The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

antenna trained on the village—and Geltsia, like a child too preoccupied with her little owie, was deaf to it all; really, women can be quite obtuse sometimes.
    He forced himself to speak again. “Thank you for telling me.”
    “I didn’t want to talk about it around the boys.”
    “I understand. And now we should go back to them.”
    “Do you not believe me, Adrian?”
    He felt like laughing out loud. Only a woman could ask something like that. He could have repeated her disappeared husband’s commandment: “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Could have said he trusted that she was, in fact, pregnant. Why not? Could tell even judging by how often she had to go outside. He’d read his share of medical texts; he knew the symptoms. Although no, he couldn’t say that, could never have said that to any woman. And that wasn’t what she was asking about anyway.
    So, instead of all that, he blurted, “And who am I supposed to believe?”
    It sounded unexpectedly rude, like a teenager’s outburst. Exactly like a teenager from a ragtag neighborhood, and it made him blush—at least she couldn’t see that in the dark!—and then he heard her respond with a muffled sigh, a bitten-down sob of relief, like the touch of a breeze that brought him her smell through the firs—the blonde smell of her hair that he remembered so well from the days when they were like Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable on a ballroom floor: long unwashed and uncurled, pulled into a greasy knot at the back of her head. It only smelled stronger, more piercing—of cut wildflowers, of hay before a storm—of Her. And he made a quick wish then: if the other one does not come back, be mine! Be mine, until I fall, until my last breath, until the last bullet that waits for me.
    And she, revived by his sincerity, seemed to awake and spoke with new urgency—to make her point, beat it to a pulp. “Mykhailo is an extraordinary person, Adrian! None of you really know him...”
    Mykhailo. Stodólya, Mykhailo to her.
    “He once said he can do everything that the Bolsheviks can, except better, and that’s why he always outplays them. He won’t let himself be caught, you’ll see!”
    She’s always been like that, Adrian thought, ever since the Youth Assembly—always pushed through to the end, to reach whatever goal she’d set for herself. And he stood there like a dolt and let her go on talking.
    “All any of us knows is how to die for Ukraine; that’s the only thing we’re good for. And he belongs to the breed of people who will build it up one day, after we win it.”
    “That could be,” he said. But what he thought was that’s how it actually is. And it’s always been like that, since the dawn of creation: those who love their land above all are the first to die for it in battle. And if they have luck—not the plain soldier-variety luck that he still had, knock on wood, but the gambler’s luck of a historical player that puts him in the right place at the right time so that their blood follows whatever suit leads in the worldwide political game, played far above and beyond their heads—then their blood brings to power those who love power itself and know how to hold on to it. And Stodólya was one of those people; that was true. And the Bolsheviks were, too. If they ever need an independent Ukraine in order to hold on to their power, they will build it just as zealously as we now fight for it in the underground. When Stalin needed to pry Ukraine from the insurgents’ influence in ’44, when the whole country was united behind them, he allowed Ukrainian ministries of defense and foreign relations to be created. And when the Supreme Liberation Council demanded from the Allies that we have a government in exile, Stalin also outmaneuvered us by making Ukraine the founding member of the United Nations Organization. And even though it was alljust for show, formal attributes of a country that does not, in fact, exist, one day we’ll make use of it all...Kyiv wasn’t built overnight.
    And he also thought: in these circumstances, living from one day to the next, he wouldn’t have dared have a child with her. And Stodólya did. So he did not live day to day—he kept a longer count. And that, too, somehow underscored the truth of what she said.
    Meanwhile, she’d gathered speed, she flew now like a bicycle down a hill, unable to stop, possessed by her lust to win him over to her side by whatever means necessary, to make it