The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (60 page)

It was like he comforted Levko in Stodólya’s stead. And Levko did cheer up a bit, brightened like a finch brought in from the cold (looking at him made Adrian think, for no particular reason, shame about your rosy cheeks, brother; winter’ll paint you green like potatoes in a cellar...). And it was only now, as he waited at the edge of the forest for the clouds that raced across the sky, swiftly unspooling into ribbons of smoke, to cover the moon and allow him to come out, that the conversation came back to him, like a bitter heartburn after a heavy supper, and he thought, coldly and clearly, yes, he would’ve given the same order but under his command Levko would have
found the courage
to step up. He would have clicked his heels and said, hand to the peak of the cap in salute, “Permission to speak, friend commander, I vouch for him.”

And to hell with what comes next.

Adrian was now finally awake, completely. Inside he felt empty, like before stepping into the line of fire. With a quick sharp whine, time came together, squeezed like a Moscow harmonica’s bellows—into the streaming minute, a singular chink open for immediate action. And that disgusting tremor inside faded, went still. And his hands weren’t shaking.

He was free.

Around him, his land breathed in the quiet of the night. The spirits of the woods who had watched over him guiding him through the thickets, stood behind him. This was
his
land—his strong-as-death love pulsed like invisible light in the dark. Those who had come to stomp it down with their boots had no such strength. Could do nothing to him.

He felt the angry glee enter him. The berserk heat that comes in battle and—if you have luck—on a mission, fills your body with
dreamlike ease, with the tease and tickle of danger that arouses and intoxicates more irresistibly the more boldly you deny that danger, until it retreats, tamed, because you showed yourself to be
stronger.
Ahead he could see the white field—no, not white but already speckled, welcoming him with black wet inlets of thaw; his mind—a white knight in icy armor—observed from outside his body, watch in hand, and the watch ticked loudly, calculating the minutes measured before his turn, and somewhere in space, or perhaps inside himself, an invisible hand wound up a barrel organ for a bawdy kolomyjka tune, tighter, tighter, don’t crack the spring—no, that’s a twig cracking underfoot, like a girl who’s done waiting. “To the mountains go white sheep, up higher and higher, I slept with a partisan and I ain’t yet crying.... ” He grinned, noisily drawing in a full chest of sharp forest air, stretching his lungs like an accordion’s bellows in anticipation of a dance, cruel like a wolf hunt. Only it wasn’t him anymore—it was a demobilized Soviet Army captain, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin, dispatched, with magnificent documents and a Nagant revolver engraved with his name, by the grain supply department to finalize grain collection in the district.
Alright, motherfucker, let’s go!
said Anton Ivanovych. And crossed himself.

Let the games begin.

Adrian’s Lost Dream

W
hy am I creeping, half-bent, along this wattle fence with no end in sight?—the weaving glistens wet, as though varnished, and drops of water leave earthbound trails on it here and there, like tears on the wrinkles of an ancient face seen up close—a thaw, it’s dawning, patches of flimsy threadbare snow like moth-eaten wool grow lighter on the black ridge as my foot finds them, spellbound, obedient, to avoid stepping on the white—

—that’s a rule we have, sweetie, like in hopscotch: “Don’t step over!” Jump on each square, miss none, to get to the main nave of the heavenly sky—here I am, Lord!—but watch out, don’t step on a single line, because each line is a line of fire, and he who steps over is out of the game—boom, dead!

And then can’t reach the heavenly sky.

Has to start all over again from the beginning. Again and again—until he comes all the way.

I am ready. Ready to do it all over again if they kill me now.

You still have time. And you have all eternity before the heavenly sky. Because the Lord gathers all who’d been killed in one place where the living cannot go—turns their shoulders to the sky and their faces to the earth from which they’d been torn too soon—and from that secret place of our Lord they watch over you: they war when you go to war, make sure you don’t stray from the path, and send you letters you don’t know how to read...

So they’re watching me right at this moment? Igor, Nestor, Lodzio, Roman, Ash, Myron, Lisovyi, Ratai, Legend, all the boys who left me here alone—I can sense their silence as it fills the air, it hangs above the ground as though a whole platoon is studying me through their optical aims from an invisible cover, and when I
raise my arm to fire my weapon they all hold their breath as well, so that my arm steadies, and when my voice warns me an inch before death—is that they, too?

They, they...but you already knew it. Ask something you don’t know—you have time for one more question.

Okay then. I’ve never said this to anyone. I would like to fall in Kyiv, like Lodzio. On the apostolic hills where my nation began. Where the Dnieper’s blue and the churches’ gold are our ancient colors before the heavenly host. Where the glory of our princes and hetmans roared—and from where our forefathers marched to the peal of St. Sophia’s bells to defend it. I never came that far—and I so yearned to go there, to see it all with my own eyes, that’s why I chose Kyi as my alias—

Your blood will be in Kyiv. You don’t need to know more.

Who are you that you say this to me?

Black furrows plowed, plowed, hey, hey.... Black furrows plowed, seeded and plowed, and the bullets sprout, sprout, hey, hey...

I know you: You are Grandma Lina! Oh, Grandma, I am so happy it’s you—only where are you, why can’t I see you?

I’m no grandma, man. I am the land.

The land? Yes, I see it—black dirt, not furrows—just mud, you leave tracks on it, too, so I must watch my step, step so the snow won’t creak underfoot, rouse neither men nor dogs, leave no trace on softening, rich soil. I see my breath knit through the air before me; I cover my mouth and nose with a wool scarf, and it’s instantly wet inside it; now tears brim in my eyes, my ears are full of wind, my eyes and nostrils full of moisture, the thaw, the thaw, everything runs, everything drips, champs, slips, screams—what?

It is the land bubbling, soaked with blood—heavy, swollen with blood like the walls of a woman’s womb: fecund, brewing, gurgling bog; she can’t take any more blood; she oozes it like black beestings—she is asking to rest; she is asking for winter...

Like a woman who bleeds in vain and bears no children? Yes, I see—it’s the time before winter, the darkest of seasons, and the land although wet, has no smell; it is going numb, entering sleep...

The winter that’s coming shall be long, so long it will seem eternal. Only the women won’t cease giving birth. Remember that.

I don’t know who you are, but listen—I cannot remember things I do not need! I have a mission, and I must come back alive, and no one will write down for me what I am soon to hear. I will have to archive it all in my head, down to the last comma, the dots above the i’s...

What you are soon to hear you will no longer need. And what you might need you will not hear.

What’s that supposed to mean?

You’ll understand when the time comes. And now the wattle fence will end, and you’ll hit your knee on a stake.

Bugger! There it is, a stake alright. How did I miss it?

This will be a sign for you. So you would remember when you wake up on the other side of this long winter.

So I am asleep?

No, soldier. You are already gone. Look—

The earth! Sweet beloved God, have mercy on us—the earth is falling from above. Is it the bunker or the world that’s collapsing? So much of it, Lord, I can’t get out from under it; it is heavy; it stifles me, covers me. I can’t see the light! It is dark...dark...

Sleep, soldier. They’ll call for you when the time comes.

***

Written on a pack of cigarettes on Adrian Vatamanyuk’s bedside table:

Blood will stay in Kyiv

Women won’t cease giving birth

You won’t need

***

Two policemen in winter shearling coats passed him by without a second look. For a minute, he was overcome by the sense of being
invisible—as though he’d been transported, in flesh, through a well suddenly opened in time, into a different November morning, where another, German, patrol passed just like that, not seeing him, as if through thin air, and the feeling made the world around him shift and begin to slip, a door taken off its hinges. This didn’t last long, two heartbeats at most, but he flushed: it’d been too long, darn it, he’d forgotten how to walk in the city.

The city, however, had not changed—those who now ruled it by day knew only the work of ruin. In the cities they took—just as in homes abandoned by owners on a moment’s notice, with embroidered tablecloths on the tables and family silver in the drawers—they repaired, fixed, or tidied nothing; they didn’t love the cities they took and didn’t understand that any place, be it a city, a home, or a bunker needed someone’s hands and heart to live. All they knew was how to wield their threatening presence to paralyze anyone who had hands and heart to put to this task, and wherever they made camp they brought with them, like rot, a cheerless air of unsettledness, discomfort, and poverty.

The heap of rubbish where the Germans had blown up the synagogue hadn’t been cleared—only sagged a bit since he was here last summer: people must’ve been stealing the excellent Austrian brick from it, pilfering it piece by piece. In the window of the pharmacy on the corner, a bust of Stalin had appeared: a sign that the local pharmacist who had supplied the underground with medicine was gone, arrested. Closer to the center, there was more Stalin: a portrait on the former German administration building, a portrait on a school—and everywhere the eye tripped on red streamers and lengths of red fabric with white lettering, strung across streets for their holiday tomorrow: “Long Live the Great Socialist October Revolution!”

The most notable change was the construction of a jail—the only project the new power had begun: through the gates, opened to let in a five-ton truck loaded with bricks, he hooked, out of the corner of his eye, and reeled into his memory a sliced-off view of the yard, and deep in it, under the dirty pink wall, the color of
Soviet ladies’ undergarments (the Poles at least had better taste and didn’t adorn either women or jails in such a nasty color!), lined up in rows, like piglets at market, were reddish sacks of precious cement. Uncovered, he noted with spite: everything with them louts is like that—just dropped in the middle of the yard, under rain and snow, can’t keep things straight even around their prison! Not for naught it is said—if it’s everyone’s, it’s gone. Like what happened around Drohobych to the cattle left behind when they’d shipped everyone off to Siberia. Six thousand head, with nowhere to keep them and nothing to feed them, because the silage they’d also left under the rain all rotted—they rounded them up in the district center and slaughtered them, as if enacting some ancient nomad funeral rite in which the animals shared the fate of their owners....

But they
are
nomads—the voice inside his head reminded. Of course, who else—Batu Khan’s horde come to ravage our cities and villages, exactly like it happened a thousand years ago, only this time it’s reached far beyond the Carpathians, across the Vistula and Oder...Flagellum Dei, Scourge of God. The man walking toward him on the other side of the street, dressed in a civilian gray Mackintosh and a hat with a navy band, seemed somehow familiar to him; he turned his face to the wall and crouched to tie an ostensibly untied shoelace, turning—to no avail—that vaguely familiar face over and over in his memory, as if straining to push through a locked door that refused to budge. He could feel with his shoulders that the man on the opposite sidewalk also slowed down, and he regretted his slipshod disguise, resented Anton Ivanovych Zlobin for not wearing at least a mustache like all Soviet military men, even retired ones (it would appear that the shaving of one’s face and the perfuming of oneself with chypre constituted their entire repertoire of personal hygiene, since, according to our girls who worked in their military hospital, they didn’t have much use for toilet paper, as the scraps of newspaper that hung on a nail in the water closet there remained undisturbed for days on end). As he assessed the distance to the closest doorway into which he could
dash, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a dark spot on the sidewalk, but then his Voice gave the order “Go!”—and when he turned his back to the wall again, the man in the gray Mackintosh was no longer there. Instead, a single crow stood on the sidewalk, covered like a brand new gun with a moist oily gloss, and leered at him saucily, askance—as if she had something to say to him.

Pish!
He almost spat as he would have in the forest (the Soviets, though, spat in the streets openly, right where they walked, and equipped their official offices with a fixture never seen in the Austrian or Polish days—special bowls for spit, like at a dentist’s!). This was the second time he saw this crow—no, couldn’t be, this had to have been a different one—the bird had greeted him at the edge of the city, on one of those boggy little lanes lined with thoroughly country-like homes behind wattle fences. His attention, strained to its limit, fixed every little detail—yet he still couldn’t identify the man in the gray Mackintosh: had they really met before (Where?) or was it merely an illusion, a coincidental similarity of facial features that raised alarm in him?

This was why the city was dangerous—it was a bottomless and unpredictable reservoir of
the past.
The woods—they were the opposite. The woods had a short memory; the woods, like the partisans, lived in the streaming moment; every storm that blasted through erased the contours of the land you knew by touch just a day before, blocked your path with a fallen tree, a slipped slope; a twig you broke as a sign was torn off by deer or bears; cuts you made on tree trunks scabbed up like blisters on your own skin, and went black, blending into the landscape; heavily trodden campsites were soon overrun by shoots of new grass, studded with a generous sprinkling of buttercup and anemones; blood you spilled seeped into the ground without a trace. Adrian would be hard-pressed to find the bunker where he’d spent the previous winter although he dug it, as conspiracy rules prescribed, himself, with his own two hands; perhaps only the peasants who’d grown up grazing their cattle in those woods and knew the area’s topography like their own homes in the night—just as he, Adrian, could take
apart and put back together a Mauser in three and half minutes without light—could etch into their memories, without fault and for all eternity, a spot at the edge of the village where someone made a money cache or buried archives in milk cans. Except no one ever divulged such information to peasants, and those who did
know
how many steps to take north by the azimuth from the dried-up hornbeam tree or the third rocky outcrop from the right often perished before they could pass the secret on to another confidante. How many of them were already there, slowly rotting underground, our abandoned secrets?