, did not lose Beast’s sense of danger, which had kept him alive through the years in the underground and now whimpered inside him like a squashed pup: the wind carried the smell of a raid.

  But after all, he thought, trying to reassure himself, wading in the free water of the warm-run (he would walk another two hundred yards, just to be sure, as far from the bunker as possible, so he wouldn’t betray its location with a stray footprint)—after all, this was no surprise: this raid covered the entire district and had been going on for more than a week already; it was the reason why they had to halt in the woods in this opportune makeshift bunker—still a ways from the village where they planned to winter.

  The village turned out to be occupied by a Bolshevik garrison, which went searching house to house; several families, their courier informed them, had been taken right away in the middle of the night, and people lurked in their yards like shadows—at night, no one put any lights on, except in the village council building, the former parish house (the priest with his family having been shipped off to Siberia the previous winter), where the Reds sat in their meetings with the turncoats all night long and drained, for bravery, buckets of homemade booze they’d looted earlier in the day. The villagers quickly surmised that drink was the Soviets’ preferred currency, and there was hardly a home left that wasn’t at work brewing some; but it didn’t protect people from being robbed, because, in addition to the alcohol, the others, like locusts, swept up everything within their reach—in a widow’s home where an insurgent hideout had been prepared, they skewered the whole pantry with probes and when they didn’t, thank God, find the hideout, they took the single thing of value that was in the home—chrome leather for a pair of boots. They’re the horde, said the courier with unconcealed contempt; he was an older man who’d been with the partisans for a long time and knew very well that in any decent army, just as in the UIA, looting was punished by firing squad—but, he added, at least this time they weren’t setting homes on fire.

  They no longer had need to torch villages as they did right after they came, when they treated the Western Lands as enemy territory—and sent whole villages to Siberia with only the clothes on their backs, murdered people on the spot without trials, raised them on bayonets, tied them to horses, sliced pregnant women’s stomachs, and raped girls in front of their mothers’ eyes. Now Stalin had called off those orders, now this was territory they considered theirs—and demanded obeisance and duty: seven metric centners of grain per each hectare of land, regardless of whether it was arable, four hundred liters of milk from each cow in a barn—just like the Germans before them, only the Germans didn’t trouble themselves by lying so shamelessly, never promised the Jews the happiest life in the world as they herded them into ghettos.

  There was already a kolkhoz in the village: back in August, in the heat of the harvest, when everyone worked around the clock, the garrison rolled in without warning, toting a Ukrainian lobcock from the Eastern regions, who, waving his submachine gun, rounded up all the men into a fold, locked it, put soldiers around it, and said none who don’t sign up for the kolkhoz come out alive. They started coming out, with hands in the air, on the third day, when they had to drink their own urine.

  And so the new Molotov Collective Farm was founded. The grain that had already been harvested was confiscated with the announcement that only those who work for the kolkhoz would receive some back, fifty grams for each so-called workday—pure scorn, people said, what this world’s come to, worse toil they’d never endured, even as serfs a hundred years ago with Austria, may it rest in peace! But bread was still taken away; those villagers, the poorer ones, who didn’t manage to hide theirs, now received assistance from the ward—out of the reserves meant for the insurgents. How long those reserves would last was something Adrian had to find out. In two days, one of his management adjutants was due with a report, and then he’d have the complete picture. Fortunately, back in the spring, when the hungry from Greater Ukraine and Bessarabia rolled into Galicia like thunderclouds, the Supreme Commander ordered the UIA to release part of the strategic reserves of grain they had won back earlier from the Germans, so they had enough to help the hungry and, according to the courier, last until the new harvest, so the people weren’t yet really affected by this kolkhoz.

  The lobcock received an oral warning: the local Security Service detail picked him up for an hour-long conversation when he was traveling through the woods with his wife. There was some unpleasantness: the woman panicked at the sight of the banderas popping out from the bushes and fainted, and the husband later had to send her to spend a month in Lviv in the Kulparkiv clinic—to help her nerves. The man himself had cooled off since then, the conversation made its impression: he’d become decidedly nicer to people and even warned the warden about the current raid, but he still wasn’t trusted in the village—neither he nor his poor wife, who returned from Lviv, the courier said, all sort of beaten down, like a hunted rabbit.

  Adrian was irked, as always, when he heard of innocent women being harmed—but in the same instant, he saw, as though sketched out in charcoal, Stodólya’s face, every muscle still; and it seemed he could almost hear the hidden ticking of the man’s thought, like that of a time bomb. Did that woman really see doctors in Lviv, or did she go through GB’s schooling? It was precisely the rabbits like her that often turned out to be the most dangerous informants—they were so terrorized by the GB that they lost their minds, became unpredictable. And Stodólya was an expert in that. This was his war; he fit into it perfectly. Adrian could only be grateful for his good fortune with Security. And he was very fortunate indeed. Wasn’t he?

  It was a strange condition, dreamlike. For the seven months since he left the infirmary after being wounded, he’d been living as if dreaming with his eyes open (only in rare moments when he was, as now, alone, he could see all three of them at once, from outside—himself, Geltsia, and Stodólya, whom she called Mykhailo)—and marveled, impassively, as if in an ether-induced haze through which no thoughts could reach to the deep layers of living pain, half-consciously: How could this have happened, and why did it have to happen?. And in that dream he did, in fact, have many occasions to feel grateful for his Security Service, thrilled at every successful mission, of which, knock on wood, they’d had quite a few. It had been a busy summer, the summer of the Lord’s year nineteen forty-seven, when the movement faced the joint special forces of USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, a giant red octopus spread over three countries, and they didn’t waste this summer, nor did they mar their honor and oath.

  He and Stodólya did work rather well together—like two mountaineers roped together, each one outdoing himself to prove his worth to the other. They fed each other a sort of constant reciprocal charge that kept them from giving in to fatigue, kept their minds sharp even after a sleepless march—like that time in the middle of summer, when they had a rendezvous and Adrian arrived not having slept for three days: he was shutting down as he walked, falling, for a few seconds at a t
ime, into a dark well while his alert body continued to move on its own. Stodólya’s people were also exhausted, and Stodólya had eyes like those prisoners their boys had fought off down by the town of S.—bloody like meat in an open wound, with eyelids drawing pale circles on his blackened face when he blinked. It wasn’t Stodólya, but Adrian who noticed Stodólya’s guard sitting down to clean his weapon and said to the man—straining as if to shout from under a mass of water—make sure, friend, you don’t have a bullet in the stock. And it was good he said it, because it turned out he did. And Geltsia was there; he remembered the way she looked at him. Was happy then and not only because he prevented a grievous accident—there’d been a few already in their territory, two riflemen had died after getting wounded like that, cleaning their weapons when they’d lost their vigilance to fatigue—but also because he kept his, and She saw it. And Stodólya did, too. Lord, how he slept then—catching up on the whole summer.... And afterward, wolfing down hot grits, abuzz with new strength and energy that were flooding his body, Adrian told them how he and his unit mowed down a hundred Reds just a few days before—those crowding a clearing in a hollow like a herd of sheep brought to slaughter really—how they could barely keep their machine guns loaded, sweeping at them from the brush.... Even the usually tight-lipped Stodólya said he wished he could have been there.

  No, they really fit themselves to each other quite well—you couldn’t have come up with a better personnel match if you tried; no great mind in General Staff could have devised this on purpose. Adrian wished sometimes there was an organizational adjutant he could pat on the shoulder, whoever it was that had brought them together like this, be it even the Devil himself. And more, somewhere at the bottom of this months-long, eyes-wide-open dream, he felt a pulsing vein, a warm-run of secret pride for not having yielded last spring to a moment of weakness, for having overcome himself—and not having asked to be transferred to a different territory for personal reasons.

  Because it did occur to him at first. He could not conceive how he would work on the same territory with the other two. Friend Dzvinya, friend Stodólya—the thought made the hair on his head ache. Once he even tagged along with Woodsman’s people when they went to a village wedding—he’d never done that before, even when an insurgent family was celebrating a marriage and asked him to come—dragging himself out in public like a lout, hoping for a temporary distraction. But at the wedding the girls seemed to sing for his ears alone—like it happens with a fresh wound: no matter how you turn, you’ll manage to worry it, moan through your teeth—“Now eagles fly to drink from that well, now that girl stands under a wedding veil...”

  In that instant he saw it clearly, as though through a brightly lit window at night: Geltsia weds Stodólya, and the one officiating is Father Yaroslav! He didn’t notice how he crushed a glass tankard in his hand—only saw it when the blood mixed with his uzvar drink and ran into his sleeve and people around him raised a fuss—“Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her since he was little, loved but didn’t take...” Two things stopped him then: first, that it would not have been easy to find anyone to replace him, especially at the moment, in May, when the place boiled like a hell-cauldron—no one starts redistributing troops in the middle of a battle!—and second, second was that Stodólya had saved his life. Carried him, wounded, from under fire, on his own back.

  He had to love Stodólya like his own brother. That was the task he had set for himself—never mind that Stodólya, armed with silence like a dynamite cruiser (always, after he was gone, he left upon the others’ memories an impression of a much larger man), did not make it especially easy to love him.

  Stodólya had saved his life.

  And Stodólya was the man She loved.

  Geltsia.

  Friend Dzvinya.

  (She protested, knotting her little brows, while her eyes flashed from under her frown with irrepressible joy at seeing him again, because he was her joy: her youth, Lviv, the first tango at a People’s Prosvita Hall ball, “I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one”—well, she did, didn’t she? For the first few moments, the play of light and shadow on her face, like on the surface of a mountain lake on a breezy day, blinded and deafened him; he drank her with his eyes like precious, thirst-quenching water, and did not comprehend what she was saying: “I’m a friend to you like all other men!”—and then she lowered her voice to a whisper which broke, with a small ding, a secret string, invisible and taut inside him: “Or we could address each other by name...Adrian?”)

  Can dreams possibly be this clear? So you understand everything, so precisely—as if you’re watching a film with voiceover?

  This is not a dream.

  What is it then? Who is this man?

  I don’t know. He is dead.

  How could he possibly be dead? Don’t you hear how alive he is? Only, something is tormenting him. Something too big for one person.

  Could this be why he cannot die?

  “Mourn you have, my fair sir,” a Gypsy woman clucked at him at the fair in S., latching on to the sleeve of his gimnastiorka and pushing her face up close to look him in the eye. “Moi, such fair officer sir, and such mourn has you!” her low voice rang hypnotic, from deep in her chest, but to him it seemed to mock. “For your mourn, I’ll read for naught, just so you know what to watch for”—something about her reminded him of Rachel, the memory rose in his body and screamed in such a yearning spasm of desire that he bolted from under those eyes of hers that were pointed at him like two black craters framed by their blazing whites, tore away roughly, like a real Soviet captain—and barked over his shoulder, in Russian, “No need!” He wanted no witchery; he never wanted to see into the future, especially right before a mission, and that day in S. they managed their mission gloriously, broke apart a whole caravan in their Soviet uniforms—“Documents check!”—sending the trucks that carried weapons on a detour to an ambush, and then another unit neatly potted the general’s black GAZ-M20 that zigzagged among the trucks loaded with people and goods leaving the fair. The Bolsheviks already knew that the banderas did not attack where there were civilians and hoped to slip by in this manner, only they didn’t know we had people among the peasants riding those trucks, so they heard the “Down!” command precisely an instant before the machine guns opened fire from the forest, and no one outside the GAZ-M20 was hurt. Inside it, the driver and the emissary general from Kyiv were killed, but the one the boys were after, a major from the regional GB they wanted to interrogate, was lifted from his hiding place under the backseat, where he lay curled up like a babe out of cradle, alive and unharmed, and, over the course of the summer, this major gave Stodólya, man by man, the GB agent network across the entire region.

  On several occasions during that time, Adrian found himself in a state of a strange arrested amazement toward Stodólya: he watched the man hunt down the octopus fanatically, pin it in, methodically, from all sides, setting his traps so tight a mouse couldn’t slip through, and then with one or two sudden strikes, sever the writhing tentacles with an expert surgeon’s precision. He witnessed more than the mere thrill of the hunt, as in combat such calculated, multistep operations obviously gave Stodólya his own, special satisfaction; and when, after each success his peculiarly molded face, dark as though burned from inside, with its close-set eyes and the protruding, slightly hooked nose (wolfhound, flashed through Adrian’s mind again: once he gets a hold of someone, not a hair will fall without his permission!) would assume for a short time a contentedly sated expression, lit with a quick, cunning squint—rebel, blast him!—and Adrian, however much he thrilled with their victory, felt somewhere deep in his heart discomforted as one feels in the presence of a rival who has an advantage. And this vexed him, and spoiled the joy.

  On one such occasion, Stodólya loosened up so much that he allowed them all to be photographed—this was unusual indeed because Stodólya was religious about secrecy and fastidiously controlled circumstances in which
any of the rebels might accidentally be caught on camera—and now it was he himself who permitted the courier to bring a photographer to the forest, from three villages over. The photographer, however, was reliable, checked many times and thoroughly instructed about where and how he was to hide the negatives; he took a picture of all five of them—Adrian, Stodólya, Geltsia, and the two Security Service guards, Raven and Levko (the young man with rosy cheeks whom Adrian warned about cleaning his weapon).

  Right before that, Stodólya’s unit eliminated one of GB’s provocation groups that had been operating on their territory since winter, terrorizing civilians, and Stodólya, usually gloomy and short-spoken, uptight and buttoned-up, was openly celebrating, letting the success soften and thaw him. He told Adrian how long he’d been hunting those bandits—he found two traitors in that GB group, guys who’d been born around here. A year earlier, GB had taken them alive and recruited them in jail, so during raids they spoke like locals and the horrified peasants believed that it was really “our boys” who went on a rampage, and wished they could now hide underground themselves, not knowing what was going on and where they could turn for protection. But as luck would have it, the bandits made a mistake: got, as was their custom, drunk, and when killing a teacher’s family one night, dressed in the rebel-style mazepynka caps and embroidered shirts, failed to notice they hadn’t finished off a twelve-year-old boy, left a witness.