The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

his good fortune with Security. And he was very fortunate indeed. Wasn’t he?
    It was a strange condition, dreamlike. For the seven months since he left the infirmary after being wounded, he’d been living as if dreaming with his eyes open (only in rare moments when he was, as now, alone, he could see all three of them at once, from outside—himself, Geltsia, and Stodólya, whom she called Mykhailo)—and marveled, impassively, as if in an ether-induced haze through which no thoughts could reach to the deep layers of living pain, half-consciously: How could this have happened, and why did it have to happen?. And in that dream he did, in fact, have many occasions to feel grateful for his Security Service, thrilled at every successful mission, of which, knock on wood, they’d had quite a few. It had been a busy summer, the summer of the Lord’s year nineteen forty-seven, when the movement faced the joint special forces of USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, a giant red octopus spread over three countries, and they didn’t waste this summer, nor did they mar their honor and oath.
    He and Stodólya did work rather well together—like two mountaineers roped together, each one outdoing himself to prove his worth to the other. They fed each other a sort of constant reciprocal charge that kept them from giving in to fatigue, kept their minds sharp even after a sleepless march—like that time in the middle of summer, when they had a rendezvous and Adrian arrived not having slept for three days: he was shutting down as he walked, falling, for a few seconds at a time, into a dark well while his alert body continued to move on its own. Stodólya’s people were also exhausted, and Stodólya had eyes like those prisoners their boys had fought off down by the town of S.—bloody like meat in an open wound, with eyelids drawing pale circles on his blackened face when he blinked. It wasn’t Stodólya, but Adrian who noticed Stodólya’s guard sitting down to clean his weapon and said to theman—straining as if to shout from under a mass of water—make sure, friend, you don’t have a bullet in the stock. And it was good he said it, because it turned out he did. And Geltsia was there; he remembered the way she looked at him. Was happy then and not only because he prevented a grievous accident—there’d been a few already in their territory, two riflemen had died after getting wounded like that, cleaning their weapons when they’d lost their vigilance to fatigue—but also because he kept his, and She saw it. And Stodólya did, too. Lord, how he slept then—catching up on the whole summer.... And afterward, wolfing down hot grits, abuzz with new strength and energy that were flooding his body, Adrian told them how he and his unit mowed down a hundred Reds just a few days before—those crowding a clearing in a hollow like a herd of sheep brought to slaughter really—how they could barely keep their machine guns loaded, sweeping at them from the brush.... Even the usually tight-lipped Stodólya said he wished he could have been there.
    No, they really fit themselves to each other quite well—you couldn’t have come up with a better personnel match if you tried; no great mind in General Staff could have devised this on purpose. Adrian wished sometimes there was an organizational adjutant he could pat on the shoulder, whoever it was that had brought them together like this, be it even the Devil himself. And more, somewhere at the bottom of this months-long, eyes-wide-open dream, he felt a pulsing vein, a warm-run of secret pride for not having yielded last spring to a moment of weakness, for having overcome himself—and not having asked to be transferred to a different territory for personal reasons.
    Because it did occur to him at first. He could not conceive how he would work on the same territory with the other two. Friend Dzvinya, friend Stodólya—the thought made the hair on his head ache. Once he even tagged along with Woodsman’s people when they went to a village wedding—he’d never done that before, even when an insurgent family was celebrating a marriage and asked him to come—dragging himself out in public like a lout, hopingfor a temporary distraction. But at the wedding the girls seemed to sing for his ears alone—like it happens with a fresh wound: no matter how you turn, you’ll manage to worry it, moan through your teeth—“Now eagles fly to drink from that well, now that girl stands under a