The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

so he would share her faith in the man whose seed she carried in her womb.
    “The Bolsheviks won’t kill him; they want him for themselves! They had offered to take him into their intelligence school, and after—to send him to Yugoslavia as an agent. They didn’t even want any information about us from him—only for him to work for them. And he outwitted them then, too: rubbed his palms so he could show a fever and get into the infirmary, and then managed to organize his escape from there.”
    “Did he?” he said. “I didn’t know this.”
    The bicycle just hit a rock at full tilt, but she never noticed the rattle, din, and clang of her words crashing: so Stodólya had been arrested? (He really didn’t know anything about the man!) If so—he had to have passed a security check with the highest levels of the Service; they must’ve turned him inside out there. But still, for some reason, this thought did not comfort him: all the separate little splinters he pulled out one by one—the disappearance, the photograph, the loss of Stodólya’s bunker, his past arrest—were coming together of their own accord, were aligning themselves into a geometric progression, and connections appeared between them where none had been evident before. Every new circumstance landed with a more alarming screech because it took on the combined weight of whatever had come before it, and this new sequence of elements skewed the whole picture further and further away from the image Geltsia had in her mind. I have to write a report to the Supreme Command, he realized. Just write it all out, as it is. And with this, part of theburden shifted off his shoulders; he felt better—it’s always easier when someone else has to make the decisions, someone other than you. He stirred impatiently, felt a wet scrape of a fir branch on his cheek, its myriad minute claws—he was in his proper place again; he knew what he had to do.
    “Anything else, Miss Gela?”
    “Don’t say ‘miss’ to me, Adrian. Please.”
    “I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
    “Because it sounds like you don’t take me seriously.”
    And this is just the beginning, he thought. It’ll only be worse later—if they get a later.
    “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “And now please, go ahead, I’ll cover the tracks.”
    “Let me do that.”
    “Some bullet-head you are!”
    “There,” she laughed—a sprinkle of light in the darkness, “that’s better! Much better than ‘miss.’ I just wanted to make weewee down by the stream.”
    “I’ll wait for you,” he said, moved by this sudden intimacy, such as they’d never shared before. He remembered an illustration in some thick anatomical volume: a semicircular dome full of innards, the riveting and simultaneously repugnant female belly and uterus inside, an oval aquarium with a bigheaded mollusk, pressing the bladder from above.... He tried to imagine what that would feel like, that pressure, shuddering as if he’d felt a wet toad in his pants, and for the first time realized that her condition meant something completely different to her than it did to him—that all this time her body knew something he would never know, even if he’d memorized all the books in the world. This something existed outside their struggle’s logic, in utter disregard of it, as if it had come from a different planet. And that’s the way it’ll always be, he thought in awe, listening to her descend heavily (she did sound heavy, the rhythm of her step had changed), like a she-bear, down the rocky slope, taking time to choose where to plant her feet (and the one who wasin her seventh month already—how did she move?)—
swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.
    Everything went quiet for a little while, and then he distinguished, over the measured babbling of the warm-run (his hearing strained, pushed like a radio receiver to the very edge of its range) the sound of louder, self-propelled, and somehow very jolly purl, and this sound suddenly clenched his throat in a wave of intolerable, melting, animal tenderness. In the same instant, as a dark accompaniment, the bass hum of free current with the violin solo, he became aware, to his horror, of muscles contracting below his stomach—his body awoke and remembered the other one, the one he lost, hammered in his temples, screamed with its every cell to will back the insatiable luxury of that one spring night, the intimate, selfsame yielding of moist flesh like earth that brims with the