The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  Our new war is no longer fought by the doctrine of Von Clausewitz, whose books we studied in underground training—not for a bridge, or a railway station, or even this or that inhabited locality. And although we do maintain our ward administration in all Western Ukrainian lands, we can’t afford to keep paying for it with growing losses and deportations the enemy chooses when they can do nothing else to us, because in another ten years of this contest the Soviets may just win for themselves a Ukraine without Ukrainians, as the Poles had already done with our lands beyond the Curzon Line. We stand against Moloch who stops at nothing, but we are the ones who are called to account to the thirty million souls of the nation whose freedom we have vowed to win. We fight for nothing if not for people’s souls, every day and every minute, and in this war we have a singular right—to die. And the right to lose is not ours.

  All this Adrian should have said to Stodólya—but didn’t. Didn’t know how to say it. Such conversations were ill suited to Stodólya—he was too certain of his own strength. He was stuffed full of it like a strongbox with dynamite. A rock of a man, that Stodólya, hard as a rock wall. Listening to him upbraid Geltsia—it was like he turned her into an inanimate object, a lecture prop, an SMG taken apart and cleaned for the benefit of rookies who’ve yet to see fire, and she sat there blushing all the way down into the collar of her gimnastiorka and didn’t dare breathe a word in her own defense (after all, Stodólya was her superior, and she was his secretary)—Adrian worried above all that she would burst into tears. (It was afterward, much later, that she confided to him that she had lost the ability to cry in the fall of ’45 when she lost her most intimate friend—the girl had a wound to her stomach and she, Geltsia, then still Zirka, sitting up with her waiting for medical assistance, let the exhaustion put her to sleep—and awoke when she brushed against her friend’s already cold body; she showed him photographs of that friend—a thin-faced, dark-haired girl, pensive as if in anticipation of the near end. The deceased sometimes have that expression not long before death—as though their flesh, already sentenced by fate, wears thin, becomes threadbare, and lets through the imminent otherworldliness. Geltsia looked at the photograph, too, along with him, and her eyes, although red from lack of sleep, were dry.)

  He did find a chance to edge into Stodólya’s diatribe, break up his verbal offensive with a few apt lines, ease the tension in the room—he had the knack for it. The underground had given him much experience in getting along with people of all temperaments. He reminded all of them together, in the world’s calmest voice: we have the order of the Supreme Command—feed the hungry. And that’s it. Period. No use flogging a dead horse. They are our brothers and we are saving Ukraine’s next generation. And another thing: if we won’t give a hungry man a piece of bread, how are we different from the Bolsheviks who feed only the ones they choose, their handmaidens—some with pea soup and some with the caviar from officers’ rations? Stodólya’s face grew even darker at that, but he said nothing. And then the courier came with the photographer, and they went to arrange themselves for the picture—he on one side, Stodólya on the other, next to Geltsia.

  A sort of effervescence came over everyone then, and they laughed and joked with the photographer. Geltsia did, too—as though there had been no unpleasantness whatsoever.

  Maybe he just didn’t understand women? Maybe she actually liked Stodólya’s annihilating upbraiding, being dragged over the coals by a tank like that—maybe she liked it when he showed that he was in command of her? And when Stodólya reproached her for carelessness—was it his way of showing her that he cared?

  He knew nothing about that. Had no experience with women. Where would he have gotten it?

  At that wedding in P., when he crushed a glass goddard in his hand, something else happened that he preferred not to recall: the alarmed womenfolk rushed to stop his blood, all but falling over each other, and in the end he found himself somewhere dark on a bed of hay with a fiery-eyed young wife who had fussed over him most of all, rubbed against him with her breasts, as if by accident, winked and made eyes at him, and finally teased him into an angry muddled confusion—alright, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll let you have it, you’re all the same! In the dark, through the hay, the woman gave off an intoxicating smell of sweat, mixed with the scent of the fire from the hearth, and whimpered with pleasure under him like a little dog, thin and high, on a single note—ee-ee-eeh, ee-ee-eeh. Outside, in the distance, the chorus of girls’ glass voices pealed the same song, the same record stuck on a gramophone inside his head: “Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her fine since he was little, loved but didn’t take.... ” And then came the moment when he realized, with disappointed, unquenchable irritation, that it was not Geltsia that he’d been yearning for with his flesh all this time, it was Rachel. Rachel who had nursed him back to life and did so in such a manner that any common woman after her simply had to seem bland to him. He all but cursed out loud at the unyielding, unavoidable, unclean whirlpool that had trapped him and dragged him further and further away from his love, and he promised himself, right there, barely having unplastered himself from the generous, sultry woman, that this would be the end of his romancing, once and for all. He couldn’t be allowed to think about women, couldn’t be distracted by them, and certainly couldn’t entertain any dreams of personal happiness—not until the struggle was over.

  Unless, he quickly tacked on, leaving himself room for maneuver, there was a miracle.

  But none came.

  Afterward, he asked to keep that photograph of the five of them for himself—the only photo he had of Her. He never had any others: back in their Lviv days, she did not gift him any. They weren’t engaged, after all—they were friends, comrades from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Youth Network, and later, under the Germans, comrades in the underground, and that is who they remained. He never once kissed her—they hadn’t had the time together for that. Even in his dreams she vanished every time he drew close, in the agony of bliss, to her radiant face. The fact that this face was now Stodólya’s to kiss—that Stodólya could, with the same panzer-force as he talked, crush her entire delicate figure, made even smaller by the uniform, fragile like a chrysalis, with the mass of his thickset, tight-jointed body (he had to be heavy, not for nothing did he always leave the impression of being larger than he really was...), that he could bore into her with the lover’s careless cruelty, and everything that happened between a man and a woman in private could very well occur between them—all this had plainly failed to reach Adrian’s awareness, as though he had an impenetrable shutter closed on that part of his mind.

  In the photograph he saw it—as clearly as if it were real. As if those two were making love right before his eyes. That photographer must have come from the mólfar, the witching tribe—pagan worship was still alive in the country around them, the girls here wore wormwood under their clothes as protection from pishogues, and fern flower still bloomed in the heart of the woods on St. John’s night, and Adrian’s bodyguard, Raven, believed it, too. Or maybe, the war was the reason—the war that had roused not only people, but spirits? On their march to Volyn, rumors of various marvels swirled around them: that at the Pochayiv monastery on the feast of Assumption, Our Lady cried living tears before the people, while in the cave below stirred the silver coffin of St. Job Zalizo, the confessor to Duke Constantine of Ostrog, and, in Ostrog itself, Constantine’s voice was heard above the ruins of his castle, as it had once been prophesied to awaken the spirit of our people down to the twelfth generation. And every night in the fields around the village of Berestechko roared the invisible battle from three hundred years ago—sabers rattled and clashed, horses neighed, and the wounded screamed so you could hear each man’s lonely call for help, and in the year of our Lord nineteen forty-two this, obviously, could not portend anything good. But at least then the church still endured and gave people comfort and help. Now, with the NKVD men running the churches and the b
atyushki they installed questioning peasants who came to confession about any guests “from the woods” who might visit at night, one had no one else left to believe but the mólfars.

  That was a mólfar picture. He could find no other explanation. This was the way people’s faces appear when a spell was cast on water—to make everything hidden rise clear to the surface. A single glimpse at his own visage (it jumped out at him, the first from the whole group) made Adrian remember the Gypsy woman from the fair: so this is how she saw him! The witch didn’t lie, it was truth she spoke—he had sorrow. A beast of a sorrow; pox on it. In the picture it could not be hidden. Like the smell that wafts off a man on the day of his death—as when, say, seven men are in a bunker together or camp to wait out the day in the woods, and all of a sudden one of them starts to reek of earth: that’s a sure sign that he’ll fall before sundown. If he’d spotted among his men anyone with eyes such as he had in the photograph (didn’t even look into the lens, the wretch!—looked somewhere to the side as if listening to a distant choir of glass voices, hey, pity-pity!), he’d take that poor slob and send him posthaste somewhere quieter, up to the mountains, to rest. Or, better still—legalize him: men don’t war for long with eyes like that. He felt bad about this mishap before Raven—the boy, just like Stodólya’s Levko, came out really well, while Adrian’s face seemed covered by a shadow cast by nothing. He looked a lot swarthier than Stodólya on the other side of the group—only the whites of his eyes glowed. Like a Gypsy’s. Or had the witch in S. put this jinx on him, to teach him a lesson?

  Generally, there was all manner of wrong with the light in that picture: it fell seemingly from nowhere, obeying no optical law. By itself, the light of the summer day that glimmered here and there in the background could not possibly create this effect. If he didn’t know better, he’d say they had the picture taken in a church, not in the woods, but in a nave, where sheaves of slanted glow come streaming down from above, from under the invisible dome, streaming—and refracting around Geltsia.

  Geltsia in her oasis of light looked as though she was rising through the air to float above the rest of them—it wouldn’t have surprised him to see that she did not touch the ground with her boot-clad little feet—so fair and serene, and smiling such a mysterious smile, as if she knew she’d been put there to watch over the men, but this was not for them to know, and for that reason her life-giving—he wished to drink it with his eyes and never stop, for the rest of his days—beloved smile that he had never seen before, had not quite come out, was halted halfway, only touching ever so slightly her daintily tailored lips, but not quite changing her expression, and her precious—nothing was dearer in the world!—clear-eyed face appeared to be lit from inside, as if Geltsia herself were the source of the fantastic light brought forth by the mólfar’s Fotokor, and the sheaves of slanted glow streamed and shifted to her and from her at once, creating, the longer one looked, the effect of a living, pulsing shimmer.

  And with this radiant shimmer, Geltsia sheltered, like Our Lady of Pochayiv with her cloak, the impenetrably dark shape of the man who stood next to her—and one could see they were selfsame. In between them there was no line that divides human bodies. Never mind that they stood not touching one another, but half a step apart, and Geltsia held her disciplined left hand on the grenade at her belt, jutting a resolute cautioning elbow in Stodólya’s direction, as if precisely to emphasize the official distance between them.

  But there was no line.

  They were one, just as it said in the Scripture: “Therefore shall a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

  He saw it for the first time—it hit him like an electric shock and the shutter fell in his mind.

  Why him? Rot it all to pieces, why him—what does he have that I don’t?

  For an instant—for a single short instant, but yes, he did, although he wouldn’t confess it even to save his immortal soul—he hated Stodólya. Everything about him—at once: that grim face of his with its hooked nose that jutted forth like an ax, the Red Army cap pushed down almost over his eyes, and the way he stood there with one foot forward like he owned the place—the rascal, you couldn’t help but admire him: “at ease” as all of them, but still alert, watchful, as they all should be—like a loaded bundook full-cocked, like a wolf on hunt, ready at any moment to leap up and tear into a stranger’s throat—and Adrian felt hot with shame for his impulsive outburst. Dog your bones, brother, this guy carried you under fire on his own back! It was this man’s efforts that dismantled the enemy agents’ network in three districts; this man’s intelligence service worked like a Swiss watch and knew of the Bolsheviks’ plans five minutes before the Bolsheviks themselves did—so what if he could not, did not know how, to let go of his abundantly tight grip without need? Adrian could indulge all he wanted in his nostalgia for the old warfare, in which the enemy came bearing arms, but that warfare was, indeed, over, and the one that was left for them to fight was incomparably harder: the housewife who put GB-supplied poison into the bread meant for the insurgents, and that batyushka who interrogated his flock when they came to confession—they did not bear arms—they were the arms, weapons of war in the hands of the enemy who wished to stay invisible. So was it really any wonder that Stodólya, constantly dealing with the darkest sides of human nature, had learned to treat people as tools to be used to achieve his goals?

  Including the woman he loved?

  Because Stodólya did love Geltsia. Adrian saw how he followed her with his eyes, how his face changed when their eyes met. On her name day he presented her with cyanide in a sealed, lightproof blue vial—he didn’t have any himself, such a luxury rarely fell into their hands, wherever did he find it? A few people Adrian knew resorted to arsenic, but it was not reliable—the Soviets could always keep them alive with a simple stomach lavage. Except cyanide, nothing was reliable: the last bullet you kept for yourself could jam, a grenade could fail to explode. Adrian was happy to know that Geltsia had a vial of certain death, pure as lightning, sewn into her collar. He was grateful to Stodólya for that.

  And still, looking at their group in the photograph—looking at them all from outside for the first time, as though he had been asleep before and just awoke—he clearly felt unease, like the ticking of a bomb.

  TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

  The unease emanated from Stodólya. The trusty Stodólya, solid as a rock wall. The Stodólya to whom you could yield—or die.

  It could not have been easy for her. It was his life she eased, his power that she softened with her light. How long could she bear this double burden—the underground’s and the husband’s?

  He felt the same unease again when they were informed that Stodólya’s winter bunker fell. Fell in the middle of October, when it was already too late to build a new one. They were lucky they hadn’t yet stocked it with a winter’s worth of food and hadn’t transferred their typewriter there. There had to have been a traitor, the courier said; around the same time, in the same territory, a Security Service courier girl got turned in by her own boyfriend—the gump believed the GB when they promised they’d leave them in peace as soon as the girl parted with the underground. When the girl said nothing under interrogation, they nailed her tongue to a board—right before the boy’s eyes. He may have been the one who somehow found out about the bunker and spilled it, but there was no way to find out: he lost his mind.

  Stodólya and Dzvinya were left without a bunker. Someone had to share quarters with them. Only no one was in a big rush to winter with Stodólya: four months in a bunker with him was no picnic.

  And, with a sudden sickening feeling in his stomach that usually occurs when you are staring into the black eye of a gun barrel, Adrian realized—he would do it. He asked the courier to wait and wrote a ciphered dépêche to Stodólya. With his secretary and bodyguard—Adrian’s own bunker had just room enough for five.

  ***

  “Geltsia! Lolly,
oh...are you here?”

  “Shhh...can you hear it?”

  “What?”

  “The wind...”

  “Listen. I was dreaming about that again.”

  “Me too.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t shout. You cried out in your sleep.”

  “What did I say?”

  “All kinds of very intelligent things, only really loudly. You woke me up. You were talking in your sleep—but in full sentences, like you were reading notes.”

  “And what did I say?”

  “That the set of memories is finite.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve no idea what it means, but you repeated it several times.”

  “Wow. That’s something...anything else?”

  “I couldn’t memorize everything, Aidy. Something along the lines of everything that happened to us already happened to someone else before. The set of memories in the world is finite. A girl that lets you smell her. Who is that?”

  “Marynka. We played together behind the trashcans, and she let me see her pee. Let me run my finger along her groove, down there.”

  “Little slut.”