The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

village of Berestechko roared the invisible battle from three hundred years ago—sabers rattled and clashed, horses neighed, and the wounded screamed so you could hear each man’s lonely call for help, and in the year of our Lord nineteen forty-two this, obviously, could not portend anything good. But at least then the church still endured and gave people comfort and help. Now, with the NKVD men running the churches and the batyushki they installed questioning peasants who came toconfession about any guests “from the woods” who might visit at night, one had no one else left to believe but the mólfars.
    That was a mólfar picture. He could find no other explanation. This was the way people’s faces appear when a spell was cast on water—to make everything hidden rise clear to the surface. A single glimpse at his own visage (it jumped out at him, the first from the whole group) made Adrian remember the Gypsy woman from the fair: so
this
is how she saw him! The witch didn’t lie, it was truth she spoke—he had sorrow. A beast of a sorrow; pox on it. In the picture it could not be hidden. Like the smell that wafts off a man on the day of his death—as when, say, seven men are in a bunker together or camp to wait out the day in the woods, and all of a sudden one of them starts to reek of earth: that’s a sure sign that he’ll fall before sundown. If he’d spotted among his men anyone with eyes such as he had in the photograph (didn’t even look into the lens, the wretch!—looked somewhere to the side as if listening to a distant choir of glass voices,
hey, pity-pity!
), he’d take that poor slob and send him posthaste somewhere quieter, up to the mountains, to rest. Or, better still—legalize him: men don’t war for long with eyes like that. He felt bad about this mishap before Raven—the boy, just like Stodólya’s Levko, came out really well, while Adrian’s face seemed covered by a shadow cast by nothing. He looked a lot swarthier than Stodólya on the other side of the group—only the whites of his eyes glowed. Like a Gypsy’s. Or had the witch in S. put this jinx on him, to teach him a lesson?
    Generally, there was all manner of wrong with the light in that picture: it fell seemingly from nowhere, obeying no optical law. By itself, the light of the summer day that glimmered here and there in the background could not possibly create this effect. If he didn’t know better, he’d say they had the picture taken in a church, not in the woods, but in a nave, where sheaves of slanted glow come streaming down from above, from under the invisible dome, streaming—and refracting around Geltsia.
    Geltsia in her oasis of light looked as though she was rising through the air to float above the rest of them—it wouldn’t havesurprised him to see that she did not touch the ground with her boot-clad little feet—so fair and serene, and smiling such a mysterious smile, as if she knew she’d been put there to watch over the men, but this was not for them to know, and for that reason her life-giving—he wished to drink it with his eyes and never stop, for the rest of his days—beloved smile that he had never seen before, had not quite come out, was halted halfway, only touching ever so slightly her daintily tailored lips, but not quite changing her expression, and her precious—nothing was dearer in the world!—clear-eyed face appeared to be lit from inside, as if Geltsia herself were the source of the fantastic light brought forth by the mólfar’s Fotokor, and the sheaves of slanted glow streamed and shifted to her and from her at once, creating, the longer one looked, the effect of a living, pulsing shimmer.
    And with this radiant shimmer, Geltsia sheltered, like Our Lady of Pochayiv with her cloak, the impenetrably dark shape of the man who stood next to her—and one could see they were selfsame. In between them there was no line that divides human bodies. Never mind that they stood not touching one another, but half a step apart, and Geltsia held her disciplined left hand on the grenade at her belt, jutting a resolute cautioning elbow in Stodólya’s direction, as if precisely to emphasize the official distance between them.
    But there was no line.
    They were one, just as it said in the Scripture: “Therefore shall a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
    He saw it for the first time—it hit him like an electric shock and