The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

would’ve liked to know for certain, because from the darkest bowels of his soul rose, menacing and unstoppable, like a pregnant woman’s urge to vomit, the thing he’d been kicking around in his mind this whole time, on the whole eighteen-kilometer return trek from the city, moving his feet without getting anywhere, trying in vain to stomp out the poison of suspicion already injected into his blood:
the picture!
His photograph displayed at the police station, his phiz that the teacher from P. recognized, having seen him but once half a year before—that picture must have been recent, which meant it could only have been
that same one
, from their group photograph. The one in which he “had mourn”—a shadow on his face like soot, the whites of his eyes bright as sin: nothing like his regular self, a highway Gypsy. No one could ever recognize him if they hadn’t seen him before—the shadow fell from nowhere like a Gypsy curse and disguised him. The GB had nowhere else to find an image of Kyi; that was the only one taken of him in the last three years—the one Stodólya had made of them all last summer.
    How did they get it?
    And
who
revealed the location of Stodólya’s bunker in October? The courier girl didn’t do it. That’s why the GB nailed her tongue to a board. And he knew how they did it: they’d bring in one of their doctors during an interrogation, and he’d pretend to offer medical attention to whomever they’re torturing—he’d feel the pulse, take the temperature, even wipe the victim’s face and put salve on the wounds. And then he’d ask the thoroughly reassured prisoner to stick his—or her—tongue out and say “A-ah!” And the others, as soon as the tongue was out, would jump in and put it in a clamp. Then they can torment their victim to death if they want without having to worry about hearing her scream, or curse, or die with the last “Glory to Ukraine!” You can do whatever you want to a person with their tongue in a clamp.
    No, not quite. Can do whatever with the body, but not with the person. That girl did not tell them anything.
    But
who
did?
What
compromised Stodólya’s bunker?
    Put your hand on my forehead, he asked her silently—She, with Stodólya’s child in her womb. Cool me, clean me, set me free. Let this poison out of my soul; tell me something else I don’t know. Tell me how he kisses, how you part your knees for him, and how he enters you as your husband, and what you feel when he does; tell me the words he says to you—I will bear it all, as long as it is
true
. Tell me so I don’t have to suspect you, too. In his memory flashed, with a burn of pain, their happiest hours in the underground, when they sang all together. Their singing and their communal prayer—those were hours of otherwise inexpressible unity, so resplendent and inspired were the faces of friends, such fires burned in their eyes. Stodólya never sang. He wasn’t musical.
    Somewhere close, but outside himself, he could hear the chronometer ticking: his consciousness, distanced from his pain, sober, cruel, and implacable, like a knight in icy armor timed him, counted his minutes. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    “Let’s go back,” he said, surprised by the sound of his own voice, the way it came out of his throat. “It’s time to leave this bunker.”
    He thought he felt her shrink, draw back. As if he’d hit her (she’d told them about the time, during a raid on the village where she was staying, dressed as a peasant, when a captain had hit her on the face and, before she could realize what she was doing, she instinctively struck him back—her mistress then threw herself at the captain’s feet in panic, assuring him that her niece was “born stupid” and they believed her: for them, it was the only possible explanation for why an unarmed person would respond to being hit by hitting back). Alright, he thought, it’s your turn to strike. Hit me, stomp me, don’t spare me, hate me if it’ll make you feel better—it doesn’t matter anymore; someday, if we survive, I’ll set things straight with you, but now we have to save ourselves. Black hunters were walking through the snow, black dogs were running,pulling the men along behind them, their leashes so taut they sang—he could feel their choking breath at the back of his neck. The anxiety that had been smoldering inside his body like fever now gathered itself, acquired a shape and a contour, pointed outside like an