The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

lieutenant. A tremor he couldn’t control started small inside his exhausted body—like a fire in a house. He focused on the prospect of hot tea, hoping it had finally boiled.
    “Adrian.”
    She stopped—like music that’s been turned off. They stood opposite each other, a step away from the stump that masked the lid to the bunker, and in the darkness he could feel the crown of her head level with his lips. Here was a woman made to his measure—the one such woman in the world.
    “I wanted to tell you. There may not be a chance later. I am very grateful to you. And not just for listening to me right now. For everything.”
    He was silent, a lamb under the cudgel.
    “You are like family to me. Like the brother I never had. And always wanted, for as long as I can remember.”
    “Thank you,” said friend lieutenant, alias Kyi. “Go ahead, Dzvinya.”
    ***
    You’ll never betray me?
    I will never betray you.
    Don’t leave me.
    I will never leave you.
    I don’t have anyone closer than you.
    Me neither. I don’t have anyone at all, just you.
    And the other man?
    There never was another. Forget it. It wasn’t me.
    Are you sure? How do you know you won’t change your mind? That if he comes back and calls you, you won’t lose your head again and run to him?
    I know because I don’t like the woman I was with him. I don’t like her. What motivated me then, what pushed me into his arms—it wasn’t mine. Wasn’t his either. I saw a completely different man when I looked at him—a man created by my want from the hard losses, unaddressed complexes, and collective desires of my people. I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. Because it’s always been foreigners and their lackeys who determined the fate of many in our country. A Ukrainian security agent, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, a Ukrainian banker—people of power—this has always been an unattainable dream: an embodied dream of our ancient collective rightlessness of “its own” native force that would protect and defend. I thought him strong. But he was only cruel.
    To you? To you, too?
    Let’s not talk about this. Don’t.
    Okay, we won’t.
    It was all like a dark pall. But I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be.
    My poor girl.
    What can I say? Taking cruelty for strength is the most common mistake of youth. Youth only knows life by the intensity of its own feelings—a continuous explosive fortissimo with a foot on the pedal. Youth knows nothing of that supreme sensitivity, the true sensitivity of the strong that denies cruelty; youth has no inkling of the force with which a barely audible pianissimo can strike under your heart. Women make this discovery with the first butterfly quickening of a child in their wombs.
    And what about men then—do you think them dumber?
    You love war. And war is not conducive to refined sensibilities, it keeps pressing on their pedals, intensifies them. It’s that same fortissimo, all the time—until you go deaf.
    You are unfair.
    I am a woman. I want to feel the butterfly stir and see God’s presence in it. God is constantly present to us in small things—in a shape of a leaf, in the thin lace of new ice along a shore. In the miracle of miniscule nails on an infant’s fingers. War makes one deaf and blind to all that.
    You are being unfair. War is also a way of seeing God manifest. Perhaps the most direct way. And the most terrible, as it should be—it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Omens in the sky, comets, messages spelled in fire, voices of spirits, descending angels, renewal of churches that will collapse under bombs tomorrow—every war has its own metaphysical history. And none have yielded as many martyrs as this one. And we are mere tools in it, rocks in God’s sling.
    Adrian. Tell me, will this war ever end?
    The war never ends, my girl. It is always the same—only the weapons change.
    Is it you telling me this? Or that other one, the dead man?
    Are any of us alive?
    No! Don’t say that. I don’t want it. And these are not your words at all!
    Don’t forget—it’s a dream. We’re dreaming this, and words can flit into this dream from wherever they please—like dust into your eyes.
    I know where these words come from. I remember the painting that went with them,
After the Blast
—one of Vlada’s, who is now dead, too. Weren’t these her words—about a strong man her imagination created out of fear of losing? What is she