The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

really Orko—but it’s all the same, whoever it was: he was now all of them—all who had perished, blown themselves up in bunkers, burned themselves in haylofts, fallen to bullets, coloring the snow red under them and grasping the grenade’s pin in their fingers’ last twitch—the endless dark ballroom where he danced, his danse funèbre gathered itself, like a fist, into this underground hideout and thousands of the fallen thundered, marching in his blood. Your blessing, Lord.
    Something moved close to the vent. Now, he thought. He seemed to feel the breath coming from above, and the breath mixed with his own, like two people sleeping under one cape. Suddenly, his body shook with a long, fierce tremor, more intense,almost, than love’s, and sticky sweat covered his forehead. He had never been so appalled before.
    “Friend commander—”
    It was Stodólya.
    Geltsia gasped behind him, a thin short noise, a baby-bat squeak. Above, the barking was cut short, turned to whimper—someone must have kicked the dog, so he’d keep quiet. The boot, give him the boot, always the boot.
    “Let her out,” said the one who had been Stodólya; no one had ever heard him speak in this voice before, it slithered over Adrian. “Let Dzvinya out, friend commander, let Dzvinya come out.”
    A noise made Adrian turn around. Dzvinya, who had squatted to throw documents into the fire, had fallen backwards, hit her head on an SMG propped against the wall, and now lay across the bunker’s floor, the fire lapping at her boots. This is hell, he thought, watching the boys drag her aside; I’m in hell. This is what it looked like in the picture of Judgment Day in the old wooden church where his father used to serve Mass: tongues of fire wagged, sparks sliced through faces, and devils in reddish-gray haloes bared their hungry fangs at you from below. Hell is feeling appalled forever, without reprieve. He didn’t know this before. Before, he was happy.
    Smoke made his eyes water.
    “Better you come down here,” he shouted, fighting back the cough. “Your wife has just fainted, she needs your assistance. If your masters will let you, of course.”
    “This is not what you think, friend. I swear—”
    “You’ve already broken one pledge you’d sworn. Don’t trouble yourself.”
    “Let me talk to her!”
    “I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask the ones you’ve sold us to.”
    “She’s guilty of nothing!”
    “All the worse for you, then,” he spoke almost mechanically, as though knocking out the standard insurgent verdict on a typewriter: “We order you to remove yourselves from such-and-suchvillage within forty-eight hours, and similarly from all Ukrainian lands. There is no place for people like you on Ukrainian land. We warn you that failure to carry out these orders will...”
    Stodólya used to be the one who carried out such verdicts; now he, Adrian, had taken his place. “You’ll just have to live with that. The judgment of Ukrainian people will find you.”
    I’ll do it myself, he promised himself mentally—I’ll give you a load of lead when we start the fight, and with such cold satisfaction, it’ll be like squeezing a boil. And that’s when he realized how he would do it—instantly, as if he saw it in a flash of a photographer’s magnesium.
    “Smoke! There’s smoke, comrade captain, they’re burning something down there!”
    “Kyi, don’t be stupid, turn yourself in. Your pal here—he’s smarter than you!”
    He knew how he would do it; he felt an amazing clarity in his mind and body. You’re yet to see how the banderas surrender. You wanna see it—I’ll show you. Something white to hold in his hand—a newspaper? The boys leaned Geltsia against a wall; her head fell to one side. As long as those above don’t stuff the vents shut, so the fire doesn’t go out...Levko kept slapping her on the cheeks; it would be better to leave her alone, let her not wake.
    “The Soviet government is doing you bandits a favor, and you’re turning up your noses at it?”
    He pushed a few more photo shreds into the fire with the toe of his boot: a merry-eyed girl’s face with her smile torn off, a pair of peasant hands folded in a lap. Somewhere in there burned the picture of the five of them together. He’d tossed it in after shredding it. Ashes alone must remain. Ashes alone, everything must burn to dust. Not a name, not a sign, nothing after us. Only our blood for you, Ukraine. A new, unfamiliar