The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Here...Lolly, my Lolly...my apple-crisp girl...”
    ***
    A bird cawed once, waking. Another one clapped its wings against the wind from atop a spruce and answered with a sad cry. (He would say—couriers calling out to each other.)
    Did it hear a human walking, or was it a sign of nearing dawn?
    He had to leave the forest while it was still dark. He had to walk through the city in broad daylight in his officer’s overcoat with ripped-off stripes like the ones commonly worn by discharged Red Army soldiers—who were clean-shaven and even sprayed with the tear-inducing acidic chypre (all Soviet military men seemed to takebaths in the stuff; what is wrong with those people?)—all in order to meet, practically in the enemy’s own lair, in an old apartment building already half occupied by the new “owners,” a dying man who had no right to die until he told him what he knew.
    His father used to go out like this in the dark too, in rain and snow—to administer the sacraments to the dying. Little Adrian would wake to the creak of the plank floors and the shuffle of steps behind the wall, and would see a golden stripe of light creeping under the nursery door. Something groaned in the big stove and the wind wailed in the chimney; younger, sounder-sleeping Myros and Henyk puffed together, like a pair of hedgehogs, in the dark under the down blankets. Outside, black furry forms shifted behind the windows—the men set out because someone needed them. And a sweet, minty chill squeezed the boy’s chest from inside because he knew that one day he would become one of those men and would also set out somewhere in the middle of the night, because such was the duty of men.
    And now he had to set out, had to reach the dying man while he was still alive. Had to take from him information that determined the course of hundreds of other people’s lives. Was this, then, not a sacrament?
    “See you later,” he said when he left; that’s how they always parted in the underground. See you later—never Farewell!
    “God help you,” breathed the watchful darkness in response, in four distinct voices, the way his mother used to bless his father with the sign of the cross when he set out, and later blessed all her sons, one after the other: God help you! Geltsia and the boys—they were his family now; he had no other. His entire past was with him now, from the earliest years of childhood—the entire length of his life wound onto the bobbin of his sleepless, tense, twenty-seven-year-old body.
    He carried it all. Had to carry it all the way there and back, intact and unharmed. Knew too much to fall. And would know even more on the way back.
    The other man, the one fighting death at this very hour, also knew he didn’t dare succumb until he passed on his secrets. Adrian was on his way to relieve him of the burden of his earthly duties—to release him unto death.
    Was this not a sacrament?
    He didn’t know who the man was, was afraid even to think of that (it had to be someone he knew, someone from the regional command)—only knew the password to enter: “Do you have Brits to sell?” And the answer: “Yes, but only size 10.”
    Brits—English chrome boots, not more comfortable but decidedly better looking than the American military boots and, for that reason, especially loved by the small-time thugs who’d flocked “in Western” Ukraine from all over the Soviet Union to grab whatever the comrades hadn’t already stolen—would actually come in handy: his own boots, a German trophy, were worn out. They had served him well though—not once did he trip or stumble on forest paths.
    The forest grew thinner, sensing its edge. In the hum and groan of the wind, Adrian’s sharp-tuned hearing distinguished the drip and slide of melting snowcaps from the tree branches: it was getting warmer. Snow no longer cracked like gunshots underfoot; with every step, he found more cushion from last year’s leaves, moss, and mulch under a thin dusting of white. New snow, especially when wet, is the most dangerous—not like dry powder. Worse yet—old snow caught under a crust. But this—even if he left an accidental footprint in the dark somewhere—would soon hollow out, collapse, wash away. By light,
they
won’t find anything. Unless, maybe, they bring dogs. But then again, they train their dogs to the smells of a rural home—and he stinks like they do, of chypre. Reeks to high heaven—exactly like all dog bosses with red stars on their