The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (66 page)

“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.

And what about men then—do you think them dumber?

You love war. And war is not conducive to refined sensibilities, it keeps pressing on their pedals, intensifies them. It’s that same fortissimo, all the time—until you go deaf.

You are unfair.

I am a woman. I want to feel the butterfly stir and see God’s presence in it. God is constantly present to us in small things—in a shape of a leaf, in the thin lace of new ice along a shore. In the miracle of miniscule nails on an infant’s fingers. War makes one deaf and blind to all that.

You are being unfair. War is also a way of seeing God manifest. Perhaps the most direct way. And the most terrible, as it should be—it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Omens in the sky, comets, messages spelled in fire, voices of spirits, descending angels, renewal of churches that will collapse under bombs tomorrow—every war has its own metaphysical history. And none have yielded as many martyrs as this one. And we are mere tools in it, rocks in God’s sling.

Adrian. Tell me, will this war ever end?

The war never ends, my girl. It is always the same—only the weapons change.

Is it you telling me this? Or that other one, the dead man?

Are any of us alive?

No! Don’t say that. I don’t want it. And these are not your words at all!

Don’t forget—it’s a dream. We’re dreaming this, and words can flit into this dream from wherever they please—like dust into your eyes.

I know where these words come from. I remember the painting that went with them,
After the Blast
—one of Vlada’s, who is now dead, too. Weren’t these her words—about a strong man her imagination created out of fear of losing? What is she doing here? Why is Vlada in this dream?

It’ll end soon. You have to bear it for just a little longer. We have to squeeze just a little farther through that narrow, dark shaft—we’ve got a bad bunker, with a straight entrance, and the entrance should always be angled, you should build it zigzag, so that when they throw in a grenade, no one inside gets hurt.

I don’t see the shaft. I see myself step into water, into a stream. I am washing my legs and dirt runs down my skin.

Maybe the dream has split at some point into separate branches, and now you’re seeing something I’m not? But water—that’s good. It’s good that the dirt is washing away.

Such clear, black streaks on bare thighs...

That’s everything extraneous coming off. The soul’s being cleansed, remains itself.

I love you. And I will never betray you.

You know, I was so jealous! For quite a while, I just never admitted it to you. Those lobsters you ate with him were stuck in my throat.

It’s washed away, all washed away like it’s never been...I see a little girl smiling, laughing, a blonde little girl, two years old or so—and somehow I know she’s mine...I’ll have a girl?

A girl! Of course, it has to be a girl, how did I not see that? A girl, of course, a little Geltsia with tiny blonde braids...

And where is the boy?

Which boy?

The one who’ll protect her. Every girl is meant to have a boy like that—a husband, a brother, someone else.... Why do I not see where he is? Has the war taken him, too?

What if he’s already been born? He’s among the living and that’s why you cannot see him?

And there’s no one alive in this dream?

Only you and me, Lolly. This is our dream. And we cannot change it...

***

“Banderas, surrender! Come out!”

Shouted, in Russian, into the vent. Above, dogs bayed, boots stomped—many boots, the commotion made the dirt fall from the ceiling, the sound growing like a shell’s whine through the air: higher, higher until it falls, explodes, buries them.

“Come out, Kyi! We know you’re there!”

The four looked at each other. The flashlight lit Levko’s face as the color drained from his cheeks and it turned sallow. Like Geltsia’s. And Raven’s.

“This is it,” the voice said inside Adrian’s head—with heretofore unknown calm. And instantly a bubble of long-awaited relief burst inside him: finally! And then his whole being rebelled against it: no! He licked his lips—the lips were also someone else’s, separate.

Who?
he mouthed without a sound, but everyone heard because they were all asking the same thing in that instant: Who brought the raid?

Or did he bring it himself? Did the dogs pick up his trail, all the way from the city?

“Come out, bitch, or we’ll smoke you out!”

Oh, so they have gas. They’ve got it all—gas, dogs, all the force in the world. His throat caught in a spasm of hatred, like a burst of machine-gun fire he mentally sent up the vent. For a moment, he couldn’t see, a dark veil over his eyes. He gestured; Raven understood him first: the papers! Hurriedly, they began
to empty their knapsacks, shred photographs; Raven struck a match, the fire blazed, sent flares dancing across faces, shadows along the walls. Adrian thought he saw Geltsia’s teeth chatter. He didn’t feel the heat either; wouldn’t have felt it if he put his hand into the fire. He did, however, feel, with his whole body, the cold of his pistol, suddenly heavy—the pistol was doing the thinking for him, choosing its aim: temple or under the chin? He stepped under the vent and shouted, head up, “Go smoke your mama out the barn! Where’s the one who brought you here?”

“What’d you want him for?”

“Get him here; I want to talk!”

Up above there was muttering, low, indistinct over the dogs’ racket, in several voices, light moved in the crack of the vent. They’ll negotiate, he realized; they want me alive. Personal commendations, promotions, decorations, vacations—they are drooling now, like those dogs, they won’t want such prize getting away from them. Talk, buy time for the archives to burn. And then fight it: grenades through the shaft and go. There’s always some chance, he’s been in worse straits. No, he thought, not like this. Lord have mercy on our souls, but Geltsia must remain; she must live. Rachel—that’s my sin, let me atone for it now. Let one of them survive. I am now like Orko in the fight yesterday—a guard to a pregnant woman. If it was really Orko—but it’s all the same, whoever it was: he was now all of them—all who had perished, blown themselves up in bunkers, burned themselves in haylofts, fallen to bullets, coloring the snow red under them and grasping the grenade’s pin in their fingers’ last twitch—the endless dark ballroom where he danced, his danse funèbre gathered itself, like a fist, into this underground hideout and thousands of the fallen thundered, marching in his blood. Your blessing, Lord.

Something moved close to the vent. Now, he thought. He seemed to feel the breath coming from above, and the breath mixed with his own, like two people sleeping under one cape. Suddenly, his body shook with a long, fierce tremor, more intense,
almost, than love’s, and sticky sweat covered his forehead. He had never been so appalled before.

“Friend commander—”

It was Stodólya.

Geltsia gasped behind him, a thin short noise, a baby-bat squeak. Above, the barking was cut short, turned to whimper—someone must have kicked the dog, so he’d keep quiet. The boot, give him the boot, always the boot.

“Let her out,” said the one who had been Stodólya; no one had ever heard him speak in this voice before, it slithered over Adrian. “Let Dzvinya out, friend commander, let Dzvinya come out.”

A noise made Adrian turn around. Dzvinya, who had squatted to throw documents into the fire, had fallen backwards, hit her head on an SMG propped against the wall, and now lay across the bunker’s floor, the fire lapping at her boots. This is hell, he thought, watching the boys drag her aside; I’m in hell. This is what it looked like in the picture of Judgment Day in the old wooden church where his father used to serve Mass: tongues of fire wagged, sparks sliced through faces, and devils in reddish-gray haloes bared their hungry fangs at you from below. Hell is feeling appalled forever, without reprieve. He didn’t know this before. Before, he was happy.

Smoke made his eyes water.

“Better you come down here,” he shouted, fighting back the cough. “Your wife has just fainted, she needs your assistance. If your masters will let you, of course.”

“This is not what you think, friend. I swear—”

“You’ve already broken one pledge you’d sworn. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Let me talk to her!”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask the ones you’ve sold us to.”

“She’s guilty of nothing!”

“All the worse for you, then,” he spoke almost mechanically, as though knocking out the standard insurgent verdict on a typewriter: “We order you to remove yourselves from such-and-such
village within forty-eight hours, and similarly from all Ukrainian lands. There is no place for people like you on Ukrainian land. We warn you that failure to carry out these orders will...”

Stodólya used to be the one who carried out such verdicts; now he, Adrian, had taken his place. “You’ll just have to live with that. The judgment of Ukrainian people will find you.”

I’ll do it myself, he promised himself mentally—I’ll give you a load of lead when we start the fight, and with such cold satisfaction, it’ll be like squeezing a boil. And that’s when he realized how he would do it—instantly, as if he saw it in a flash of a photographer’s magnesium.

“Smoke! There’s smoke, comrade captain, they’re burning something down there!”

“Kyi, don’t be stupid, turn yourself in. Your pal here—he’s smarter than you!”

He knew how he would do it; he felt an amazing clarity in his mind and body. You’re yet to see how the banderas surrender. You wanna see it—I’ll show you. Something white to hold in his hand—a newspaper? The boys leaned Geltsia against a wall; her head fell to one side. As long as those above don’t stuff the vents shut, so the fire doesn’t go out...Levko kept slapping her on the cheeks; it would be better to leave her alone, let her not wake.

“The Soviet government is doing you bandits a favor, and you’re turning up your noses at it?”