The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “No kidding?”

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure… a picture of a woman taken not long before she died. Vlada, when we shot that interview with her, in the Passage, for a moment had eyes like that—as if no longer hers. And I also, for some reason, remembered Aunt Lyusya, my mom’s sister—you haven’t met her, she died in 2000…”

  “Of what?”

  “Breast cancer. She had this tremendous will to live, believed to her last day that she would get better. Mom was with her, and she said when her heart stopped, she had this baffled expression on her face, like—what, this is it? She looked like that in the coffin, too…. She was a very strong woman, one of those, you know, that hold the family together—way out of Mom’s league in that respect. After the war, during the famine, she went after bread somewhere to your neck of the woods, schlepped a sack of flour all the way back from Zdolbuniv, no one knew where she got it…. That flour fed them through that hungry year—and Mom was so weak with hunger she couldn’t get up. Later, when Mom left to study, Aunt ferried food to her in Kyiv too, every Sunday…. But what made me think of that?”

  “Must be that kind of a night. With the dead in our dreams. Means it’ll rain, no?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s not supposed to be. Here, be quiet a sec. Can you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The wind.”

  “No… isn’t that the fridge?”

  “No, be quiet now. You’ll hear it howl. Come to me. Here… Lolly, my Lolly… my apple-crisp girl…”

  * * *

  A bird cawed once, waking. Another one clapped its wings against the wind from atop a spruce and answered with a sad cry. (He would say—couriers calling out to each other.)

  Did it hear a human walking, or was it a sign of nearing dawn?

  He had to leave the forest while it was still dark. He had to walk through the city in broad daylight in his officer’s overcoat with ripped-off stripes like the ones commonly worn by discharged Red Army soldiers—who were clean-shaven and even sprayed with the tear-inducing acidic chypre (all Soviet military men seemed to take baths in the stuff; what is wrong with those people?)—all in order to meet, practically in the enemy’s own lair, in an old apartment building already half occupied by the new “owners,” a dying man who had no right to die until he told him what he knew.

  His father used to go out like this in the dark too, in rain and snow—to administer the sacraments to the dying. Little Adrian would wake to the creak of the plank floors and the shuffle of steps behind the wall, and would see a golden stripe of light creeping under the nursery door. Something groaned in the big stove and the wind wailed in the chimney; younger, sounder-sleeping Myros and Henyk puffed together, like a pair of hedgehogs, in the dark under the down blankets. Outside, black furry forms shifted behind the windows—the men set out because someone needed them. And a sweet, minty chill squeezed the boy’s chest from inside because he knew that one day he would become one of those men and would also set out somewhere in the middle of the night, because such was the duty of men.

  And now he had to set out, had to reach the dying man while he was still alive. Had to take from him information that determined the course of hundreds of other people’s lives. Was this, then, not a sacrament?

  “See you later,” he said when he left; that’s how they always parted in the underground. See you later—never Farewell!

  “God help you,” breathed the watchful darkness in response, in four distinct voices, the way his mother used to bless his father with the sign of the cross when he set out, and later blessed all her sons, one after the other: God help you! Geltsia and the boys—they were his family now; he had no other. His entire past was with him now, from the earliest years of childhood—the entire length of his life wound onto the bobbin of his sleepless, tense, twenty-seven-year-old body.

  He carried it all. Had to carry it all the way there and back, intact and unharmed. Knew too much to fall. And would know even more on the way back.

  The other man, the one fighting death at this very hour, also knew he didn’t dare succumb until he passed on his secrets. Adrian was on his way to relieve him of the burden of his earthly duties—to release him unto death.

  Was this not a sacrament?

  He didn’t know who the man was, was afraid even to think of that (it had to be someone he knew, someone from the regional command)—only knew the password to enter: “Do you have Brits to sell?” And the answer: “Yes, but only size 10.”

  Brits—English chrome boots, not more comfortable but decidedly better looking than the American military boots and, for that reason, especially loved by the small-time thugs who’d flocked “in Western” Ukraine from all over the Soviet Union to grab whatever the comrades hadn’t already stolen—would actually come in handy: his own boots, a German trophy, were worn out. They had served him well though—not once did he trip or stumble on forest paths.

  The forest grew thinner, sensing its edge. In the hum and groan of the wind, Adrian’s sharp-tuned hearing distinguished the drip and slide of melting snowcaps from the tree branches: it was getting warmer. Snow no longer cracked like gunshots underfoot; with every step, he found more cushion from last year’s leaves, moss, and mulch under a thin dusting of white. New snow, especially when wet, is the most dangerous—not like dry powder. Worse yet—old snow caught under a crust. But this—even if he left an accidental footprint in the dark somewhere—would soon hollow out, collapse, wash away. By light, they won’t find anything. Unless, maybe, they bring dogs. But then again, they train their dogs to the smells of a rural home—and he stinks like they do, of chypre. Reeks to high heaven—exactly like all dog bosses with red stars on their caps.

  So why did he feel so weary-hearted, why?

  He had dreamed something bad, that’s why. And he could not remember what it was.

  Couldn’t even put shards of that dream together. Of one thing he was sure, though: the dream boded ill. And this feeling—that in the dream he was entrusted with a terrible secret that touched on the fate of many people, and he lost it, like a nervous rookie on his first courier run—would not let go of him. The beast that lived inside him lost its bearing and pawed at him, restless, not certain where the danger was coming from—from the raids in the forest behind? From the city ahead? And was it he himself that was in danger, or the friends he left in the ill-fitting makeshift bunker?

  In Von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege, he once underlined something that struck him as especially apt: four elements constitute the atmosphere of war—danger, tension, chance, uncertainty. This was the formula he always chose to begin the course he taught at junior officers’ schooling: when you have a ready formula it becomes incomparably easier to act. Was he not well used to uncertainty? To the feeling of danger that filled the air? What, in heaven’s name, was happening to him—all he had done was forget a dream!

  And yet he felt disarmed.

  He stood at the edge of the forest—awash in the inky-blue clearness that quickly, too quickly, with the swiftness implacable to any human prayer or curse, thinned the November night (somehow, all his riskiest missions, just like all the most significant collisions of his life, always happened in November)—and felt a nasty, uncontrollable tremor rise from the depths of his sleep-deprived body and swell in his throat, unstoppable like vomit. He tore off one mitten, fanned his fingers in front of his face—but it wasn’t light enough yet to see if his hand was shaking. Dog your mother! Had he gotten so he was afraid to step out of the woods?

  Stodólya. Stodólya was the reason—Stodólya wrung his memory dry of dreams. From the instant he woke, the man weighed down his consciousness with the full mass of his presence (oh yes, he was constantly aware of Stodólya’s presence as of an external force!) and stole that portion of Adrian’s attention that was supposed to keep his dreams afloat. Stodólya was heavy; he left no room, not the tiniest crack for anything that was not him. He was stronger than Adrian, yes, that was the th
ing. Finally, he’d said it to himself. Stronger than himself, Adrian Ortynsky (aka Beast, aka Askold, aka Kyi), Ukrainian Insurgent Army Lieutenant, the region’s administrative adjutant, decorated with the Bronze Cross of Service and the Silver Star…. None of which meant anything against this simple fact: Stodólya was stronger.

  And Geltsia knew it.

  That’s why she’d chosen—him.

  A woman, of course, she was a woman in everything—how do they say it in French?—a woman par excellence. And you can’t fool a woman; a woman sees the strongest man way before his commanders—and more surely than the men he commands. Stodólya had will enough to bend, not dozens, but hundreds, even thousands of people. The sector was too small for him—he’d do well with the region. Or even in the area’s Central Security Service Command. One day, if he doesn’t get killed, that’s where he’ll go, most likely. While he, Adrian Ortynsky (Beast, Askold, Kyi), always felt best in open combat—and when it ended without losses. Hated nothing more than sending people to their deaths. And that’s why, however much longer he had allotted to him, he would never rise to regional command.

  For some reason, he remembered the story Levko told him the day before—a story that was more like a confession. Levko did have an artistic temperament, and Adrian liked him: the boy was sensitive. Of them all, Levko was the first to feel uneasy—as soon as they stepped into that bunker to wait out the raid. He joked and bantered but it all came out somehow nervous, and Adrian could feel it: he and Levko, whom he had once prompted just in time to check for the bullet in the stock before cleaning his rifle, were connected by that special, wordless link that occurs between the rescuer and the rescued—the one Adrian could never sense with Stodólya. When they found themselves alone, Levko started talking as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity for a long time. He told Adrian how they had to liquidate an MGB major they’d captured during the operation in S., one they’d lived with in the woods for six months, until he gave them every single agent he knew in the territory. That major was great help—he cooperated willingly—and in the six months they spent together they all got so used to each other that near the end they didn’t even guard him anymore. Where would he escape to anyway, back to his Bolsheviks? To be court-martialed and shot?

  When Stodólya gathered his Security Service troops and announced that the operation was completed and they no longer needed the major, it became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. They knew more about the major than about each other. They knew he was a Ukrainian, from around Zaporizhya, that he’d been mobilized to NKVD when he was very young, that he’d brought his wife and child to Lviv with him, that he had an elderly mother back in Zaporizhya to whom he sent money every month—they knew lots of things. Stodólya asked if any one of them would vouch with his life that the major could be left with the underground. That if they kept him, he would pledge allegiance to Ukraine and would fight on our side. None of them were ready to do this; the silence held. Stodólya asked if anyone would volunteer for the liquidation. No one did. Stodólya then chose two men, who later came back as good as dead themselves.

  The major told them that he hadn’t expected any other end for himself. That he was a military man, too, and understood. Even though he wasn’t a military man—he was from the NKVD, which meant he, too, must have had to shoot at an unarmed man with a blindfold over his face. Service like that makes men into no-good soldiers: they can’t fathom that the gun barrel can just as easily be turned on them, and when they first chance upon such an impossibility, they lose all human semblance on the spot; it’s hard to watch. But in the six months he had spent with them, the major also changed, had been reborn—and faced his death as an officer should, as if he wished for nothing more than to earn their respect, to be seen as their equal. He said under no circumstances were they to send word to his wife, because it would only put her in danger from the bureau. It was better for her to know nothing and receive his pension with a bonus for death in service. He asked them not to blindfold him. And for a smoke. They smoked, all three of them. Get on with it, boys, the major said.

  That wasn’t a liquidation; that was murder. Everyone knew it. Those two boys fell soon afterward—first one and then the other volunteered for “dead missions,” the kind from which no one comes back. They were looking for death, Levko said. What they had done broke something inside them. Levko said this without judgment, as if he were speaking about a random bullet or a change of weather—in no way did he intend to discuss with Adrian his commanding officer’s actions, which he did not doubt; something else tormented him, and Adrian saw what it was: Levko blamed himself—for not having vouched for the major at that decisive moment. For not having had the courage to step forward, click his heels, look Stodólya in the eye and say, “I vouch for him.” And to hell with what comes next.

  He was a good man, Levko—and it pained him that he had not had the courage. That it was his, Levko’s, faintheartedness, and his faintheartedness alone, that cost these people their lives. All three of them.

  “You are not a coward,” Adrian told him. “But it is good that you’re afraid of being one. A man is always afraid of something; only fools have no fear. The question is what are you afraid of more? Then your greatest fear snuffs out the lesser ones—and that is true courage.”

  This was an idea Adrian cherished; he’d had it since long ago, since the Germans, when he first took part in an attack on a Gestapo jail: the idea that courage, true courage in which you never falter, is simply a question of the hierarchy of fears—when you fear dishonor and a traitor’s brand more than death (and more than that, most of all, so much your blood turns to ice in your veins, you fear Shevchenko’s poetic warning: “You’ll perish, vanish, our Ukraine and no trace will be left on earth”—nothing more horrible could befall you than bearing witness to that, and no force in the world could ever stop you from fighting to avert that horror). But he couldn’t be certain Levko understood the word hierarchy. Although, really, he was saying it all just to say something. Not to be silent. Talking to shut up his own conscience. Because, had he been in Stodólya’s shoes, wouldn’t he, Kyi, have given the same order?

  It was like he comforted Levko in Stodólya’s stead. And Levko did cheer up a bit, brightened like a finch brought in from the cold (looking at him made Adrian think, for no particular reason, shame about your rosy cheeks, brother; winter’ll paint you green like potatoes in a cellar…). And it was only now, as he waited at the edge of the forest for the clouds that raced across the sky, swiftly unspooling into ribbons of smoke, to cover the moon and allow him to come out, that the conversation came back to him, like a bitter heartburn after a heavy supper, and he thought, coldly and clearly, yes, he would’ve given the same order but under his command Levko would have found the courage to step up. He would have clicked his heels and said, hand to the peak of the cap in salute, “Permission to speak, friend commander, I vouch for him.”

  And to hell with what comes next.

  Adrian was now finally awake, completely. Inside he felt empty, like before stepping into the line of fire. With a quick sharp whine, time came together, squeezed like a Moscow harmonica’s bellows—into the streaming minute, a singular chink open for immediate action. And that disgusting tremor inside faded, went still. And his hands weren’t shaking.

  He was free.

  Around him, his land breathed in the quiet of the night. The spirits of the woods who had watched over him guiding him through the thickets, stood behind him. This was his land—his strong-as-death love pulsed like invisible light in the dark. Those who had come to stomp it down with their boots had no such strength. Could do nothing to him.

  He felt the angry glee enter him. The berserk heat that comes in battle and—if you have luck—on a mission, fills your body with dreamlike ease, with the tease and tickle of danger that arouses and intoxicates more irresistibly the more boldly you deny that danger, until it retreats, tamed, because you showed yourself to be stronger. Ahead he could
see the white field—no, not white but already speckled, welcoming him with black wet inlets of thaw; his mind—a white knight in icy armor—observed from outside his body, watch in hand, and the watch ticked loudly, calculating the minutes measured before his turn, and somewhere in space, or perhaps inside himself, an invisible hand wound up a barrel organ for a bawdy kolomyjka tune, tighter, tighter, don’t crack the spring—no, that’s a twig cracking underfoot, like a girl who’s done waiting. “To the mountains go white sheep, up higher and higher, I slept with a partisan and I ain’t yet crying….” He grinned, noisily drawing in a full chest of sharp forest air, stretching his lungs like an accordion’s bellows in anticipation of a dance, cruel like a wolf hunt. Only it wasn’t him anymore—it was a demobilized Soviet Army captain, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin, dispatched, with magnificent documents and a Nagant revolver engraved with his name, by the grain supply department to finalize grain collection in the district. Alright, motherfucker, let’s go! said Anton Ivanovych. And crossed himself.

  Let the games begin.

  Adrian’s Lost Dream

  Why am I creeping, half-bent, along this wattle fence with no end in sight?—the weaving glistens wet, as though varnished, and drops of water leave earthbound trails on it here and there, like tears on the wrinkles of an ancient face seen up close—a thaw, it’s dawning, patches of flimsy threadbare snow like moth-eaten wool grow lighter on the black ridge as my foot finds them, spellbound, obedient, to avoid stepping on the white—

  —that’s a rule we have, sweetie, like in hopscotch: “Don’t step over!” Jump on each square, miss none, to get to the main nave of the heavenly sky—here I am, Lord!—but watch out, don’t step on a single line, because each line is a line of fire, and he who steps over is out of the game—boom, dead!

  And then can’t reach the heavenly sky.

  Has to start all over again from the beginning. Again and again—until he comes all the way.