The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  “O-olya!” a woman’s voice sang out, as if through a silk veil, slicing the quiet from above.

  “Stay behind,” Adrian whispered. “Ask for directions, like you’re lost. And, God forbid, do not follow me—you can’t be seen with me.”

  “May God bless you,” he added or maybe just meant to add. If there was an answer, he did not hear it.

  Ahead of him lay eighteen kilometers in which anyone could recognize him. The hunters walked in the snow, well-fed whippers in new shearling coats and snug leather shoulder-belts, surveying the field through field glasses—and the dogs lunged at the end of their leashes, baying, choking, barking their lungs out, and scuffed the ground madly with their back legs, kicking up fountains of black mud into the sky. The beast did not err; the beast had guessed it all as soon as he stuck his nose out of the bunker at dawn: the warm wind from the south carried on it the smell of a raid, a hunt—and he was the one being hunted.

  * * *

  Do you see it?

  I see it.

  He is coming.

  Yes.

  Don’t be afraid.

  I am not.

  It’s just a dream. We’re dreaming the same dream.

  Is it really possible? For two people to dream the same dream?

  It is. My grandma and grandpa had it happen to them once, in Karaganda. It’s actually quite simple: I’m dreaming you, and you’re dreaming me.

  It is, isn’t it? So strange—how simple things can be in a dream; it seems it couldn’t be any other way.

  That’s because in dreams things are the way they really are. And in daytime—the way they appear to us.

  Then I really love you. Now, in this dream, it’s so obvious it doesn’t require any further proof or evidence. I can’t see you in this dreamscape; you’re somewhere aside, close by, like a part of me—I can only feel there’s another, separate life beside me, and I love it. And I know it’s you. It is you, isn’t it? You? Is it you? ADRIAN?

  * * *

  “Adrian? Where’d you go? Why did you turn on the light?”

  “Go back to sleep… I just have to write this down, or I’ll forget…”

  “Write what down? The covers are all bunched up—how’d that happen? What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Four.”

  “Did you feel me love you? While we were asleep? In our dream? And you just had to wake up.”

  “There was something else there. Let me think.”

  “Come here, we’ll think together.”

  “Damn it!”

  “What?”

  “My knee… I just touched it… it’s like bruised or something. What did I do? Last night it was fine.”

  “Did you hit the bedside table? You’ve been jumping up and down all night. Let me see.”

  “How bizarre. How very bizarre.”

  “No, no bruise… Does it hurt when I do this?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What about here?”

  “It’s like it’s inside somewhere, really deep. Muffled. Really weird.”

  “Well, go back to sleep then. You scared me and I lost my dream again. All I remember is that I loved you very much for some reason. Why would that be?”

  “That’s good. You just go on loving me. Love me all the time.”

  “And what do you think I’ve been doing?”

  “Man, I am in luck.”

  “We’re both in luck.”

  “Uhu. Madly.”

  “Oh… Aidy… Aidy, I love you. No, please don’t stop… oh, God… oh, you, you’re my… my… my…—my love… my beloved…”

  “Here, let me wipe your tears. Put your head on my shoulder… like that. Just like that.”

  “That’s even better than in my dream.”

  “It’s what comes after.”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what it is… because when I’m with you, I always see something. New pictures every time—like a movie…”

  “You’re my picture. The best in the world.”

  “I only wish you could see what I see… I wish I could show you. That would be some kind of a movie!”

  “So what was it this time?”

  “A flash. Just a flash, but incredibly bright. Like a searchlight straight into your eyes after coming out of a dark cellar. And a blast… a mix of terror and thrill, like flying out of your body. I wonder if it’s like that when you die…”

  “The way you moaned… it scared me a little.”

  “It really seemed a lot like dying.”

  “You know, you just helped me understand something.”

  “Something about your infinite sets again?”

  “No, about that dream of mine… I realized why there’s no fear of death in it, in any of those dreams… even though they’re all, in a way, about death. Strange, isn’t?”

  “You little fool…”

  “Baby, what is it now? Why are you crying again?”

  “Because I love you. I love you so much I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Shhh… don’t cry. Here, do you want me to hold you and rock you?”

  “Jeez!”

  “There… I’d rather have you laugh.”

  “Go ahead, tell me. What about the fear of death?”

  “Nothing, that’s the thing, it’s not there. I don’t think he was afraid of death at all, that man. I think he was always ready for it. And that’s what made all the pictures in his head so sharply focused, intensely physical. It’s the same as in ecstasy, you know? When you said the thing about leaving your body, it made me think of this.”

  “Oh God. No, it can’t be…”

  “What?”

  “No, nothing… just a guess. I think I know who that man was.”

  “For real?”

  “More or less… you wouldn’t recognize him, would you? In a picture?”

  “No more than myself without a mirror.”

  “Well, then it’s moot. No use thinking about it.”

  “About what?”

  “That flash. Nothing, forget it. How’s your knee?”

  “Quiet now. Not a peep. You’ve healed me.”

  “Aidy?”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Do you think it’s really us? Or are we dreaming ourselves?”

  “I don’t know, Lolly.”

  “Sometimes I get this feeling… promise you won’t laugh at me?”

  “I promise.”

  “I get the feeling that we got someone else’s love. Someone’s once unfulfilled love—you know, like the imperfect tense in grammar.”

  “Well, then it was meant to be.”

  “No, listen… once when I was little, really little, when we still lived in Tatarka, this one girl moved out from our apartment building. The whole building got blighted; they moved us out not long after that, too, but this family was the first to go, and the whole building helped them. The truck came and parked in front of the gateway; people carried furniture out of the apartment—the same armchairs we used to pounce on together—I can see them now in that girl’s living room…. Outside, under the sky, they looked like pulled-out teeth. They let me hold the lampshade they’d had above their dinner table, with a wire frame, you know, bright yellow with little tassels.”

  “I know—vintage fifties.”

  “Uhu, everything they had was old… taken out of place, it stopped being a lampshade—I could pull it over my head, and it’d be a hooped skirt, like a princess’s…. And there was this one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about… we made a secret a couple days before, that girl and I. We were very proud of it, too. And so I stood there and all I could think was, now she is moving out and what’s going to happen to our secret? You see, she’d forgotten all about it. She’d moved on to other things. Maybe if we’d had a chance and snuck away, just the two of us, to dig up that secret and pledge our undying friendship over it, everything would’ve been different. More melodramatic. Or, if she had bequeathed that secret to someone else, given me permissi
on to show it to someone else after she left, to another girl… but nothing like that happened—our secret just died; it was so clear. It died because she forgot about it. The same thing happened to it as happened to the armchairs and the lampshade—it lost its defining purpose. It was still in the same spot as the day before, and perfectly undisturbed, but it was no longer a secret—just a little pile of buried rubbish. Are you listening?”

  “Uhu.”

  “And I remember this very un-childlike gloom came over me. A child—she feels the same things as the adults, you know, just doesn’t have the words for them. It was like I saw all at once all those secrets we’d made and then abandoned and never checked on again—how they all were somewhere underground. All our sealed friendships, tears, pledges… our little lives under glass like exhibits in Mom’s museum. A giant museum of abandoned secrets. And people walked right over it; they didn’t even know it was there, right under their feet.”

  “The museum of abandoned secrets—that’s nice. I like it.”

  “I don’t feel like I’ve been making much sense….”

  “No, I understand. You are trying to say that you and I are together because we accidentally dug up someone else’s love. Like one of those secrets that got left behind.”

  “Yeah… something like that.”

  “But don’t you think it’s also possible that whoever made it may have, as you put it, bequeathed it to us?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think that man was in love with Gela. And she did something wrong. She made some terrible mistake that messed up everything. And it still hasn’t been fixed.”

  “Now, that’s just your imagination…”

  “No, it’s a hunch. A woman’s hunch, trust me on this one. It’s always us, the brilliant and the beautiful, who make the kind of royal mess no plain little mouse of a girl could ever dream of. It’s true. You know why? The risk is higher: plain little mice don’t get nearly as many chances to imagine they can control someone else’s fate.”

  “Never really liked those plain little mice…”

  “That’s the problem right there! You all want the brilliant and the beautiful. Do you think that makes our lives easier?”

  “Oh, you poor, long-suffering, brilliant thing…”

  “Finally, about time someone felt sorry for me. At least I’m alive—for now.”

  “And warm too. Damn it!”

  “What?”

  “My knee!… Got it! Lolly, I remember! I was crawling along a wattle fence somewhere on the outskirts of town, and ahead, in the city, lay a betrayal. I was supposed to kill the traitor, Lolly! That’s what I went to do; that’s why I was called! And I didn’t even learn his name! I learned nothing!”

  “This was all in your dream?”

  “And I bumped my knee—against that fence!”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nothing to kid about, girl! The pain made me remember…. And you, by the way, were there too—you spoke to me.”

  “Me? And what did I say?”

  “Wait, it might not have been you after all… Granny Lina, maybe? In any case, it was a woman’s voice; I’m sure of that. A woman that’s very close, very dear to me. It couldn’t have been Mom, could it? Shit, I can’t remember…. All I see is this soggy plowed field right in front of me.”

  “And you don’t remember what she said, the woman?”

  “Wait, I wrote it down as soon as I woke up! It should be here somewhere…. Here, got it! On my cigarettes.”

  “Let me see. Jeez, that’s some chicken scratch.”

  “I wrote in the dark! ‘You won’t need.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “How should I know? It’s all gone now. ‘You won’t need’—no kidding, that’s like a joke or something…. ‘Blood will stay in Kyiv.’ Don’t remember that either. ‘Women…’ what about them?”

  “Give it to me.”

  “A prophesy of the Oracle of frigging Delphi: The words are all there but make no sense whatsoever! Like you said about that secret of yours: a pile of buried rubbish…”

  “‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’”

  “How’s that again?”

  “‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’ That’s what you wrote down.”

  “Sure. Is that supposed to be like E=mc2?”

  “That’s not as stupid as it seems.”

  “What does that have to do… you’ve got to understand, that dream was a warning—a warning that for some reason was left unheeded. Who was that traitor I had to kill? And someone was supposed to die because of him—the dream is still leaving marks to make someone, anyone remember that!”

  “Listen. We’ve got to stop this. We’re both going nuts. It’s like Macbeth with the witches—he also kept trying to decipher their prophetic message, and look what happened to him. It’s not like we’re going to find out anyway. I’m done, sweetie. I quit. Turn off the lights, it’ll be light outside soon….”

  “Lolly?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Are you asleep?”

  “I is.”

  “Alright then. Good night.”

  * * *

  What happened still didn’t make sense to anyone.

  Stodólya disappeared.

  As simple as that. He’d left the bunker before dawn, soon after Adrian had left, to go to the village to get some food and just disappeared. Hadn’t come back.

  Hard as Adrian tried to look elsewhere, Geltsia’s eyes found him wherever he turned—ghastly, completely black around the huge pupils, corners swelling with blood. He had seen eyes like that once—on a hare he’d shot, and they had gone glassy afterward, turned dead. Those eyes of Geltsia’s grated on him, demanded an extra effort of him while his thoughts raced in every direction at once like mice in a barn. Geltsia hampered him; he wished she weren’t there.

  The thing that didn’t make any sense was that they still had food—not much, and only groats, which you couldn’t just eat by themselves, but Geltsia managed to boil grits even in these makeshift circumstances, and they could’ve lasted another day or two! And they still had a bit of anti-scurvy herbal tea—no sugar to go with it, but so what, he would’ve loved a cup of that tea right now, forget the sugar, as long as it were hot, but it was a chore—so he had to make do with the cold grits when he came back, and now his weighted-down stomach made noises like someone was moving a room’s worth of furniture in it; this, too, was irritating. Darn it, even if they had to go hungry for a little bit, what’s the fuss? To not eat is to not shit—can wait for a bit (as they cheered themselves up when Geltsia was out of earshot): wouldn’t be the first time their stomachs saw their spines; you’d chew on bark and leaves in the woods sometimes just to make your mouth, hot as a dry skillet, fill with spit again, to fool your body into humming with sweet warmth—rebels are old pals with hunger. Whatever possessed Stodólya to take off in such a rush to get food, not even waiting for Adrian’s return?

  Wrong, wrong, something here was wrong and he could feel it, and the boys could feel it, too, and this unspoken torment mixed with anxiety wormed into their souls like an itch drawn out over a fire—like when lice, feeling the heat, crawl out from under your skin, and it’s better to endure the honest scorch to your fingers held over the blades of flame than to bear the crawling that bores into your brain.

  And Stodólya, of all people! The one who was draconian about maintaining conspiracy, the one who had the authority to court-martial others for the smallest infraction—and who knows how many he had convicted already. It wasn’t all enemy blood he had on his hands. His motto was, “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Now it occurred to Adrian that whenever Stodólya said that he did so with a sort of condescending scorn, like he was challenging them—like he was warning them, up front, not to trust him, and he found it entertaining that no one braved asking him, up front: So, do you mean we shouldn’t trust you either, friend Stodólya? An ancient paradox, from the Gymnasium logic class: t
he Cretan said all Cretans are liars, so did the Cretan tell the truth? The paradox cannot be solved: according to Gödel, every system of axioms contains a statement that cannot be proven within that system. But when you find yourself inside the system, the realization of it sends your shaken world helter-skelter and all things leave their usual places like in the nightmare where you’re crossing a frozen river and suddenly the ice begins to crack under your feet, opening a black abyss.

  If you start seeing a traitor in everyone, even in the comrade who’d carried you out from under fire on his own back (Was that really what happened? Or was it only an elaborate ruse, orchestrated on purpose like those NKVD barrel ambushes with staged fire to fool the victim into believing that our boys had fought him off from the Reds, so that the grateful soul would tell them everything they couldn’t pry out under torture? How can you know what really happened if there are no witnesses, except Stodólya, of that fatal May march left alive, and you yourself were unconscious?), if you don’t trust anyone, and see the enemy’s traps everywhere, then how do you not lose your mind, how do you even go on living?

  Could Stodólya have lost his mind? Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore, nerves failed him, he’d gone mad—and no one in the group noticed? No one stopped him?

  Bolsheviks went mad like that, and not infrequently. They had people shoot themselves; leaders throw themselves out the windows. Adrian had long ceased being shocked by that: ever since he saw, in combat once, how when some of the Reds turned and ran, their major, small and narrow-shouldered, a gnome with grotesque wings of shoulder straps, chased after them and shouted, “Halt, motherfucker!” while firing at the running men’s backs, and did fell a few before Raven, first to shake off their common torpor (because none of the rebels had ever beheld a marvel like that—an officer shooting his own men in the back—before), mowed the gnome down with a short burst from his machine gun. Adrian remembered well their common impulse of sympathy for their living enemies—up till then he’d only felt sorry for their dead, when they found them lying in the forest uncollected, in foreign uniforms, with glassy eyes staring at the sky (“Why did you come here?” he chided them, mentally), and it occurred to him that the garrison’s atrocities and their constant, self-obliterating drinking, their monstrous explosions of irrational rage (somewhere they skewered to death a man who’d come into the forest for firewood, somewhere else they opened fire on children sledding from a hill and killed one) must have come from more than their sense of impunity alone (“We can do anything!” barked one of those drunken Ivans when villagers came to complain to “Officer, sir” that “you can’t do that”). It must have come from the fact that in a land boiling with partisan warfare these people had been turned into tiny, inanimate screws—and they had broken under the strain just like screws: the nightmare ice cracked and split under their feet all the time, and behind them shuffled some major of theirs, in big shoulder straps, ready to shoot anyone in the back at any minute. And the major, in turn, had his own superior behind him, and that one his; and this went all the way up to Stalin: everyone was afraid of everyone and no one trusted anyone. And this was the fundamental formula that they carried with them wherever they went like a mass lunacy—to make it so no one could trust anyone. So no one would love anyone—because trust is only possible among those who love one another. That’s what they wanted from us; this would be their victory.