The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  No, not quite. Can do whatever with the body, but not with the person. That girl did not tell them anything.

  But who did? What compromised Stodólya’s bunker?

  Put your hand on my forehead, he asked her silently—She, with Stodólya’s child in her womb. Cool me, clean me, set me free. Let this poison out of my soul; tell me something else I don’t know. Tell me how he kisses, how you part your knees for him, and how he enters you as your husband, and what you feel when he does; tell me the words he says to you—I will bear it all, as long as it is true. Tell me so I don’t have to suspect you, too. In his memory flashed, with a burn of pain, their happiest hours in the underground, when they sang all together. Their singing and their communal prayer—those were hours of otherwise inexpressible unity, so resplendent and inspired were the faces of friends, such fires burned in their eyes. Stodólya never sang. He wasn’t musical.

  Somewhere close, but outside himself, he could hear the chronometer ticking: his consciousness, distanced from his pain, sober, cruel, and implacable, like a knight in icy armor timed him, counted his minutes. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

  “Let’s go back,” he said, surprised by the sound of his own voice, the way it came out of his throat. “It’s time to leave this bunker.”

  He thought he felt her shrink, draw back. As if he’d hit her (she’d told them about the time, during a raid on the village where she was staying, dressed as a peasant, when a captain had hit her on the face and, before she could realize what she was doing, she instinctively struck him back—her mistress then threw herself at the captain’s feet in panic, assuring him that her niece was “born stupid” and they believed her: for them, it was the only possible explanation for why an unarmed person would respond to being hit by hitting back). Alright, he thought, it’s your turn to strike. Hit me, stomp me, don’t spare me, hate me if it’ll make you feel better—it doesn’t matter anymore; someday, if we survive, I’ll set things straight with you, but now we have to save ourselves. Black hunters were walking through the snow, black dogs were running, pulling the men along behind them, their leashes so taut they sang—he could feel their choking breath at the back of his neck. The anxiety that had been smoldering inside his body like fever now gathered itself, acquired a shape and a contour, pointed outside like an antenna trained on the village—and Geltsia, like a child too preoccupied with her little owie, was deaf to it all; really, women can be quite obtuse sometimes.

  He forced himself to speak again. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it around the boys.”

  “I understand. And now we should go back to them.”

  “Do you not believe me, Adrian?”

  He felt like laughing out loud. Only a woman could ask something like that. He could have repeated her disappeared husband’s commandment: “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Could have said he trusted that she was, in fact, pregnant. Why not? Could tell even judging by how often she had to go outside. He’d read his share of medical texts; he knew the symptoms. Although no, he couldn’t say that, could never have said that to any woman. And that wasn’t what she was asking about anyway.

  So, instead of all that, he blurted, “And who am I supposed to believe?”

  It sounded unexpectedly rude, like a teenager’s outburst. Exactly like a teenager from a ragtag neighborhood, and it made him blush—at least she couldn’t see that in the dark!—and then he heard her respond with a muffled sigh, a bitten-down sob of relief, like the touch of a breeze that brought him her smell through the firs—the blonde smell of her hair that he remembered so well from the days when they were like Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable on a ballroom floor: long unwashed and uncurled, pulled into a greasy knot at the back of her head. It only smelled stronger, more piercing—of cut wildflowers, of hay before a storm—of Her. And he made a quick wish then: if the other one does not come back, be mine! Be mine, until I fall, until my last breath, until the last bullet that waits for me.

  And she, revived by his sincerity, seemed to awake and spoke with new urgency—to make her point, beat it to a pulp. “Mykhailo is an extraordinary person, Adrian! None of you really know him...”

  Mykhailo. Stodólya, Mykhailo to her.

  “He once said he can do everything that the Bolsheviks can, except better, and that’s why he always outplays them. He won’t let himself be caught, you’ll see!”

  She’s always been like that, Adrian thought, ever since the Youth Assembly—always pushed through to the end, to reach whatever goal she’d set for herself. And he stood there like a dolt and let her go on talking.

  “All any of us knows is how to die for Ukraine; that’s the only thing we’re good for. And he belongs to the breed of people who will build it up one day, after we win it.”

  “That could be,” he said. But what he thought was that’s how it actually is. And it’s always been like that, since the dawn of creation: those who love their land above all are the first to die for it in battle. And if they have luck—not the plain soldier-variety luck that he still had, knock on wood, but the gambler’s luck of a historical player that puts him in the right place at the right time so that their blood follows whatever suit leads in the worldwide political game, played far above and beyond their heads—then their blood brings to power those who love power itself and know how to hold on to it. And Stodólya was one of those people; that was true. And the Bolsheviks were, too. If they ever need an independent Ukraine in order to hold on to their power, they will build it just as zealously as we now fight for it in the underground. When Stalin needed to pry Ukraine from the insurgents’ influence in ’44, when the whole country was united behind them, he allowed Ukrainian ministries of defense and foreign relations to be created. And when the Supreme Liberation Council demanded from the Allies that we have a government in exile, Stalin also outmaneuvered us by making Ukraine the founding member of the United Nations Organization. And even though it was all just for show, formal attributes of a country that does not, in fact, exist, one day we’ll make use of it all...Kyiv wasn’t built overnight.

  And he also thought: in these circumstances, living from one day to the next, he wouldn’t have dared have a child with her. And Stodólya did. So he did not live day to day—he kept a longer count. And that, too, somehow underscored the truth of what she said.

  Meanwhile, she’d gathered speed, she flew now like a bicycle down a hill, unable to stop, possessed by her lust to win him over to her side by whatever means necessary, to make it so he would share her faith in the man whose seed she carried in her womb.

  “The Bolsheviks won’t kill him; they want him for themselves! They had offered to take him into their intelligence school, and after—to send him to Yugoslavia as an agent. They didn’t even want any information about us from him—only for him to work for them. And he outwitted them then, too: rubbed his palms so he could show a fever and get into the infirmary, and then managed to organize his escape from there.”

  “Did he?” he said. “I didn’t know this.”

  The bicycle just hit a rock at full tilt, but she never noticed the rattle, din, and clang of her words crashing: so Stodólya had been arrested? (He really didn’t know anything about the man!) If so—he had to have passed a security check with the highest levels of the Service; they must’ve turned him inside out there. But still, for some reason, this thought did not comfort him: all the separate little splinters he pulled out one by one—the disappearance, the photograph, the loss of Stodólya’s bunker, his past arrest—were coming together of their own accord, were aligning themselves into a geometric progression, and connections appeared between them where none had been evident before. Every new circumstance landed with a more alarming screech because it took on the combined weight of whatever had come before it, and this new sequence of elements skewed the whole picture further and further away from the image Geltsia had in her mind. I have to write a report to the Supreme Command, he reali
zed. Just write it all out, as it is. And with this, part of the burden shifted off his shoulders; he felt better—it’s always easier when someone else has to make the decisions, someone other than you. He stirred impatiently, felt a wet scrape of a fir branch on his cheek, its myriad minute claws—he was in his proper place again; he knew what he had to do.

  “Anything else, Miss Gela?”

  “Don’t say ‘miss’ to me, Adrian. Please.”

  “I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Because it sounds like you don’t take me seriously.”

  And this is just the beginning, he thought. It’ll only be worse later—if they get a later.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “And now please, go ahead, I’ll cover the tracks.”

  “Let me do that.”

  “Some bullet-head you are!”

  “There,” she laughed—a sprinkle of light in the darkness, “that’s better! Much better than ‘miss.’ I just wanted to make weewee down by the stream.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” he said, moved by this sudden intimacy, such as they’d never shared before. He remembered an illustration in some thick anatomical volume: a semicircular dome full of innards, the riveting and simultaneously repugnant female belly and uterus inside, an oval aquarium with a bigheaded mollusk, pressing the bladder from above.... He tried to imagine what that would feel like, that pressure, shuddering as if he’d felt a wet toad in his pants, and for the first time realized that her condition meant something completely different to her than it did to him—that all this time her body knew something he would never know, even if he’d memorized all the books in the world. This something existed outside their struggle’s logic, in utter disregard of it, as if it had come from a different planet. And that’s the way it’ll always be, he thought in awe, listening to her descend heavily (she did sound heavy, the rhythm of her step had changed), like a she-bear, down the rocky slope, taking time to choose where to plant her feet (and the one who was in her seventh month already—how did she move?)—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.

  Everything went quiet for a little while, and then he distinguished, over the measured babbling of the warm-run (his hearing strained, pushed like a radio receiver to the very edge of its range) the sound of louder, self-propelled, and somehow very jolly purl, and this sound suddenly clenched his throat in a wave of intolerable, melting, animal tenderness. In the same instant, as a dark accompaniment, the bass hum of free current with the violin solo, he became aware, to his horror, of muscles contracting below his stomach—his body awoke and remembered the other one, the one he lost, hammered in his temples, screamed with its every cell to will back the insatiable luxury of that one spring night, the intimate, selfsame yielding of moist flesh like earth that brims with the juices of life, the fiery contour in the dark—as though these seven months had never been—he couldn’t hold on to separate faces, they came together in his mind and melded: the barely visible stain of Geltsia in the dark between fir branches; the white face, like a round of sheep cheese, of Rachel thrown back to the moon, upper lip bitten down. He was blind; he simply wanted to embrace the Woman, a pregnant woman with a taut round belly. To squeeze his head between her milk-laden breasts, to breathe in her smell.

  Sobs shook him hard, once, like wind over a dried tree—dry sobs, tearless like a soundless scream. Like the mute roar of a beast with its tongue nailed down.

  Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—she was coming back. He could hear her heavy breathing: she was short of breath. He felt happy to have her coming back and to have her miss his moment of weakness. (He watched yellowish circles swim in place of the fiery contour, as if someone had thumbed him on the eyes.)

  “It’s beautiful in the forest right now, don’t you think?” she exhaled into the back of his head in a single spasm, like she’d also just cried. And instantly sensed the change that had come over him—a woman must sense these things, as a doe senses a deer buck, from afar. As long as she doesn’t decide to touch me right now, he thought. Anything but that soothing touch of her hand. As long as she doesn’t, I’ll bear it. He faltered a bit as he stepped aside to let her pass and remained standing like that, feet wide apart, his hand instinctively planted on his gun, as if prepared to defend himself.

  “And did you know,” she suddenly laughed very softly, and it was almost like a touch, only not the kind he feared, “that my Lina is also a mama? Three years already!”

  “Who?” he asked, confused.

  “Lina, my sister!”

  Her sister? Oh, yes, she has a sister...

  “She married a very nice young man, one of ours, a student at the Polytechnic. And they already have a little son, named Ambroziy—in honor of our dad.”

  “Aha,” he said. “Congratulations,” thinking, who was it that I already said this to today? Quite a day I’ve had—full of other people’s children. Lina? That little girl in a sailor suit that used to run around with her dog? She had that comical way of blushing whenever he brought pastries for her, as a present. He held back a big fir branch, so that Geltsia wouldn’t have to bend too low. As they walked, her quiet twitter continued to envelop him like the stream’s babbling: she’d visited her family recently, in October, when she was in Lviv on a mission. They still live in the same house on Krupyarska; the house now belongs to the Soviets, and they’d been moved to the ground-floor room. They all went crazy when she rapped on the window that night—they hadn’t seen each other for three years! And the boy is very handsome, looks like Lina—she’d taken a good look at him while he slept.

  “We talked about you, too. Lina was very happy when I told her you were alive. You were her first love, did you know that?”

  “No,” he said, “I did not know that.”

  Life was full of things he didn’t know. But it did not matter anymore, he did not change his mind, she didn’t convince him. They had to get out of the bunker. The clock was ticking.

  “She was head over heels in love with you. In Gymnasium, she had a picture of Clark Gable pinned above her desk—with his mustache covered up, to make him look more like you. I think she was probably a little jealous of me.”

  Oh no, he thought, I won’t fall for this. Does she mean to soften me up with this? A covered-up mustache—what notions women have sometimes! They’ve always fallen head over heels for him, that’s the son of a bitch he is: women have always fallen for him hard and fast, lined up wherever he went and threw flowers (or more than that, some threw themselves) at his feet—all except one.

  His soul no longer perceived the meaning of what she was saying (she’s gone lost her wits for Mykhailo; it’s like she’s lost her bearing without him and doesn’t understand anything!). He only thought, at the pace of a ticking clock, of sparks of tiny bubbles rising through wobbly water, boiling the dark outline of fear: she’s playing me; she’s playing me however she pleases, like a piano, and I am letting her. I am responsible for a woman who has more power over me than I do over her, and this is bad, it is no good at all, friend lieutenant. A tremor he couldn’t control started small inside his exhausted body—like a fire in a house. He focused on the prospect of hot tea, hoping it had finally boiled.

  “Adrian.”

  She stopped—like music that’s been turned off. They stood opposite each other, a step away from the stump that masked the lid to the bunker, and in the darkness he could feel the crown of her head level with his lips. Here was a woman made to his measure—the one such woman in the world.

  “I wanted to tell you. There may not be a chance later. I am very grateful to you. And not just for listening to me right now. For everything.”

  He was silent, a lamb under the cudgel.

  “You are like family to me. Like the brother I never had. And always wanted, for as long as I can remember.”

  “Thank you,” said friend lieutenant, alias Kyi. “Go ahead, Dzvinya.”

  ***

  You’ll never betray me?

  I will never betray you.

 
; Don’t leave me.

  I will never leave you.

  I don’t have anyone closer than you.

  Me neither. I don’t have anyone at all, just you.

  And the other man?

  There never was another. Forget it. It wasn’t me.

  Are you sure? How do you know you won’t change your mind? That if he comes back and calls you, you won’t lose your head again and run to him?

  I know because I don’t like the woman I was with him. I don’t like her. What motivated me then, what pushed me into his arms—it wasn’t mine. Wasn’t his either. I saw a completely different man when I looked at him—a man created by my want from the hard losses, unaddressed complexes, and collective desires of my people. I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. Because it’s always been foreigners and their lackeys who determined the fate of many in our country. A Ukrainian security agent, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, a Ukrainian banker—people of power—this has always been an unattainable dream: an embodied dream of our ancient collective rightlessness of “its own” native force that would protect and defend. I thought him strong. But he was only cruel.

  To you? To you, too?

  Let’s not talk about this. Don’t.

  Okay, we won’t.

  It was all like a dark pall. But I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be.

  My poor girl.

  What can I say? Taking cruelty for strength is the most common mistake of youth. Youth only knows life by the intensity of its own feelings—a continuous explosive fortissimo with a foot on the pedal. Youth knows nothing of that supreme sensitivity, the true sensitivity of the strong that denies cruelty; youth has no inkling of the force with which a barely audible pianissimo can strike under your heart. Women make this discovery with the first butterfly quickening of a child in their wombs.