The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

operation in S., one they’d lived within the woods for six months, until he gave them every single agent he knew in the territory. That major was great help—he cooperated willingly—and in the six months they spent together they all got so used to each other that near the end they didn’t even guard him anymore. Where would he escape to anyway, back to his Bolsheviks? To be court-martialed and shot?
    When Stodólya gathered his Security Service troops and announced that the operation was completed and they no longer needed the major, it became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. They knew more about the major than about each other. They knew he was a Ukrainian, from around Zaporizhya, that he’d been mobilized to NKVD when he was very young, that he’d brought his wife and child to Lviv with him, that he had an elderly mother back in Zaporizhya to whom he sent money every month—they knew lots of things. Stodólya asked if any one of them would vouch with his life that the major could be left with the underground. That if they kept him, he would pledge allegiance to Ukraine and would fight on our side. None of them were ready to do this; the silence held. Stodólya asked if anyone would volunteer for the liquidation. No one did. Stodólya then chose two men, who later came back as good as dead themselves.
    The major told them that he hadn’t expected any other end for himself. That he was a military man, too, and understood. Even though he wasn’t a military man—he was from the NKVD, which meant he, too, must have had to shoot at an unarmed man with a blindfold over his face. Service like that makes men into no-good soldiers: they can’t fathom that the gun barrel can just as easily be turned on them, and when they first chance upon such an impossibility, they lose all human semblance on the spot; it’s hard to watch. But in the six months he had spent with them, the major also changed, had been reborn—and faced his death as an officer should, as if he wished for nothing more than to earn their respect, to be seen as their equal. He said under no circumstances were they to send word to his wife, because it would only put her in danger from the bureau. It was better forher to know nothing and receive his pension with a bonus for death in service. He asked them not to blindfold him. And for a smoke. They smoked, all three of them. Get on with it, boys, the major said.
    That wasn’t a liquidation; that was murder. Everyone knew it. Those two boys fell soon afterward—first one and then the other volunteered for “dead missions,” the kind from which no one comes back. They were looking for death, Levko said. What they had done broke something inside them. Levko said this without judgment, as if he were speaking about a random bullet or a change of weather—in no way did he intend to discuss with Adrian his commanding officer’s actions, which he did not doubt; something else tormented him, and Adrian saw what it was: Levko blamed
himself
—for not having vouched for the major at that decisive moment. For not having had the courage to step forward, click his heels, look Stodólya in the eye and say, “I vouch for him.” And to hell with what comes next.
    He was a good man, Levko—and it pained him that he had not had the courage. That it was his, Levko’s, faintheartedness, and his faintheartedness alone, that cost these people their lives. All three of them.
    “You are not a coward,” Adrian told him. “But it is good that you’re afraid of being one. A man is always afraid of something; only fools have no fear. The question is what are you afraid of more? Then your greatest fear snuffs out the lesser ones—and that is true courage.”
    This was an idea Adrian cherished; he’d had it since long ago, since the Germans, when he first took part in an attack on a Gestapo jail: the idea that courage, true courage in which you never falter, is simply a question of the hierarchy of fears—when you fear dishonor and a traitor’s brand more than death (and more than that, most of all, so much your blood turns to ice in your veins, you fear Shevchenko’s poetic warning: “You’ll perish, vanish, our Ukraine and no trace will be left on earth”—nothing more horrible could befall you than bearing witness to that, andno force in the world could ever stop you from fighting to avert that horror). But he couldn’t be certain Levko understood the word hierarchy. Although, really, he was saying