The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (61 page)

The city was a different beast—inside its walls, the city closely guarded the entire mass of time lived in it by its people, stashed it, generation after generation like a tree growing new whorls. Here your past could pounce at you from behind a corner at any moment, like an ambush no reconnaissance could ever warn you about. It could explode in your face like a time-delay bomb—with an old Gymnasium professor of yours, miraculously not exterminated by the Germans or the Soviets, or with a former friend from the German Fachkursen, later recruited by the NKVD, or simply with someone who had once been a witness to an old fragment of your life, which was, at the moment, of absolutely no use to you and thus subject to being expunged from your memory—but not from the city’s. Because this was the city’s job—to
remember
: without purpose, meaning, or need, but wholly, with its every stone—just as to flow is the job of rivers, and to grow is the job of grass. And if you take the city’s memory away—if you deport the people who’d lived in it for generations and populate it, instead, with relocated squatters, the city withers and shrivels, but as long as its ancient walls—its
stone memory
—stand, it will not die.

Adrian walked down the street and felt the city oozing the past from every pore, sap from a pine tree. It trapped him like a fly with his little feet sinking into sticky amber goo—he felt as if he were walking on the bottom of a lake, against the resistance of many atmospheres. It may have been because at the moment he wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as he could. His time,
tied to the time of the one who was fading like a dying candle and who waited for his friend Kyi to whom he could pass on the secrets he’d guarded until his last breath, was running out. But friend Kyi could not run. The city hung on him, weighed him down with stone on all sides; it clung to him with the tar of dozens of eyes he could see, and hundreds more he couldn’t. Lord, how much easier things were in the forest.

I’ve done become a woodsman, he thought with a city dweller’s instinctive pride in this accomplishment and with a growing anxiety about how much of it was apparent to others (so far, he checked, there was no tail). And right away, the next idea caught up with the previous one, clicked against it, like balls on a pool table: so,
they’ve
really driven us from our cities, from our memory’s terrain—into the underground of history, the twilight zone....

“Documents!”

“Please.”

A captain and a lieutenant, well-fed and also in good shearling coats; another fifty meters behind them, a woman with a market basket approached. The rest of the way was open; the space he left between them as he handed over his documents—piece by piece, not all at once—would be enough for a freely swung cross-in, edge of hand against Adam’s apple above the collar, the two of them at once; he punched equally strong from either side.

“Looks like he’s on a road assignment, tovarish Kapitan...”

“Last name?” verifying the papers actually belonged to him. “Zlobin, Anton-Vannych.”

At the sound of his undeniably Russian pronunciation—a local could never fake
that
!—both finally, as if on command, relaxed, brightened up.

“Where are you from?” the captain asked with unexpectedly human curiosity; Adrian saw in close-up, as if through a Zeiss telescope, his pale eyelashes and thin, watery skin grained with freckles, breathed his smell—shag, leather shoulder belt, chypre...

TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

“Lvovzagotzerno, tovarish Kapitan.”

“That’s not what I mean! Where’d you fight?”

“First Ukrainian front,” he said, icing with hatred, feeling the pistol against his side under his overcoat, and in his stomach—the tightening knot of anticipation, because at any moment, any moment now the alien past could rush at him, and he wouldn’t know what to do with it: he was confident in his Russian only with short, chopped-up sentences, even though the original Anton Zlobin, known by the alias Lisovyi in the Insurgent Army, always praised his pronunciation.

“And I was at the First Byelorussian!” the captain said, thrilled for no particular reason. “Did we cross paths in Berlin, by chance? It’s just your phiz looks so familiar.”

“I was done fighting at Sandomierz.”

The woman with the basket passed them and, not looking back, hurried along as if someone were after her.

“Got laid up in hospitals for a while after that.”

“Well, it’s no picnic here either,” the captain said by way of boasting—or maybe complaining. “The banderas are keeping things hot alright.” He clearly wanted to add something else, but stopped and waved Adrian off with the carefree, comfortable gesture of a person not afraid of leaving himself open to a throat jab. He offered Adrian’s documents back as if to say, sorry, brother, just doing my job, and in a flash of sudden insight that is the sole provenance of ancient, well-tempered hatred—the kind that doesn’t fog your mind with black madness but hardens, year after year, into a heavy amalgam that melds you with the one you hate like two lovers to death—Adrian realized that the captain also longed for the old warfare. For his First Byelorussian front, the brotherhood of battle that he must have experienced there, and that the reason he tarried with needless yap was that he felt much better then and there, than now and here. And now he would remember him, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin wounded at the First Ukrainian front; now Adrian would have one more person who knows him in this city. Rot your bones to pieces, tovarish Kapitan.

He kept walking, and about ten meters before the intersection he needed, that same crow materialized on the sidewalk before him. Turned her head every which way and stepped from one foot to another like a whore in high heels. He didn’t give a doggone about signs and such nonsense, but this was a bit too much.

“Shoo!”

The crow bounced once, heavy and awkward, like a woman at term, then again, and lifted into the air, wings rustling, and then landed, a few steps ahead, atop a cracked mascaron head above a doorway. Adrian thought he saw the mascaron wink at him. Was it just a tall tale or can crows really live to three hundred years old? And this same one could have flown above the battle at Berestechko? The ominous bird stared down at him as if it knew something. Where had he seen this unmoving gaze before? Like a snake’s, the Queen of Snakes...

TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

As he turned the corner, he spotted the gray Mackintosh at the other end of the street again (Could it be the same one?) and made a sharp turn into the first available gateway, and stood still, waiting. A woman dressed in a whole pack of silver foxes walked by with a small boy—“How many times do I have to tell you—No!” scorched her high, screeching, self-assured voice. Must be a commissar’s wife. Claws clicking on the cobblestones, a dog ran by—there’s a creature that doesn’t need to be afraid anymore.... Minutes dropped, loud as drumbeats; somewhere in the building a radio came on. The gray Mackintosh still did not show. If he was a tail, he was an incredibly sloppy, amateur one.

Come
on
already, for God’s sake!

Here it is finally, Kirov Street. Kirov! All streets now renamed after some Bolshevik commissars, new scabs on old walls.... From here, it’s the sixth door on the right. One, two...

“Watch out!” boomed in his head.

The morning street looked empty, lying in wait. And, like in the children’s game of cold-warm-hot, his alarm grew with every step. He could actually hear it, the sound of alarm pushing from
inside at his temples. Something was wrong, and the something was right ahead of him. Dear Lord, please let him be alive, please let me come in time, Lord Almighty, please keep him living.... A small old man with a cane shuffled out of the third door and began to close it behind him with a protracted, teeth-grating screech. Four, five...he saw every doorstep at once, polished to a silky gloss by thousands of feet, saw every crack in the sidewalk, the moist gleam of the cobblestones, the sugary trim of snow along the curb, and the dark specks in it, burbling with thaw-water, and the tear-streaked, cracked (Why doesn’t anyone fix it?) clay gutter at the building’s door. And—three curtained windows on the fourth floor: safe to proceed.

Here are the doors, the sixth doorway, a lion’s head with a ring in its maw, a gold maslin handle. Heavy. His mouth instantly dry. Lord, please let me not be late. Fourth floor, apartment eight.

Stairwell—dusk, pale light from the pseudo-gothic window facing the yard. If need arises, he can flee that way. Silence uneasy, ominous. But no, a door slams overhead. That’s lower, on the third floor. Someone coming down the stairs, the planks groan and creak: a man.

Adrian hastened his step to have his back to the window when he meets the man—he’d already advertised himself plenty, no need to parade his face before the neighbor as well.... From above, a pair of boots descends, then navy uniform breeches—a policeman! A major. Well, that’ll beat your grandmother! Jeepers. Steady now, don’t look away, keep straight at him, open, bold, schlagfertig...

TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...

But the policeman, much heavier and slower, also plows straight at him, silently like a somnambulist, his entire body blocking the way, like a boulder; he snuffles with the previous night’s vodka heaves and poor digestion; he blocks Adrian’s path as if he wants to embrace him—and looming, with all his shoulder straps, stripes, stars, and belts, exhales unexpectedly quickly, quietly, hoarsely into Adrian’s face.

“Number eight?” he asks.

Adrian is silent.

“Leave, it’s a kapkán. They arrested everyone last night. ”

“Thank you,” Adrian manages to peel off through his dry lips, then jumps astraddle the rail and slides down in a blink. He’s out in the street, in the deafening, blazing day, faster, faster—but not too fast, he can’t run, watch out!—puts distance between himself and the sixth door, Kirov Street, all the while waiting, with his back tuned to every sound, for someone to yell “Halt!” after him like a shot of the starting pistol. But nothing happens, it’s all quiet behind him; there’s no chase, no stomping boots; two more blocks and he’ll turn onto a more crowded street that runs to the market; he’ll mix with the passersby. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us....

Why wasn’t there a curtain pulled back in the middle window—the agreed-upon signal in case of failure? They didn’t have time? Someone prevented them? Or, worse, the worst—were they betrayed? Kapkán—the word stuck in his mind and lay there like a rock in the middle of a stream, cracked into its two syllables, two blows with a Tatar cudgel,
kap-kán
—but man, do you have luck! Thank You, Almighty Lord—three and a half floors below the trap, two minutes before the fatal knock on the door, three-one-three, “Do you have Brits to sell?” He’d have dropped like a ham hock into stew. God bless that major—whatever’d come over him? With girls, it’s been known to happen—sometimes moskali saved them by warning them like this, but a man? Must get a message to our people at the police, let them find out what kind of a major they got themselves here.... “They arrested everyone last night”—whom, how many? Was the one he’d come to see among them? Had he had the time to shoot himself, or was he taken alive? Waited for friend Kyi, but got another kind of visitor altogether, the uninvited kind—if only the courier had come the day before, a day, just a day earlier!

Adrian all but moaned through his teeth, his old wound aching in his chest: as if it were he who was being dragged, unconscious, and tossed like a sack into the “black raven,” as they called police
vans...“You, black raven, why’d you circle ov-er the hum-ble heaad of mine” went the doleful ballad, drawn out like your own guts slowly pulled by a well crank, when friend Lisovyi sang it around their campfire, the former Red Army captain, Andriy Zlobin, who perished in the Carpathians and to whom Adrian owed his papers (they only changed Andriy to Anton, but that was nothing in comparison to what it would’ve taken them to manufacture good legal papers otherwise). And now it came, the “black raven”—not for nothing did the stupid black bird haunt him But no, you bastards, the day has not yet come when you could take Kyi alive! But who, who was it? He didn’t know even their aliases. A wounded man, dying—that’s all the courier communicated. And what if they’d taken him alive?—they’ll nurse him, to be sure, patch him up in their hospital and then torture him until he tells them what he was supposed to tell Adrian.... And right from under his nose, rot it!—the MGB snatched away the secret that couldn’t be confided to a single other person on the territory, the secret he’d walked eighteen kilometers (and now had to walk as many back!) to hear, and now could only pray to God that they wouldn’t get to it, that it would perish, vanish forever, go into the ground together with whoever was its keeper...

“Beg pardon!” he blurted in Russian when he shoved past another man. Closer to the market there were more people; he couldn’t keep the same pace without drawing attention to himself, and he spotted behind him—this time beyond any doubt because it was much closer—the gray Mackintosh and the navy-banded hat.... Whoa, brother, you’re a slob to shame all slobs, who tails like that? His mouth was still dry, but his heart had returned to his chest, and his reason worked coolly and clearly as though placed outside of his body. Under different circumstances, he’d have had good fun losing that tail, would make a sport of vanishing without a trace, but now he felt unavenged wrath choking him, high in his throat where it had risen, by the law of communicating vessels. As soon as the first, dark wave of fear ebbed—he was still in that state where the body, like a
well-oiled machine, acts of its own accord as it does in dreams, in love, and in moments of mortal danger—and before he knew what he was doing and could rein himself in, in blatant denial of all logic of safety that demanded he remove himself, now, at once, far from the city, he was making a show of turning onto another street, almost tripping into the arms—Beg pardon!—of another fur-wrapped missus who instantly ogled him with a purely feminine hunger—some other time, lady; I’ve no cash on me today!—a quiet and usually empty street where he knew a very good doorway, with narrow latticework like in a confessional—and he was feeling an urge to confess to someone, a powerful urge indeed! He didn’t care if it was broad daylight, as long as the dolt didn’t lose him again.