The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  Room 3. Adrian’s Dreams

  Lviv, November 1943

  The man with a briefcase under his arm runs hard down the sidewalk, past the locked doors and padlocked shutters on the windows of ground-floor apartments; his footfalls, even on smooth unshod soles, thunder in the emptiness of the early morning, loud enough, it seems, to rouse the entire neighborhood; the cobblestones are wet and slippery under the film of the night’s lingering frost. A voice inside his head calls, “Watch out!”—the same voice that’s always warned him of imminent danger, that gives plain and concise orders: step off the path and hide under a bridge—moments before a Studebaker full of Krauts drives across it; or “Don’t go there!” two blocks away from the safe house—where, as it turned out later, in place of their liaison agents, Gestapo had been waiting for him since the night before. Some in the Security Service felt compelled to wonder if this was too much luck, if, by chance, he was actually the one to “spill” that safe house, having avoided the trap so handily, but to hell with them and their suspicions; everyone knows he’d come out dry, alive, and unscathed from much hotter waters, almost as though he was possessed, and perhaps he is, by this voice that whispers its spell over him, demanding that he obey, that he respond instantly, in his muscles, in his body, like a wild animal, not wasting a single instant on thinking. This is why the second he hears “Watch out!” he opens his briefcase and puts the still-warm Walther pistol inside it. The muzzle is still smoking after the shot, the smell of gunpowder and burned metal all but comforting, welcome in his nostrils; his hand still feels the springy imprint of the recoil that had pushed it up and back moments ago. Grabbing the briefcase by the handle with his other hand, he proceeds at a regular pace, a sparse, focused gait of someone on his way to the day’s business—a clerk hurrying to his office—precisely a moment before the milky-gray fog at the corner of Bliaharska expels the black shapes of the military patrol, glistening in their leather coats like wet tree trunks.

  Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen. Adrian Ortynsky, aka the Beast (the alias he had taken for good reason) got lucky again. To walk past them without arousing their suspicion is nothing, piece of cake, done it a million times—the thing is to relax, not to clench up into an anxious knot, but to cease being a solid body altogether and proceed as though it were all a dream from which he could wake at any second, whenever he so chose. The November morning chill biting at his skin under layers of clothes; the particular grip of his hand on the briefcase handle so that he could drop it, should the need arise, simply by relaxing his fingers; the dark cupola of the Dominican Cathedral in the fog-distorted distance at the end of the street, floating weightless high above the ground; the frost-laced damp cobblestones—Katzenkopfstein, the dream readily offers in German—and the synchronous pounding of marching boots on them (iron-shod boots, made to last, made for stomping the will of the Übermensch into whoever is under them, for intimidation, not for flight), the pounding that comes closer, overtakes him—and passes, thank you, sweet Lord Jesus, passes without hesitation.

  In that moment of passing—as the patrol leaves the man and his persisting luck behind as indifferently as if he’d willed himself to dissolve, right in front of their eyes, into shaggy strands of milky-white fog—a very important shift occurs in his own consciousness: the bullet he just fired into the chest of the Polish Gebiet Polizei’s Commandant when he stepped out of his office into Serbska Street (Kroatenstrasse, as they call it), and his flight along Serbska and Ruska Streets after that (to the young gunmen he schooled he always said the Germans were bears, and one must run from them the only way one can outrun a bear in the mountains—on a crooked path, diagonally uphill; the Magyars, they were wolves and only knew the language of fear; and the Poles, well, the Poles were rabid dogs; he knew that for certain, had known it ever since that childhood day when the Uhlans galloped into their village, dragged his father out of the parish, pulled his vestments over his head, and chased him around with whips, while one of them rode on his back, all of them yelling, “Long live Marshal Piłsudski!”—the Poles were rabid dogs and were to be killed like dogs, with a single shot), and everything that happened a mere minute before he slid as a single mass into the past like a load of dirt slipping off a shovel into a hole. It became just another completed mission, another assassination on Beast’s record, while the man himself strolls freely onward with his briefcase, away from it, toward his new, clear, and certain destination: the streetcar stop, his final rendezvous point with the courier girls who would relieve him of the murder weapon.

  He glances at his watch—it would be impolite to make them wait—and hastens his step, through the modest park, past the wet tree trunks, their rutted bark like weathered weeping faces, on to Pidvalna, and every hair that stands on its end on his arms quivers as the seconds tick off.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  This has always come easy to him: parceling out his time, slivering himself up into its fragments. Shedding the just-lived like flakes of dry skin, pulling all his senses up by the root from the past moment and replanting them completely intact into the present. It could be said he really didn’t have a past in the sense that other men had, the ones who moaned and talked in their sleep. If it were up to him, he’d send them packing home: a man who calls out to the living and the dead in his sleep can no longer fight. Bullets find him in the next fight, and sometimes even without a fight, they just find him, as if made for the single express purpose of finding and pinning someone’s living past. But he is Beast and knows how to live in the fleeting moment alone. And he has luck.

  Now he does not fear the echo of his own steps on the park’s paved path.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And what wonderful fog lingers this morning! (He is lucky with that, too.)

  In the fog, or at night, or even without a single glimmer of light at all (especially since the Soviet air raids began and only a few ghostly bluish camouflage lamps smolder on the railway station’s canopy), he knows his city by touch, in his blood, like a lover’s body: wherever he may stumble blindly, wherever he throws his arm out for balance, the city offers itself to him, yields softly, opens a familiar alley, a warm odorous ditch, a moist crease between buildings. Zhydivska… Bliaharska… Pidvalna—it’s his lips, his skin, the slippery lining of his innards that rub and burrow and part the lightly breathing folds of stony flesh; it’s his city and it will never betray him; it’ll guide him through itself like a loving and knowing wife, his faithful one; it’ll spread itself open and take him in; if need be, it’ll hide him completely—inside, in the swampy, sinewy darkness of its underground passages.

  He does not remember how long it’s been since he was with a real woman, even in a dream from which a man wakes with the sticky semen on his thighs—but in his city whose every cobblestone (every Katzenkofstein, pox on their German whoring mothers) he remembers not just with the soles of his feet but has learned, once and forever, with every muscle and tendon in his previous, long-gone life as a child, a schoolboy, a loafer, and a fop; here, he stays erect day and night, as it sometimes happens in the happiest of marriages—and the city keeps and protects him as no woman could. At times, the German presence in the city infects his own body: the black-and-white blemished eagles and crooked-arm crosses on buildings (Kroatenstrasse, ha!) feel like scabby calluses on a beloved body, a sensation first engendered by the Soviets in ’39, by their shabby, kitchen-smelling soldiers in stiff boots, their savage “Davai, davai, move on!” their ubiquitous patches of red (just like the German color later) fabric stretched over buildings with their slogans and pictures of their leaders, the entire wood-suitcased Asiatic horde of them that within a few weeks picked every store clean to the bones like an invasion of giant red ants and hatched instead, in the heart of the downtown, in front of the Opera house, a swollen welt of a flea market where the local crowd could be entertained in broad daylight by the sight of their women latched on to each other’s hair in a ferocious fight over a pair of satin stockin
gs.

  The fear that bred and burrowed through the city, which had never known anything like it, was the surest sign of their foreignness. When the Soviets ran away, this instinctive sixth sense of foreign presence remained with him, and that’s why he, unlike so many others, never doubted that the Germans would not stay long either, not even in the very beginning, before the arrests. They were also strangers here, just as foreign, though they maintained the appearance of human beings so much more than those other ones: their officers wore gloves, made use of handkerchiefs, and when they gave their “word of honor,” they did keep it, even while they were calmly and efficiently robbing people’s homes of anything that had remained after the Soviets. Just like the others, they spun the city into a spider web of fear, and just like the others, they were blind: they had no eyes to see how drastically they did not fit here, that they were a carbuncle, a pimple that the body would expunge, burn off with fever. Against the intimacy he had with the city—and he hadn’t really ever been this close with a woman, hadn’t ever had one he could truly call his—this innate rejection of the foreign raised in him, when he was on a mission, a sense not even of righteousness but of his own mystical invincibility. He was untouchable. How could he fail when every pebble was on his side? Afterward, he would always pray and ask God to forgive him for his pride, if this was pride—he wasn’t sure; he had lost the habit of deeper contemplation when he began living in the running stream of each moment, so in all moral questions he had placed his trust in God: he knew better.

  And here’s the streetcar stop, a trifle left to do, a few minutes: give the briefcase to the girls, get on the streetcar with them, jump down at the convenient turn off the Lychakivska (Oststrasse, man, Oststrasse!)—and that’s it. He’s done.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And that’s when an invisible wave of heat washes over him, out of nowhere, and his blood thunders in his temples—never mind that his body mechanically continues on its course, at the same brisk tempo of an inaudible lively march. His lips grow instantly dry and he gasps for air like a fish, mouth open wide—he can’t breathe.

  This is not a signal of danger—something else, something other waits ahead—something is closing the distance between them, heading to their inexorable collision at the streetcar stop, something that could not, should not be there. Something whose presence at today’s assassination of the Polish police Commandant is absolutely inconceivable—incompatible by blood type.

  He has seen, but he cannot believe: his blood resists, all his many years of honed underground instincts, everything that made him invincible. A single memory shoots through all those years, incinerates everything they contain into ash, throws the heart of the once-lived time: the orchestra is playing tango with Polish lyrics—“I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one, I will let you go your way”—and the smell of a girl’s blonde hair under the electric lights, the intoxicating light smell, the sharp torment of unspeakable tenderness that turns everything inside you into a flower, a bloom of animate, tickling petals (and, at the same time, the nagging fear—what if she catches a waft of his sweat and it disgusts her—so delicate, so small and light that it makes him want to fall, drop himself as a shower of petals under her feet). He feels all this hit his chest with a force no lesser than that of the bullet he fired into the police executioner sentenced to death by the Organization—as if his own shot caught up with him in the middle of the street, and Beast goes faint and soft, about to collapse like the man he killed, and he will now see everything he did not stay to watch earlier on Serbska. This painfully clear, visceral realness of the memory is the most surprising part of it all—that it should be so perfectly alive after being pried out of some long-barricaded corner of his past that he considered irrevocably severed from his present: this is the amazement he felt as a little boy when, in the middle of the winter, he beheld the gleaming round smoothness of an apple pulled from the cellar where it had been kept in its underground nest of straw—by what magic did it preserve that smoothness, that deep, slightly bitter breath of autumnal orchards?

  He does not collapse; he is carried forward, dizzy with the merciless shortening of the distance between them, and his past melts inside him with brutal, catastrophic speed. He sees himself as one does in one’s moment of death—or the instant after dying?—from outside: among all the people out walking on this downtown street at this early hour, he is the most vulnerable, an open moving target. A slow, wet, gaping wound.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

  My name—Adrian Ortynsky.

  He is happy.

  He sees with great clarity the wet rounds of cobblestones, and the hem of ice at the edge of the sidewalk, and the shiny streetcar tracks. He sees before him, growing closer with every step, the two girls’ faces: one, Nusya’s, as though muted, dim, and the other—yes, he knew, he’d been told that there would be two of them, that Nusya would bring a companion, but Lord, who could imagine!—the other blazes in his eyes like a dazzling flare that remains after looking at the sun; he can’t see her features, but he doesn’t have to see them in order to know—with his entire being, his whole life at once—it is She.

  She.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… “I have time, I will wait,” the orchestra plays, and the couples spin on the dance floor. How long he’s been waiting—all these years, and he didn’t even know it. And now the waiting is over.

  Closer. Closer still. Another moment—and his hand would fall into hers. He is not surprised to notice that it suddenly begins to snow—someone up above also waited for this moment to give his signal, to let large white flakes spin in the air, settle on Her hair, the golden curls around the small beret, on Her eyelashes, instantly fuzzy as though bleached. Her eyelashes. Her lips.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind a watchful half-thought perks up, as if transplanted from someone else’s mind, that snow is bad news, he’ll leave tracks when he runs across the park—but nothing of this kind has any chance of rising to the surface of his consciousness at the moment. Does she recognize him? She is snowflaked. Smiling. Serene. Snow Queen—that’s what he called her that night when he walked her home, to the Professors’ Colony far up Lychakivska, her tall lace-up boots leaving tiny, miniscule impressions in the snow, child’s tracks, and when he pointed it out to her, she indulged him with a small laugh, slightly coy, “What fancy is that, Mister Adrian; it’s just my foot, it’s plenty common.” “But I insist, Miss Gela, be so kind as to compare,” and he carefully planted his bear paw next to her little delicate trace like an imprint of a flower petal with the minute bud of her heel at the bottom, and it felt as though he were protecting it from a stranger’s prying eyes, shielding her with his own imprinted presence—“Take a look, be so kind, I insist”—once, and again, and the whole way home. To see their footprints next to each other, again and again, was rapture beyond compare, like touching her in some mysteriously intimate way, and when she flitted away from him, almost startled, when she drew back her hand and hid in her towered fortress—her eminent professorial villa guarded by a quietly watchful army of relatives and maids, invisible at this late hour, and with doors that creaked like a living baritone in surprise—he remained standing just outside her porch, rooted to the spot where she had abandoned him, without the slightest idea of where he should go next or why.

  The sparse garland of petals threaded by her tiny booted feet led away from him and ended, like his thoughts, at the door; then a second-floor window lit up and her shadow swung onto the curtain, filling him with a new wave of joy, so he stood there for a long time not taking his eyes off that tall window, haloed like a beatific fresco in church, where her shadow moved as though on a movie screen: retreating, then surfacing again, and then holding still for a while, allowing him to imagine that she was looking at him, and he could no more stop the flood of whispered insanities he muttered to himself than if he’d been wrung by a fever. He laughed and felt no cold. The window went dark eventually, and it took
him a while to realize what that meant—she’d gone to bed, and he told himself so, muttering under his breath, shaking his head and smiling a little, as if he were lulling her to sleep in his own arms, as if he’d just been granted another proof of her incredible closeness, a sign that the two of them belonged to themselves: she asleep upstairs, in her boudoir, the seam of her steps needling up the snow-white stairs; and he, bearing witness to both these marvels, and thus drunk on his ecstasy, remained there guarding her tracks until light, with no recollection of when and how he got home.

  And the most amazing thing—he didn’t even catch a cold.

  The fact that she now approaches—in the same gliding walk instilled by Lviv’s most glorious tuteurs (only the legs, my lady, we’re moving only our legs!) beside Nusya, his regular courier, and carries toward him that serene, unattainable smile of hers like a discrete source of light in the November cityscape—is equivalent to the heavens collapsing in pieces onto the earth below—he wouldn’t blink an eye if they did collapse. Snow falls and carries the smell of her hair, the dizzyingly tender, humid blonde smell; a flake alit on his lips and its featherlight, barely perceptible kiss pulls his mouth into the long-forgotten smile of that night, a blissfully silly smile, reflexive like the contraction of muscles when a doctor taps your knee with his little hammer, and instead of letting them both know that he had completed his mission, that everything was okay and went according to plan, Adrian Ortynsky exhales, equally unconsciously, and blurted out like the village idiot, like a green, greener-than-grass rookie… “Gela…”

  The sound of his own voice brings him back.

  TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… “Does the gentleman know himself?”