The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (57 page)

He understood: Lyusya from Poltava and the little sister, Olyunka, she’d left at home reminded Geltsia of her own little sister—where was she now, the younger Dovganivna, for whom (now he remembered this, too!) he used to buy éclairs in the Mikolyash Passage, not yet bombed into dust then, in the center of Lviv—what had this blood storm done to her?

Since the spring of ’44, when the NKVD ordered the families of insurgents arrested en masse, small children included, every one of them carried inside the same burning wound, the knowledge that it was not just their own lives alone they offered to lay down—as the Gospels say, for their people, because that’s what they’d chosen freely, and their yoke was their freedom, and their burden was light—but that they also condemned, inadvertently, their loved ones to following them into suffering, into torture or Siberia, or at best—if they fell in battle—to the sight of their mangled, vandalized bodies—stripped naked, girls’ breasts or men’s genitals cut off, a trident carved into the dead forehead—and mothers and fathers unable to mourn their children or to bury them but bound to say, as they turn themselves into stone, not thrice but thirty-three times, like Peter, if he could bear it: I do not know this man. I do not know this woman. Mama, forgive me.... (And they forgave—they all forgave, only not all of them endured: the mother from Kremenets, when they stood her up before the bodies of her six sons, also said, “I do not know them”—but never spoke another word until her heart broke under the burden of six-fold grief, and the mother fell dead next to her children.)

It was easier for him: His mother and father were in Siberia already, and his mother never saw his brothers—arrested in ’41—dead. In the pile of massacred bodies the Bolsheviks left when they retreated, the family could not find either Henyk or Myros.
One could choose to think they survived (and that’s what Mother believed), that they were safe somewhere, abroad, on the other side of the ocean.

He understood—and smiled at Geltsia from across all the past years at once, the way he smiled at her on that long-ago day when he stood at sunset on Krupyarska awash in the apple-crisp aura, the fresh air of young girlhood.

“And then—did you help those Poltava girls?”

Their eyes met—and such a depth of gratitude was in her gaze that he felt his entire chest flush with heat: she needed him, after all!

The men grew quiet and she spoke again, and he saw it all as though with his own eyes—he saw the girl Lyusya. He knew that type of Poltava girl, beautiful (Geltsia said the girl was beautiful) with the beauty of antique statues—tall, majestic as Roman matrons, with classical sloping shoulders and profiles destined for Carrara marble. He’d glimpsed their breed in the refugee waves more than once: The steppe-borne daughters of Ceres, Amazons, Kozak women—how dare the demons of the twentieth century turn them into highway beggars? Geltsia (bundled in a kerchief up to her eyes: “If any strangers came to the house, my story was I had toothache”) had fixed a bowl of thin gruel for the girl, fearing that fresh bread with milk might hurt her after she hadn’t had any for so long, and then took her to the pantry and filled a sixty-pound sack (“Took both of us to stamp it down!”) with wheat flower—of the stores reserved for the insurgents (“I wrote out a quittance for the warden, a very nice man, he just said, ‘We don’t keep count of that,’ said he’d have given her of his own grain, and flagged a wagon right there, to take her to the station, to get on the Zdolbuniv train”). And it was there, in the pantry that it happened: As they went to pour the grain into the sack, Lyusya from Poltava suddenly froze, her face changed.

“She was looking at my hands,” Geltsia said, guiltily raising her delicate, so unmistakably intelligentsia-bred fingers, and Adrian
felt his stomach knot again in pity at the sight of them: they were fit for a typewriter or a radio, but to muck stalls?

“She knew you?” Levko whistled.

“Told you so!” Stodólya cut in, with a kind of venomous satisfaction. “Hands and lingerie—how many girls already got caught on that!”

“I took off my underthings when I changed, and I was going to soak my hands in brine-water and rub them with ashes—it makes them look like you’d farmed all your life, never fails. But, it’s a chore—so I hadn’t had the time! So we are standing there, the two of us, looking at each other: I know that you know that I know...and then she started crying.” Geltsia’s voice gave a suspicious din, like cracked crystal. “Fell to her knees, grasped my hands, kissed them. I yell ‘Get up, miss!’ and she, ‘I won’t tell anyone! I won’t tell a word to anyone, I swear to you!’”

She stopped, fighting the emotions. The men were silent, too.

“And that’s when she told me that as soon as they got off the train the MGB picked them up, right there at the station.... Kept them for half the day telling them horrors about the banderas and instructing them, when they go to the villages, to watch and report if they notice anything special.... Fed them pea soup for that.”

“And if they’d given her sixty pounds of flour, would you’ve vouched she wouldn’t tell on you?” Stodólya asked dryly.

This was no longer a man teasing a woman he loved; this was a superior analyzing the situation for the benefit of the younger riflemen, and Adrian, who had no grounds on which to intrude upon Security’s business, could only listen as any other accidental witness and concede, in his heart of hearts, that Stodólya had a point: Geltsia behaved in that situation dangerously indeed, she could have gotten caught herself and implicated her hosts. (Someday, when we win our Ukraine, we’ll build a monument, somewhere in the Carpathians so it’ll be seen from far away—a monument to the rural families that helped us, and went into Siberian exile for us, and died by the hundreds of thousands, but never once, not at one door said to us: go on, boys, God keep you, go on your way because we have children
and want to live. No, instead they said: it’s one God’s will for all, what he gives you, children, we’ll take ourselves. You’re laying your lives down and we won’t spare you a piece of bread?)

Still, despite all the rationalizing, he felt that Stodólya pursued not so much Geltsia’s old (before she was under his command?) mistakes but something else, something more important perhaps, something unsaid: quite simply Stodólya did not believe any of those strays, even if they vailed before him—just as he did not believe anyone he couldn’t check and verify.

That
was the most important thing.

Whichever portions of the world were not subject to his control represented, for Stodólya, enemy territory where there was no room for sympathy. Adrian had met other men who lived by the same notion—there used to be more of them when the war first began.

This was Poland’s legacy, he thought: for twenty years Poland handled us as tools, with a condescending, speak-to-you-through-the-teeth certainty that the Rúsyns were not people but pigs, and honed and tempered us to respond, like a good ax, symmetrically, in kind. But Poland fell and was forever banished from these lands, and so did Hitler’s Reich that had come armed with the same blind scorn for us, the üntermensch, and now came Moscow that knew no people at all—they gave no more thought to blowing their own into ashes than strangers. Tens of armies and hundreds of tribes had stampeded through Ukraine (from the happy Italians, handsome lads and inept, take-it-all-just-leave-me-alone soldiers who would’ve gladly given us all their ammunition if we’d let them go home without a fight, to the motley swarms of narrow-eyed nomads that erupted from the depths of the Asian steppes—like a new European invasion of Genghis Khan’s hordes, except that, for some reason, so many of them wanted to join our side when taken prisoner, almost as many as from among the Red Army Ukrainians). And over the shattered borders, through the smoke of the pyres, we glimpsed the Great Ukraine, the dream of our fathers, and learned, on
our first marches east, from it, crippled and tortured in ways we never imagined, what neither Poland nor Germany could teach us: that there is no free country without free people, and he who forces his will upon others imprisons himself.

And when our military force, like a swollen river, reached the floodmark and began to spill into vengeance, and fires swallowed the manors of Polish colonists in Volyn and Podolia, we found another force that dammed the rush that careened toward blind retribution: the pontiff of St. George’s Hill, and with him the stigmatic martyrs in the underground put up a halting hand holding a cross and begged our people not to stain their holy weapons with innocent blood in the face of the Lord; and the Supreme Command spoke to us through its Third Congress ordering us to be
reborn
for the struggle ahead—because our force is called to serve not vengeance but liberation, and he who wrongs the unarmed, imprisons himself.

And we were reborn; we recast ourselves in the furnace of battle; we tempered ourselves into steel, shedding the irresolute into the winds of the crisscrossed frontlines—the accidental avengers, the forcibly mobilized, all those who had grown weary and yearned for the plow more than the sword and who valued life above freedom; only death’s volunteers remained, the bridegrooms of death—a noble metal that rang clear as a bell. And when the Soviets came, hanging us publicly in the squares (and quit as soon as they realized who they were dealing with), every such execution fed our strength—our boys stepped up to the noose with their heads held proud and high, called out to the crowd with their last breath, “Glory to Ukraine!” and the human sea rumbled, swelling with the wrath of forced silence, and at night dozens more ran off into the woods to volunteer and win themselves a death like that—a death of free men. And we already knew: for every force that enslaves, there will be another, greater force—German for the Polish, Russian for the German. Only the force of liberation has no match: it is the one and the same and combats all tribes and peoples, however many there are on this earth.

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.