The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

to move for the first time in many years. Someone worked at his side as he lay unconscious, worked to do good for him—the attention he discerned on the other side of the lamp was also kind and comforting, caring, and his forehead retained the feeling of being touched by a delicate, cool hand. He was so moved by this sweet, blessed peace that had been given to his body that he just lay there enjoying his helplessness, feeling his every cell vibrate with joy, glowing inside, the hot wash of gratitude barely dammed by his closed eyelids: kindness, he was filled with kindness; it flowed through him; it emanated through every pore of his skin; it inundated and washed away his feeble self, his memory, his past, even his name—he was nameless, helpless like a new babe bobbing on the waves of an endless, resplendent ocean, washed on all sides with love so abundant it made him weak with awe and marvel.
    Where did it all come from, or had he died already, unbeknownst to himself, and gone to heaven? But he’d had no chance to confess; he’d wanted to confess, but hadn’t gained the strength to speak, and yet he felt he’d been heard and forgiven—so this was what it was like to have been forgiven of your sins. He willed himself, for the last time, to open his tear-streaked eyelids, open wide—like the dead eyes of murdered rebels that the NKVD pins with matchsticks when they put their tangled bodies on display in city squares—and from his alien, heavily numb lips happily peeled off the single and most important thing he had to say: “Thank you, Father.”
    At this, the ocean shifted, and in front of him stood a solid wall of gold, high as the distant heavens, and he knew he had to scale it to get to the other side. This was incredibly hard and he could not hold on—he collapsed, everything collapsed, and darkness fell.
    Later still came long, viscous dreams that trapped him like the knee-deep bogs that filled his boots when they’d marched north in spring. Mother came and poured milk from a jar into his mouth; there was too much, it filled his nostrils and he couldn’t breathe; he fought and turned away until he saw it wasn’t milk at all but cherry liqueur, hot, thick, and ruby red.
    Then he was in Lviv again, at Sapieha Palace, and boys marched at him out of the gates of the Academic Gymnasium, while he stood with his hand raised in salute waiting for them to pass so that he could march after them, but he never got to go with them because Lodzio Daretsky called out of the ranks to him, laughing, “You dope, what are you doing walking around in a uniform? The Soviets are everywhere.”
    “And you,” Adrian called back. “What about you? Are you allowed?”
    “We’ve nothing to worry about now!” Lodzio answered and laughed, a free, raucous laugh, such as he never had while he was alive; only then did Adrian make out, next to Lodzio, Myron, who’d blown himself up in a bunker not too long ago so he wouldn’t be captured, and Legend, tortured to death back when Germans first came by the Gestapo on Pelchynska Street, and that doctor from the East he’d met a few times in the Red Cross office, Ratai, they called him; he had that Poltava way of rolling his l’s so soft, smooth as silk, and he’d perished, they said, this last winter somewhere in the mountains when the Poles dropped grenades into his infirmary. They were all dead, those who marched past Sapieha; they’d never even met each other alive. He recognized some but not others, and could only ask as he watched them pass, “Where are you going, then?”
    “To St. George’s,” someone said, maybe even Lodzio, “to pray for Ukraine. You better get going too, enough lollygagging already!”
    He felt shamed, and wanted to run after them, but something held him from behind. He turned and saw it was Obersturmführer Willie Wirzieng himself, the hog with a butcher’s jaw—onlychanged out of his Gestapo uniform into new NKVD rags, with enormous epaulettes studded with living, blinking human eyes instead of stars, and an invisible voice told Adrian that those were the eyes of Ukrainian political prisoners that Wirzieng had personally gouged out—who grinned at him, strutted and hissed, “Never did kill me, did you?” Adrian protested that he tried, twice, and both times the failure wasn’t his: the first time Wirzieng unexpectedly took a different route, went the way he’d never gone before, and the other time something else made him abort the