The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

brand new gun with a moist oily gloss, and leered at him saucily, askance—as if she had something to say to him.
    Pish!
He almost spat as he would have in the forest (the Soviets, though, spat in the streets openly, right where they walked, and equipped their official offices with a fixture never seen in the Austrian or Polish days—special bowls for spit, like at a dentist’s!). This was the second time he saw this crow—no, couldn’t be, this had to have been a different one—the bird had greeted him at the edge of the city, on one of those boggy little lanes lined with thoroughly country-like homes behind wattle fences. His attention, strained to its limit, fixed every little detail—yet he still couldn’t identify the man in the gray Mackintosh: had they really met before (Where?) or was it merely an illusion, a coincidental similarity of facial features that raised alarm in him?
    This was why the city was dangerous—it was a bottomless and unpredictable reservoir of
the past.
The woods—they were the opposite. The woods had a short memory; the woods, like the partisans, lived in the streaming moment; every storm that blasted through erased the contours of the land you knew by touch just a day before, blocked your path with a fallen tree, a slipped slope; a twig you broke as a sign was torn off by deer or bears; cuts you made on tree trunks scabbed up like blisters on your own skin, and went black, blending into the landscape; heavily trodden campsites were soon overrun by shoots of new grass, studded with a generous sprinkling of buttercup and anemones; blood you spilled seeped into the ground without a trace. Adrian would be hard-pressed to find the bunker where he’d spent the previous winter although he dug it, as conspiracy rules prescribed, himself, with his own two hands; perhaps only the peasants who’d grown up grazing their cattle in those woods and knew the area’s topography like their own homes in the night—just as he, Adrian, could takeapart and put back together a Mauser in three and half minutes without light—could etch into their memories, without fault and for all eternity, a spot at the edge of the village where someone made a money cache or buried archives in milk cans. Except no one ever divulged such information to peasants, and those who did
know
how many steps to take north by the azimuth from the dried-up hornbeam tree or the third rocky outcrop from the right often perished before they could pass the secret on to another confidante. How many of them were already there, slowly rotting underground, our abandoned secrets?
    The city was a different beast—inside its walls, the city closely guarded the entire mass of time lived in it by its people, stashed it, generation after generation like a tree growing new whorls. Here your past could pounce at you from behind a corner at any moment, like an ambush no reconnaissance could ever warn you about. It could explode in your face like a time-delay bomb—with an old Gymnasium professor of yours, miraculously not exterminated by the Germans or the Soviets, or with a former friend from the German Fachkursen, later recruited by the NKVD, or simply with someone who had once been a witness to an old fragment of your life, which was, at the moment, of absolutely no use to you and thus subject to being expunged from your memory—but not from the city’s. Because this was the city’s job—to
remember
: without purpose, meaning, or need, but wholly, with its every stone—just as to flow is the job of rivers, and to grow is the job of grass. And if you take the city’s memory away—if you deport the people who’d lived in it for generations and populate it, instead, with relocated squatters, the city withers and shrivels, but as long as its ancient walls—its
stone memory
—stand, it will not die.
    Adrian walked down the street and felt the city oozing the past from every pore, sap from a pine tree. It trapped him like a fly with his little feet sinking into sticky amber goo—he felt as if he were walking on the bottom of a lake, against the resistance of many atmospheres. It may have been because at the moment he wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as he could. His time,tied to the time of the one who was fading like a dying candle and who waited for his friend Kyi to whom he could pass on the secrets he’d guarded until his last breath, was running out. But friend Kyi could not run. The city hung on him, weighed him