The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana

  And what about men then—do you think them dumber?

  You love war. And war is not conducive to refined sensibilities, it keeps pressing on their pedals, intensifies them. It’s that same fortissimo, all the time—until you go deaf.

  You are unfair.

  I am a woman. I want to feel the butterfly stir and see God’s presence in it. God is constantly present to us in small things—in a shape of a leaf, in the thin lace of new ice along a shore. In the miracle of miniscule nails on an infant’s fingers. War makes one deaf and blind to all that.

  You are being unfair. War is also a way of seeing God manifest. Perhaps the most direct way. And the most terrible, as it should be—it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Omens in the sky, comets, messages spelled in fire, voices of spirits, descending angels, renewal of churches that will collapse under bombs tomorrow—every war has its own metaphysical history. And none have yielded as many martyrs as this one. And we are mere tools in it, rocks in God’s sling.

  Adrian. Tell me, will this war ever end?

  The war never ends, my girl. It is always the same—only the weapons change.

  Is it you telling me this? Or that other one, the dead man?

  Are any of us alive?

  No! Don’t say that. I don’t want it. And these are not your words at all!

  Don’t forget—it’s a dream. We’re dreaming this, and words can flit into this dream from wherever they please—like dust into your eyes.

  I know where these words come from. I remember the painting that went with them, After the Blast—one of Vlada’s, who is now dead, too. Weren’t these her words—about a strong man her imagination created out of fear of losing? What is she doing here? Why is Vlada in this dream?

  It’ll end soon. You have to bear it for just a little longer. We have to squeeze just a little farther through that narrow, dark shaft—we’ve got a bad bunker, with a straight entrance, and the entrance should always be angled, you should build it zigzag, so that when they throw in a grenade, no one inside gets hurt.

  I don’t see the shaft. I see myself step into water, into a stream. I am washing my legs and dirt runs down my skin.

  Maybe the dream has split at some point into separate branches, and now you’re seeing something I’m not? But water—that’s good. It’s good that the dirt is washing away.

  Such clear, black streaks on bare thighs...

  That’s everything extraneous coming off. The soul’s being cleansed, remains itself.

  I love you. And I will never betray you.

  You know, I was so jealous! For quite a while, I just never admitted it to you. Those lobsters you ate with him were stuck in my throat.

  It’s washed away, all washed away like it’s never been...I see a little girl smiling, laughing, a blonde little girl, two years old or so—and somehow I know she’s mine...I’ll have a girl?

  A girl! Of course, it has to be a girl, how did I not see that? A girl, of course, a little Geltsia with tiny blonde braids...

  And where is the boy?

  Which boy?

  The one who’ll protect her. Every girl is meant to have a boy like that—a husband, a brother, someone else.... Why do I not see where he is? Has the war taken him, too?

  What if he’s already been born? He’s among the living and that’s why you cannot see him?

  And there’s no one alive in this dream?

  Only you and me, Lolly. This is our dream. And we cannot change it...

  ***

  “Banderas, surrender! Come out!”

  Shouted, in Russian, into the vent. Above, dogs bayed, boots stomped—many boots, the commotion made the dirt fall from the ceiling, the sound growing like a shell’s whine through the air: higher, higher until it falls, explodes, buries them.

  “Come out, Kyi! We know you’re there!”

  The four looked at each other. The flashlight lit Levko’s face as the color drained from his cheeks and it turned sallow. Like Geltsia’s. And Raven’s.

  “This is it,” the voice said inside Adrian’s head—with heretofore unknown calm. And instantly a bubble of long-awaited relief burst inside him: finally! And then his whole being rebelled against it: no! He licked his lips—the lips were also someone else’s, separate.

  Who? he mouthed without a sound, but everyone heard because they were all asking the same thing in that instant: Who brought the raid?

  Or did he bring it himself? Did the dogs pick up his trail, all the way from the city?

  “Come out, bitch, or we’ll smoke you out!”

  Oh, so they have gas. They’ve got it all—gas, dogs, all the force in the world. His throat caught in a spasm of hatred, like a burst of machine-gun fire he mentally sent up the vent. For a moment, he couldn’t see, a dark veil over his eyes. He gestured; Raven understood him first: the papers! Hurriedly, they began to empty their knapsacks, shred photographs; Raven struck a match, the fire blazed, sent flares dancing across faces, shadows along the walls. Adrian thought he saw Geltsia’s teeth chatter. He didn’t feel the heat either; wouldn’t have felt it if he put his hand into the fire. He did, however, feel, with his whole body, the cold of his pistol, suddenly heavy—the pistol was doing the thinking for him, choosing its aim: temple or under the chin? He stepped under the vent and shouted, head up, “Go smoke your mama out the barn! Where’s the one who brought you here?”

  “What’d you want him for?”

  “Get him here; I want to talk!”

  Up above there was muttering, low, indistinct over the dogs’ racket, in several voices, light moved in the crack of the vent. They’ll negotiate, he realized; they want me alive. Personal commendations, promotions, decorations, vacations—they are drooling now, like those dogs, they won’t want such prize getting away from them. Talk, buy time for the archives to burn. And then fight it: grenades through the shaft and go. There’s always some chance, he’s been in worse straits. No, he thought, not like this. Lord have mercy on our souls, but Geltsia must remain; she must live. Rachel—that’s my sin, let me atone for it now. Let one of them survive. I am now like Orko in the fight yesterday—a guard to a pregnant woman. If it was really Orko—but it’s all the same, whoever it was: he was now all of them—all who had perished, blown themselves up in bunkers, burned themselves in haylofts, fallen to bullets, coloring the snow red under them and grasping the grenade’s pin in their fingers’ last twitch—the endless dark ballroom where he danced, his danse funèbre gathered itself, like a fist, into this underground hideout and thousands of the fallen thundered, marching in his blood. Your blessing, Lord.

  Something moved close to the vent. Now, he thought. He seemed to feel the breath coming from above, and the breath mixed with his own, like two people sleeping under one cape. Suddenly, his body shook with a long, fierce tremor, more intense, almost, than love’s, and sticky sweat covered his forehead. He had never been so appalled before.

  “Friend commander—”

  It was Stodólya.

  Geltsia gasped behind him, a thin short noise, a baby-bat squeak. Above, the barking was cut short, turned to whimper—someone must have kicked the dog, so he’d keep quiet. The boot, give him the boot, always the boot.

  “Let her out,” said the one who had been Stodólya; no one had ever heard him speak in this voice before, it slithered over Adrian. “Let Dzvinya out, friend commander, let Dzvinya come out.”

  A noise made Adrian turn around. Dzvinya, who had squatted to throw documents into the fire, had fallen backwards, hit her head on an SMG propped against the wall, and now lay across the bunker’s floor, the fire lapping at her boots. This is hell, he thought, watching the boys drag her aside; I’m in hell. This is what it looked like in the picture of Judgment Day in the old wooden church where his father used to serve Mass: tongues of fire wagged, sparks sliced through faces, and devils in reddish-gray haloes bared their hungry fangs at you from below. Hell is feeling appalled forever, without reprieve. He didn’t know this befor
e. Before, he was happy.

  Smoke made his eyes water.

  “Better you come down here,” he shouted, fighting back the cough. “Your wife has just fainted, she needs your assistance. If your masters will let you, of course.”

  “This is not what you think, friend. I swear—”

  “You’ve already broken one pledge you’d sworn. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “Let me talk to her!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask the ones you’ve sold us to.”

  “She’s guilty of nothing!”

  “All the worse for you, then,” he spoke almost mechanically, as though knocking out the standard insurgent verdict on a typewriter: “We order you to remove yourselves from such-and-such village within forty-eight hours, and similarly from all Ukrainian lands. There is no place for people like you on Ukrainian land. We warn you that failure to carry out these orders will...”

  Stodólya used to be the one who carried out such verdicts; now he, Adrian, had taken his place. “You’ll just have to live with that. The judgment of Ukrainian people will find you.”

  I’ll do it myself, he promised himself mentally—I’ll give you a load of lead when we start the fight, and with such cold satisfaction, it’ll be like squeezing a boil. And that’s when he realized how he would do it—instantly, as if he saw it in a flash of a photographer’s magnesium.

  “Smoke! There’s smoke, comrade captain, they’re burning something down there!”

  “Kyi, don’t be stupid, turn yourself in. Your pal here—he’s smarter than you!”

  He knew how he would do it; he felt an amazing clarity in his mind and body. You’re yet to see how the banderas surrender. You wanna see it—I’ll show you. Something white to hold in his hand—a newspaper? The boys leaned Geltsia against a wall; her head fell to one side. As long as those above don’t stuff the vents shut, so the fire doesn’t go out...Levko kept slapping her on the cheeks; it would be better to leave her alone, let her not wake.

  “The Soviet government is doing you bandits a favor, and you’re turning up your noses at it?”

  He pushed a few more photo shreds into the fire with the toe of his boot: a merry-eyed girl’s face with her smile torn off, a pair of peasant hands folded in a lap. Somewhere in there burned the picture of the five of them together. He’d tossed it in after shredding it. Ashes alone must remain. Ashes alone, everything must burn to dust. Not a name, not a sign, nothing after us. Only our blood for you, Ukraine. A new, unfamiliar excitement alit in him, growing brighter and hotter as the fire that swallowed their archives. Someone was coughing; he wiped his eyes and saw a smudge of soot on his hand: It was his own hand but he could not comprehend it.

  “Should we burn the newspapers, too, friend commander?”

  “Leave them. Let them read.”

  “Come out nicely, Kyi, or are you done living?”

  “And who would you be to order me around like your pig herd?” he shouted, listening to the movement above ground. Just as he thought, they were taking positions on the ground behind the trees, away from the entrance in case grenades came flying out of the bunker; Stodólya showed them where the entrance was. “Or are you all pig herds yourselves? Then go fetch me Colonel Voronin, I’ll talk to him!”

  “Yeah, sure! No colonel for you—I, Captain Boozerov, am in charge of this operation!”

  He thought, there, my death introduced itself. From a thousand possible anonymous faces it had chosen this one. And I wished so much for this to happen in Kyiv—and I never got to see the city. That’s a shame. That was one thing he regretted, a single thing, and the regret was already too small to touch anything inside him. Lord, help me. This is the last time I’ll ever ask You.

  He heard a bolt click: Levko sent the bullet into the stock. And stood up, for some reason—the low ceiling kept him half-bent and he stood like that, pistol in hand, as if holding the entire earth on his shoulders and swaying a bit under its weight.

  “Friend commander...friends...”

  “Hold on, Levko,” Adrian said. “While we’re still armed, it’s no good rushing into the next world without taking a few Bolshevik souls with us. Captain Boozerov’s already in a hurry, can’t you hear it?”

  “Kyi, surrender! I’m giving you five minutes to think!”

  “Grenades?” Raven asked hoarsely, ravenously.

  Adrian looked at Geltsia. She was awake. She sat, unmoving, and shone her eyes at him straight through the darkness. For a moment, all sounds disappeared and the only thing he heard was blood ringing in his ears. A high, dangerous whine.

  “Forgive me, Adrian.”

  She knew, he realized. Knew that he loved her. She is here, with me. Hand in hand. My love, my happiness. Wonder lurched inside him, tore free, and burned high and even like a torch.

  “May the good Lord forgive you,” he answered in Father Ortynsky’s voice. “And you forgive me, Gela. And you forgive me, boys, for however I sinned before you, Raven...and you, Levko...”

  “Lord forgive...”

  “I forgive you, forgive me, friends...”

  “And you forgive me...”

  “May the good Lord...”

  Awkwardly, like strangers, they kissed each other: each was already alone with his or her fading life and the touch of another’s body struggled to reach their awareness—a stubby cheek, a hot cheek, a cold one, a wet one.... That’s Geltsia’s, he realized: she is crying, her tears returned. Tears ran down her cheeks in grooves or moist glitter, and he suddenly regretted not having had the chance to shave one last time—felt like he was leaving a camp untidied.

  “I said five minutes, Kyi! Did you hear me?”

  He heard fear in that shout. Now’s the time, he thought. Like in that fairytale where the shrew kept asking the girl to dance and she tarried and tarried, until the roosters called. Only the roosters won’t call for us, and help won’t come. His clock was about to stop; the hand counting seconds almost ran its last circle. The thing for which he’d been preparing himself all these years was rising before him as a humongous, menacing wall, more magnificent and menacing than anything he had known before. Even the feeling he had when stood in formation in 1943 with four Insurgent Army companies, just sworn in, and sang “Ukraine’s not yet perished,” could not match this. Nothing could. And no matter how much you prepare yourself for this, you can’t ever be ready.

  “Dzvinya, you stay,” he spoke. “Stay here. Come out later...when it’s all over. That would be best.”

  She opened her mouth spasmodically, as if about to yawn. And instantly the sharp pity he felt for her—for leaving her alone, tearing her away, as though he were ripping out of her, full of love, his aching flesh—caught him and entered him like a knife under his ribs—and he shuddered, scorched by the boundless, infinite mass of life that was hidden inside him.

  “They already know everything you know—from him,” she said as if to justify herself. “It won’t do any more harm if you turn yourselves in.”

  Only then did he see the pistol in her hand.

  “Shoot me, Adrian. I beg you.”

  “No!” he said.

  “For the love of God, do it. I’m afraid my hand will err.”

  “You must live.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Gela,” he said.

  She jerked her chin sideways, in torment, as if not having the strength to complete the gesture of refusal. “I don’t want to...carry his blood,” she whispered the last words.

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He was not a woman. The life force that was in her differed from the one he felt, the one that urged him into his last battle. He could only repeat, “You must live. You can bear it, Gela. You’re strong.”

  “I don’t want to surrender to them. I have grenades, too, two of them, in fact.” At once and without words they all remembered how they gave her an RGD grenade for her name day in September, and she must’ve remembered it, too, because she sobbed, or perhaps chuckled nerv
ously. “Goodness, I clear forgot—I’ve got Christmas presents prepared for you all!” And next she was tossing some bundles into the gathering darkness from her knapsack—mittens? socks?—something white fluttered and fell like a wing. Scooping up heat from the cinders, she caught it, shook it out. “This one’s for you, friend commander, will you wear it? Lina, my sister, asked me to give it to you. I was saving it for Christmas.”

  It was a shirt—a blazing white shirt with dense embroidery, lush as a row of marigolds, down the front. The kind girls embroidered for their betrothed—and the sight of it made the three men’s breath catch in their throats. The shirt glowed in the dark as though alive; it wanted to be worn into marriage, not into death. And suddenly Adrian knew why it was there.

  “Geltsia, bless your heart!” he said, no longer surprised by anything. Everything was the way it had to be; life, aimed at its end like a bullet sent down the stock, ran smoothly along its course as though guided by a supreme will, and everything fit into its proper slot. And the little girl in the sailor suit, who had, without knowing it, embroidered his last weapon, was also there and looked at him with love. He would use the shirt to come out.

  He explained his plan: he would announce they were giving themselves up. He’d come out first, under a white flag—this one, he took the shirt into his hands, but it had no smell: he could no longer perceive smells, could only sense the smoke. He’d use the shirt to hide a grenade—they won’t see it until they close around him. Then, with three blasts at once, they’d be able to destroy at least a dozen enemies. More if they were lucky.

  And Stodólya with them, he thought but didn’t say out loud. That was his last mission, his alone, not to be delegated to anyone else: he had to kill the traitor. He dared not die without it; he wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye in the other world. And Geltsia had to stay here, in the bunker; Geltsia had to live. Someone had to raise our children.

  “Friend commander.” It was she again, only her voice had changed unrecognizably, became low, as with a cold. “Allow me to go with you.”