The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

would know that under that patch of earth people lived and food cooked—on a tiny gas flame that smoldered for three hours to make a pot of gruel. Rot it. This bunker was never any good. He didn’t like it from the moment he saw it: not dug deep enough, shoddy (loose earth kept falling from the ceiling with a rustlingnoise, over and over, grating on their already ragged nerves) and fatally tight for the five of them. But at the moment they had no other choice but to stay and wait. And now he was walking away to the city, leaving his comrades to the mercy of fate—and the southern wind. By noon it should thaw more, speckle other open spaces with the same ice-hole blackness, and mask their hiding place anew—the air he drew in was humid, only the wind had to hold. Nothing to be done now—dawn was near. He had to go. Over the same wet snow.
    He freed one hand from his overcoat’s sleeve and with a quick motion, like his mother used to do whenever he had to travel away from home at night, made the sign of the cross over the bank, which seemed to have held its breath in the predawn stillness, with the black stain against the white.
    And plunged into the creek.
    “De-vil’s winds! Accur-sed winds!” That’s how Geltsia recited the poem for them—she knew myriad poems by heart, while he had forgotten everything unnecessary that he had ever learned and could not stop marveling at her, making her recite again and again, so he could exist in the presence of her voice, whose sound in the darkness packed thick enough to cut with a knife the breath of four lice-ridden men (and she—She!—had to breathe their miasma), spilled like cascades of silk, seemed to glow like silver. And that’s Tychyna? Really? The same one who now writes odes to Stalin and the kolkhozes?
    Ever since his Gymnasium years he loved no poet more than Ólzhych, his “To the Unknown Soldier”—that was about him: his life. But Ólzhych had been tortured to death in a German concentration camp by, they said, none other than Willie Wirzieng himself, whom Adrian was supposed to liquidate back in Lviv in ’43. Twice he tried, and both times something had stood in his way—that Gestapo man must’ve sold his soul to the Devil; the Huzuls say about such people that they have “help”...Adrian buried Ólzhych for himself then, together with the guilt about the failed missions; nothing in the worldcould make him recite one of his poems now. Even to Her. No, especially to Her.
    De-vil’s winds. At least it’s safer to travel in this wind: his steps cannot be heard in the woods. Although it’s not just his steps that cannot be heard—those
other ones
, if they came, wouldn’t be heard either.
    He once had the alias Beast—a long time ago, back with the Germans. Later, when Beast got on the GB wanted list, he had to change his alias, but, thank God, did not lose Beast’s sense of danger, which had kept him alive through the years in the underground and now whimpered inside him like a squashed pup: the wind carried the smell of a raid.
    But after all, he thought, trying to reassure himself, wading in the free water of the warm-run (he would walk another two hundred yards, just to be sure, as far from the bunker as possible, so he wouldn’t betray its location with a stray footprint)—after all, this was no surprise: this raid covered the entire district and had been going on for more than a week already; it was the reason why they had to halt in the woods in this opportune makeshift bunker—still a ways from the village where they planned to winter.
    The village turned out to be occupied by a Bolshevik garrison, which went searching house to house; several families, their courier informed them, had been taken right away in the middle of the night, and people lurked in their yards like shadows—at night, no one put any lights on, except in the village council building, the former parish house (the priest with his family having been shipped off to Siberia the previous winter), where the Reds sat in their meetings with the turncoats all night long and drained, for bravery, buckets of homemade booze they’d looted earlier in the day. The villagers quickly surmised that drink was the Soviets’ preferred currency, and there was hardly a home left that wasn’t at work brewing some; but it didn’t protect people from being robbed, because, in addition to the alcohol, the others, like locusts, swept up everything within their reach—in a