The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

fell in battle—to the sight of their mangled, vandalized bodies—stripped naked, girls’ breasts or men’s genitals cut off, a trident carved into the dead forehead—and mothers and fathers unable to mourn their children or to bury them but bound to say, as they turn themselves into stone, not thrice but thirty-three times, like Peter, if he could bear it: I do not know this man. I do not know this woman. Mama, forgive me.... (And they forgave—they all forgave, only not all of them endured: the mother from Kremenets, when they stood her up before the bodies of her six sons, also said, “I do not know them”—but never spoke another word until her heart broke under the burden of six-fold grief, and the mother fell dead next to her children.)
    It was easier for him: His mother and father were in Siberia already, and his mother never saw his brothers—arrested in ’41—dead. In the pile of massacred bodies the Bolsheviks left when they retreated, the family could not find either Henyk or Myros.One could choose to think they survived (and that’s what Mother believed), that they were safe somewhere, abroad, on the other side of the ocean.
    He understood—and smiled at Geltsia from across all the past years at once, the way he smiled at her on that long-ago day when he stood at sunset on Krupyarska awash in the apple-crisp aura, the fresh air of young girlhood.
    “And then—did you help those Poltava girls?”
    Their eyes met—and such a depth of gratitude was in her gaze that he felt his entire chest flush with heat: she needed him, after all!
    The men grew quiet and she spoke again, and he saw it all as though with his own eyes—he saw the girl Lyusya. He knew that type of Poltava girl, beautiful (Geltsia said the girl was beautiful) with the beauty of antique statues—tall, majestic as Roman matrons, with classical sloping shoulders and profiles destined for Carrara marble. He’d glimpsed their breed in the refugee waves more than once: The steppe-borne daughters of Ceres, Amazons, Kozak women—how dare the demons of the twentieth century turn them into highway beggars? Geltsia (bundled in a kerchief up to her eyes: “If any strangers came to the house, my story was I had toothache”) had fixed a bowl of thin gruel for the girl, fearing that fresh bread with milk might hurt her after she hadn’t had any for so long, and then took her to the pantry and filled a sixty-pound sack (“Took both of us to stamp it down!”) with wheat flower—of the stores reserved for the insurgents (“I wrote out a quittance for the warden, a very nice man, he just said, ‘We don’t keep count of that,’ said he’d have given her of his own grain, and flagged a wagon right there, to take her to the station, to get on the Zdolbuniv train”). And it was there, in the pantry that it happened: As they went to pour the grain into the sack, Lyusya from Poltava suddenly froze, her face changed.
    “She was looking at my hands,” Geltsia said, guiltily raising her delicate, so unmistakably intelligentsia-bred fingers, and Adrianfelt his stomach knot again in pity at the sight of them: they were fit for a typewriter or a radio, but to muck stalls?
    “She knew you?” Levko whistled.
    “Told you so!” Stodólya cut in, with a kind of venomous satisfaction. “Hands and lingerie—how many girls already got caught on that!”
    “I took off my underthings when I changed, and I was going to soak my hands in brine-water and rub them with ashes—it makes them look like you’d farmed all your life, never fails. But, it’s a chore—so I hadn’t had the time! So we are standing there, the two of us, looking at each other: I know that you know that I know...and then she started crying.” Geltsia’s voice gave a suspicious din, like cracked crystal. “Fell to her knees, grasped my hands, kissed them. I yell ‘Get up, miss!’ and she, ‘I won’t tell anyone! I won’t tell a word to anyone, I swear to you!’”
    She stopped, fighting the emotions. The men were silent, too.
    “And that’s when she told me that as soon as they got off the train the MGB picked them up, right there at the station.... Kept them for half the day telling them horrors about the banderas and instructing them, when they go to the villages, to watch and report if they notice anything special.... Fed them pea soup for that.”
    “And if they’d given her sixty pounds of flour, would you’ve vouched she wouldn’t tell on you?”