The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

palace, the shattered ice palace of the Snow Queen. A streetcar pulls up, the hoped-for one—everything as it should be, yes, ma’am, everything as the good Lord ordered and the General Staff had planned, and theeye coolly counts, as though through the gun’s sight, the doors: let the front wagon pass; it’s nur für die Deutschen and almost empty at this hour; people at the stop huddle closer to the rear of the car, mostly womenfolk who can’t easily jump up into the middle while the car is still moving, let us climb in now, my girls—please, my fair ladies, go ahead—“Sir, mind your step!”—what a shame, I did step on someone’s toes—“Please excuse me!”—a wench in a headscarf, then a lady in a fox fur collar, and that’s when you clutch your purse anxiously, blocking the way for the folks behind you, nicely done, a sudden shift, a short commotion at the door—I learned this trick back in Polish times, when I did time on Lontska Street in the cell with pickpockets, but where did you pick it up, my pet, how do you know what to do next?—and it is your narrow gloved paw, not Nusya’s, in the midst of swirling bodies that takes my briefcase with the precious Walther, also corpus delicti, in the moment when I’m lifting you onto the step, and then you’re up, in the car, catching the swinging ceramic loop in your other hand and regaling the conductor with your easy, luminous smile. The way you clasp the briefcase is so sweet, so femininely helpless, but you have taken on the burden of mortal risk, albeit the lesser share of it because the police don’t stop women in the streets to search them, do not subject them to that disgusting groping that always leaves you feeling dishonored, clenching your teeth until your brain cramps.
    No, they do not touch the women and, God willing, Nusya and you will get the weapon to its secret cache without any trouble, only no one will tell me if you did, just as no one had told me that you were here—here and not in the safe Zurich where you’d gone to study before the war, and we’d never had a chance to say goodbye because I was chasing lice in the cell on Lontska when you left, and then Poland fell, and the Soviets came, and I had to flee to Krakow because the Poles handed over the lists of their political prisoners to the NKVD, most of them Ukrainians, and our boys started getting snatched again, and of those who did get snatched, none ever came back.
    All these years I kept seeing the same dream—I remember it clearly, and I’ve always thought I don’t dream; I was sure I didn’t, but maybe I just forgot my dreams as soon as I woke up because my mind, once conscious, bolted the doors to the rest of it, so maybe I did moan and call for you in that dream—the dream in which we are dancing in a great dark hall, like the one at Prosvita or the People’s House, only bigger, and at some point you vanish, and I don’t even notice how and when, just suddenly realize that I am dancing alone—an instant of abysmal cold, of sticky terror: Where are you, Geltsia? I dash around looking for you, run around the hall like a madman, and the hall is growing bigger; it’s not a hall anymore but a giant open space, a drilling field, only dark as night, but I know that you’re somewhere here, you must be here, only for some reason I can’t see you.... And now here you are, you’re found again, my girl, the gears of separated times have locked back together, and we are together and have already executed the first movement of our dance, the pas de deux with a handgun. Somewhere an invisible master of ceremonies is calling out the dances inaudibly as I lift myself into the streetcar behind Nusya, and for another ten or twelve minutes will have the pleasure of beholding your face over people’s heads, my brave little girl—this is the kind of music they’re playing for us, nothing to be done about that; we must dance until the end, until the last breath as our oath commands—we were always such a glorious couple, the best on any dance floor. They said the two of us were the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable; all your friends must have envied you, so have no cares and fear not. It’s not for nothing that I have luck, and there’s always been enough of it to go around, to cover everyone who went with me, and those who went alone and did not come back—Igor, whom the Bolsheviks tortured to death in Drohobych jail so that his mother could only