The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

down with stone on all sides; it clung to him with the tar of dozens of eyes he could see, and hundreds more he couldn’t. Lord, how much easier things were in the forest.
    I’ve done become a woodsman, he thought with a city dweller’s instinctive pride in this accomplishment and with a growing anxiety about how much of it was apparent to others (so far, he checked, there was no tail). And right away, the next idea caught up with the previous one, clicked against it, like balls on a pool table: so,
they’ve
really driven us from our cities, from our memory’s terrain—into the underground of history, the twilight zone....
    “Documents!”
    “Please.”
    A captain and a lieutenant, well-fed and also in good shearling coats; another fifty meters behind them, a woman with a market basket approached. The rest of the way was open; the space he left between them as he handed over his documents—piece by piece, not all at once—would be enough for a freely swung cross-in, edge of hand against Adam’s apple above the collar, the two of them at once; he punched equally strong from either side.
    “Looks like he’s on a road assignment, tovarish Kapitan...”
    “Last name?” verifying the papers actually belonged to him. “Zlobin, Anton-Vannych.”
    At the sound of his undeniably Russian pronunciation—a local could never fake
that
!—both finally, as if on command, relaxed, brightened up.
    “Where are you from?” the captain asked with unexpectedly human curiosity; Adrian saw in close-up, as if through a Zeiss telescope, his pale eyelashes and thin, watery skin grained with freckles, breathed his smell—shag, leather shoulder belt, chypre...
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    “Lvovzagotzerno, tovarish Kapitan.”
    “That’s not what I mean! Where’d you fight?”
    “First Ukrainian front,” he said, icing with hatred, feeling the pistol against his side under his overcoat, and in his stomach—the tightening knot of anticipation, because at any moment, any moment now the alien past could rush at him, and he wouldn’t know what to do with it: he was confident in his Russian only with short, chopped-up sentences, even though the original Anton Zlobin, known by the alias Lisovyi in the Insurgent Army, always praised his pronunciation.
    “And I was at the First Byelorussian!” the captain said, thrilled for no particular reason. “Did we cross paths in Berlin, by chance? It’s just your phiz looks so familiar.”
    “I was done fighting at Sandomierz.”
    The woman with the basket passed them and, not looking back, hurried along as if someone were after her.
    “Got laid up in hospitals for a while after that.”
    “Well, it’s no picnic here either,” the captain said by way of boasting—or maybe complaining. “The banderas are keeping things hot alright.” He clearly wanted to add something else, but stopped and waved Adrian off with the carefree, comfortable gesture of a person not afraid of leaving himself open to a throat jab. He offered Adrian’s documents back as if to say, sorry, brother, just doing my job, and in a flash of sudden insight that is the sole provenance of ancient, well-tempered hatred—the kind that doesn’t fog your mind with black madness but hardens, year after year, into a heavy amalgam that melds you with the one you hate like two lovers to death—Adrian realized that the captain also longed for the old warfare. For his First Byelorussian front, the brotherhood of battle that he must have experienced there, and that the reason he tarried with needless yap was that he felt much better then and there, than now and here. And now he would remember him, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin wounded at the First Ukrainian front; now Adrian would have one more person who knows him in this city. Rot your bones to pieces, tovarish Kapitan.
    He kept walking, and about ten meters before the intersection he needed, that same crow materialized on the sidewalk before him. Turned her head every which way and stepped from one foot to another like a whore in high heels. He didn’t give a doggone about signs and such nonsense, but this was a bit too much.
    “Shoo!”
    The crow bounced once, heavy and awkward, like a woman at term, then again, and lifted into the air, wings rustling, and then landed, a few steps ahead, atop a cracked mascaron head above a doorway. Adrian thought he saw the mascaron wink at him. Was it just a tall tale or can crows really live to three hundred years old? And this