The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (17 page)

I am crying, flashes in his mind. Sweet Lord, I am crying. These are my tears.

Without noticing, he slows his flight—à deux temps, à deux temps—and touches his cheeks with his hands, with his fingertips,
carefully as though it were
someone else’s
face. Woe to you, Adrian, pulses in his head, woe and woe and endless woe, you’re done, you’re finished...

Why woe?! Everything went just fine!

He blinks at his watch again: the entire operation, from the moment his mark stepped into Serbska Street, has taken twelve minutes. Twelve and a half to be exact. Actually, almost thirteen. Thirteen.

So what—he’s never been one for signs—what is happening to him? A premonition? A hunch? What is he afraid of?

“And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said unto him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?’ And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.”

He never really understood that Gospel episode of healing the bleeding woman, even when he got older and learned from his friends—in lewd, draffish words that did not accord with the Holy Scriptures—what that meant, that the woman was “bleeding,” and it tormented him for a long time, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. His dad read the Scriptures out loud to him when he was little; later, he didn’t dare ask him about it. The story remained a mystery to him: how could He, without seeing, feel that someone had taken of his power?

Now he knows. The Gospel was as precise as a medical diagnosis. You couldn’t have put it better. There are no better words, that’s it.

That’s exactly what he felt.

Something has changed—and he already knows what it is: of those twelve (no, thirteen, damn it, thirteen!) minutes, the last ten remain with him and
do not pass
. The minutes he spent with Geltsia. She remains with him. He carries her inside him and does not want to let go, not for all the treasures in the world. He knows this is how it will be from now on.

All these years without her he sped across the surface of time as though on smooth ice—light, unstoppable—and now it has cracked, opened a hole, given under his new weight. The power that had held him above time has left him.

Adrian Ortynsky, alias Beast, registered as a Fachkursen student at the Polytechnic, also Johannes Weiss by other papers, also Andrzej Ortynski. Twenty-three. Invulnerable. Elusive. Invincible. Immortal.

And, in this very moment, fully and clearly conscious, he is about to die.

His death has already set out for him; it began its countdown to their rendezvous precisely ten minutes ago. How long before it runs out—hours, months, years—doesn’t matter; he and death are out to find each other and
will
rendezvous as certainly as lovers who’d set a date.

TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...The beast inside him reaches for his throat (how defenseless the moving pulsing bulge under his fingers, how easy it would be to crush the cartilage and shred the tendons), throws his head back at the snow-swollen sky, and bares its teeth as though to show his perfect mandibles to the invisible dentist somewhere above.

He may have seemed to be screaming—but mutely, without noise. Or laughing—also without noise. A single living soul under the war’s November sky, with his face turned up. The dead can rarely enact such a feat; only the luckiest of them fall down face-up, because, yes, even death has its share of luck to give to its chosen few. The rest die with their eyes down, into the ground. Into the ground.

Kyiv, April 2003

A
hospital? White coats, no, not coats, more like white sheets wrapped around people’s torsos, very strange...it must be a hospital.

A black Opel Kadett—very fancy—black uniforms, black shiny peaks on uniform caps—Where are they taking me?

Wake up, Adrian.

The vision slips away, as if sucked through a dark tunnel, grows smaller, shrivels into a tiny dot, and is gone.

To lie a little longer with my eyes closed, listening to the noises around me, feeling out the room like a blind man, inhaling its familiar scents: this is my room. The bed—empty; my arm, when I reach out, falls as if chopped off onto a crumpled pillow, nothing else. I hear myself growl in protest, and the noise wakes me up completely: this is my voice. Eyes still closed, I think beyond the doors, listening in my mind to the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen. All quiet. I am alone. There should be a clock on a bedside table on the other side of the bed; I can reach it with my other hand. Wow. Lolly must’ve dashed out before dawn. Of course—she’s got the early morning show today. Which I have already missed. Slob. Darn it. What is it with me and sleeping these days?

Inside my head like the smarting trace of a needle: the black Opel Kadett full of foreign officers (What uniform
is
that?), a woman in a white coat, or rather a sheet wrapped around her body; a spatula, or what do you call it, being boiled in a shallow metal dish.... To heck with it, shake it off.

Outside it’s raining, a nice spring rain that brushes the trees and the grass with a gentle lisping noise. Open the balcony doors and breathe deeply: the air is warm, moist. Beautiful. In the yard
below, a smattering of tiny bubbles spreads like a new skin over a silver Mercedes that has a tiny flag on its parliament-issue license plate; my trusty Volkswagen huddles behind it like a village accountant next to the Terminator. The Mercedes’s Representative owner lives next door—a quiet type, must be really new, first-term, not a real politician yet.

I know where he lives because someone broke into his flat last year, and the cops went door to door, thorough as plumbers, and had everyone sign a piece of paper stating that we saw and heard nothing. They were the ones who told us, spilled the beans on the Rep., so to speak. Before, when the family from the first floor was robbed, no one came to ask any questions whatsoever; the folks simply put iron bars on their windows. Now, when you’re coming home late at night, the sidewalk is divided into regular squares of golden light from their grated windows, like a medieval fortress. You’d think kids would like playing in that light—they’d be fairies, or kings, or knights with their fair ladies—only kids don’t pretend things like that anymore. And they should be in bed anyway, which is too bad. Somehow thinking of the kids makes me feel sad—I don’t know if it’s because I’m not one of them anymore and can’t make good use of the fairytale stage, or because when I was little we didn’t have such golden-crossed windows. We had a hedge of dirty-gray, nine-floor apartment towers, tiled on the outside like the insides of water closets, the yards between them dotted with the toy-size white huts mysteriously designated “trash-collector”—they stank ferociously, but we still liked hiding there, in between the large trash cans, big enough that if you crouched, no one could find you; and it was in the dark intimacy of that stinking refuge that I learned how girls pee. The girl’s name was Marynka, and she wore bright, fire-engine red leggings. Since I could not believe my eyes, she kindly permitted me to investigate by touching the wet furrow between the tiny flaps; I must have had the instincts of an experimentalist already. Experience is experience, even when it’s gained behind a dumpster. Nothing is wasted.

Lolly must have been running late: her cup and the spoon she used to stir her coffee tossed willy-nilly in the sink, the squishy grounds in the rusty-brown filter still warm in the coffeemaker. The bowl with unfinished muesli she left on the windowsill makes me go all warm and fuzzy, and I catch myself smiling: I know she stood here, eating, looking out the window into the well of our yard, as she always does when she eats alone. Walking around the kitchen like this, retracing her steps—it’s like pulling on a still-warm robe she’s taken off and left hanging invisibly in the air; you can wrap yourself in it, you want to rub your cheek against her, Lolly. And the smell—the waft of her perfume lifted off the pillow where she slept, warm with the sweet, yeasty, bread-dough smell of her body—it follows me around, grows stronger by the window where she stood, washes over me at the door where she put on her boots. I press my fingers against my nose and inhale a slightly different version of her—a sharper, saltier tinge like the smell of seaweed drifting in from a distant beach—draw it in, and hear myself moan, unwittingly. What a joke! I’m like a dog left in the house alone, nosing his way around, looking for his master. When she first began staying the night, I did exactly what a dog would do after she’d left: I burrowed into her bathrobe and went back to sleep until she returned. The only social gesture I could muster was to call the office and lazily lie to them about feeling under the weather—I’ve no idea whether they ever bought the excuse, delivered as it was in a blissed-out drone; and I didn’t care, and when you don’t care, you’re always ahead because no one can do anything to you. I’d lounge in my nirvana bed until noon—sleeping, waking, dozing off again, marveling joyfully at the change of light and the objects in the room that seemed unrecognizable once they’d responded, like salient creatures, to Lolly’s vibrating presence—and never had the guts to tell her about it. But it was then, actually, that I started having
these
dreams.

In the daytime, they fade, melt, sink under the surface like shards of cracked ice floes. They’re all thin around the edges; I lose the plot, only grasp the biggest pieces, stacked on top of each
other but disjointed like pages from different chapters caught by a single wayward staple: the black Opel Kadett, some sort of place like a hospital, the spatula or whatever it is, the white-sheeted torso. Normally that’s how it is with dreams, especially when your mind is stuffed fuller than your in-box, and you wake up like someone slammed your face against a table: not this again, damn it, can I please think of something else? But
these
dreams, they were different from the get-go. First of all, they aren’t just a fantastical reworking of whatever happened the day before; they’ve no relationship to anything I could ever have personally experienced. No déjà vu whatsoever. As best I could articulate this to Lolly—because it is always when I talk to her that I can best verbalize my ideas, even when it’s the operational principle of a thermionic generator or something else she has no clue about—
these
dreams feel like I’ve been put inside someone else’s closet, and I’m looking at a stranger’s clothes, hung around in strange order. What I see and manage to remember certainly means something to someone out there, but I myself feel like the person who accidentally got plugged into someone else’s phone conversation.

“Do you mean to say,” Lolly then inquired, frowning and biting her lower lip in concentration, “that you are seeing someone else’s dreams?”

“No, that’s the thing, that’s their other distinction: it’s more precise to say that I’m dreaming someone else’s consciousness.”

“Meaning?”

“Um, how do I put it...it doesn’t look like a dream—more like a memory, a very vivid, visceral memory, with touch and smell—only I am absolutely certain that whatever is happening has never happened to
me
. I know it’s not
my
memory.”

One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language, plus your vocabulary expands to such unprecedented levels that sometimes people think you’re the one who writes for a living. So, here’s the picture—stuck in my mind
after I dreamt it a least a dozen times: a forest in springtime, tree trunks spotted with sunlight, the smell of wet bark and sap, a very green smell, and the man walking in front of me is dressed in a gray-blue military uniform with a Schmeiser over his shoulder, only his belt is not made of leather, for some reason, but woven, with stitching. We are walking through the forest “goose-file”—somehow I know that’s what it’s called—and this sturdy peasant back, girded with its woven belt, is the last thing I see when a dry stutter explodes from behind the trees; something shoves me hard in the chest, and everything goes black. After that, I don’t remember anything—it’s gone like a piece of paper in dark water. A bit later, after she’d had a chance to confer with knowledgeable people—she knows more experts in various fields than the State Reference Library, all she has to do is pick up the phone—Lolly, excited as Sherlock Holmes on a case, reported that such woven, stitched belts do, in fact, exist, and have for quite a while—as part of the US Army uniform. You see, that’s what I mean—how would I ever know that?

“Okay, what about that Schmeiser? Are you sure it was a Schmeiser?”

“Absolutely, and the forest looked very much like our forests here, not the American woods, and more than that—in my dream, I knew what everything was called, not just the trees but even the bushes: thorn apple, heather, juniper.”

“Well, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all—you could have picked those up somewhere, in passing, like when you went hiking with your mom when you were little, the time you climbed Goverla, and then just forgot...”

“But by this logic, is it the same with the American uniform: I knew it once, then I forgot? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

In response, Lolly arranged her face into one of her proprietary contortions: one lip thoughtfully pursed, brows scrunched together, eyes like a pair of tiny pointy horns—“the silence of the wolves” it’s called, when she runs out of arguments but doesn’t want to admit defeat (she also has “the silence of the lambs”—with
big, piteous eyes, when she’s begging for mercy)—and, of course, as always, I had to laugh and hug the little imp. But I also had to wonder: Heck, what if I
had
seen a uniform like that somewhere before, like on one of those shoddy posters in military prep classes? We’re all Cold War children after all, and those with technical education especially—all groomed to work for our dear ol’ military industrial complex, which, may it rest in peace—met such inglorious demise that I’m the last one of our class who still, at least on paper, counts in the ranks of our profession, although others never relied on it for their bread and butter, and it’s good they didn’t because it wouldn’t get you a single dry a crumb now. I’m lucky I liked playing with Uncle’s cigarette holders when I was a kid—who knew I’d start a business out of that, ha!—but I still remember the u-es-es-arr’s terrible military secrets, like the fact that the diameter of our noodles matched the caliber of our bullets, and that our cocoa factories were engineered to switch to manufacturing gunpowder in twenty-four hours, so why shouldn’t some rotten layer of my collective unconscious spit up a long-forgotten detail about those dirty imperialists we were so keen to fight?