The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

ear until the little thing obedientlylowered its head as if agreeing to accept its end. He saw himself as that lamb now.
    So, that’s how it is, he thought obtusely. So that’s why. As if he slammed, at full speed, into a dead wall, but the momentum kept his legs moving: so that’s how it is. That’s the thing. But then again—he felt strangely relieved, as if someone put red-hot iron through a wound inside him and let the pus out: Stodólya went to find some milk. Left, without explaining himself to anyone, because his wife was pregnant and needed nourishment. Well, he probably would have gone too, if it were him. Would’ve crawled on his hands and knees, even right now. Would’ve kept crawling as long as he had air in his chest.
    She interpreted his silence in her own manner.
    “I can bear it, Adrian.”
    That Adrian resounded inside him like a twist of steel in an open wound. She could’ve addressed him by his alias right then, could’ve given him at least that one drop of mercy. But she couldn’t think about him: he was here, right before her, alive, unharmed, and free, and he was not her child’s father.
    “I won’t be any trouble. And when my time comes in the spring, I’ll go have the baby up in the mountains. It’s all been arranged; I have an address.”
    She was apologizing; she saw herself as the only one to fault for what had happened. And at the same time, she emanated such unbending fortitude that Adrian’s breath caught in his throat: it was as though she’d grown taller in the dark. He did not know this woman, had no inkling of her strength. “They can’t do anything to us!” flashed in his mind with wild, rabid joy, a blast of awe like one inspired by a mighty storm—a sudden, almost superhuman pride for
our women
: no one can ever do anything to a nation like this. We’ll overcome it all, all! He stood at attention instinctively, as if he were about to salute her. Geltsia, Lord. The same delicate violet of a girl, tiny feet in soft lace-up boots, the petals of her tracks scattered over the snow—he’d once stood at her door, stood there all night long, havingforgotten himself with happiness. Geltsia, Geltsia, my only one, why are you not mine?
    And instantly everything inside him collapsed, leaving a sickening vacuum. He remembered where and when he lost her—remembered the dream that had haunted him all these years, ever since the Polish prison: the two of them dancing in a darkened ballroom, somewhere in Prosvita or the People’s House, and at some moment Geltsia vanishes—detaches from his arms and dissolves into the darkness. Just as she would, if she took a step back now, be lost in the gloom of the forest. In his dream, he ran madly all over the great hall looking for her and could never find her; the hall grew bigger and bigger like a dark drill field without end, filling, along the walls, with the dead who kept coming—those who had departed, as the song went, for a different, bloody dance—to break Moscow’s shackles off Ukrainian hands. And he, too, joined the bloody dance—he died in the infirmary; he hung on a cross, and the centurion struck him between the ribs with his spear where the bullet had entered, and Geltsia was the merciful sister. No, she was Magdalene in an overcoat lined with living raw purple, like ripped-off skin, with its hem folded back, and no matter how hard he called for her, she did not hear him and did not look toward him, and the centurion promised him with a malicious chuckle that he’d see her again, moy-ye, see her good and right! And the merciful sister was a different woman, Rachel. And he loved her, too.
    “Dark, swarthy like a Jewess. Pregnant, about seven months.... ” And Geltsia now—four? It suddenly struck him: this meant that when they had that picture taken, she already had the new life living inside her! It coalesced into a pool of light before his eyes, in the space where he sensed, more than saw, her fragile figure between the fir branches, that picture, illuminated like a Byzantine icon by her semi-apparent smile: the smile women smile when they carry a secret invisible to others under their hearts.
    He was overcome with a queer urge to place his hand on her stomach—and instantly, the next thought was: How nice wouldit be if it weren’t Geltsia’s but Rachel’s stomach—then
he’d know for certain
? But he didn’t have a chance to finish that thought, didn’t get to comprehend what it was that he