The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

and none he wished for.
    Another time they started talking about the assassination of Colonel Konovalets in ’38, and how differently, had he been alive, the Ukrainian card would’ve been played between Hitler and the Allies during the war, with an incomparably more winsome outcome for us. Stodólya regarded such high-minded speculations with open scorn, saying that such politicking nowadays was no more use than mustard after dinner, and, of course, he had a point; but the assassination itself, its technique and execution—with the bomb camouflaged as a box of chocolates—aroused his genuine curiosity.
    “Colonel let his chocolate get him,” he grumbled, curtly, not as a reprove to the departed for having been fond of such high-society luxuries, as one might have expected to come from a peasant’s son (although Adrian never did know for certain whether Stodólya really was a peasant’s son, had no concept of what education he might have had—Stodólya never said anything revealing and kept his true identity a secret), but more with disappointment that even a great man such as Colonel Konovalets could have had a weakness, even one so tiny—hardly worth a haw—and one could hear in his voice the lesson he extracted from it and learned like
Paternoster
: that you dare not have any weaknesses the enemy could exploit.That’s who Stodólya was—a man without weaknesses. And that’s why he was disliked in the underground.
    And feared a bit, too: Adrian wasn’t the only one Stodólya kept on edge.
    From the day they had themselves photographed, when they celebrated eliminating that provocation group (every tentacle severed like that gave them, for a while, an illusion of breathing more freely), another conversation stuck in his mind, one that fell like a spark on straw and, word after word, flamed up into an almost serious quarrel between Stodólya and Geltsia. They were talking about the hungry that were coming from the East—for some reason, the locals called such people “the Americans.” Levko, of the rosy cheeks, had gone to the city to reconnoiter, dressed in woman’s garb (“You should see what a fetching wench he makes!” Geltsia laughed), and had seen, at the station, a freight train full of these people: they climbed down from the cars and fell right on the spot to rest, having no strength to drag themselves any further. Close by stood a canvas-covered army truck, and soldiers picked up and tossed into it, like logs, those who could not get up again.
    Adrian remembered Gypsy from Slobozhanshchyna, one of the men with whom he had made acquaintance in the infirmary: he, too, had told of similar things happening in ’33 in Great Ukraine. When kolkhozes come, the Easterners then said to the Galicians, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Geltsia, agitated, told a story of her own: one spring she had to wait out raids in a different territory, stayed at a homestead with a reliable family, with the cover story of being their niece, when one day a very young girl, from somewhere around Poltava, wandered into their yard asking for work. “You mean that’s what she’d told you,” Stodólya interrupted, seemingly beside the point; it was obvious they had argued about this before, and now he was taunting Geltsia on purpose by treating her like a child (in response she merely glared at him from under her knotted brow, a single affected glower that pulled Adrian’s insides into a knot).
    “The girl was called Lyusya,” Geltsia continued.
    What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s short for Lyudmyla...a fine name, thought Adrian—it warmed him with some long-forgotten radiance, this name that could belong to a little doll, Lyusya-Lolly-little dolly, white lacy frills below the hem of the dress, fragrant girlish hair plaited into thin braids, the glossy silk of it in his hand. (Long ago, when he had just started at the Gymnasium, a young girl in a sailor suit appeared in the gates of the building next door every morning, with hair plaited into two thin braids—and, giggling, hid behind the gate as soon as he approached, until one time she lingered, stepping forward bravely and informing him, with the composure of a grown woman, in Polish, “Mama washed my hair, would you like to feel it?”—and offered him her bowed head, smooth, acorn-glossy with a little groove in the middle, pale like a June bug’s maggot, which he could not keep from touching, ran his finger over it—and was scorched, for the