The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Father,” he said, and wanted to say again, Father, but his voice failed him and only a low groan came out. Someone shone a battery lamp at him; the circle of its light swung back and forth across the wall, a log wall like that of a village church; and in the shadows, outside this circle of light, he thought he saw a priest’s dark cassock. This made him happy: Papa’s here, he thought, and the overwhelming joy of it almost brought him to tears—he felt so weak and tender, softened with love and gratitude to his father, so worn out he couldn’t even get up to kiss his father’s hand and ask for absolution as he’d longed to do: Father, I killed people, I abandoned my studies back when the Germans first came—how many fell at my hand? I did not forget, Dad, what you said to me when I left, when you gave me your blessing: Do not shame us, son. I was a good soldier and I am clean before Ukraine; forgive me, Father, my blood-spilling sins. But then he remembered, the gash of the memory clean and sharp in his mind like a knife wound, that it had been three years since they sent Mom and Dad to Siberia, and he moaned again and closed his eyes, still feeling, like a blind man, the tightly packed, hard-breathing human mass all around him. The air was heavy—the animal pall of human flesh mixed with the acerbic tinge of medicine and disinfectant; it wheezed, mumbled, and bubbled; it heaved like a dog coughing up a bone; once, a young voice rang out from the dark, wild and loud, “Throw the grenade!”

  “Shhh,” a whisper rustled toward the voice, soothing, comforting. He heard clothing move, sensed the air stir around him, and the circle of light lifted from his eyelids, went to the young voice, but still he felt like the Holy Father remained at his bed, not leaving him. The other smell, that’s what it was—sap, or as they say around this country, firring, the woods. Pine trees. The logs of the wall, he noticed when he opened his eyes, also seemed fresh, stained with sap. An infirmary then, not a jail.

  He was safe—someone was looking after him: his body was immobilized, swaddled and feeble, blissfully freed of the need to move for the first time in many years. Someone worked at his side as he lay unconscious, worked to do good for him—the attention he discerned on the other side of the lamp was also kind and comforting, caring, and his forehead retained the feeling of being touched by a delicate, cool hand. He was so moved by this sweet, blessed peace that had been given to his body that he just lay there enjoying his helplessness, feeling his every cell vibrate with joy, glowing inside, the hot wash of gratitude barely dammed by his closed eyelids: kindness, he was filled with kindness; it flowed through him; it emanated through every pore of his skin; it inundated and washed away his feeble self, his memory, his past, even his name—he was nameless, helpless like a new babe bobbing on the waves of an endless, resplendent ocean, washed on all sides with love so abundant it made him weak with awe and marvel.

  Where did it all come from, or had he died already, unbeknownst to himself, and gone to heaven? But he’d had no chance to confess; he’d wanted to confess, but hadn’t gained the strength to speak, and yet he felt he’d been heard and forgiven—so this was what it was like to have been forgiven of your sins. He willed himself, for the last time, to open his tear-streaked eyelids, open wide—like the dead eyes of murdered rebels that the NKVD pins with matchsticks when they put their tangled bodies on display in city squares—and from his alien, heavily numb lips happily peeled off the single and most important thing he had to say: “Thank you, Father.”

  At this, the ocean shifted, and in front of him stood a solid wall of gold, high as the distant heavens, and he knew he had to scale it to get to the other side. This was incredibly hard and he could not hold on—he collapsed, everything collapsed, and darkness fell.

  Later still came long, viscous dreams that trapped him like the knee-deep bogs that filled his boots when they’d marched north in spring. Mother came and poured milk from a jar into his mouth; there was too much, it filled his nostrils and he couldn’t breathe; he fought and turned away until he saw it wasn’t milk at all but cherry liqueur, hot, thick, and ruby red.

  Then he was in Lviv again, at Sapieha Palace, and boys marched at him out of the gates of the Academic Gymnasium, while he stood with his hand raised in salute waiting for them to pass so that he could march after them, but he never got to go with them because Lodzio Daretsky called out of the ranks to him, laughing, “You dope, what are you doing walking around in a uniform? The Soviets are everywhere.”

  “And you,” Adrian called back. “What about you? Are you allowed?”

  “We’ve nothing to worry about now!” Lodzio answered and laughed, a free, raucous laugh, such as he never had while he was alive; only then did Adrian make out, next to Lodzio, Myron, who’d blown himself up in a bunker not too long ago so he wouldn’t be captured, and Legend, tortured to death back when Germans first came by the Gestapo on Pelchynska Street, and that doctor from the East he’d met a few times in the Red Cross office, Ratai, they called him; he had that Poltava way of rolling his l’s so soft, smooth as silk, and he’d perished, they said, this last winter somewhere in the mountains when the Poles dropped grenades into his infirmary. They were all dead, those who marched past Sapieha; they’d never even met each other alive. He recognized some but not others, and could only ask as he watched them pass, “Where are you going, then?”

  “To St. George’s,” someone said, maybe even Lodzio, “to pray for Ukraine. You better get going too, enough lollygagging already!”

  He felt shamed, and wanted to run after them, but something held him from behind. He turned and saw it was Obersturmführer Willie Wirzieng himself, the hog with a butcher’s jaw—only changed out of his Gestapo uniform into new NKVD rags, with enormous epaulettes studded with living, blinking human eyes instead of stars, and an invisible voice told Adrian that those were the eyes of Ukrainian political prisoners that Wirzieng had personally gouged out—who grinned at him, strutted and hissed, “Never did kill me, did you?” Adrian protested that he tried, twice, and both times the failure wasn’t his: the first time Wirzieng unexpectedly took a different route, went the way he’d never gone before, and the other time something else made him abort the mission.

  “Alright, try again!” said the one who was Wirzieng, and Adrian opened his eyes at once, as if shaken: above him, a woman’s face floated in the dull yellow glow of a lantern, now coming closer, now pulling away. Geltsia!, he thought, thrilled—it had been so long since her last letter he’d begun to wonder if she’d moved out west with one of their convoys, then suddenly remembered he wasn’t supposed to call her Geltsia, should have said Zirka, but it wasn’t her anyway; the kiss that moistened his parched lips wasn’t hers—and in the next instant he knew it wasn’t a kiss, either. He was nailed to a cross; he rose and fell on his pierced hands as he fought for air, and every time he lifted himself, a terrible, infernal pain filled his chest and the centurion below shoved at his mouth a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of his spear. How long can I last like this?, he thought, terrified, and saw below, on the other side of the cross, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill: they sat there like the myrrh-bearing wives in Brueghel’s Crucifixion, at the foot of a little knoll, and played cards like in Yalta, with cut-up pieces of a map—he strained, against the piercing pain, to see who’d gotten the map of Ukraine, but it wasn’t there; he realized it was long gone, played to the bottom of the discard pile, and would never come up again in this game. He wanted to shout in anger at the glib Churchill, who looked a little like Wirzieng, What about your Fulton speech—didn’t you promise to wage war on the Soviets?—but asked instead, Lord, why did you abandon me? The centurion popped up again, bared his teeth at him, and pointed to where Geltsia, no, Zirka, kneeled, bent at the waist, loose-haired, in a fitted uniform overcoat that had parted, very Brueghel-like, to reveal a bit of raw, purple lining that pulsed like freshly skinned flesh. He gathered his remaining strength to call out to her, to catch her eye at least, so she’d know he was there, but she did not see him, someone’s shoulders blocked her view, and he couldn’t figure out how it was
that he could see her but she couldn’t see him, and then wondered, with a new pang of horror, if she no longer lived.

  “She lives alright, lives just fine,” the centurion said in the exasperated tone of a peasant telling his old cow to stand still; Adrian looked closer and went cold: under her coat, Geltsia’s body was wrapped in a white sheet spotted with blood.

  “And we’ll see each other again?” Adrian pleaded, because he no longer feared anything, even a no.

  “Sure you’ll see her,” Roman howled menacingly, for some reason in the Boyko dialect and sounding as though he called from the bottom of a well. “Moy-ye, you’ll see her good and right…”; then, he took aim and hit Adrian between the ribs with his spear, so hard that all the stars tumbled out of the sky and darkness fell again.

  And a bit later he clearly heard a woman’s low voice say above him, “His fever has broken, Father Chaplain.”

  And another voice, a man’s, padding softly but surely, as if with felt-slippered feet, answered quietly, “Thank the merciful Lord.”

  This was no longer a dream.

  He opened his eyes and tried to move; the same terrible pain rang through his chest, making him hiss and freeze, eyes bulging, waiting for his body to tell him where it did not hurt. The man stood at the foot of his bed dressed not in a cassock, but in civilian clothes, wearing a vested suit and a cravat, and the woman, whom he could guess to be young and swarthy, lingered right above him, so that in the dim light he could clearly see the lush, oblong hillocks of her breasts under her blouse—like a pair of doves, he thought with a sudden lively interest. And at once felt angry at this most inappropriately eager metaphor, and at the even more inappropriate urge to stroke these doves, and his inability to move, and at the next thought that came on the heels of the first: how scrubby, hairy, and foul-smelling he must’ve grown, a beast of the woods indeed, in contrast to the man at the foot of his bed, who, although no longer young, with large bald spots on his bulbous forehead, was clean-shaven, sharp-collared, and seemed to emanate the unmistakable aura of a good cologne, which made it all the more humiliating to be lying in front of him like this. These were all rotten, sordid thoughts, noxious muck—all occasioned by this woman, her near warmth and scent, and this made him truly and finally furious: Why’d she have to go and stand there?

  He was also nettled at the vague, elusive connection he felt between the man and something extraordinarily nice, something precious and joyful—like a sun shower in a glen when he was a child, a veil of gold nuggets thrown over the iridescent green and held up with pillars of sunlight—but what it was—so fine, and perhaps recent—Adrian could not recall, the woman’s presence distracted him; he did, however, recall a different glen, and the recollection lifted him above the last traces of his delirium and made him forget the pain that had pulled an iron brace around his chest again: How long has it been, and what about the boys? What happened to them?

  They were trekking through the woods and the last thing he remembered was the sunlight spotting the trunks of the pines and the rectangular back of their guide, Roman, ahead of him, outfitted in a homemade uniform and girded with a thick, stitched, woven sash, instead of a regular leather belt—men ragged him about it (the girls liked Roman so much they didn’t want him to leave, stole his belt and kept it!), as men in resistance always rag agreeably quiet types. Roman, in response, only smiled his reserved, farmhand smile and kept at whatever he had to do; belt or no belt, he was good at it, his rifle—an MP44, a beauty—was a piece to prize. When Adrian asked him about it, Roman simply said he “borrowed it back in ’44 from one SS man,” and Adrian liked that about him, too—the way he said it. Anyone who’d seen Roman walk through the woods would also know he was a veteran: he had a light, capacious gait, noiseless as a cat’s, not a twig cracked underfoot, not a puddle stirred. Adrian appreciated it right away—this inborn skill of a native who didn’t have to learn the woods by camping with Plast Scouts—and tried to walk like that, too, light and agile, happy to have the man lead him.

  He’d felt out of sorts since the night before, trailed by a premonition of some vague ill, irritable and distracted, and then the strap on his map case snapped right as they were about to set out—another bad omen—so this sturdy rectangular back ahead of him felt reassuring. Adrian was glad to be looking at it, this dependable construction as though especially designed for the purpose of hefting horse-size loads—carrying sacks of grain, bringing sheep out of a snowstorm into the warmth of the barn, and the wounded, sure, why not dragging wounded friends off the battlefield, too.

  Of course you never thought of it like that—you didn’t say to yourself, Let’s take this guy with us because he could carry me if I get hurt, or finish me off—but no combat unit could persist without this gut-felt certainty. It was the primeval raw goo, the only substance that could bind a handful of discrete male selves into one—a unit, a pack, a swarm, a hundred—only then could an idea transform them into a working army, a self-propelled force that gathered speed and multiplied its strength, so that one day in ’45 a field up north might have turned from rusty-brown to gray with sheaves of rag-doll soldiers that the Bolsheviks kept herding onto it, hundred after hundred, until they had to give up and retreat, never to realize that it was a single swarm of UIA, not even forty souls, that turned them back. The idea, no matter what our political teachers told us, is like yeast and will leaven only the finest flour; and the boys who came from behind the Curzon Line and told stories of how they sang duets, from their trenches, at the Poles on the other side before the fight—“Antko, Antko what are you fighting for?”—“My father Sta-a-alin!”—until one of the Antkos, driven to distraction, would snap back, “No more mine than yours!” which eliminated any possibility of further fighting on the spot, and those boys, proud and very conscious of what they fought for, and by that faith made invincible—were first and foremost good stock, the finest flour that could wrap you like a second skin, so that you and the man before you, and the one behind, and those to your right and to your left, all of you, once mixed together, became one flesh, an army of the people. This was the feeling, lost for several years after the army split up into small groups and went underground, that he experienced again behind the shield of Roman’s rectangular back as they moved through the humid early-morning woods, in unfamiliar terrain, goose-file.

  There were five of them, too many he thought, but the dark-eyed security-service character with hollow cheeks, Stodólya, had insisted they take two guards where one would have been plenty, and nothing, nothing in him snapped or dropped—no time!—when Roman suddenly froze in his tracks and the next instant they caught machine-gun fire from behind the bushes… Sweet Lord Jesus, what happened after that?

  Who carried him out? Who dragged him to the infirmary (something made him believe it was Roman)? How did it all even happen—reconnaissance said the raids had passed—how did they drop right into the ambush, like a ham hock into stew? And who to ask about it all now—the one the dark-eyed nurse calls Father Chaplain?

  Two pairs of eyes, black and gray, gleamed at him expectantly from the dusk. Well, there you have it—he’s awake and alive, no worries. And mad as hell—nothing inside him but anger: as though the very refitting of him back into reality, from which he had been so abruptly disengaged, scraped him raw and left him fiercely itching. Doggone it, if only the pain in his chest would let up! He, who had always scorned any corporeal weakness like a mistake in a mathematical equation, now must be compelled to lie hobbled on his cot and wonder if he’ll make it up to relieve himself.

  The priest coughed gently, as though tuning his voice to a pitch that wouldn’t add to the pain, and then smiled—an unexpectedly open smile that made his whole face glow, every scrunched-up wrinkle of it, “Glory to Ukraine, Commander.”

  He returned the greeting, barely catching his breath before falling into a cruel fit of coughing that made him break out in sweat. He wasn’t a commander, just the management adjutant, but they didn’t ne
ed to know that. Where the hell was he?

  “You’ll have to stay with us a bit until you get stronger. I am Yaroslav, and this is our nurse, Rachel.”

  Rachel, huh. Now it would’ve been impolite not to look at her straight, and, trained as he was in the German days, he took quick stock of her features; his eye gathered and arranged them, like a picture in a kaleidoscope—noticing the unmistakable signs of the persecuted race, small things you normally don’t see until someone pointed them out: a meaningful tuck of the plump upper lip, distinct like an Arabian stallion’s; the cut of her nostrils; the smattering of freckles on her olive skin; and her large, prominent eyes like jet stones, half-hidden under heavy eyelids. He remembered then where he had seen this face before, now heavily retouched by shadows: it was she who leaned over him to put a cool cloth on his forehead; she who washed his body and gave him water to drink, wiping his mouth and chin dry.

  Suddenly and inexplicably embarrassed, he asked, “So it was you who cared for me?”

  She laughed and spoke fast, with the melodic Hebraic intonation—almost as if she felt a bit shy herself and rushed to sweep her unease under the pile of words. “Me and our doctor, he’s the one who did the surgery, took out the bullet, and repaired your pleura. The bullet came close but didn’t touch the lung—you must have special luck!”

  “Thank you,” he mumbled, disoriented: he was being swept up in the forgotten prewar hustle of the Galich market, the clamor from the Jewish rows where quick, black-eyed merchants outyelled and outclucked each other praising their goods, and he wanted to close his eyes again—this woman had too much life in her; she spouted it thick and heavy as oil and he was too weak. The priest and the nurse apparently understood how he felt and exchanged a quick, short glance—adult conspirators over a small child’s head—but he did not get upset with them; he had no more energy for that, and he had to conserve the little he did have if he hoped to find out anything. It was imperative that he keep them there, that he speak to them, so that they wouldn’t leave him alone with the picture that had been branded in his mind and still burned there: the sun spots on the trunks of the trees and Roman’s rectangular back with the assault rifle and a hand grenade in a holster, girded over his shirt with the homemade woven sash. They did not seem to want to step away from him either, and Adrian read their hesitation. The two of them, no, three, counting the invisible doctor, had fought Death for him: he was their small personal victory and they deserved to enjoy it for a little while longer—and he had to exploit this.