The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

mission.
    “Alright, try again!” said the one who was Wirzieng, and Adrian opened his eyes at once, as if shaken: above him, a woman’s face floated in the dull yellow glow of a lantern, now coming closer, now pulling away. Geltsia!, he thought, thrilled—it had been so long since her last letter he’d begun to wonder if she’d moved out west with one of their convoys, then suddenly remembered he wasn’t supposed to call her Geltsia, should have said Zirka, but it wasn’t her anyway; the kiss that moistened his parched lips wasn’t hers—and in the next instant he knew it wasn’t a kiss, either. He was nailed to a cross; he rose and fell on his pierced hands as he fought for air, and every time he lifted himself, a terrible, infernal pain filled his chest and the centurion below shoved at his mouth a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of his spear. How long can I last like this?, he thought, terrified, and saw below, on the other side of the cross, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill: they sat there like the myrrh-bearing wives in Brueghel’s
Crucifixion
, at the foot of a little knoll, and played cards like in Yalta, with cut-up pieces of a map—he strained, against the piercing pain, to see who’d gotten the map of Ukraine, but it wasn’t there; he realized it was long gone, played to the bottom of the discard pile, and would never come up again in this game. He wanted to shout in anger at the glib Churchill, who looked a little like Wirzieng,
What about your Fulton speech—didn’t you promise to wage war on the Soviets?—
but asked instead,
Lord, why did you abandon me?
The centurion popped up again, bared his teeth at him, and pointed to where Geltsia, no, Zirka, kneeled, bent at the waist, loose-haired, in a fitted uniformovercoat that had parted, very Brueghel-like, to reveal a bit of raw, purple lining that pulsed like freshly skinned flesh. He gathered his remaining strength to call out to her, to catch her eye at least, so she’d know he was there, but she did not see him, someone’s shoulders blocked her view, and he couldn’t figure out how it was that he could see her but she couldn’t see him, and then wondered, with a new pang of horror, if she no longer lived.
    “She lives alright, lives just fine,” the centurion said in the exasperated tone of a peasant telling his old cow to stand still; Adrian looked closer and went cold: under her coat, Geltsia’s body was wrapped in a white sheet spotted with blood.
    “And we’ll see each other again?” Adrian pleaded, because he no longer feared anything, even a no.
    “Sure you’ll see her,” Roman howled menacingly, for some reason in the Boyko dialect and sounding as though he called from the bottom of a well. “Moy-ye, you’ll see her good and right...”; then, he took aim and hit Adrian between the ribs with his spear, so hard that all the stars tumbled out of the sky and darkness fell again.
    And a bit later he clearly heard a woman’s low voice say above him, “His fever has broken, Father Chaplain.”
    And another voice, a man’s, padding softly but surely, as if with felt-slippered feet, answered quietly, “Thank the merciful Lord.”
    This was no longer a dream.
    He opened his eyes and tried to move; the same terrible pain rang through his chest, making him hiss and freeze, eyes bulging, waiting for his body to tell him where it did not hurt. The man stood at the foot of his bed dressed not in a cassock, but in civilian clothes, wearing a vested suit and a cravat, and the woman, whom he could guess to be young and swarthy, lingered right above him, so that in the dim light he could clearly see the lush, oblong hillocks of her breasts under her blouse—like a pair of doves, he thought with a sudden lively interest. And at once felt angry at this most inappropriately eager metaphor, and at the even more inappropriate urge to stroke these doves, and his inability to move, and at the next thought that came on the heels of the first: howscrubby, hairy, and foul-smelling he must’ve grown, a beast of the woods indeed, in contrast to the man at the foot of his bed, who, although no longer young, with large bald spots on his bulbous forehead, was clean-shaven, sharp-collared, and seemed to emanate the unmistakable aura of a good cologne, which made it all the more humiliating to be lying in front of him like this. These were all rotten, sordid thoughts, noxious muck—all occasioned by this woman, her near warmth and scent,