The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Read online

  Nevertheless, the whole infirmary rooted for Gypsy, and even Ash, the lad with the penetrating wound to his leg, raised his fever-thinned voice from where he lay, too weak to get up, “Pin his tail, Gypsy!” “Show him how we do it!” the others chimed in. The Easterner was popular, despite his constant showing off and slightly superior attitude toward the Galicians, to whom he referred, always in the plural, as “Galich-men.” (“You Galich-men, you ain’t seen a tarred wolf yet, ye follow?”) How, exactly, one came to sight a tarred wolf was never clear—for all they knew, this mysterious creature was not unlike the tar-bristled Gypsy himself; his buffoonery always seemed to come from the outside, in third person, whom he alternatively ridiculed and reassured, and the Galich-men took no offense. Gypsy did not hide the fact that he once fought for the Soviet army; he even revealed to Adrian something he’d never heard before—that before sending soldiers into combat, Bolshevik commissars swore to them, “on behalf of the Party and the people,” that the kolkhozes would be abolished after the war. Adrian had to laugh at this—how stupid could Stalin really be?

  “Easy to say now,” Gypsy replied, with new and unexpected vile in his voice that made the room go so quiet you could hear shadows gather in the corners. “What else would I’ve fought for on the motherfucker’s side? For what they did in ’33?”

  The boys tsked and shushed him, but without conviction, as if instead of shaming Gypsy for his cursing they felt shamed themselves: “Hey, bite it, a lady’s listening!” Rachel, who was warming something up on her burner with her back to them, did not betray with a single motion whether she’d been listening, but in that instant Adrian became aware, suddenly and intensely, of how differently they all behaved, all the time—not because they were not well, but because of her. Because she was there.

  It only made it worse that he’d never been one of those who took every chance to revile “the skirted army,” averring that the “wenches” belonged at home and not in the insurgency, but, at the same time, he had to admit feeling, on multiple occasions, that he would rather manage without female assistance, although sometimes it was simply out of the question. Among the bleakest episodes of Adrian’s resistance career was his parting with Nusya, his courier of many years: her puffy red face, her mouth that kept slipping into an ominous twist followed, again and again, by bursts of uncontainable sobbing, and the things she said to him then, as he listened mutely and didn’t know how to respond. He was, of course, aware of the possibility that Nusya liked him—but, come on, girls always liked him, all of them, as far back as the Gymnasium he had to put up with all their talk of how much he looked like Clark Gable, and it drove him to distraction because the boys at the Assembly paid him back with pure, unadulterated spite that made it that much harder to win their respect, and later to best them, demanding that he take, teeth clenched, the most outlandish dares and emerge the winner, every time. Nusya’s coy, kittenish mannerisms were, in his mind, a direct consequence of her conservative Polish upbringing (“Femininity above all!”), in addition to her having been born an incurable flirt, so it was only after that last, heart-rending scene that haunted him for long afterward that he wondered whether a woman was ever capable of sacrificing herself for an idea—for the pure, selbstaendige idea, an idea that’s its own justification—or only one that was embodied in a person she loved, a husband, a father, a son, alive or dead? Even Geltsia—although Geltsia was something completely separate and very different—rushed back home from Switzerland in ’41 exactly like her old man, Dovgan Senior, did in 1918 when he left his family in Vienna, and all but walked the last leg to Lviv from Krakow, arriving to catch the last, withering street fights—those for the Central Post Office. Then he spent a year torturing himself for being late—you’d think the only reason we couldn’t hold on to Lviv back then was not for the massive Polish reinforcements but for Dr. Dovgan’s absence at the front lines, never mind he’d been excused from the Austrian draft for being flatfooted. Twenty-three years later Geltsia also missed the best part—the June 30 Sovereignty Proclamation—but came just in time to see everything else, everything that followed and does not seem to end. In a way, she tied the score for her old man. She’s always adored her father.

  Women. And yet Adrian had to admit that every one he’d ever worked with remained tough and loyal to the end. Women took risks less willingly than men—that much was true, but they didn’t go looking for trouble out of pure bravado; instinctively, he’d always trusted women more than men, as though their dedication to the cause drew extra strength from their devotion to the men they loved and took pride in, the twin bonds mightier than steel. He still disapproved when resistance couples got engaged or married—but only because he believed now wasn’t the right time—though no one could deny that the ones who did marry fought twice as hard, as if their wives supplied them with extra energy. Like batteries.

  Rachel here—did she have a husband or a fiancé? Why didn’t she legalize in the first place, as almost all Insurgent Army Jews did when the war ended and we went underground? Although, that first wave rode the trains to Siberia—that’s a Bolshevik thank-you right there, for helping them fight the Germans—the later ones were more cautious, obtaining false papers that could get them over to Poland and from there to Palestine. Adrian heard about only one Jewish doctor, Moses, who refused to leave and perished not too long ago somewhere around Lviv in a raid—blew himself up with a hand grenade when he was surrounded.

  Adrian watched Rachel’s unreadable back and felt an enormous, monstrous pity fill him—the sort one feels for an orphaned, abandoned child. He never felt this way about the Ukrainian girls in resistance; it stood to reason that they should fight along with the men for the common sacred cause, but why should this Jewish girl suffer? “Come with us, Galya, with the Kozak army, we shall treat you finer than your own mommy,” went the song they used to sing at student parties; and Yuzya, the linguist, once told them, swearing on his own mother’s grave no less, that the original version had Haya, not Galya—Haya, the young tavern-keeper—and it was only much later that the oral tradition reworked the unusual name into a native one that sounded similar. “By her braids to a pine tree they tied the young Haya…”—lied to her, lured her, took her with them, and then tied her hair to a pine tree in the woods and set the tree on fire. And she screamed and no one heard her. Like that Ukrainian teacher whom the Soviet partisans tied by each leg to a bent-over birch and then let the trees go—they did say one of them could not take her screaming up there and shot her, half-torn, in the head. “Who comes riding through the woods he will hear my crying…”—what a horrific song: trees screech, unbending, and you scream, and I can do nothing to help you, girl, only make sure you always have a grenade and teach you to pull the pin out with your teeth when they twist your arms behind your back, before they think to jerk your head up. “Hey, Haya, Haya, green woods left you crying…”—it even sounds vile, this Haya, Haya… like gasping for air, not singing… or are my lungs wheezing? Galya is better.

  Adrian didn’t notice as he fell asleep, finally. He dreamt of Roman. The guide was the same as before, in his homespun duds and with the MP on his shoulder. Adrian followed him through the woods again, stepping into his tracks just as before, only the forest was somehow stranger, newly washed by the rain and threaded with sunlight, much like the green woods in the song; Roman seemed to be saying something as he walked, but Adrian could not make out any of it, no matter how hard he strained to listen. Then Roman stopped, and very clearly said, “Here’s where I live.” Adrian looked around him and saw a small, dark hovel, or rather a cabin, empty but for the icons on the wall and a large table in the middle—Roman appeared on the other side of the table, where Adrian couldn’t reach him.

  “And where is your family?” Adrian asked, thinking that the cabin would surely be too small for anyone else.

  “They’ll come soon,” Roman answered elusively, in his usual reserved way. “They’ll all come soon,” he said and added, “lig
ht me a candle.” Adrian was puzzled: Why wouldn’t Roman do it himself, if he’s not a Jew and it’s not the Shabbat? There was no candle on the table anyway.

  He woke up from the dream with a vague sense of unfulfilled obligation, but also, for the first time, really rested, refreshed; this made him happy—it meant his body was coming back to him; the elemental, animal pleasure of this erased the inarticulate regret about Roman’s request. It felt good; he was good at slipping the grip of the past.

  The new sliver of strength would serve him well that day. It was the day Ash died.

  For the first time, Adrian watched a man die not in combat, and it proved a lot more difficult. The plan had been to take Ash to the forest-warden’s station to do surgery later in the day, cut the gangrened leg off, but he did not live that long.

  When he woke up, he felt really well, unusually so, even sat up on his cot and smiled without a trace of delirium. Orko came and said encouraging things to him; Rachel busied herself preparing the tools for surgery. Back from his excursion outside, Adrian stopped next to her burner and stared with a convalescent’s eager curiosity at the stubby, oblong metal box: 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 mysterious-looking metal tongues, not unlike the ones that used to accompany asparagus at Dr. Dovgan’s dinner table. Adrian was mesmerized by the interaction of water and metal: he had seen water boil around bullets and shrapnel when they fell, hissing, into the river—but here was the opposite, water heating the cold metal, warming it gradually, peacefully, surreptitiously almost; there was a strange harmony in this, a musical sensibility that held him captive, unable to turn away. The picture would stay etched into his memory along with the melodic word he’d never heard before, pyemia. Pyemia, aka death, one of its many aliases. Death is a great conspirator; she changes her names and guises whenever she pleases. So much work to unmask her, find her—and so often too late.

  “Girls will love you anyway,” Orko said to Ash.

  Something new hung in the heavy, stuffy air of the bunker; people lay, sat, and moved as though afraid to disturb this new invisible presence. Adrian asked for some water to drink and saw Rachel’s drawn face up close: her lower lip pinned with her teeth, her Arabian-stallion nostrils tense, flared, the tiny smudges of freckles around her nose dark and sharp as never before. Someone knocked on the vent outside, three—one—three: the code. Yaroslav appeared with some ether he procured for the surgery, carried in a tightly lidded stoup he didn’t open—the flame of the kerosene lamp could ignite the vapors, it was unsafe—but its availability made everyone, not just Orko and Rachel, feel relieved, breathe easier, as if the priest’s offering appeased the invisible force that had nested among them, gnawing at the beams and the walls until they threatened to collapse, a massive, crowded grave. Rachel packed knapsacks, clattering instruments, running Orko through a checklist: “Did they boil the bedsheets at the station? Did the girls bring alcohol from the village? Please pass me that large clamp.” Can they go already? thought Adrian, irritably. Let them take it all out of here, and the poor sap with it. Lord, please help, please let everything go well.

  But it didn’t. While they were packing, Ash turned for the worse, and then worse yet. He degenerated faster and faster, like he was falling off a cliff. And then the agony began.

  “Mommy,” Ash mumbled blissfully as convulsions shook his body and rattled his teeth. “Go, the bells are ringing… my horse, Bloom…”

  “He is not in pain,” Orko said quietly to comfort everyone, himself included. “He feels good: the intoxication, the poison in the blood is making him euphoric like strong drink.”

  Adrian covered his head with his blanket and sweated there, in the dark; the stench grew intolerable and he was afraid he’d have to throw up, and then afraid of coughing. Yaroslav asked a question in a low voice, someone answered, “Ash.” The priest didn’t know the men in the bunker by their aliases, but for Ash it didn’t matter any longer.

  “Give me your hand, your hand, Marichka… the music’s so fine!”

  “My son, you must make your peace with the Lord.”

  The altered, deep sound of the priest’s voice, at once kind and resolute, made Adrian startle and recall, no, regain—because he never forgot it but simply put the feeling away, saved it so that he could retrieve it later and enjoy it fully when he was alone—the sensation of floating, weightless and powerless like a newborn, in an ocean of soft, ambient light—Forgive me my sins, Father. It was Yaroslav who took his confession when he was on the brink of death, when they didn’t know if his heart could take him through the pain; it was Yaroslav who gave him absolution, and he felt happy, as happy as only one having passed through a great passion that clears the soul can be, like a surgeon’s scalpel, of the gangrene of sin, so that one may know God is here, he has not abandoned you… thank you, Lord, for your mercy has no bounds, the dark cassock at the foot of the bed, the swinging light of the lamp that was now turned on to Ash—Yaroslav was administering last rites, not waiting for the boy to regain consciousness. Adrian squeezed his eyes shut and began to pray along with everyone else.

  And still the end wouldn’t come.

  Ash now talked to his commanders, reporting some ambush, a “herd” or a “hollow,” asked to be forgiven and thanked them for coming to his wedding, being his guests—his speech stuttered like a faulty telegraph, words came in mismatched chunks, but it was still clear: Ash was saying goodbye. His body could no longer hold its contents. If not for the smell, Adrian may have been able to stay there with him instead of standing up and risking his neck by climbing above ground in the middle of the day (although he couldn’t tell what time it was—they may have been watching Ash die for hours, days already), but the old Beast, the alter ego he was loath to give up despite the overdue need for a new alias, as secrecy demanded, raised his head and listened warily: outside, everything was clear, the air moved gently, the trees shuffled their fragrant leaves, and a brook rolled on somewhere close with the noise like wind in the treetops. A doe stepped gingerly to the water on her tiny hooves and froze, listening, not far from the lid over the back exit where they’d meant to take the patient, to carry him downstream to the station; she must have sensed the two-legged animal underground; but they were alone, the two of them, and could hear nothing else, no magpies or blue jays, who are always first to signal the presence of strangers, not a mouse disturbed, only the tinkling of cowbells far in the distance—the sweetest music of a clear forest. During raids, the Soviets didn’t allow people to take cattle to graze in the woods, so that no one could send word to the rebels. All clear, just a few meters away was life—and here was death, and its colossal mass squeezed him out of the lair, up, up, like a cork. He found an excuse, too: someone had to take out the latrine bucket—high time really, it was overflowing, foul; others had been taking turns to do it, and now he was strong enough to pitch in. Gypsy readily volunteered to help; Gypsy was quiet today—silently got up, silently climbed the ladder (dragging his leg), silently pushed the lid open. A muted heave, like a sigh—pfff—and the cork popped out.

  Later he couldn’t tell how long he sat there, deaf and blind in the green-and-gold carousel, the piercing intensity of colors and smells of life. His head spun; his arms, when he leaned against the ground, trembled. He could barely help Gypsy with anything, leaving him to bury the waste more or less by himself. It smelled of near rain; the yellow genista flowers glowed bright as stars, and a smooth black caterpillar crawled across one yellow petal. Adrian lay on his back to catch his breath and saw the sky: big fluffy clouds, like clumps of down, sped across it. In his temples—the same persistent beat: no—like a mad radioman—no, no, no. No. A death like that—no, please, God, no.

  He begged the Lord for a single thing in this hour of weakness; he pled for a single mercy—a death in combat. Under fire, under bullets. Do not fear the fire that is sent to test you. If only it were fi
re alone! The beautiful, noble, honest fire—he trusted it, he’d been in it, fire from machine guns, and artillery, and tanks; he’d learned to kill with a single shot, and that was war he could understand. It was war he knew how to win—and, in his way, loved; the “old warfare” as the Insurgent Army’s veterans called it, nostalgically. Now the Soviets brought a different kind of “warfare.” More and more often, death at their hands meant typhoid in well water, paralyzing poison in a bottle, gas creeping through the vent into an underground shelter. Before taking your life, this death robbed you of your will and your body, turned you into a sack of pus. Adrian Ortynsky did not fear torture: he knew he could last through it without breaking because, ultimately, it always ended in unconsciousness (or death, he used to add, but after he learned of his strong heart, he became less optimistic). But, Lord knows, this slow, horrific, humiliating extinction—he didn’t want it. Did not want. Weak I am, Lord, take this cup away from me!

  Gypsy sat nearby and smoked. Then he buried the stub and thoroughly covered the spot with moss. Suddenly, he spoke: “My father, he used to do woodwork. Made crosses.”

  Adrian didn’t say anything.