The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

and this made him truly and finally furious: Why’d she have to go and stand there?
    He was also nettled at the vague, elusive connection he felt between the man and something extraordinarily nice, something precious and joyful—like a sun shower in a glen when he was a child, a veil of gold nuggets thrown over the iridescent green and held up with pillars of sunlight—but what it was—so fine, and perhaps recent—Adrian could not recall, the woman’s presence distracted him; he did, however, recall a different glen, and the recollection lifted him above the last traces of his delirium and made him forget the pain that had pulled an iron brace around his chest again: How long has it been, and what about the boys? What happened to them?
    They were trekking through the woods and the last thing he remembered was the sunlight spotting the trunks of the pines and the rectangular back of their guide, Roman, ahead of him, outfitted in a homemade uniform and girded with a thick, stitched, woven sash, instead of a regular leather belt—men ragged him about it (the girls liked Roman so much they didn’t want him to leave, stole his belt and kept it!), as men in resistance always rag agreeably quiet types. Roman, in response, only smiled his reserved, farmhand smile and kept at whatever he had to do; belt or no belt, he was good at it, his rifle—an MP44, a beauty—was a piece to prize. When Adrian asked him about it, Roman simply said he “borrowed it back in ’44 from one SS man,” and Adrian liked that about him, too—the way he said it. Anyone who’d seen Roman walk through the woods would also know he was a veteran: he had a light, capacious gait, noiseless as a cat’s, not a twigcracked underfoot, not a puddle stirred. Adrian appreciated it right away—this inborn skill of a native who didn’t have to learn the woods by camping with Plast Scouts—and tried to walk like that, too, light and agile, happy to have the man lead him.
    He’d felt out of sorts since the night before, trailed by a premonition of some vague ill, irritable and distracted, and then the strap on his map case snapped right as they were about to set out—another bad omen—so this sturdy rectangular back ahead of him felt reassuring. Adrian was glad to be looking at it, this dependable construction as though especially designed for the purpose of hefting horse-size loads—carrying sacks of grain, bringing sheep out of a snowstorm into the warmth of the barn, and the wounded, sure, why not dragging wounded friends off the battlefield, too.
    Of course you never thought of it like that—you didn’t say to yourself,
Let’s take this guy with us because he could carry me if I get hurt, or finish me off
—but no combat unit could persist
without
this gut-felt certainty. It was the primeval raw goo, the only substance that could bind a handful of discrete male selves into one—a unit, a pack, a swarm, a hundred—only then could an idea transform them into a working army, a self-propelled force that gathered speed and multiplied its strength, so that one day in ’45 a field up north might have turned from rusty-brown to gray with sheaves of rag-doll soldiers that the Bolsheviks kept herding onto it, hundred after hundred, until they had to give up and retreat, never to realize that it was a single swarm of UIA, not even forty souls, that turned them back. The idea, no matter what our political teachers told us, is like yeast and will leaven only the finest flour; and the boys who came from behind the Curzon Line and told stories of how they sang duets, from their trenches, at the Poles on the other side before the fight—“Antko, Antko what are you fighting for?”—“My father Sta-a-alin!”—until one of the Antkos, driven to distraction, would snap back, “No more mine than yours!” which eliminated any possibility of further fighting on the spot, and those boys, proud and very conscious of what they fought for,and by that faith made invincible—were first and foremost good stock, the finest flour that could wrap you like a second skin, so that you and the man before you, and the one behind, and those to your right and to your left, all of you, once mixed together, became one flesh, an army of the people. This was the feeling, lost for several years after the army split up into small groups and went underground, that he experienced again behind the shield of Roman’s rectangular back as they moved through the humid