The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Stodólya reproached her for carelessness—was it his way of showing her that he cared?
    He knew nothing about that. Had no experience with women. Where would he have gotten it?
    At that wedding in P., when he crushed a glass goddard in his hand, something else happened that he preferred not to recall: the alarmed womenfolk rushed to stop his blood, all but falling over each other, and in the end he found himself somewhere dark on a bed of hay with a fiery-eyed young wife who had fussed over him most of all, rubbed against him with her breasts, as ifby accident, winked and made eyes at him, and finally teased him into an angry muddled confusion—alright, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll let you have it, you’re all the same! In the dark, through the hay, the woman gave off an intoxicating smell of sweat, mixed with the scent of the fire from the hearth, and whimpered with pleasure under him like a little dog, thin and high, on a single note—
ee-ee-eeh
,
ee-ee-eeh
. Outside, in the distance, the chorus of girls’ glass voices pealed the same song, the same record stuck on a gramophone inside his head: “Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her fine since he was little, loved but didn’t take.... ” And then came the moment when he realized, with disappointed, unquenchable irritation, that it was not Geltsia that he’d been yearning for with his flesh all this time, it was Rachel. Rachel who had nursed him back to life and did so in such a manner that any common woman after her simply had to seem bland to him. He all but cursed out loud at the unyielding, unavoidable, unclean whirlpool that had trapped him and dragged him further and further away from his love, and he promised himself, right there, barely having unplastered himself from the generous, sultry woman, that this would be the end of his romancing, once and for all. He couldn’t be allowed to think about women, couldn’t be distracted by them, and certainly couldn’t entertain any dreams of personal happiness—not until the struggle was over.
    Unless, he quickly tacked on, leaving himself room for maneuver, there was a miracle.
    But none came.
    Afterward, he asked to keep that photograph of the five of them for himself—the only photo he had of Her. He never had any others: back in their Lviv days, she did not gift him any. They weren’t engaged, after all—they were friends, comrades from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Youth Network, and later, under the Germans, comrades in the underground, and that is who they remained. He never once kissed her—they hadn’t had the time together for that. Even in his dreams she vanished every time he drew close, in the agony of bliss, to her radiant face.The fact that this face was now Stodólya’s to kiss—that Stodólya could, with the same panzer-force as he talked, crush her entire delicate figure, made even smaller by the uniform, fragile like a chrysalis, with the mass of his thickset, tight-jointed body (he had to be heavy, not for nothing did he always leave the impression of being larger than he really was...), that he could bore into her with the lover’s careless cruelty, and everything that happened between a man and a woman in private could very well occur between them—all this had plainly failed to reach Adrian’s awareness, as though he had an impenetrable shutter closed on that part of his mind.
    In the photograph he
saw
it—as clearly as if it were real. As if those two were making love right before his eyes. That photographer must have come from the mólfar
, the witching tribe—pagan worship was still alive in the country around them, the girls here wore wormwood under their clothes as protection from pishogues, and fern flower still bloomed in the heart of the woods on St. John’s night, and Adrian’s bodyguard, Raven, believed it, too. Or maybe, the war was the reason—the war that had roused not only people, but spirits? On their march to Volyn, rumors of various marvels swirled around them: that at the Pochayiv monastery on the feast of Assumption, Our Lady cried living tears before the people, while in the cave below stirred the silver coffin of St. Job Zalizo, the confessor to Duke Constantine of Ostrog, and, in Ostrog itself, Constantine’s voice was heard above the ruins of his castle, as it had once been prophesied to awaken the spirit of our people down to the twelfth generation. And every night in the fields around the