The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (21 page)

There were five of them, too many he thought, but the dark-eyed security-service character with hollow cheeks, Stodólya, had insisted they take two guards where one would have been plenty, and nothing, nothing in him snapped or dropped—no time!—when Roman suddenly froze in his tracks and the next instant they caught machine-gun fire from behind the bushes...Sweet Lord Jesus, what happened after that?

Who carried him out? Who dragged him to the infirmary (something made him believe it was Roman)? How did it all even happen—reconnaissance said the raids had passed—how did they drop right into the ambush, like a ham hock into stew? And who to ask about it all now—the one the dark-eyed nurse calls Father Chaplain?

Two pairs of eyes, black and gray, gleamed at him expectantly from the dusk. Well, there you have it—he’s awake and alive, no worries. And mad as hell—nothing inside him but anger: as though the very refitting of him back into reality, from which he had been so abruptly disengaged, scraped him raw and left him fiercely itching. Doggone it, if only the pain in his chest would let up! He, who had always scorned any corporeal weakness like a mistake in a mathematical equation, now must be compelled to lie hobbled on his cot and wonder if he’ll make it up to relieve himself.

The priest coughed gently, as though tuning his voice to a pitch that wouldn’t add to the pain, and then smiled—an unexpectedly
open smile that made his whole face glow, every scrunched-up wrinkle of it, “Glory to Ukraine, Commander.”

He returned the greeting, barely catching his breath before falling into a cruel fit of coughing that made him break out in sweat. He wasn’t a commander, just the management adjutant, but they didn’t need to know that. Where the hell was he?

“You’ll have to stay with us a bit until you get stronger. I am Yaroslav, and this is our nurse, Rachel.”

Rachel, huh. Now it would’ve been impolite not to look at her straight, and, trained as he was in the German days, he took quick stock of her features; his eye gathered and arranged them, like a picture in a kaleidoscope—noticing the unmistakable signs of the persecuted race, small things you normally don’t see until someone pointed them out: a meaningful tuck of the plump upper lip, distinct like an Arabian stallion’s; the cut of her nostrils; the smattering of freckles on her olive skin; and her large, prominent eyes like jet stones, half-hidden under heavy eyelids. He remembered then where he had seen this face before, now heavily retouched by shadows: it was she who leaned over him to put a cool cloth on his forehead; she who washed his body and gave him water to drink, wiping his mouth and chin dry.

Suddenly and inexplicably embarrassed, he asked, “So it was you who cared for me?”

She laughed and spoke fast, with the melodic Hebraic intonation—almost as if she felt a bit shy herself and rushed to sweep her unease under the pile of words. “Me and our doctor, he’s the one who did the surgery, took out the bullet, and repaired your pleura. The bullet came close but didn’t touch the lung—you must have special luck!”

“Thank you,” he mumbled, disoriented: he was being swept up in the forgotten prewar hustle of the Galich market, the clamor from the Jewish rows where quick, black-eyed merchants outyelled and outclucked each other praising their goods, and he wanted to close his eyes again—this woman had too much life in her; she spouted it thick and heavy as oil and he was too weak. The priest
and the nurse apparently understood how he felt and exchanged a quick, short glance—adult conspirators over a small child’s head—but he did not get upset with them; he had no more energy for that, and he had to conserve the little he did have if he hoped to find out anything. It was imperative that he keep them there, that he speak to them, so that they wouldn’t leave him alone with the picture that had been branded in his mind and still burned there: the sun spots on the trunks of the trees and Roman’s rectangular back with the assault rifle and a hand grenade in a holster, girded over his shirt with the homemade woven sash. They did not seem to want to step away from him either, and Adrian read their hesitation. The two of them, no, three, counting the invisible doctor, had fought Death for him: he was their small personal victory and they deserved to enjoy it for a little while longer—and he had to exploit this.

He pinned them to the spot with questions, quick and straight as darts, concise, dry, to the point, Security Service style—not leaving the one being questioned any chance to think—asked in a low voice because his breath barely squeezed in and out of his chest and he was afraid of coughing again. Gradually, however, the strength came and took his side—the anonymous, faceless strength of the Organization, blind as the laws of physics; he managed to claim it again, if only for a few minutes, and he was no longer the patient—he was an officer, and the two healthy, strong, full-blooded people, the man and the woman before him, straightened up and stood at attention without even noticing.

Who brought him to the hospital?
Woodsman’s men. A zero point zero of new information—of course it was Woodsman’s people, who else, those were the men with whom he’d set out.
How many made it out of the ambush?
They didn’t know.
Were there other wounded?
Yes, but with light injuries, to arms, shins, nothing serious, thank the Lord.
Killed?
They didn’t know this either—but they would have heard if there had been, someone in the surrounding villages would’ve known.
So they were not in a village?
No, the village
was no longer safe, there must be a mole, NKVD came and stayed for a whole month before Easter, searched every house until they found the hideout with two wounded men—they must’ve known what they were looking for.
And? Took them alive?
No, the boys shot themselves. May their souls rest in peace. This bunker, in the woods, is safe; that’s where they did surgery—at the warden’s station; the one who carried him out on his back, the guy with the big nose, told them he was severely wounded, said he was an important person, a commander from the district, asked them to do everything possible.

So that’s how it was. He was very grateful. He said another thank-you just to Rachel, who rushed off to bring him water to drink, good, spring water; the whole hospital seemed to be very well kept. “Now let the commander rest a bit.”

“How much longer?”

“That’s for the doctor to say when he comes back.”

It seemed they really had nothing more for him to learn. He thanked them again; a record number of thanks per unit of time. He was, in fact, exhausted—limp like a beaten-out rug.

The guy with the big nose—that was Stodólya, obviously: he had a distinctive, elongated physiognomy, with gaunt cheeks that made his nose protrude like a wolf’s. He certainly knew his conspirator trade, but he went too far this time: could’ve left him instructions about communication instead of dooming him to passive waiting. They carried full knapsacks of literature—did even a shred of it survive? Stodólya, huh. Carried him out on his own back, fancy that. Why did he think it should have been Roman who saved him?

It was very good that Stodólya was alive and unharmed. It meant that while he was lying here, Stodólya was doing both of their jobs. Someone had to collect information about the local Bolshevik agents—they really wormed their way into the woodwork here. You should be pleased, Commander.

He was not; at least not as much as he ought to have been. All for the simple and primitive reason he was ashamed to admit even
to himself: he didn’t like Stodólya. Some barrier stood between them, and neither man had a burning urge to overcome it. Such things were rare in resistance where the spirit of brotherhood and a shared fate united everyone, where you were pleased just to see a comrade alive. It just had to have been Stodólya, of all people. The man who saved his life—Stodólya.

Of the two most readily available strategies for handling an unmotivated antipathy toward someone who’s done you good—forgetting the good or identifying the motivation at the core of the antipathy—Adrian instinctively adopted the latter; his memory solicitously offered something he once heard about Stodólya: that he executed a boy who’d fallen asleep while keeping night watch. The boy was a new recruit, arrived from a nearby village the night before; he was seventeen years old. Stodólya did as The Code demanded, and no one would ever hold it against him, but still Adrian did not like to think about that boy and his last moments in front of the firing squad—as if it were he, Adrian, who was to blame for his ill fate.

There was something else, though. These country boys—these hard young men, straight as an arrow, honest as the land itself—always engendered in him an inexpressible guilt. It wasn’t the purely military emotion of the officer toward the people he could send to their deaths—it was a more delicate, more intimate sort of emotion, like the desperate impotence of a loving father and husband who cannot protect the ones he loves. He felt guilty about his “high” birth; about his education, which inspired in them the traditionally Ukrainian, near-pious devotion; about the moments of pure exaltation he had experienced in Vienna before St. Stefan Cathedral and in the presence of Raphael’s
Madonna with the Blue Diadem
—he felt guilty for having seen the world they didn’t know, and would never see before they perished; even a shared death could not ordain them equal. It may have been the burden of this guilt that, with time, had made him more enamored, in a romantically zealous, innocent way, of the mysterious metaphysical force that blazed in those boys like peat fires and filled him with awe and
trepidation. It was not rational; it didn’t come from books they’d been given to read or ideas they’d been taught—this force came straight from the very land that had borne them and from which they’d been shoved, and stomped, and kicked by rib-cracking Polish, Magyar, Muscovite, and who knows who else’s boots; this was the amassed force of its centuries-old, silent, dark ire.

One day in ’44 around Kremenets, he and three others stopped at a homestead to ask for water; while the mistress fixed supper and ran to the pantry, which in that country they called by the Polish word spizharnia, the master, a solidly built, not-yet-old man with a face tanned like boot leather, sat them all down in a row on the bench under the icons, like kids in a schoolhouse, and demanded to know what it was that they were fighting for. They pulled out a stack of brochures from their knapsacks, and a few issues of
Idea and Action
; Adrian, worn out and faint with the warmth, food, and domesticity, mouthed the usual, well-rehearsed statements like a somnambulant, hearing his own voice from a great distance and seeing nothing except the three transfixed little faces of the boys who watched them—and listened to them as though to a choir of angels—from the loft above the stove where their mother had ordered them to stay; and when they said goodbye and thanked the mistress for the supper, while she fussed over them and filled their arms with food—“Here, take this, for the road, of Lord’s bounty”—bread, salo
, and pungent smoked ham, the not-yet-old man suddenly appeared among them dressed in his sheepskin coat, outfitted with an old Russian Mosin Nagant he’d been keeping who knows where, and a leather tote, nodded to his wife, meaning, me too, and when she wailed, “Don’t you go buck-mad on me, old fool!” he said simply, “Martha, look, it’s
our army
that’s come!” Adrian’s throat caught at these words and didn’t let go. It took all they had to talk the man out of it.

Later, he saw dozens of them, those middle-aged men, often side by side with their sons; he watched them fight—and remembered that lump in his throat. This war wasn’t simply fought by people with arms—it was fought by the land itself, fierce and
implacable, its every bush and knoll, every living thing. A young village wife in front of her house, arms across the chest—laughing straight into the Reds’ faces—while he listened from the backyard, rifle cocked.

“Some hot thing you are, all by yourself—and where’d be your husband?”

“He is, indeed, Officer-sir, somewhere, lest your boys shot him already!”

He froze to the spot, ready for an explosion, but the woman better divined the balance of powers: the others sort of withered right there and, after shooting the breeze for a while longer, just for show, left, retreated.

“Gramps, you got some water to drink?” An old man, white-haired and white-bearded, towering over the fence like the Lord of Sabaoth, watching the crawl of exhausted alien troops, two and a half million of them, an entire front making its way back from Germany, where they’d been thrown, like an elephant against a pack of wolves, back in ’45—and too late: “Go on,” the old man called, waving them on with his hands almost in blessing, “the Bolsheviks will take care of you.” Every fence, every gulch, every haystack resisted. Never before had the land known a war like this one. Even that eternal peasant—bovine—patience and stamina, that had so grated on Adrian in the days of Polish rule, suddenly transubstantiated, like water into wine, into something with a higher, ominous purpose, something far from the dumb fatalism he had believed it to be on the sleepless nights when he, a student then, turned over and over in his mind Stefanyk’s blood-curdling vignettes and the caustic lines of Ivan Franko’s “Moses,” “For you knew yourself to be brother of slaves and the shame of it burned you”—now he burned with shame that he could ever have believed himself to be somehow better, higher than they.

In reality, the power of their self-sacrifice was far greater than his—perhaps precisely because not one of these men ever believed himself to be in any way special, and this innate humility concealed their inner dignity, their immutable core, hard as flint—and ready
to strike a fire. Once lit by the blaze of war, they saw themselves, for the first time, inside history—and took it up, with a spit and a rub of their calloused hands, like a plow. “Martha, look, it’s
our army
that’s come!” The army waited for you, it was ready—it gave you a shot at glory and a band of brothers, “gain the Ukrainian nation or die fighting for it,” but also Stodólya and his firing squad, should you fall asleep on watch. Shouldn’t have fallen asleep, of course; you couldn’t fight a war with men like that. Our army is not just an army, and our cause is a special cause. Who couldn’t understand this?