The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (67 page)

He pushed a few more photo shreds into the fire with the toe of his boot: a merry-eyed girl’s face with her smile torn off, a pair of peasant hands folded in a lap. Somewhere in there burned the picture of the five of them together. He’d tossed it in after shredding it. Ashes alone must remain. Ashes alone, everything must burn to dust. Not a name, not a sign, nothing after us. Only our blood for you, Ukraine. A new, unfamiliar excitement alit in him, growing brighter and hotter as the fire that swallowed their archives. Someone was coughing; he wiped his eyes and saw a smudge of soot on his hand: It was his own hand but he could not comprehend it.

“Should we burn the newspapers, too, friend commander?”

“Leave them. Let them read.”

“Come out nicely, Kyi, or are you done living?”

“And who would you be to order me around like your pig herd?” he shouted, listening to the movement above ground. Just as he thought, they were taking positions on the ground behind the trees, away from the entrance in case grenades came flying out of the bunker; Stodólya showed them where the entrance was. “Or are you all pig herds yourselves? Then go fetch me Colonel Voronin, I’ll talk to him!”

“Yeah, sure! No colonel for you—I, Captain Boozerov, am in charge of this operation!”

He thought, there, my death introduced itself. From a thousand possible anonymous faces it had chosen this one. And I wished so much for this to happen in Kyiv—and I never got to see the city. That’s a shame. That was one thing he regretted, a single thing, and the regret was already too small to touch anything inside him. Lord, help me. This is the last time I’ll ever ask You.

He heard a bolt click: Levko sent the bullet into the stock. And stood up, for some reason—the low ceiling kept him half-bent and he stood like that, pistol in hand, as if holding the entire earth on his shoulders and swaying a bit under its weight.

“Friend commander...friends...”

“Hold on, Levko,” Adrian said. “While we’re still armed, it’s no good rushing into the next world without taking a few Bolshevik souls with us. Captain Boozerov’s already in a hurry, can’t you hear it?”

“Kyi, surrender! I’m giving you five minutes to think!”

“Grenades?” Raven asked hoarsely, ravenously.

Adrian looked at Geltsia. She was awake. She sat, unmoving, and shone her eyes at him straight through the darkness. For a moment, all sounds disappeared and the only thing he heard was blood ringing in his ears. A high, dangerous whine.

“Forgive me, Adrian.”

She knew, he realized. Knew that he loved her. She is here, with me. Hand in hand. My love, my happiness. Wonder lurched inside him, tore free, and burned high and even like a torch.

“May the good Lord forgive you,” he answered in Father Ortynsky’s voice. “And you forgive me, Gela. And you forgive me, boys, for however I sinned before you, Raven...and you, Levko...”

“Lord forgive...”

“I forgive you, forgive me, friends...”

“And you forgive me...”

“May the good Lord...”

Awkwardly, like strangers, they kissed each other: each was already alone with his or her fading life and the touch of another’s body struggled to reach their awareness—a stubby cheek, a hot cheek, a cold one, a wet one.... That’s Geltsia’s, he realized: she is crying, her tears returned. Tears ran down her cheeks in grooves or moist glitter, and he suddenly regretted not having had the chance to shave one last time—felt like he was leaving a camp untidied.

“I said five minutes, Kyi! Did you hear me?”

He heard fear in that shout. Now’s the time, he thought. Like in that fairytale where the shrew kept asking the girl to dance and she tarried and tarried, until the roosters called. Only the roosters won’t call for us, and help won’t come. His clock was about to stop; the hand counting seconds almost ran its last circle. The thing for which he’d been preparing himself all these years was rising before him as a humongous, menacing wall, more magnificent and menacing than anything he had known before. Even the feeling he had when stood in formation in 1943 with four Insurgent Army companies, just sworn in, and sang “Ukraine’s not yet perished,” could not match this. Nothing could. And no matter how much you prepare yourself for this, you can’t ever be ready.

“Dzvinya, you stay,” he spoke. “Stay here. Come out later...when it’s all over. That would be best.”

She opened her mouth spasmodically, as if about to yawn. And instantly the sharp pity he felt for her—for leaving her alone,
tearing her away, as though he were ripping out of her, full of love, his aching flesh—caught him and entered him like a knife under his ribs—and he shuddered, scorched by the boundless, infinite mass of life that was hidden inside him.

“They already know everything you know—from him,” she said as if to justify herself. “It won’t do any more harm if you turn yourselves in.”

Only then did he see the pistol in her hand.

“Shoot me, Adrian. I beg you.”

“No!” he said.

“For the love of God, do it. I’m afraid my hand will err.”

“You must live.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Gela,” he said.

She jerked her chin sideways, in torment, as if not having the strength to complete the gesture of refusal. “I don’t want to...carry his blood,” she whispered the last words.

He didn’t know what to say to that. He was not a woman. The life force that was in her differed from the one he felt, the one that urged him into his last battle. He could only repeat, “You must live. You can bear it, Gela. You’re strong.”

“I don’t want to surrender to them. I have grenades, too, two of them, in fact.” At once and without words they all remembered how they gave her an RGD grenade for her name day in September, and she must’ve remembered it, too, because she sobbed, or perhaps chuckled nervously. “Goodness, I clear forgot—I’ve got Christmas presents prepared for you all!” And next she was tossing some bundles into the gathering darkness from her knapsack—mittens? socks?—something white fluttered and fell like a wing. Scooping up heat from the cinders, she caught it, shook it out. “This one’s for you, friend commander, will you wear it? Lina, my sister, asked me to give it to you. I was saving it for Christmas.”

It was a shirt—a blazing white shirt with dense embroidery, lush as a row of marigolds, down the front. The kind girls embroidered
for their betrothed—and the sight of it made the three men’s breath catch in their throats. The shirt glowed in the dark as though alive; it wanted to be worn into marriage, not into death. And suddenly Adrian knew why it was there.

“Geltsia, bless your heart!” he said, no longer surprised by anything. Everything was the way it had to be; life, aimed at its end like a bullet sent down the stock, ran smoothly along its course as though guided by a supreme will, and everything fit into its proper slot. And the little girl in the sailor suit, who had, without knowing it, embroidered his last weapon, was also there and looked at him with love. He would use the shirt to come out.

He explained his plan: he would announce they were giving themselves up. He’d come out first, under a white flag—this one, he took the shirt into his hands, but it had no smell: he could no longer perceive smells, could only sense the smoke. He’d use the shirt to hide a grenade—they won’t see it until they close around him. Then, with three blasts at once, they’d be able to destroy at least a dozen enemies. More if they were lucky.

And Stodólya with them, he thought but didn’t say out loud. That was his last mission, his alone, not to be delegated to anyone else: he had to kill the traitor. He dared not die without it; he wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye in the other world. And Geltsia had to stay here, in the bunker; Geltsia had to live. Someone had to raise our children.

“Friend commander.” It was she again, only her voice had changed unrecognizably, became low, as with a cold. “Allow me to go with you.”

But he wasn’t listening—a giant dark wall was rising before him, bigger than anything he had ever scaled before, and he said to the one who wasn’t letting him go, who was tethering him to life, “No,” and stepped up to the vent.

“Wait!” Her hair had come loose; she looked deranged. “Listen to me! They’ve come for you, friend Kyi, but
he
has come for me!”

The men looked at her as if they’d seen her for the first time.

“He’ll survive,” she said; hysterical notes rang in her voice. “He’ll slip out, he’s wily. You won’t be able to do anything to him. The Area Council of Security Service Command is in two weeks, and he’ll go there—with new troops. And that’ll be the end. Lord,” she almost cried, “don’t you understand that
you
won’t kill him? You won’t fool him with your show, and he’ll escape; he’d escape even if you had a bomb here instead of your grenade and took half a garrison with you! I have to come out. And first, just like he wants! That’s the only way he’d believe you—if I’m standing next to you!”

Silence. Through the ringing in his ears Adrian thought he heard thin children’s voices singing in chorus, far away, a carol.

“She’s right,” Levko said quietly.

Three kings came from an East-ern la-and, put pre-cious gifts into the Vir-gin’s ha-ands...

She was right, Stodólya had come for her. Stodólya also knew he, Adrian, loved her, and counted on it—that he wouldn’t let her die. She was right; she knew him best. She was right, that was the only way—to come out together; to perish together.

I didn’t want this, thought Adrian Ortynsky as he collapsed with inaudible din, shattered into pieces, into myriad slivers of his own life, all visible at once and up close like lit windows at night through a field glasses, like a snowstorm splintered into myriad snowflakes—he didn’t want this. But his will was no longer there—
Not what I will but what you will. Get up, let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand.
The choir of angels reverberated, the ringing in his ears grew—somewhere far ahead, on the other side of the impossibly dark wall they were to scale, rang St. Sophia’s bells, the bells of Heavenly Ukraine for which they were setting out.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Yes, he thought. Yes. She was right.

He nodded. Very slowly—everything around him instantly became very slow so that no trifle escaped his attention, not one snowflake that swirled before his eyes—he could see them all; he could hold everything at once somehow: the ribbed ebony
handle of Raven’s SMG, the convex gleam of buttons on their jackets, the crimson remnants of the fire like an ashen bruise over a wound, and the rounded snouts of grenades, sitting dark, alive in their hands. Six grenades between the four of them. Not bad at all.

“Agreed,” he said.

And then he felt it stir in the bunker—the breeze of tension that always comes before battle.

Geltsia made the sign of the cross over him, and he also saw the gesture distinctly, like a snowflake under a magnifying glass: his mother made the cross over him like that, when he left home for the last time. He wanted to smile to his bride in death—this was, in a way, their wedding, and the chorus of tiny voices that made the invisible glass sphere of his life crack with a slow ringing sang the wedding hymn for them—but he could no longer smile. Instead, with a senseless, bear-like lurch he suddenly pulled them all by the shoulders together as though he were about to dance the arkán with them here in this tomb—the ancient dance, the warriors’ dance in which a single, many-headed body spins in a locked circle, and feet stomp the ground with a single force, faster and faster, and the chain gathers speed, arms on shoulders, shoulder to shoulder, the eternal male dance of their people that’s been holding the circle together on this land with an inhuman effort, ever since the days of the Horde, holds the circle that others keep breaking with blood and torment, and it takes more torment and blood to renew it, to find the strength and stomp your ground. It’s mine! I won’t give it!—here’s our circle, we are together at last, my girl, this is it, this is our wedding dance; it was once interrupted, but everything’s now set right. We are together again; we’ve found our music; we’ve only the finale to play—play it cleanly, without a single fault, because it can’t ever be played again...

The last twitch of the hand counting seconds—and the clock stopped.

“We surrender!” Kyi called out from underground. “You win!”

He still heard the noise of movement above—when they skittered, ran up there, barking orders—but he was already thinking with his body alone, wrapping his grenade with the wedding shirt:
She
will walk two steps ahead; I will pull the safety pin out of the grenade. Those above shouted for them to come out with arms in the air, and he pictured their fear—gray, as if a pack of excited rats swirled around the bunker, not entirely sure of its prey, and the rats had to be soothed, so he spoke—or rather someone else spoke from him while he listened—“There’s a woman here who requires medical assistance...”—and these words were as right, mindless, and singularly precise as his movements, and were received by the others as a command. Because he, Kyi, had taken command over them in this moment. He roused them onto their feet, already happier, already weaker; their minds’ focus shifted from the imminent order “Fire!” to a new hole in their shoulder-straps:
Ha, we win, the pussy talked them into it!

This was something they understood, something that accorded with what sent them out trudging through snow and muck in other people’s lands and putting to the torch the cities and villages they’d come to hate: some pussy, a fat ration, and everyone afraid of you—they already believed their luck, they were straining their necks and rubbing their hands together, these simple organisms, lower vertebrates that know only the most primitive instincts and destroy anything they can’t understand. Although created in God’s image, they never did become people, and he felt no hatred for them—hatred had already left him like all other emotions that used to constitute his being—but among them was the man whose heart he felt inside his own like proud flesh, like a second, black heart that continued to beat in this hour, and he had to cut it off, tear it out by the root, excise it. Through the lifted lid flooded the white blaze of military searchlights, blinding them with steam and cold, trained on the bunker and the black female shape rose in his sight, endlessly slowly, in stopped time dammed like a lake with the invisible dark wall before them, and stepped into the light—the cold, devilish light meant not to brighten but
to blind—with her arms up in the air, to give him a few extra seconds to regain his scorched-out sight.