The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  He pinned them to the spot with questions, quick and straight as darts, concise, dry, to the point, Security Service style—not leaving the one being questioned any chance to think—asked in a low voice because his breath barely squeezed in and out of his chest and he was afraid of coughing again. Gradually, however, the strength came and took his side—the anonymous, faceless strength of the Organization, blind as the laws of physics; he managed to claim it again, if only for a few minutes, and he was no longer the patient—he was an officer, and the two healthy, strong, full-blooded people, the man and the woman before him, straightened up and stood at attention without even noticing.

  Who brought him to the hospital? Woodsman’s men. A zero point zero of new information—of course it was Woodsman’s people, who else, those were the men with whom he’d set out. How many made it out of the ambush? They didn’t know. Were there other wounded? Yes, but with light injuries, to arms, shins, nothing serious, thank the Lord. Killed? They didn’t know this either—but they would have heard if there had been, someone in the surrounding villages would’ve known. So they were not in a village? No, the village was no longer safe, there must be a mole, NKVD came and stayed for a whole month before Easter, searched every house until they found the hideout with two wounded men—they must’ve known what they were looking for. And? Took them alive? No, the boys shot themselves. May their souls rest in peace. This bunker, in the woods, is safe; that’s where they did surgery—at the warden’s station; the one who carried him out on his back, the guy with the big nose, told them he was severely wounded, said he was an important person, a commander from the district, asked them to do everything possible.

  So that’s how it was. He was very grateful. He said another thank-you just to Rachel, who rushed off to bring him water to drink, good, spring water; the whole hospital seemed to be very well kept. “Now let the commander rest a bit.”

  “How much longer?”

  “That’s for the doctor to say when he comes back.”

  It seemed they really had nothing more for him to learn. He thanked them again; a record number of thanks per unit of time. He was, in fact, exhausted—limp like a beaten-out rug.

  The guy with the big nose—that was Stodólya, obviously: he had a distinctive, elongated physiognomy, with gaunt cheeks that made his nose protrude like a wolf’s. He certainly knew his conspirator trade, but he went too far this time: could’ve left him instructions about communication instead of dooming him to passive waiting. They carried full knapsacks of literature—did even a shred of it survive? Stodólya, huh. Carried him out on his own back, fancy that. Why did he think it should have been Roman who saved him?

  It was very good that Stodólya was alive and unharmed. It meant that while he was lying here, Stodólya was doing both of their jobs. Someone had to collect information about the local Bolshevik agents—they really wormed their way into the woodwork here. You should be pleased, Commander.

  He was not; at least not as much as he ought to have been. All for the simple and primitive reason he was ashamed to admit even to himself: he didn’t like Stodólya. Some barrier stood between them, and neither man had a burning urge to overcome it. Such things were rare in resistance where the spirit of brotherhood and a shared fate united everyone, where you were pleased just to see a comrade alive. It just had to have been Stodólya, of all people. The man who saved his life—Stodólya.

  Of the two most readily available strategies for handling an unmotivated antipathy toward someone who’s done you good—forgetting the good or identifying the motivation at the core of the antipathy—Adrian instinctively adopted the latter; his memory solicitously offered something he once heard about Stodólya: that he executed a boy who’d fallen asleep while keeping night watch. The boy was a new recruit, arrived from a nearby village the night before; he was seventeen years old. Stodólya did as The Code demanded, and no one would ever hold it against him, but still Adrian did not like to think about that boy and his last moments in front of the firing squad—as if it were he, Adrian, who was to blame for his ill fate.

  There was something else, though. These country boys—these hard young men, straight as an arrow, honest as the land itself—always engendered in him an inexpressible guilt. It wasn’t the purely military emotion of the officer toward the people he could send to their deaths—it was a more delicate, more intimate sort of emotion, like the desperate impotence of a loving father and husband who cannot protect the ones he loves. He felt guilty about his “high” birth; about his education, which inspired in them the traditionally Ukrainian, near-pious devotion; about the moments of pure exaltation he had experienced in Vienna before St. Stefan Cathedral and in the presence of Raphael’s Madonna with the Blue Diadem—he felt guilty for having seen the world they didn’t know, and would never see before they perished; even a shared death could not ordain them equal. It may have been the burden of this guilt that, with time, had made him more enamored, in a romantically zealous, innocent way, of the mysterious metaphysical force that blazed in those boys like peat fires and filled him with awe and trepidation. It was not rational; it didn’t come from books they’d been given to read or ideas they’d been taught—this force came straight from the very land that had borne them and from which they’d been shoved, and stomped, and kicked by rib-cracking Polish, Magyar, Muscovite, and who knows who else’s boots; this was the amassed force of its centuries-old, silent, dark ire.

  One day in ’44 around Kremenets, he and three others stopped at a homestead to ask for water; while the mistress fixed supper and ran to the pantry, which in that country they called by the Polish word spizharnia, the master, a solidly built, not-yet-old man with a face tanned like boot leather, sat them all down in a row on the bench under the icons, like kids in a schoolhouse, and demanded to know what it was that they were fighting for. They pulled out a stack of brochures from their knapsacks, and a few issues of Idea and Action; Adrian, worn out and faint with the warmth, food, and domesticity, mouthed the usual, well-rehearsed statements like a somnambulant, hearing his own voice from a great distance and seeing nothing except the three transfixed little faces of the boys who watched them—and listened to them as though to a choir of angels—from the loft above the stove where their mother had ordered them to stay; and when they said goodbye and thanked the mistress for the supper, while she fussed over them and filled their arms with food—“Here, take this, for the road, of Lord’s bounty”—bread, salo, and pungent smoked ham, the not-yet-old man suddenly appeared among them dressed in his sheepskin coat, outfitted with an old Russian Mosin Nagant he’d been keeping who knows where, and a leather tote, nodded to his wife, meaning, me too, and when she wailed, “Don’t you go buck-mad on me, old fool!” he said simply, “Martha, look, it’s our army that’s come!” Adrian’s throat caught at these words and didn’t let go. It took all they had to talk the man out of it.

  Later, he saw dozens of them, those middle-aged men, often side by side with their sons; he watched them fight—and remembered that lump in his throat. This war wasn’t simply fought by people with arms—it was fought by the land itself, fierce and implacable, its every bush and knoll, every living thing. A young village wife in front of her house, arms across the chest—laughing straight into the Reds’ faces—while he listened from the backyard, rifle cocked.

  “Some hot thing you are, all by yourself—and where’d be your husband?”

  “He is, indeed, Officer-sir, somewhere, lest your boys shot him already!”

  He froze to the spot, ready for an explosion, but the woman better divined the balance of powers: the others sort of withered right there and, after shooting the breeze for a while longer, just for show, left, retreated.

  “Gramps, you got some water to drink?” An old man, white-haired and white-bearded, towering over the fence like the Lord of Sabaoth, watching the crawl of exhausted alien troops, two and a half million of them, an entire front making its way back from Germany, where they’d been thrown, like an
elephant against a pack of wolves, back in ’45—and too late: “Go on,” the old man called, waving them on with his hands almost in blessing, “the Bolsheviks will take care of you.” Every fence, every gulch, every haystack resisted. Never before had the land known a war like this one. Even that eternal peasant—bovine—patience and stamina, that had so grated on Adrian in the days of Polish rule, suddenly transubstantiated, like water into wine, into something with a higher, ominous purpose, something far from the dumb fatalism he had believed it to be on the sleepless nights when he, a student then, turned over and over in his mind Stefanyk’s blood-curdling vignettes and the caustic lines of Ivan Franko’s “Moses,” “For you knew yourself to be brother of slaves and the shame of it burned you”—now he burned with shame that he could ever have believed himself to be somehow better, higher than they.

  In reality, the power of their self-sacrifice was far greater than his—perhaps precisely because not one of these men ever believed himself to be in any way special, and this innate humility concealed their inner dignity, their immutable core, hard as flint—and ready to strike a fire. Once lit by the blaze of war, they saw themselves, for the first time, inside history—and took it up, with a spit and a rub of their calloused hands, like a plow. “Martha, look, it’s our army that’s come!” The army waited for you, it was ready—it gave you a shot at glory and a band of brothers, “gain the Ukrainian nation or die fighting for it,” but also Stodólya and his firing squad, should you fall asleep on watch. Shouldn’t have fallen asleep, of course; you couldn’t fight a war with men like that. Our army is not just an army, and our cause is a special cause. Who couldn’t understand this?

  Now, for the first time in years, he had many hours at his disposal and could think about all this. All the time in the world, as the funny English saying went. The shelter was equipped with a radio receiver, and sometimes he caught snippets of American broadcasts, but he only recognized individual words and didn’t have the textbook with him that he’d begun to study last winter; his German, against his rather naïve hope, did not help at all. Once he woke up, drenched in sweat, with a lucky guess that the “slaughter” he heard from the radio was the same as the German “schlachten.” He must have called it out before he was quite awake, because in the darkness next to him bedsprings creaked and something very dear, a breath of home, bread and fresh milk, brushed hot against his face, and he felt in his hands two warm hillocks like a pair of round-chested doves of the kind he’d kept when he was a boy, and held on to them so they wouldn’t get away.

  “What is it now, easy, shhh, shhh,” the doves cooed their reprove, and he realized, in a flash—It’s Rachel!—and meant to beg her pardon so that she wouldn’t think ill of him, to tell her how vowel sounds travel from language to language, crawl across great fields of snow camouflaged in white robes, and how he came to unmask them, but she determined otherwise. “Sleep now, sleep,” and went to do something with his pillow or blanket; he never learned exactly what because he obeyed her order and sank back into sleep instantly, like a rock into water. And he made no morec serendipitous linguistic discoveries after that: the thorny thickets of English pronunciation got the best of him.

  Or maybe, he thought in his more lucid moments, when the pain curled up like a small dark animal in his chest and only its slow pulse warned him it was still there, maybe he simply lost the knack for abstract reasoning, having trained his mind to aim for immediate and practical results. For some reason, this made him sad, which, in turn, also proved disconcerting: coupled with his physical debility, the forced mental indolence disrupted his routine and released a host of subterranean emotional currents he didn’t know how to manage—he flailed and bobbed in them, ineffectual like a poor swimmer. He couldn’t even give them names, label them—he’d always been better at numbers than words; he spent his first year in the woods toting around Krenz’s Collection of Mathematical Problems, until he finally had to leave it behind at a safe house—now he wished he had it back; it would’ve helped him keep his wits engaged instead of obsessing about God knows what nonsense.

  Beside him, the infirmary bunker hid three other wounded who, for various reasons, could not be placed with village families; one man was brought in after Adrian—gangrene had spread to his leg and, when they unwound the bandage, the small shelter filled with a noxious cloying smell that nothing, not the excellent ventilation nor the nightly airings, could dispel. Once he caught a whiff of the same sugary-rotten-marshy scent on Rachel—it unnerved him: they all liked the nurse; she was so lovely to watch as she worked around them, moving smoothly between their cots, radiating her abundant, blazing aliveness throughout the room, as she cooked their food, or brought fragrant herbs from outside for the brew she boiled on the kerosene burner and poured into small stoups—all without a moment of rest, such a hard worker, bless her heart, and it was so wrong to have this rotten smell connected with her, until he spied her grabbing a roll of gauze before she ducked behind the curtain that cordoned off her bed and suddenly realized where the smell had come from. A hot flush of shame flooded his face then, and he felt like a boy caught spying around the girls’ convenience. He tried to forget this episode, along with the night he grasped her breasts, to remove them from his memory, as was his custom to do with anything that distracted him from the mission. The problem, however, was the mission had stayed up above the ground somewhere, outside the infirmary bunker, leaving him to cough and spout like an engine on half its cylinders.

  He was no good at being sick. He made sure to communicate that to the doctor, Orko, the first time he saw him, a young man, a student by the looks of him, and always badly shaved—whenever he sat down on the edge of Adrian’s cot, the lamp illuminated a few stray bristles on his cheek. Orko was possessed of an attractive innate seriousness, often found among good students from poor families; Adrian appreciated how thoroughly and considerately, as if teaching a class, the doctor described what was going on inside his chest, where the bullet had entered, and what path it drilled—here Orko wiggled his fingers in the air and, failing to locate an anatomic chart or a chalkboard, drew with his index finger a parabola in front of Adrian’s nose and stabbed at the space above it. He also confessed they had feared he wouldn’t survive the pain of surgery—they had nothing with which to etherize him: ever since many of our people at the district clinic had been arrested, all drugs, not just ether or chloroform, had been difficult to procure, and they’d had to have their alcohol homemade, with an extra round of distillation. But Orko told him he was lucky to have a very strong heart, and a strong, healthy organism in general, knock on wood, so all they had to do now was pray that nothing got infected.

  Orko spoke with a mechanistic, crafty practicality, as though puzzling out a fault in a broken mechanism: all parts and their functions were clear to him, and this inspired trust. Adrian would have loved to talk more with him, but Orko had little time to spare on chitchat: he practiced illegally and was called to do surgery almost every day, sometimes at the forest station and sometimes right in an open field, rushing from one village to the next to save whoever got burned, kicked, or mangled. Two villages over, there was a girl orderly, sent in by the Soviets from the other side of the River Zbruch, but the locals didn’t trust the sovietka, calling for “their own doctor” instead, and were often right to do so, Orko sensibly observed: the girl knew little beyond mustard plaster, fire cups, and, when she first got here, the Komsomol. Now, after a few conversations with Woodsman, she was thinking straighter, and had started working for us, but she’s not much help yet, young as she is and greener than grass. Adrian had to laugh, in his mind, at Orko calling anyone young, although there were, in fact, only a few older doctors with the insurgency—almost all of them emigrated to Europe after the Bolsheviks took over, and even if Orko never had a chance to finish his studies and obtain a proper diploma, Adrian was certainly not one to criticize his professional skills.

  It was also a long time since he ate like this: in obeisance
to Orko’s instructions, a steady caravan of village women passed through their shelter, bearing baskets of eggs, fresh milk, and sour cream. “You’d think we’d moved the market here,” the boys joked. He was regaining his physical strength quickly: first he could sit up in bed; then he made his way to the toilet, down a narrow fifteen-foot corridor from the main room, on his own, albeit by holding on to the wall; and then he was able to get outside to stretch his legs. The first time he climbed to the surface, the exertion of it sent him back to his cot, where he lay for a while gasping for breath and watching luminescent green circles spin in front of his eyes. He caught Rachel’s dark eyes and read in her gaze a strained, almost painful attention—she even bit her lip as though to fight back a moan, and that’s when he smiled at her as he used to smile to the younger, weaker soldiers, to cheer them up, and being able to do so improved his mood dramatically.

  He remembered the way she bit her lip—or rather held it with the just-visible edge of her teeth—later, when he sat playing chess with Gypsy, a man from Slobozhanshchyna, an Easterner, who was shot in the hip. Gypsy’s face, in the time he spent in the infirmary, succumbed to a tar-black pirate beard that made his incredibly white teeth glisten ferociously from its thicket when he talked—and he talked a lot, a quick-hitting storm of words, choppy like the rattle of a machine gun. Adrian could make out maybe every sixth word or so, because Gypsy peppered his machine-gun delivery with unfamiliar sayings, interrupted, over and over, with the meaningless “ye follow” as if he were mocking someone hard of hearing, “Hey, you, ye follow, wait with your laundry up the stream, let me finish”—with talk like that, no wonder they couldn’t put him in the village; he was too conspicuously “not from around here.” Adrian found himself taken by surprise when this chatterbox turned out to be quite a competent chess player, who executed such a clever version of the old Indian defense that Adrian, playing black, couldn’t regroup and counterattack until mittelspiel.