The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (56 page)

Stodólya had saved his life.

And Stodólya was the man She loved.

Geltsia.

Friend Dzvinya.

(She protested, knotting her little brows, while her eyes flashed from under her frown with irrepressible joy at seeing him again, because he was her joy: her youth, Lviv, the first tango at a People’s Prosvita Hall ball, “I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one”—well, she did, didn’t she? For the first few moments, the play of light and shadow on her face, like on the surface of a mountain lake on a breezy day, blinded and deafened him; he drank her with his eyes like precious, thirst-quenching water, and did not
comprehend what she was saying: “I’m a
friend
to you like all other men!”—and then she lowered her voice to a whisper which broke, with a small ding, a secret string, invisible and taut inside him: “Or we could address each other by name...Adrian?”)

Can dreams possibly be this clear? So you understand everything, so precisely—as if you’re watching a film with voiceover?

This is not a dream.

What is it then? Who is this man?

I don’t know. He is dead.

How could he possibly be dead? Don’t you hear how alive he is? Only, something is tormenting him. Something too big for one person.

Could this be why he cannot die?

“Mourn you have, my fair sir,” a Gypsy woman clucked at him at the fair in S., latching on to the sleeve of his gimnastiorka and pushing her face up close to look him in the eye. “Moi, such fair officer sir, and such mourn has you!” her low voice rang hypnotic, from deep in her chest, but to him it seemed to mock. “For your mourn, I’ll read for naught, just so you know what to watch for”—something about her reminded him of Rachel, the memory rose in his body and screamed in such a yearning spasm of desire that he bolted from under those eyes of hers that were pointed at him like two black craters framed by their blazing whites, tore away roughly, like a real Soviet captain—and barked over his shoulder, in Russian, “No need!” He wanted no witchery; he never wanted to see into the future, especially right before a mission, and that day in S. they managed their mission gloriously, broke apart a whole caravan in their Soviet uniforms—“Documents check!”—sending the trucks that carried weapons on a detour to an ambush, and then another unit neatly potted the general’s black GAZ-M20 that zigzagged among the trucks loaded with people and goods leaving the fair. The Bolsheviks already knew that the banderas did not attack where there were civilians and hoped to slip by in this manner,
only they didn’t know we had people among the peasants riding those trucks, so they heard the “Down!” command precisely an instant before the machine guns opened fire from the forest, and no one outside the GAZ-M20 was hurt. Inside it, the driver and the emissary general from Kyiv were killed, but the one the boys were after, a major from the regional GB they wanted to interrogate, was lifted from his hiding place under the backseat, where he lay curled up like a babe out of cradle, alive and unharmed, and, over the course of the summer, this major gave Stodólya, man by man, the GB agent network across the entire region.

On several occasions during that time, Adrian found himself in a state of a strange arrested amazement toward Stodólya: he watched the man hunt down the octopus fanatically, pin it in, methodically, from all sides, setting his traps so tight a mouse couldn’t slip through, and then with one or two sudden strikes, sever the writhing tentacles with an expert surgeon’s precision. He witnessed more than the mere thrill of the hunt, as in combat such calculated, multistep operations obviously gave Stodólya his own, special satisfaction; and when, after each success his peculiarly molded face, dark as though burned from inside, with its close-set eyes and the protruding, slightly hooked nose (wolfhound, flashed through Adrian’s mind again: once he gets a hold of someone, not a hair will fall without his permission!) would assume for a short time a contentedly sated expression, lit with a quick, cunning squint—rebel, blast him!—and Adrian, however much he thrilled with their victory, felt somewhere deep in his heart discomforted as one feels in the presence of a rival who has an advantage. And this vexed him, and spoiled the joy.

On one such occasion, Stodólya loosened up so much that he allowed them all to be photographed—this was unusual indeed because Stodólya was religious about secrecy and fastidiously controlled circumstances in which any of the rebels might accidentally be caught on camera—and now it was he himself who permitted the courier to bring a photographer to the forest, from three villages over. The photographer, however, was reliable, checked many
times and thoroughly instructed about where and how he was to hide the negatives; he took a picture of all five of them—Adrian, Stodólya, Geltsia, and the two Security Service guards, Raven and Levko (the young man with rosy cheeks whom Adrian warned about cleaning his weapon).

Right before that, Stodólya’s unit eliminated one of GB’s provocation groups that had been operating on their territory since winter, terrorizing civilians, and Stodólya, usually gloomy and short-spoken, uptight and buttoned-up, was openly celebrating, letting the success soften and thaw him. He told Adrian how long he’d been hunting those bandits—he found two traitors in that GB group, guys who’d been born around here. A year earlier, GB had taken them alive and recruited them in jail, so during raids they spoke like locals and the horrified peasants believed that it was really “our boys” who went on a rampage, and wished they could now hide underground themselves, not knowing what was going on and where they could turn for protection. But as luck would have it, the bandits made a mistake: got, as was their custom, drunk, and when killing a teacher’s family one night, dressed in the rebel-style mazepynka caps and embroidered shirts, failed to notice they hadn’t finished off a twelve-year-old boy, left a witness.

At this news, Stodólya’s eyes flashed with that predatory, quick flash of wicked triumph, instantly hidden by his characteristic squint, giving Adrian the feeling of a creeping, unpleasant chill that told him they were different: Stodólya spared no thoughts for the murdered family, and the wounded boy, in his mind, had played his part once he relayed the information and gave them the lead. Stodólya enjoyed the revenge itself, knew how to enjoy it. And not the way one enjoys winning a complex combination in chess, but almost lustfully, like love. Adrian did not know how to do that. The hatred toward the enemy, by itself, did nothing for him; he didn’t know how to savor it.

That was the first time it occurred to Adrian that Stodólya outdid him in something important. Or maybe that’s what a real counterintelligence officer was supposed to be—immune
to sentiment. When a village courier, a very young girl, sitting with them around a campfire, blurted out, like a little kid, that she dreamed of studying to be a doctor one day, “when we have Ukraine,” she touched a nerve in all of them: Raven remembered how, in Polish times, he dreamt of becoming a barrister, defending the wronged; and the rosy-cheeked Levko, when he was little, acted in theatrical performances at Prosvita and everyone said that he would make a fine actor, but what kind of job is that for a lad? Adrian tossed in his two cents with a story about how he surprised himself when he discovered he could use trigonometry in battle after having been best in his class at it in school. Only Stodólya said nothing. As if he had no life other than the one he had now, none in reserve and none he wished for.

Another time they started talking about the assassination of Colonel Konovalets in ’38, and how differently, had he been alive, the Ukrainian card would’ve been played between Hitler and the Allies during the war, with an incomparably more winsome outcome for us. Stodólya regarded such high-minded speculations with open scorn, saying that such politicking nowadays was no more use than mustard after dinner, and, of course, he had a point; but the assassination itself, its technique and execution—with the bomb camouflaged as a box of chocolates—aroused his genuine curiosity.

“Colonel let his chocolate get him,” he grumbled, curtly, not as a reprove to the departed for having been fond of such high-society luxuries, as one might have expected to come from a peasant’s son (although Adrian never did know for certain whether Stodólya really was a peasant’s son, had no concept of what education he might have had—Stodólya never said anything revealing and kept his true identity a secret), but more with disappointment that even a great man such as Colonel Konovalets could have had a weakness, even one so tiny—hardly worth a haw—and one could hear in his voice the lesson he extracted from it and learned like
Paternoster
: that you dare not have any weaknesses the enemy could exploit.
That’s who Stodólya was—a man without weaknesses. And that’s why he was disliked in the underground.

And feared a bit, too: Adrian wasn’t the only one Stodólya kept on edge.

From the day they had themselves photographed, when they celebrated eliminating that provocation group (every tentacle severed like that gave them, for a while, an illusion of breathing more freely), another conversation stuck in his mind, one that fell like a spark on straw and, word after word, flamed up into an almost serious quarrel between Stodólya and Geltsia. They were talking about the hungry that were coming from the East—for some reason, the locals called such people “the Americans.” Levko, of the rosy cheeks, had gone to the city to reconnoiter, dressed in woman’s garb (“You should see what a fetching wench he makes!” Geltsia laughed), and had seen, at the station, a freight train full of these people: they climbed down from the cars and fell right on the spot to rest, having no strength to drag themselves any further. Close by stood a canvas-covered army truck, and soldiers picked up and tossed into it, like logs, those who could not get up again.

Adrian remembered Gypsy from Slobozhanshchyna, one of the men with whom he had made acquaintance in the infirmary: he, too, had told of similar things happening in ’33 in Great Ukraine. When kolkhozes come, the Easterners then said to the Galicians, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Geltsia, agitated, told a story of her own: one spring she had to wait out raids in a different territory, stayed at a homestead with a reliable family, with the cover story of being their niece, when one day a very young girl, from somewhere around Poltava, wandered into their yard asking for work. “You mean that’s what she’d told you,” Stodólya interrupted, seemingly beside the point; it was obvious they had argued about this before, and now he was taunting Geltsia on purpose by treating her like a child (in response she merely glared at him from under her knotted brow, a single affected glower that pulled Adrian’s insides into a knot).

“The girl was called Lyusya,” Geltsia continued.

What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s short for Lyudmyla...a fine name, thought Adrian—it warmed him with some long-forgotten radiance, this name that could belong to a little doll, Lyusya-Lolly-little dolly, white lacy frills below the hem of the dress, fragrant girlish hair plaited into thin braids, the glossy silk of it in his hand. (Long ago, when he had just started at the Gymnasium, a young girl in a sailor suit appeared in the gates of the building next door every morning, with hair plaited into two thin braids—and, giggling, hid behind the gate as soon as he approached, until one time she lingered, stepping forward bravely and informing him, with the composure of a grown woman, in Polish, “Mama washed my hair, would you like to feel it?”—and offered him her bowed head, smooth, acorn-glossy with a little groove in the middle, pale like a June bug’s maggot, which he could not keep from touching, ran his finger over it—and was scorched, for the first time, by the silky defenselessness of woman, little doll, lolly, who trusts herself to you as innocently as nature itself, like a chrysalis that knows nothing yet of how fragile it is, pulled from its underground nest.)

“I told her,” Geltsia continued, “we had no work at the moment and we didn’t keep hired hands, and when she heard it she suddenly went all aquiver like a sick chicken, it scared me—my owners were having a pest on their chickens right then...” and, catching Adrian’s look, interpreted it in her own way: “Please let it not surprise you, I have mastered all farm chores already; I even know how to muck horse stalls! Only I don’t have the knack for milking,” she added, honestly. “So I ask her—and she’s so famished, so wasted, all eyes—‘Miss, are you unwell?’ And she tells me that she’s tugged there all the way from Poltavshchyna, that they have terrible hunger there, already ate their dogs and cats, and at home she left her mom and little sister Olyunka who cannot get up anymore, born in ’39—turns out, and I didn’t know this, Stalin forbade women to have abortions before the war.”

“Sure,” the boys chimed in, “he had to re-sow what he’d mowed in ’33!”

“Ain’t got enough of his own stock to people Ukraine—but he needs someone to work!”

“And to war for him too—they don’t spare their people at all! Look at the herds they drive at us—like lambs to slaughter.”

“In the mountains, after they had two hundred of their own killed in a battle, they poured gas on them and burned the whole lot.”

“You’re kidding! Whatever for?”

“You know why—to hide their losses. So the number’d be smaller.”

“And how’s that supposed to work—two hundred living souls gone from the face of the earth and what—no one’d cry for them up there in Moscow-land?”

“Like the Bolsheviks care! For them, a man’s life or a chicken’s, ’tis all the same.”

“And when they first came in ’39, some buffleheads in our village were so happy—they made it out, you see, that when it said the Bolshevik Party was krasnaya raboche-krestyanskaya, it meant Christian and for that reason krasna
, fine. Asked of those: Where are your chaplains?”

Someone laughed, spoons clicked faster against the canteens, and Geltsia remained quiet, her eyes fixed on a single invisible point, as though she was overcome, for a moment, by that ancient, viscous fatigue that makes one fall out of the conversation or forget about a bullet in the stock, and at once something exploded in Adrian’s head, lighting, like a flare, the dark vista. He remembered who it was that wore that sailor suit—it wasn’t that little Polish girl next door, no, it was a different, older girl: down the steep Krupyarska Street the hoop rolled, bouncing on the cobblestones and throwing off dazzling flashes of the late afternoon sun, and a shaggy red cur chased, barking, after it, and up flew the kicked-up pleats of the sailor-suit skirt—“Lina!” Geltsia called and, turning to him, said with loving pride, “That’s my little sister.” He did not remember the younger girl’s face. After looking at Geltsia, it remained on his retina as a bouncing flare, like after looking
at the sun—he only remembered how when she ran up to them, breathing hard, the tiny hillocks of her breasts rose under the sailor blouse and that fresh, apple-crisp waft of a young body that he always associated with Geltsia and the Dovgans’ home—the scent that is only found in homes with growing daughters.