The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

in his own consciousness: the bullet he just fired into the chest of the Polish Gebiet Polizei’s Commandant when he stepped out of his office into Serbska Street (Kroatenstrasse, as they call it), and his flight along Serbska and Ruska Streets after that (to the young gunmen he schooled he always said the Germans were bears, and one must run from them the only way one can outrun a bear in the mountains—on a crooked path, diagonally uphill; the Magyars, they were wolves and only knew the language of fear; and the Poles, well, the Poleswere rabid dogs; he knew that for certain, had known it ever since that childhood day when the Uhlans galloped into their village, dragged his father out of the parish, pulled his vestments over his head, and chased him around with whips, while one of them rode on his back, all of them yelling, “Long live Marshal Piłsudski!”—the Poles were rabid dogs and were to be killed like dogs, with a single shot), and everything that happened a mere minute before he slid as a single mass into the past like a load of dirt slipping off a shovel into a hole. It became just another completed mission, another assassination on Beast’s record, while the man himself strolls freely onward with his briefcase, away from it, toward his new, clear, and certain destination: the streetcar stop, his final rendezvous point with the courier girls who would relieve him of the murder weapon.
    He glances at his watch—it would be impolite to make them wait—and hastens his step, through the modest park, past the wet tree trunks, their rutted bark like weathered weeping faces, on to Pidvalna, and every hair that stands on its end on his arms quivers as the seconds tick off.
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    This has always come easy to him: parceling out his time, slivering himself up into its fragments. Shedding the just-lived like flakes of dry skin, pulling all his senses up by the root from the past moment and replanting them completely intact into the present. It could be said he really didn’t have a past in the sense that other men had, the ones who moaned and talked in their sleep. If it were up to him, he’d send them packing home: a man who calls out to the living and the dead in his sleep can no longer fight. Bullets find him in the next fight, and sometimes even without a fight, they just find him, as if made for the single express purpose of finding and pinning someone’s living past. But he is Beast and knows how to live in the fleeting moment alone. And he has luck.
    Now he does not fear the echo of his own steps on the park’s paved path.
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...And what wonderful fog lingers this morning! (He is lucky with that, too.)
    In the fog, or at night, or even without a single glimmer of light at all (especially since the Soviet air raids began and only a few ghostly bluish camouflage lamps smolder on the railway station’s canopy), he knows his city by touch, in his blood, like a lover’s body: wherever he may stumble blindly, wherever he throws his arm out for balance, the city offers itself to him, yields softly, opens a familiar alley, a warm odorous ditch, a moist crease between buildings. Zhydivska...Bliaharska...Pidvalna—it’s his lips, his skin, the slippery lining of his innards that rub and burrow and part the lightly breathing folds of stony flesh; it’s his city and it will never betray him; it’ll guide him through itself like a loving and knowing wife, his faithful one; it’ll spread itself open and take him in; if need be, it’ll hide him completely—inside, in the swampy, sinewy darkness of its underground passages.
    He does not remember how long it’s been since he was with a real woman, even in a dream from which a man wakes with the sticky semen on his thighs—but in
his
city whose every cobblestone (every Katzenkofstein, pox on their German whoring mothers) he remembers not just with the soles of his feet but has learned, once and forever, with every muscle and tendon in his previous, long-gone life as a child, a schoolboy, a loafer, and a fop; here, he stays erect day and night, as it sometimes happens in the happiest of marriages—and the city keeps and protects him as no woman could. At times, the German presence in the city infects his own body: the black-and-white blemished eagles and crooked-arm crosses on buildings (Kroatenstrasse, ha!) feel like scabby calluses on a beloved body, a sensation first engendered by the Soviets in ’39,