The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  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.

  And now, on top of everything else, he felt angry because he sensed in himself and the boys the same noxious virus—the corrosive poison of silent suspicion. He didn’t allow himself to think the worst, but the thought was already inside him, inside them all—injected into their blood like that “vaccine” given to people arrested in K., after which the GB, for no apparent reason, let them all go home, and, within a month, all seventy who’d been vaccinated succumbed to a mysterious illness. A man’s utmost humiliation: to feel that you, without ever noticing, gave in and now act exactly the way the enemy wants you to act, against your own will. And everything that used to give you strength—friendship, brotherhood, love—begins to fall apart from inside, eaten away by doubt. You begin to do the enemy’s work for him: you break up the ice under your own feet, throwing your pickax in time to the beat of your heart.

  Or, maybe, Stodólya simply didn’t risk walking back through the woods with knapsacks once it got light, and stayed to wait for nightfall somewhere?

  Where could that be? Not in the village, surely?

  And why not? The warden could have hidden him. There was still hope; they just had to wait for the night. Anything could have happened.

  Adrian knew that while he had been gone, in the city, the others had already talked to death all the likely versions of what happened—and that his return gave them new energy, enough for another round. Really, all kinds of things happened at war. Under different circumstances, meaning if Stodólya had been there, he would have told them about the policeman he’d met in the city, three and a half floors below the appointed door. “Leave, it’s a kapkán.... ” And now he won’t. Not ever. Even if Stodólya, God willing, does come back, alive and well—he still won’t tell them. Only in his report, to his anchor in General Staff. Don’t believe anyone, and no one will betray you.

  No, that’s not what the anchor had told him, a long time ago, in Lviv, back under the Germans, during that dark time when our people fell utterly without explanation—when Gestapo shot down OUN members right in the streets, picking them out from among passersby as certainly as if the Germans carried their photos in their pockets, until it turned out they did, in fact, have photos, and more—that back in November of 1939, in Kraków, at a joint conference of Gestapo and NKVD, the Soviets had turned over to the Krauts the lists of political cases they’d inherited from the Poles, so everyone who’d joined the Organization under the Polish rule was obliged to disappear, go underground: “Remember,” his anchor had said then, “even if I betray, you never will.” And he remembered—because at those words, goose bumps sped up his spine. He remembered it for the rest of his days: he was the sentinel who didn’t dare leave his post even if he were there alone.

  He wasn’t alone—yet.

  Levko and Raven’s faces, concerned and alert in the shape-shifting flicker of the gas burner (Geltsia went to brew some tea after all—it was the only reasonable thing that could still be done to maintain the illusion of unshattered order), moved him to an unfamiliar, painful tenderness—as if these boys, a mere seven or eight years younger than he, were his sons. If God had given him a son, he’d wish for one thing and one thing only—that his child grow up to be like them. They’d been taught from a young age that work and prayer are life’s foundation, but what they’d really learned was to tell good from evil. And that’s the only important thing, the most important thing that a father must give his child—God takes care of the rest.

  Adrian felt he was growing lightheaded and his eyes were beginning to tear up—probably because there was so little air to breathe in the bunker. And Geltsia’s presence impeded him—he couldn’t look into her bloodstained, wounded-hare eyes; they pierced right through him. As if in accusation, as if to say, in plain language: you never liked him—are you happy now?

  Happy he was not. Honest to God, was not. Wanted one thing—to know the truth. Either this or that. Either dry solid ground under his feet—or ice water closing over his head, but either one or the other, finally. Anything but this nightmarish cracking of ice where things should be solid. To wake up, finally, from his seven-month dream through which he’d been marching blindly with his eyes open. Marching because he loved this woman. She looked at him with all but hatred now, and he still loved her.

  No, the boys said, there’d been no shooting—if there’d been a fight, they would’ve heard it, noise carried far. There was, thus, hope that Stodólya was still alive.

  Still, they had to get themselves out of this bunker. Adrian was sure of that. The bunker smelled like a grave to him. Had from the beginning.

  Hence, they’d drink their tea and would have to spend the night in the woods.

  Geltsia looked at him out of her terrible blackened eyes as if she didn’t understand what he was saying. Mater Dolorosa, flashed through his mind, irritably. She did not like sleeping on the snow; she once admitted to him that for her it was the most unpleasant aspect of the partisan life. For a woman, it really must be uncomfortable—when everyone sleeps under the same waterproof cape, fitt
ed against each other like spoons in a drawer, turn all together, and a half-awake chap is liable to grab hold of some body part that doesn’t belong to him—but at the moment he worried a lot more about how they would keep themselves warm during the night. There’d been too little snow for them to pile onto the cape as insulation, and things could get tough if the night dipped far below freezing. Geltsia would have to lie in the middle, and they would keep her warm; they’d protect her, they’d guard her from the cold. And what if Stodólya did get caught by the raid?

  The water still refused to boil. Let me breathe on it, Levko offered, and Raven chuckled something supportive—they were showing themselves they could still joke. Or perhaps the still-young energy in them, like in young animals, took over; well, that was not half bad. Not half bad. We’ve got another fight or two in us yet, boys. We’ll keep things hot for them as that captain said. He stared at the lifeless little pot—come on, boil already!—and a different vision rose before his clouded eyes: a stubby oblong metal box sat on the burner, and the water in it wobbled a little, and glowing sparks of tiny bubbles rose from the bottom, growing more numerous and dense until they sheathed a pair of surgical metal pincers, readied for an operation. That operation didn’t happen either.

  What?, he startled: Geltsia called his name. Instantly, he was scared—really scared, to a cold squeeze inside his chest—What is it, am I asleep?—and all his fatigue disappeared, at once, as if surgically removed. He was focused again, ready for action—only his heart beat faster than normal. The doubt, that’s what had worn him down, burdened him, taken away his strength—that accursed doubt. He needed a moment, a moment....

  Geltsia wanted him to come outside with her. Signaled it with her eyes.

  And this, too, had already been; his body remembered it: going out of a bunker into the night after a different woman, his heart pounding, and him not knowing himself, knowing nothing except the nearness of her presence, stepping toward the moonlight—only then it was spring, and now pale spots of snow lay under the firs, and in the graphite sky to which both instinctively turned their faces once they’d climbed out, gulping the open air and space with all their senses, the naked branches of hornbeams hung black against a murky, chalk-dusted moon. It was quiet—the wind had died down, and only the free warm-run’s muffled babble rose from the bottom of the ravine. Adrian had time to realize that of all of them Geltsia left the bunker most often; he’d noticed it yesterday—it must be that time of the month for her, and the bunker, without a latrine, was not meant for long stays. And that was when he heard her voice, the voice that instantly shook him clear and sober of his revelry in the night’s open air—it spoke as if from under stone.

  “I’m to blame. It’s my fault.”

  In the firs’ dense shadow he could barely make out the stain of her face. Were she to take another step back he wouldn’t be able to see her at all. And this, too, it seemed, had once been—where? When? She suffered and he could do nothing to help her.

  “He went for me...the food was for me. He wanted to find me some milk.”

  Milk? What did milk have to do with anything? It was as if she were speaking a foreign language that refused to coalesce into meaning in his ears. He thought he heard a twig break somewhere in the thickets—or did he?

  “I should have talked him out of it. I told him it would pass...the malady. It’s the early weakness; it always passes.”

  He still didn’t understand—he only knew she wasn’t there, with him, in that moment, wasn’t with them all, and that’s why she irritated him, like a voice cutting against the choir’s harmony—she was separate from them, locked in this obtuse hull of hers. Her anxiety had a different color, different density. So she is ill?

  “It’s not an illness,” Geltsia responded to his unspoken thought—gently brushed aside the man’s crude clutch extended toward her in the dark; a new note appeared in her voice—soothing, self-assured, maternal almost—her voice glowed again, albeit not as brightly. “It happens often...in the fourth month.”

  It happened. The blow fell onto him softly, like a lump of snow from a spruce. In the Hutsul highlands he once saw a master slaughter a lamb, after talking to it for a long time, all but whispering into the animal’s ear until the little thing obediently lowered its head as if agreeing to accept its end. He saw himself as that lamb now.

  So, that’s how it is, he thought obtusely. So that’s why. As if he slammed, at full speed, into a dead wall, but the momentum kept his legs moving: so that’s how it is. That’s the thing. But then again—he felt strangely relieved, as if someone put red-hot iron through a wound inside him and let the pus out: Stodólya went to find some milk. Left, without explaining himself to anyone, because his wife was pregnant and needed nourishment. Well, he probably would have gone too, if it were him. Would’ve crawled on his hands and knees, even right now. Would’ve kept crawling as long as he had air in his chest.

  She interpreted his silence in her own manner.

  “I can bear it, Adrian.”

  That Adrian resounded inside him like a twist of steel in an open wound. She could’ve addressed him by his alias right then, could’ve given him at least that one drop of mercy. But she couldn’t think about him: he was here, right before her, alive, unharmed, and free, and he was not her child’s father.

  “I won’t be any trouble. And when my time comes in the spring, I’ll go have the baby up in the mountains. It’s all been arranged; I have an address.”

  She was apologizing; she saw herself as the only one to fault for what had happened. And at the same time, she emanated such unbending fortitude that Adrian’s breath caught in his throat: it was as though she’d grown taller in the dark. He did not know this woman, had no inkling of her strength. “They can’t do anything to us!” flashed in his mind with wild, rabid joy, a blast of awe like one inspired by a mighty storm—a sudden, almost superhuman pride for our women: no one can ever do anything to a nation like this. We’ll overcome it all, all! He stood at attention instinctively, as if he were about to salute her. Geltsia, Lord. The same delicate violet of a girl, tiny feet in soft lace-up boots, the petals of her tracks scattered over the snow—he’d once stood at her door, stood there all night long, having forgotten himself with happiness. Geltsia, Geltsia, my only one, why are you not mine?

  And instantly everything inside him collapsed, leaving a sickening vacuum. He remembered where and when he lost her—remembered the dream that had haunted him all these years, ever since the Polish prison: the two of them dancing in a darkened ballroom, somewhere in Prosvita or the People’s House, and at some moment Geltsia vanishes—detaches from his arms and dissolves into the darkness. Just as she would, if she took a step back now, be lost in the gloom of the forest. In his dream, he ran madly all over the great hall looking for her and could never find her; the hall grew bigger and bigger like a dark drill field without end, filling, along the walls, with the dead who kept coming—those who had departed, as the song went, for a different, bloody dance—to break Moscow’s shackles off Ukrainian hands. And he, too, joined the bloody dance—he died in the infirmary; he hung on a cross, and the centurion struck him between the ribs with his spear where the bullet had entered, and Geltsia was the merciful sister. No, she was Magdalene in an overcoat lined with living raw purple, like ripped-off skin, with its hem folded back, and no matter how hard he called for her, she did not hear him and did not look toward him, and the centurion promised him with a malicious chuckle that he’d see her again, moy-ye, see her good and right! And the merciful sister was a different woman, Rachel. And he loved her, too.

  “Dark, swarthy like a Jewess. Pregnant, about seven months.... ” And Geltsia now—four? It suddenly struck him: this meant that when they had that picture taken, she already had the new life living inside her! It coalesced into a pool of light before his eyes, in the space where he sensed, more than saw, her fragile figure between the fir branches, that picture, illuminated like a Byzantine icon by her semi-ap
parent smile: the smile women smile when they carry a secret invisible to others under their hearts.

  He was overcome with a queer urge to place his hand on her stomach—and instantly, the next thought was: How nice would it be if it weren’t Geltsia’s but Rachel’s stomach—then he’d know for certain? But he didn’t have a chance to finish that thought, didn’t get to comprehend what it was that he would’ve liked to know for certain, because from the darkest bowels of his soul rose, menacing and unstoppable, like a pregnant woman’s urge to vomit, the thing he’d been kicking around in his mind this whole time, on the whole eighteen-kilometer return trek from the city, moving his feet without getting anywhere, trying in vain to stomp out the poison of suspicion already injected into his blood: the picture! His photograph displayed at the police station, his phiz that the teacher from P. recognized, having seen him but once half a year before—that picture must have been recent, which meant it could only have been that same one, from their group photograph. The one in which he “had mourn”—a shadow on his face like soot, the whites of his eyes bright as sin: nothing like his regular self, a highway Gypsy. No one could ever recognize him if they hadn’t seen him before—the shadow fell from nowhere like a Gypsy curse and disguised him. The GB had nowhere else to find an image of Kyi; that was the only one taken of him in the last three years—the one Stodólya had made of them all last summer.

  How did they get it?

  And who revealed the location of Stodólya’s bunker in October? The courier girl didn’t do it. That’s why the GB nailed her tongue to a board. And he knew how they did it: they’d bring in one of their doctors during an interrogation, and he’d pretend to offer medical attention to whomever they’re torturing—he’d feel the pulse, take the temperature, even wipe the victim’s face and put salve on the wounds. And then he’d ask the thoroughly reassured prisoner to stick his—or her—tongue out and say “A-ah!” And the others, as soon as the tongue was out, would jump in and put it in a clamp. Then they can torment their victim to death if they want without having to worry about hearing her scream, or curse, or die with the last “Glory to Ukraine!” You can do whatever you want to a person with their tongue in a clamp.