The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

system, the realization of it sends your shaken world helter-skelter and all things leave their usual places like in the nightmare where you’re crossing a frozen river and suddenly the ice begins to crack under your feet, opening a black abyss.
    If you start seeing a traitor in everyone, even in the comrade who’d carried you out from under fire on his own back (Was that really what happened? Or was it only an elaborate ruse, orchestrated on purpose like those NKVD barrel ambushes with staged fire to fool the victim into believing that our boys had fought himoff from the Reds, so that the grateful soul would tell them everything they couldn’t pry out under torture? How can you know what really happened if there are no witnesses, except Stodólya, of that fatal May march left alive, and you yourself were unconscious?), if you don’t trust anyone, and see the enemy’s traps everywhere, then how do you not lose your mind, how do you even go on living?
    Could Stodólya have lost his mind? Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore, nerves failed him, he’d gone mad—and no one in the group noticed? No one stopped him?
    Bolsheviks went mad like that, and not infrequently. They had people shoot themselves; leaders throw themselves out the windows. Adrian had long ceased being shocked by that: ever since he saw, in combat once, how when some of the Reds turned and ran, their major, small and narrow-shouldered, a gnome with grotesque wings of shoulder straps, chased after them and shouted, “Halt, motherfucker!” while firing at the running men’s backs, and did fell a few before Raven, first to shake off their common torpor (because none of the rebels had ever beheld a marvel like that—an officer shooting his own men in the back—before), mowed the gnome down with a short burst from his machine gun. Adrian remembered well their common impulse of
sympathy for their living enemies
—up till then he’d only felt sorry for their dead, when they found them lying in the forest uncollected, in foreign uniforms, with glassy eyes staring at the sky (“Why did you come here?” he chided them, mentally), and it occurred to him that the garrison’s atrocities and their constant, self-obliterating drinking, their monstrous explosions of irrational rage (somewhere they skewered to death a man who’d come into the forest for firewood, somewhere else they opened fire on children sledding from a hill and killed one) must have come from more than their sense of impunity alone (“We can do anything!” barked one of those drunken Ivans when villagers came to complain to “Officer, sir” that “you can’t do that”). It must have come from the fact that in a land boiling with partisan warfare these people had been turned into tiny, inanimate screws—and they had broken under the strainjust like screws: the nightmare ice cracked and split under their feet all the time, and behind them shuffled some major of theirs, in big shoulder straps, ready to shoot anyone in the back at any minute. And the major, in turn, had his own superior behind him, and that one his; and this went all the way up to Stalin: everyone was afraid of everyone and no one trusted anyone. And this was the fundamental formula that they carried with them wherever they went like a mass lunacy—to make it so
no one could trust anyone
. So no one would love anyone—because trust is only possible among those who love one another. That’s what they wanted from us; this would be their victory.
    And now, on top of everything else, he felt angry because he sensed in himself and the boys the same noxious virus—the corrosive poison of silent suspicion. He didn’t allow himself to think the worst, but the thought was already inside him, inside them all—injected into their blood like that “vaccine” given to people arrested in K., after which the GB, for no apparent reason, let them all go home, and, within a month, all seventy who’d been vaccinated succumbed to a mysterious illness. A man’s utmost humiliation: to feel that you, without ever noticing, gave in and now act exactly the way the enemy wants you to act, against your own will. And everything that used to give you strength—friendship, brotherhood, love—begins to fall apart from inside, eaten away by doubt. You begin to do the enemy’s work for him: you break up the ice under your own feet, throwing your pickax in time to the beat of your heart.
    Or, maybe, Stodólya simply didn’t risk