The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “Colonel let his chocolate get him,” he grumbled, curtly, not as a reprove to the departed for having been fond of such high-society luxuries, as one might have expected to come from a peasant’s son (although Adrian never did know for certain whether Stodólya really was a peasant’s son, had no concept of what education he might have had—Stodólya never said anything revealing and kept his true identity a secret), but more with disappointment that even a great man such as Colonel Konovalets could have had a weakness, even one so tiny—hardly worth a haw—and one could hear in his voice the lesson he extracted from it and learned like Paternoster: that you dare not have any weaknesses the enemy could exploit. That’s who Stodólya was—a man without weaknesses. And that’s why he was disliked in the underground.

  And feared a bit, too: Adrian wasn’t the only one Stodólya kept on edge.

  From the day they had themselves photographed, when they celebrated eliminating that provocation group (every tentacle severed like that gave them, for a while, an illusion of breathing more freely), another conversation stuck in his mind, one that fell like a spark on straw and, word after word, flamed up into an almost serious quarrel between Stodólya and Geltsia. They were talking about the hungry that were coming from the East—for some reason, the locals called such people “the Americans.” Levko, of the rosy cheeks, had gone to the city to reconnoiter, dressed in woman’s garb (“You should see what a fetching wench he makes!” Geltsia laughed), and had seen, at the station, a freight train full of these people: they climbed down from the cars and fell right on the spot to rest, having no strength to drag themselves any further. Close by stood a canvas-covered army truck, and soldiers picked up and tossed into it, like logs, those who could not get up again.

  Adrian remembered Gypsy from Slobozhanshchyna, one of the men with whom he had made acquaintance in the infirmary: he, too, had told of similar things happening in ’33 in Great Ukraine. When kolkhozes come, the Easterners then said to the Galicians, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Geltsia, agitated, told a story of her own: one spring she had to wait out raids in a different territory, stayed at a homestead with a reliable family, with the cover story of being their niece, when one day a very young girl, from somewhere around Poltava, wandered into their yard asking for work. “You mean that’s what she’d told you,” Stodólya interrupted, seemingly beside the point; it was obvious they had argued about this before, and now he was taunting Geltsia on purpose by treating her like a child (in response she merely glared at him from under her knotted brow, a single affected glower that pulled Adrian’s insides into a knot).

  “The girl was called Lyusya,” Geltsia continued.

  What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s short for Lyudmyla… a fine name, thought Adrian—it warmed him with some long-forgotten radiance, this name that could belong to a little doll, Lyusya-Lolly-little dolly, white lacy frills below the hem of the dress, fragrant girlish hair plaited into thin braids, the glossy silk of it in his hand. (Long ago, when he had just started at the Gymnasium, a young girl in a sailor suit appeared in the gates of the building next door every morning, with hair plaited into two thin braids—and, giggling, hid behind the gate as soon as he approached, until one time she lingered, stepping forward bravely and informing him, with the composure of a grown woman, in Polish, “Mama washed my hair, would you like to feel it?”—and offered him her bowed head, smooth, acorn-glossy with a little groove in the middle, pale like a June bug’s maggot, which he could not keep from touching, ran his finger over it—and was scorched, for the first time, by the silky defenselessness of woman, little doll, lolly, who trusts herself to you as innocently as nature itself, like a chrysalis that knows nothing yet of how fragile it is, pulled from its underground nest.)

  “I told her,” Geltsia continued, “we had no work at the moment and we didn’t keep hired hands, and when she heard it she suddenly went all aquiver like a sick chicken, it scared me—my owners were having a pest on their chickens right then…” and, catching Adrian’s look, interpreted it in her own way: “Please let it not surprise you, I have mastered all farm chores already; I even know how to muck horse stalls! Only I don’t have the knack for milking,” she added, honestly. “So I ask her—and she’s so famished, so wasted, all eyes—‘Miss, are you unwell?’ And she tells me that she’s tugged there all the way from Poltavshchyna, that they have terrible hunger there, already ate their dogs and cats, and at home she left her mom and little sister Olyunka who cannot get up anymore, born in ’39—turns out, and I didn’t know this, Stalin forbade women to have abortions before the war.”

  “Sure,” the boys chimed in, “he had to re-sow what he’d mowed in ’33!”

  “Ain’t got enough of his own stock to people Ukraine—but he needs someone to work!”

  “And to war for him too—they don’t spare their people at all! Look at the herds they drive at us—like lambs to slaughter.”

  “In the mountains, after they had two hundred of their own killed in a battle, they poured gas on them and burned the whole lot.”

  “You’re kidding! Whatever for?”

  “You know why—to hide their losses. So the number’d be smaller.”

  “And how’s that supposed to work—two hundred living souls gone from the face of the earth and what—no one’d cry for them up there in Moscow-land?”

  “Like the Bolsheviks care! For them, a man’s life or a chicken’s, ’tis all the same.”

  “And when they first came in ’39, some buffleheads in our village were so happy—they made it out, you see, that when it said the Bolshevik Party was krasnaya raboche-krestyanskaya, it meant Christian and for that reason krasna, fine. Asked of those: Where are your chaplains?”

  Someone laughed, spoons clicked faster against the canteens, and Geltsia remained quiet, her eyes fixed on a single invisible point, as though she was overcome, for a moment, by that ancient, viscous fatigue that makes one fall out of the conversation or forget about a bullet in the stock, and at once something exploded in Adrian’s head, lighting, like a flare, the dark vista. He remembered who it was that wore that sailor suit—it wasn’t that little Polish girl next door, no, it was a different, older girl: down the steep Krupyarska Street the hoop rolled, bouncing on the cobblestones and throwing off dazzling flashes of the late afternoon sun, and a shaggy red cur chased, barking, after it, and up flew the kicked-up pleats of the sailor-suit skirt—“Lina!” Geltsia called and, turning to him, said with loving pride, “That’s my little sister.” He did not remember the younger girl’s face. After looking at Geltsia, it remained on his retina as a bouncing flare, like after looking at the sun—he only remembered how when she ran up to them, breathing hard, the tiny hillocks of her breasts rose under the sailor blouse and that fresh, apple-crisp waft of a young body that he always associated with Geltsia and the Dovgans’ home—the scent that is only found in homes with growing daughters.

  He understood: Lyusya from Poltava and the little sister, Olyunka, she’d left at home reminded Geltsia of her own little sister—where was she now, the younger Dovganivna, for whom (now he remembered this, too!) he used to buy éclairs in the Mikolyash Passage, not yet bombed into dust then, in the center of Lviv—what had this blood storm done to her?

  Since the spring of ’44, when the NKVD ordered the families of insurgents arrested en masse, small children included, every one of them carried inside the same burning wound, the knowledge that it was not just their own lives alone they offered to lay down—as the Gospels say, for their people, because that’s what they’d chosen freely, and their yoke was their freedom, and their burden was light—but that they also condemned, inadvertently, their loved ones to following them into suffering, into torture or Siberia, or at best—if they fell in battle—to the sight of their mangled, vandalized bodies—stripped naked, girls’ breasts or men’s genitals cut off, a trident carved into the dead forehead—and mothers and fathers unable to mourn their children or to bury them but bound to say, as they turn t
hemselves into stone, not thrice but thirty-three times, like Peter, if he could bear it: I do not know this man. I do not know this woman. Mama, forgive me…. (And they forgave—they all forgave, only not all of them endured: the mother from Kremenets, when they stood her up before the bodies of her six sons, also said, “I do not know them”—but never spoke another word until her heart broke under the burden of six-fold grief, and the mother fell dead next to her children.)

  It was easier for him: His mother and father were in Siberia already, and his mother never saw his brothers—arrested in ’41—dead. In the pile of massacred bodies the Bolsheviks left when they retreated, the family could not find either Henyk or Myros. One could choose to think they survived (and that’s what Mother believed), that they were safe somewhere, abroad, on the other side of the ocean.

  He understood—and smiled at Geltsia from across all the past years at once, the way he smiled at her on that long-ago day when he stood at sunset on Krupyarska awash in the apple-crisp aura, the fresh air of young girlhood.

  “And then—did you help those Poltava girls?”

  Their eyes met—and such a depth of gratitude was in her gaze that he felt his entire chest flush with heat: she needed him, after all!

  The men grew quiet and she spoke again, and he saw it all as though with his own eyes—he saw the girl Lyusya. He knew that type of Poltava girl, beautiful (Geltsia said the girl was beautiful) with the beauty of antique statues—tall, majestic as Roman matrons, with classical sloping shoulders and profiles destined for Carrara marble. He’d glimpsed their breed in the refugee waves more than once: The steppe-borne daughters of Ceres, Amazons, Kozak women—how dare the demons of the twentieth century turn them into highway beggars? Geltsia (bundled in a kerchief up to her eyes: “If any strangers came to the house, my story was I had toothache”) had fixed a bowl of thin gruel for the girl, fearing that fresh bread with milk might hurt her after she hadn’t had any for so long, and then took her to the pantry and filled a sixty-pound sack (“Took both of us to stamp it down!”) with wheat flower—of the stores reserved for the insurgents (“I wrote out a quittance for the warden, a very nice man, he just said, ‘We don’t keep count of that,’ said he’d have given her of his own grain, and flagged a wagon right there, to take her to the station, to get on the Zdolbuniv train”). And it was there, in the pantry that it happened: As they went to pour the grain into the sack, Lyusya from Poltava suddenly froze, her face changed.

  “She was looking at my hands,” Geltsia said, guiltily raising her delicate, so unmistakably intelligentsia-bred fingers, and Adrian felt his stomach knot again in pity at the sight of them: they were fit for a typewriter or a radio, but to muck stalls?

  “She knew you?” Levko whistled.

  “Told you so!” Stodólya cut in, with a kind of venomous satisfaction. “Hands and lingerie—how many girls already got caught on that!”

  “I took off my underthings when I changed, and I was going to soak my hands in brine-water and rub them with ashes—it makes them look like you’d farmed all your life, never fails. But, it’s a chore—so I hadn’t had the time! So we are standing there, the two of us, looking at each other: I know that you know that I know… and then she started crying.” Geltsia’s voice gave a suspicious din, like cracked crystal. “Fell to her knees, grasped my hands, kissed them. I yell ‘Get up, miss!’ and she, ‘I won’t tell anyone! I won’t tell a word to anyone, I swear to you!’”

  She stopped, fighting the emotions. The men were silent, too.

  “And that’s when she told me that as soon as they got off the train the MGB picked them up, right there at the station…. Kept them for half the day telling them horrors about the banderas and instructing them, when they go to the villages, to watch and report if they notice anything special…. Fed them pea soup for that.”

  “And if they’d given her sixty pounds of flour, would you’ve vouched she wouldn’t tell on you?” Stodólya asked dryly.

  This was no longer a man teasing a woman he loved; this was a superior analyzing the situation for the benefit of the younger riflemen, and Adrian, who had no grounds on which to intrude upon Security’s business, could only listen as any other accidental witness and concede, in his heart of hearts, that Stodólya had a point: Geltsia behaved in that situation dangerously indeed, she could have gotten caught herself and implicated her hosts. (Someday, when we win our Ukraine, we’ll build a monument, somewhere in the Carpathians so it’ll be seen from far away—a monument to the rural families that helped us, and went into Siberian exile for us, and died by the hundreds of thousands, but never once, not at one door said to us: go on, boys, God keep you, go on your way because we have children and want to live. No, instead they said: it’s one God’s will for all, what he gives you, children, we’ll take ourselves. You’re laying your lives down and we won’t spare you a piece of bread?)

  Still, despite all the rationalizing, he felt that Stodólya pursued not so much Geltsia’s old (before she was under his command?) mistakes but something else, something more important perhaps, something unsaid: quite simply Stodólya did not believe any of those strays, even if they vailed before him—just as he did not believe anyone he couldn’t check and verify.

  That was the most important thing.

  Whichever portions of the world were not subject to his control represented, for Stodólya, enemy territory where there was no room for sympathy. Adrian had met other men who lived by the same notion—there used to be more of them when the war first began.

  This was Poland’s legacy, he thought: for twenty years Poland handled us as tools, with a condescending, speak-to-you-through-the-teeth certainty that the Rúsyns were not people but pigs, and honed and tempered us to respond, like a good ax, symmetrically, in kind. But Poland fell and was forever banished from these lands, and so did Hitler’s Reich that had come armed with the same blind scorn for us, the üntermensch, and now came Moscow that knew no people at all—they gave no more thought to blowing their own into ashes than strangers. Tens of armies and hundreds of tribes had stampeded through Ukraine (from the happy Italians, handsome lads and inept, take-it-all-just-leave-me-alone soldiers who would’ve gladly given us all their ammunition if we’d let them go home without a fight, to the motley swarms of narrow-eyed nomads that erupted from the depths of the Asian steppes—like a new European invasion of Genghis Khan’s hordes, except that, for some reason, so many of them wanted to join our side when taken prisoner, almost as many as from among the Red Army Ukrainians). And over the shattered borders, through the smoke of the pyres, we glimpsed the Great Ukraine, the dream of our fathers, and learned, on our first marches east, from it, crippled and tortured in ways we never imagined, what neither Poland nor Germany could teach us: that there is no free country without free people, and he who forces his will upon others imprisons himself.

  And when our military force, like a swollen river, reached the floodmark and began to spill into vengeance, and fires swallowed the manors of Polish colonists in Volyn and Podolia, we found another force that dammed the rush that careened toward blind retribution: the pontiff of St. George’s Hill, and with him the stigmatic martyrs in the underground put up a halting hand holding a cross and begged our people not to stain their holy weapons with innocent blood in the face of the Lord; and the Supreme Command spoke to us through its Third Congress ordering us to be reborn for the struggle ahead—because our force is called to serve not vengeance but liberation, and he who wrongs the unarmed, imprisons himself.

  And we were reborn; we recast ourselves in the furnace of battle; we tempered ourselves into steel, shedding the irresolute into the winds of the crisscrossed frontlines—the accidental avengers, the forcibly mobilized, all those who had grown weary and yearned for the plow more than the sword and who valued life above freedom; only death’s volunteers remained, the bridegrooms of death—a noble metal that rang clear as a bell. And when the Soviets came, hanging us publicly in the squares (and quit as soon as they r
ealized who they were dealing with), every such execution fed our strength—our boys stepped up to the noose with their heads held proud and high, called out to the crowd with their last breath, “Glory to Ukraine!” and the human sea rumbled, swelling with the wrath of forced silence, and at night dozens more ran off into the woods to volunteer and win themselves a death like that—a death of free men. And we already knew: for every force that enslaves, there will be another, greater force—German for the Polish, Russian for the German. Only the force of liberation has no match: it is the one and the same and combats all tribes and peoples, however many there are on this earth.

  Our new war is no longer fought by the doctrine of Von Clausewitz, whose books we studied in underground training—not for a bridge, or a railway station, or even this or that inhabited locality. And although we do maintain our ward administration in all Western Ukrainian lands, we can’t afford to keep paying for it with growing losses and deportations the enemy chooses when they can do nothing else to us, because in another ten years of this contest the Soviets may just win for themselves a Ukraine without Ukrainians, as the Poles had already done with our lands beyond the Curzon Line. We stand against Moloch who stops at nothing, but we are the ones who are called to account to the thirty million souls of the nation whose freedom we have vowed to win. We fight for nothing if not for people’s souls, every day and every minute, and in this war we have a singular right—to die. And the right to lose is not ours.

  All this Adrian should have said to Stodólya—but didn’t. Didn’t know how to say it. Such conversations were ill suited to Stodólya—he was too certain of his own strength. He was stuffed full of it like a strongbox with dynamite. A rock of a man, that Stodólya, hard as a rock wall. Listening to him upbraid Geltsia—it was like he turned her into an inanimate object, a lecture prop, an SMG taken apart and cleaned for the benefit of rookies who’ve yet to see fire, and she sat there blushing all the way down into the collar of her gimnastiorka and didn’t dare breathe a word in her own defense (after all, Stodólya was her superior, and she was his secretary)—Adrian worried above all that she would burst into tears. (It was afterward, much later, that she confided to him that she had lost the ability to cry in the fall of ’45 when she lost her most intimate friend—the girl had a wound to her stomach and she, Geltsia, then still Zirka, sitting up with her waiting for medical assistance, let the exhaustion put her to sleep—and awoke when she brushed against her friend’s already cold body; she showed him photographs of that friend—a thin-faced, dark-haired girl, pensive as if in anticipation of the near end. The deceased sometimes have that expression not long before death—as though their flesh, already sentenced by fate, wears thin, becomes threadbare, and lets through the imminent otherworldliness. Geltsia looked at the photograph, too, along with him, and her eyes, although red from lack of sleep, were dry.)