The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

haloed like a beatific fresco in church, where her shadow moved as though on a movie screen: retreating, then surfacing again, and then holding still for a while, allowing him to imagine that she was looking at him, and he could no more stop the flood of whispered insanitieshe muttered to himself than if he’d been wrung by a fever. He laughed and felt no cold. The window went dark eventually, and it took him a while to realize what that meant—she’d gone to bed, and he told himself so, muttering under his breath, shaking his head and smiling a little, as if he were lulling her to sleep in his own arms, as if he’d just been granted another proof of her incredible closeness, a sign that the two of them belonged to themselves: she asleep upstairs, in her boudoir, the seam of her steps needling up the snow-white stairs; and he, bearing witness to both these marvels, and thus drunk on his ecstasy, remained there guarding her tracks until light, with no recollection of when and how he got home.
    And the most amazing thing—he didn’t even catch a cold.
    The fact that she now approaches—in the same gliding walk instilled by Lviv’s most glorious tuteurs (only the legs, my lady, we’re moving only our legs!) beside Nusya, his regular courier, and carries toward him that serene, unattainable smile of hers like a discrete source of light in the November cityscape—is equivalent to the heavens collapsing in pieces onto the earth below—he wouldn’t blink an eye if they did collapse. Snow falls and carries the smell of her hair, the dizzyingly tender, humid blonde smell; a flake alit on his lips and its featherlight, barely perceptible kiss pulls his mouth into the long-forgotten smile of
that night
, a blissfully silly smile, reflexive like the contraction of muscles when a doctor taps your knee with his little hammer, and instead of letting them both know that he had completed his mission, that everything was okay and went according to plan, Adrian Ortynsky exhales, equally unconsciously, and blurted out like the village idiot, like a green, greener-than-grass rookie...“Gela...”
    The sound of his own voice brings him back.
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...“Does the gentleman know himself?”
    That’s Nusya speaking from somewhere at his side, almost out of his armpit—she’s such a little button of a girl and always when she’s nervous this awkward Polish syntax spills out of her:she bragged she’d graduated, in the old days, from the Madame Strzalkowska’s Polish Gymnasium, and it’s a marvel indeed that they hadn’t quite managed to craft a first-rate Polish chauvinist out of her—my dear pal Nusya, Nyusichka, who wouldn’t love you, you nugget of a girl? He is suddenly gripped by a wild, predatory joy, reckless, drunk, like the thrill that swells his veins in the middle of a street fight, that explodes out of his chest as song, as uncouth howling (once he caught fire as he ran through yards, balconies, and roofs, firing back, and his head roared, like a tavern band getting people to the dance floor. “Tell you once I went to L-viv! Saw me many pret-ty things!”—
wzzz
! a bullet zapped the tin roofing next to him, and a tambourine rattled inside him, answering, and the fiddle squealed higher and faster, rabid,
presto, presto:
“On a bal-cony up high sat a la-dy stool-a-stri-de! Shame to look and shame to see, but she’s right abo-ve me!”—dog your mother, missed me, didn’t you?)—he’s swollen with it; he’s lifted above the earth; he could grab both girls under his arms, like a fairytale giant, and make a game of kicking open the trap of time that has closed around them—the three of them, encircled in a single reality available to them, however you slice it: a dead body on Serbska Street, a gun in a briefcase, the briefcase in their hands, and the police will start searching the city any minute if they haven’t yet. Tick, tick goes the blood in his veins, counting seconds—they’re all tied together into this one sack, and some giant invisible magnet has pulled Her toward him and pressed Her into his chest, and their dance isn’t over until the orchestra stops.
    So, come on, whoring mother’s son, play! Play, damn it, play till your ribs crack!
    And before any gentleman who might indeed know himself has a chance to utter a word, copper cymbals slam together in his head, a deafening, thunderous clatter descends upon him, a loose ringing like the sound of a crashing crystal