The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

identify the shirt on the body; Nestor, who perished somewhere in Auschwitz after they arrested him in September of ’43; and Lodzio, Lodzio Daretsky, the most talented of our class, who went to Kyiv last summer, after the resistance there had already fallen,and one day, God be my witness, I will find that son of a bitch who sent Lodzio there, to be shot like a rabid dog by Gestapo the day after he got there—all of them, and there’s more every day, stand in the gloom along the dance hall’s walls, or maybe in formation around that drill field, and follow us with their eyes—Igor and Nestor and Lodzio, and God alone knows how many more. In my dream, I run past them without looking because I am searching for you alone, and only now that you have come back and the dream surfaces as a drowned man comes up from the bottom of the Tysa River when the highland pipes sound their call, do I realize that it was they who filled the hall; it had to grow bigger to make room for them all, all who stepped out of the dance and will never come back—but they stand there, mute, and do not move, and watch us, and wait, and this means that our party, Geltsia, is only now beginning.
    “Grand rond! Avancez! A trois temps!”
    “Time!” the voice urges, shoves, hard, from inside his skull. Gulp, one last time, an eyeful of her face, inhale her, almost taste her on your lips—what fool said you don’t drink off a face?—and off you run, brother, à trois temps
, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta; the streetcar screeches as it contorts its body through the turn; stones of nearby buildings speckle your vision—jump, you useless fool!
    Down, down the hill, ahead of the streetcar, with his hands now free and his eyes slashed raw, heavy as a pound of bleeding flesh severed from her radiant face in the gloom of the crowd, hammered now with endless rocks, stones, cat’s heads, Katzenkopfstein, run!
    Run. Run. Run. Round the corner...through the gate...park...down the path...trees...trees—black stumps. Is it someone’s labored breath behind you? No, it’s your own raincoat, rustling. And why are your cheeks wet, and what are these tiny streams running from your nose to your lips—is this sweat, already?
    I am crying, flashes in his mind. Sweet Lord, I am crying. These are my tears.
    Without noticing, he slows his flight—à deux temps, à deux temps—and touches his cheeks with his hands, with his fingertips,carefully as though it were
someone else’s
face. Woe to you, Adrian, pulses in his head, woe and woe and endless woe, you’re done, you’re finished...
    Why woe?! Everything went just fine!
    He blinks at his watch again: the entire operation, from the moment his mark stepped into Serbska Street, has taken twelve minutes. Twelve and a half to be exact. Actually, almost thirteen. Thirteen.
    So what—he’s never been one for signs—what is happening to him? A premonition? A hunch? What is he afraid of?
    “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said unto him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?’ And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.”
    He never really understood that Gospel episode of healing the bleeding woman, even when he got older and learned from his friends—in lewd, draffish words that did not accord with the Holy Scriptures—what that meant, that the woman was “bleeding,” and it tormented him for a long time, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. His dad read the Scriptures out loud to him when he was little; later, he didn’t dare ask him about it. The story remained a mystery to him: how could He, without seeing, feel that someone had taken of his power?
    Now he knows. The Gospel was as precise as a medical diagnosis. You couldn’t have put it better. There are no better words, that’s it.
    That’s exactly what he felt.
    Something has changed—and he already knows what it is: of those twelve (no, thirteen, damn it, thirteen!) minutes, the last ten remain with him and
do not pass
. The minutes he spent with Geltsia. She remains with him. He carries her inside him and does not want to let go, not for all the treasures in the world. He knows this is how it will be from now on.
    All these years without her he sped across the surface of time as though on smooth ice—light, unstoppable—and now it