The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

first time, by the silky defenselessness of woman, little doll, lolly, who trusts herself to you as innocently as nature itself, like a chrysalis that knows nothing yet of how fragile it is, pulled from its underground nest.)
    “I told her,” Geltsia continued, “we had no work at the moment and we didn’t keep hired hands, and when she heard it she suddenly went all aquiver like a sick chicken, it scared me—my owners were having a pest on their chickens right then...” and, catching Adrian’s look, interpreted it in her own way: “Please let it not surprise you, I have mastered all farm chores already; I even know how to muck horse stalls! Only I don’t have the knack for milking,” she added, honestly. “So I ask her—and she’s so famished, so wasted, all eyes—‘Miss, are you unwell?’ And she tells me that she’s tugged there all the way from Poltavshchyna, that they have terrible hunger there, already ate their dogs and cats, and at home she left her mom and little sister Olyunka who cannot get up anymore, born in ’39—turns out, and I didn’t know this, Stalin forbade women to have abortions before the war.”
    “Sure,” the boys chimed in, “he had to re-sow what he’d mowed in ’33!”
    “Ain’t got enough of his own stock to people Ukraine—but he needs someone to work!”
    “And to war for him too—they don’t spare their people at all! Look at the herds they drive at us—like lambs to slaughter.”
    “In the mountains, after they had two hundred of their own killed in a battle, they poured gas on them and burned the whole lot.”
    “You’re kidding! Whatever for?”
    “You know why—to hide their losses. So the number’d be smaller.”
    “And how’s that supposed to work—two hundred living souls gone from the face of the earth and what—no one’d cry for them up there in Moscow-land?”
    “Like the Bolsheviks care! For them, a man’s life or a chicken’s, ’tis all the same.”
    “And when they first came in ’39, some buffleheads in our village were so happy—they made it out, you see, that when it said the Bolshevik Party was krasnaya raboche-krestyanskaya, it meant Christian and for that reason krasna
, fine. Asked of those: Where are your chaplains?”
    Someone laughed, spoons clicked faster against the canteens, and Geltsia remained quiet, her eyes fixed on a single invisible point, as though she was overcome, for a moment, by that ancient, viscous fatigue that makes one fall out of the conversation or forget about a bullet in the stock, and at once something exploded in Adrian’s head, lighting, like a flare, the dark vista. He remembered who it was that wore that sailor suit—it wasn’t that little Polish girl next door, no, it was a different, older girl: down the steep Krupyarska Street the hoop rolled, bouncing on the cobblestones and throwing off dazzling flashes of the late afternoon sun, and a shaggy red cur chased, barking, after it, and up flew the kicked-up pleats of the sailor-suit skirt—“Lina!” Geltsia called and, turning to him, said with loving pride, “That’s my little sister.” He did not remember the younger girl’s face. After looking at Geltsia, it remained on his retina as a bouncing flare, like after lookingat the sun—he only remembered how when she ran up to them, breathing hard, the tiny hillocks of her breasts rose under the sailor blouse and that fresh, apple-crisp waft of a young body that he always associated with Geltsia and the Dovgans’ home—the scent that is only found in homes with growing daughters.
    He understood: Lyusya from Poltava and the little sister, Olyunka, she’d left at home reminded Geltsia of her own little sister—where was she now, the younger Dovganivna, for whom (now he remembered this, too!) he used to buy éclairs in the Mikolyash Passage, not yet bombed into dust then, in the center of Lviv—what had this blood storm done to her?
    Since the spring of ’44, when the NKVD ordered the families of insurgents arrested en masse, small children included, every one of them carried inside the same burning wound, the knowledge that it was not just their own lives alone they offered to lay down—as the Gospels say, for their people, because that’s what they’d chosen freely, and their yoke was their freedom, and their burden was light—but that they also condemned, inadvertently, their loved ones to following them into suffering, into torture or Siberia, or at best—if they