The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

them into it!
    This was something they understood, something that accorded with what sent them out trudging through snow and muck in other people’s lands and putting to the torch the cities and villages they’d come to hate: some pussy, a fat ration, and everyone afraid of you—they already believed their luck, they were straining their necks and rubbing their hands together, these simple organisms, lower vertebrates that know only the most primitive instincts and destroy anything they can’t understand. Although created in God’s image, they never did become people, and he felt no hatred for them—hatred had already left him like all other emotions that used to constitute his being—but among them was the man whose heart he felt inside his own like proud flesh, like a second, black heart that continued to beat in this hour, and he had to cut it off, tear it out by the root, excise it. Through the lifted lid flooded the white blaze of military searchlights, blinding them with steam and cold, trained on the bunker and the black female shape rose in his sight, endlessly slowly, in stopped time dammed like a lake with the invisible dark wall before them, and stepped into the light—the cold, devilish light meant not to brighten butto blind—with her arms up in the air, to give him a few extra seconds to regain his scorched-out sight.
    His hand squeezed its death grip on the grenade.
    What illumination. What quiet.
    He was looking from above, from aside, from the night sky—and saw himself: his body stepped out of the bunker holding the white bundle in his hand raised high above his head—and a noise came from nowhere, from the firs as if the forest sighed its farewell, and the cloth wing opened above him in the searchlights like a beating sail as tens of eyes boiled to it.
    The world stopped breathing, the Earth held its spin.
    He saw the muzzles of machine guns aimed at him from the dark and the figures behind them—below, by the stream, to the sides, among the trees—saw the face of the shepherd dog barking his head off, straining his leash, and Geltsia’s profile two steps before him, and the trajectory of her gaze clear as on a ballistic graph—a hyperbola reaching down and behind the firs from where the light beat on them and where a cape stood stiff like a monument, and shapes clustered together. There!—and saw the stillness that came over the scene and lasted for a single endless moment melded into the pause of creation—when only he and Geltsia moved among all the figures frozen in the forest with the lightness of somnambulists on the edge of a roof, turned inward to listen to a musical rhythm audible to them alone—this was enough for him to gain his advantage, exactly as he wanted.
    “Him! That’s him!”
    They no longer paid any attention to the woman.
    “Throw down your weapon!”
    He dropped his submachine gun.
    And that’s when they ran to him. Came into motion just as slowly, incomparably more slowly than his consciousness, transported outside his body, commanded—like a pile of black fallen leaves whirling into his eyes. The back of his head felt the burn of hot breath and the dog collar’s clang, the hand that was holding the sheaf of light separated from the cape, and the light wascoming closer, splitting, along the way, into several distinct figures, and the face that pounded inside him as his second heart—the living, real face with the hooked ax of a nose pulling it forward, the wolfish face with close-set holes for eyes—swam into focus, blocking the light before him: it was coming straight at him, contorted with a wild spasm of terror and joy, and it took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t coming at him; no, it was coming at her—at the woman who stood beside him, who, in the rhythm of their inaudible wedding dance, already took her decisive step back before the storm of black fallen leaves.
    “Glory to Ukraine!” he said to Stodólya. And relaxed his fingers curled around the grenade’s handle. The world, deafened, clicked drily, and a white veil flit as it fell—his wedding shirt’s wing.
    “Grenade! He’s got a grena—!”
    “Motherfu—”
    “Oh God!”
    “Down!”
    He did not hear the explosion. Or the two that followed, almost in sync. He only saw the flash, the terrible flash, dazzling beyond what a human brain can endure—as if a thousand suns exploded at once, and the Earth flew up in a single sky-high black wave. He had time to lean forward