The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

widowers, either.”
    “Mm-m.”
    “No, I mean it. The one who survives, he or she, sort of, didn’t hold on to the other—let them slip. Let death have them, you know?”
    “Hush. Don’t think about that. You and I will live happily ever after and die on the same day.”
    “Really? You promise?”
    “Cross my heart. Worse comes to worst, we’ll blow ourselves up with one grenade.”
    “Why did you say that? About the grenade?”
    “How should I know? I was asleep, remember?”
    “You poor thing!”
    “Yep. You’re the one who roused me—and instead of getting down to business, took me to task about who I killed.”
    “I love you. Here, put your paw right here, uh-huh, that’s good...I know you didn’t kill anybody. Honest.”
    “Cross your heart? You believe me?”
    “I do believe you, Aidy.”
    “Let’s sleep then.”

Room 6. Adrian’s Last Dream
    And we will dream the same dream. The same dream, my love—only we will be watching it from different ends.
Where are you, Adrian? I cannot see you. I’m here. Don’t be afraid. Give me your hand.
    A t night, the wind howled and wailed in the vents, mournful like the clamor of the lost souls it drove through the dark, host after weeping host. The giant firs at the entrance to the bunker flailed their boughs, clawing at the air, and for a moment Adrian thought dozens of hands were pushing the branches apart, splitting and cracking their way through the forest, and heard in the howling of the wind a distant echo of foreign voices calling to each other and the baying of dogs. But it was only the wind—
lem wind
, as the Lemko people from beyond the Curzon Line called it.
    They—who had wandered the entire summer in a wasted, deserted land, among the villages burned by the Poles, where only feral cats, remembering people, ran out to greet them—believed that air could hold echoes of voices that had once rung through it, and insisted that the wind often brought, mixed with the smell of the charred homes, the clamor of a great human mass—children crying, cattle bellowing, engines running—all those unmistakable sounds of a twenty-four-hour deportation, which in reality happened already two months ago.
    Every time, Adrian patiently explained to them that it was not physically possible for a sound to exist without its source and even used a stick to draw on the ground the range of fading fluctuations. But, of late, he himself experienced such auditory hallucinations more and more often: his nerves were wearing thin, which was bad because ahead of him loomed the entire unbroken winter like a wall that could not be scaled—only dug under, crawled beneathby the patient marking off of days, one at a time, on the calendar in the bunker.
    “I’ll craze!” he thought suddenly, in a flash—and got angry at the thought, jumping onto the trunk of a fallen spruce, slipping under it, hugging it with his arms and legs, delighting without shame in the joy of his body roused from immobility, each muscle awake (pure sport, a child’s game—he could’ve just as easily walked on top of the log, sweeping over his tracks with a handful of fir brush). His body responded, engaged, instantly recalling its long-forgotten skills, the deeply buried spider-like four-handedness of a mountaineer, which a long time ago, in a different life, had carried him over mountain gorges on Plast climbing trips; this was
the same
body, limber and lithe, and it was a blast of true delight to move it ahead like this, bear-fashion, under the log, trying not to disturb the feathery cap of wet snow on top. Instantly sweaty, warmed from inside with a healthy heat, dry as a fire’s, he crawled to the spot where he was to leap down into a quick, nonfreezing stream—the “warm-run”—pulled himself astraddle the log and drew a triumphant breath, looking over the whole wooded gulch, lit by the snow’s glow in the predawn dusk.
    And that’s when it struck him, sharp as the proverbial stick in the eye, the thing they’d feared: the snow had betrayed them. The first, fleeting, phantom November snow—as soon as the wind changed and breathed warm from the south—didn’t hold, it sank and opened above their underground bunker, a thawed-out window of dark earth, clear like a circle of breath on cold glass.
    Even from where he sat, he could see the rusting of last year’s leaves in it. Aw, for the love of tripe!
    The wind “spilled” them, undid all their conspiracy. Even a child