The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

about them?”
    “Give it to me.”
    “A prophesy of the Oracle of frigging Delphi: The words are all there but make no sense whatsoever! Like you said about that secret of yours: a pile of buried rubbish...”
    “‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’”
    “How’s that again?”
    “‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’ That’s what you wrote down.”
    “Sure. Is that supposed to be like E=mc 2 ?”
    “That’s not as stupid as it seems.”
    “What does that have to do...you’ve got to understand, that dream was a warning—a warning that for some reason was left unheeded. Who was that traitor I had to kill? And someone was supposed to die because of him—the dream is still leaving marks to make someone, anyone remember that!”
    “Listen. We’ve got to stop this. We’re both going nuts. It’s like Macbeth with the witches—he also kept trying to decipher their prophetic message, and look what happened to him. It’s not like we’re going to find out anyway. I’m done, sweetie. I quit. Turn off the lights, it’ll be light outside soon.... ”
    “Lolly?”
    “Mmm?”
    “Are you asleep?”
    “I is.”
    “Alright then. Good night.”
    ***
    What happened still didn’t make sense to anyone.
    Stodólya disappeared.
    As simple as that. He’d left the bunker before dawn, soon after Adrian had left, to go to the village to get some food and just disappeared. Hadn’t come back.
    Hard as Adrian tried to look elsewhere, Geltsia’s eyes found him wherever he turned—ghastly, completely black around the huge pupils, corners swelling with blood. He had seen eyes like that once—on a hare he’d shot, and they had gone glassy afterward, turned dead. Those eyes of Geltsia’s grated on him, demanded an extra effort of him while his thoughts raced in every direction at once like mice in a barn. Geltsia hampered him; he wished she weren’t there.
    The thing that didn’t make any sense was that they still had food—not much, and only groats, which you couldn’t just eat by themselves, but Geltsia managed to boil grits even in these makeshift circumstances, and they could’ve lasted another day or two! And they still had a bit of anti-scurvy herbal tea—no sugar to go with it, but so what, he would’ve loved a cup of that tea right now, forget the sugar, as long as it were hot, but it was a chore—so he had to make do with the cold grits when he came back, and now his weighted-down stomach made noises like someone was moving a room’s worth of furniture in it; this, too, was irritating. Darn it, even if they had to go hungry for a little bit, what’s the fuss? To not eat is to not shit—can wait for a bit (as they cheered themselves up when Geltsia was out of earshot): wouldn’t be the first time their stomachs saw their spines; you’d chew on bark and leaves in the woods sometimes just to make your mouth, hot asa dry skillet, fill with spit again, to fool your body into humming with sweet warmth—rebels are old pals with hunger. Whatever possessed Stodólya to take off in such a rush to get food, not even waiting for Adrian’s return?
    Wrong, wrong, something here was wrong and he could feel it, and the boys could feel it, too, and this unspoken torment mixed with anxiety wormed into their souls like an itch drawn out over a fire—like when lice, feeling the heat, crawl out from under your skin, and it’s better to endure the honest scorch to your fingers held over the blades of flame than to bear the crawling that bores into your brain.
    And Stodólya, of all people! The one who was draconian about maintaining conspiracy, the one who had the authority to court-martial others for the smallest infraction—and who knows how many he had convicted already. It wasn’t all enemy blood he had on his hands. His motto was, “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Now it occurred to Adrian that whenever Stodólya said that he did so with a sort of condescending scorn, like he was challenging them—like he was
warning
them, up front, not to trust him, and he found it entertaining that no one braved asking him, up front: So, do you mean we shouldn’t trust you either, friend Stodólya? An ancient paradox, from the Gymnasium logic class: the Cretan said all Cretans are liars, so did the Cretan tell the truth? The paradox cannot be solved: according to Gödel, every system of axioms contains a statement that cannot be proven within that system. But when you find yourself inside the