The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

widow’s home where an insurgent hideout had been prepared, they skeweredthe whole pantry with probes and when they didn’t, thank God, find the hideout, they took the single thing of value that was in the home—chrome leather for a pair of boots. They’re the horde, said the courier with unconcealed contempt; he was an older man who’d been with the partisans for a long time and knew very well that in any decent army, just as in the UIA, looting was punished by firing squad—but, he added, at least this time they weren’t setting homes on fire.
    They no longer had need to torch villages as they did right after they came, when they treated the Western Lands as enemy territory—and sent whole villages to Siberia with only the clothes on their backs, murdered people on the spot without trials, raised them on bayonets, tied them to horses, sliced pregnant women’s stomachs, and raped girls in front of their mothers’ eyes. Now Stalin had called off those orders, now this was territory they considered
theirs
—and demanded obeisance and duty: seven metric centners of grain per each hectare of land, regardless of whether it was arable, four hundred liters of milk from each cow in a barn—just like the Germans before them, only the Germans didn’t trouble themselves by lying so shamelessly, never promised the Jews the happiest life in the world as they herded them into ghettos.
    There was already a kolkhoz in the village: back in August, in the heat of the harvest, when everyone worked around the clock, the garrison rolled in without warning, toting a Ukrainian lobcock from the Eastern regions, who, waving his submachine gun, rounded up all the men into a fold, locked it, put soldiers around it, and said none who don’t sign up for the kolkhoz come out alive. They started coming out, with hands in the air, on the third day, when they had to drink their own urine.
    And so the new Molotov Collective Farm was founded. The grain that had already been harvested was confiscated with the announcement that only those who work for the kolkhoz would receive some back, fifty grams for each so-called workday—pure scorn, people said, what this world’s come to, worse toil they’dnever endured, even as serfs a hundred years ago with Austria, may it rest in peace! But bread was still taken away; those villagers, the poorer ones, who didn’t manage to hide theirs, now received assistance from the ward—out of the reserves meant for the insurgents. How long those reserves would last was something Adrian had to find out. In two days, one of his management adjutants was due with a report, and then he’d have the complete picture. Fortunately, back in the spring, when the hungry from Greater Ukraine and Bessarabia rolled into Galicia like thunderclouds, the Supreme Commander ordered the UIA to release part of the strategic reserves of grain they had won back earlier from the Germans, so they had enough to help the hungry and, according to the courier, last until the new harvest, so the people weren’t yet really affected by this kolkhoz.
    The lobcock received an oral warning: the local Security Service detail picked him up for an hour-long conversation when he was traveling through the woods with his wife. There was some unpleasantness: the woman panicked at the sight of the banderas popping out from the bushes and fainted, and the husband later had to send her to spend a month in Lviv in the Kulparkiv clinic—to help her nerves. The man himself had cooled off since then, the conversation made its impression: he’d become decidedly nicer to people and even warned the warden about the current raid, but he still wasn’t trusted in the village—neither he nor his poor wife, who returned from Lviv, the courier said, all sort of beaten down, like a hunted rabbit.
    Adrian was irked, as always, when he heard of innocent women being harmed—but in the same instant, he saw, as though sketched out in charcoal, Stodólya’s face, every muscle still; and it seemed he could almost hear the hidden ticking of the man’s thought, like that of a time bomb. Did that woman really see doctors in Lviv, or did she go through GB’s schooling? It was precisely the rabbits like her that often turned out to be the most dangerous informants—they were so terrorized by the GB that they lost theirminds, became unpredictable. And Stodólya was an expert in that. This was
his
war; he fit into it perfectly. Adrian could only be grateful for