The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

deserved to enjoy it for a little while longer—and he had to exploit this.
    He pinned them to the spot with questions, quick and straight as darts, concise, dry, to the point, Security Service style—not leaving the one being questioned any chance to think—asked in a low voice because his breath barely squeezed in and out of his chest and he was afraid of coughing again. Gradually, however, the strength came and took his side—the anonymous, faceless strength of the Organization, blind as the laws of physics; he managed to claim it again, if only for a few minutes, and he was no longer the patient—he was an officer, and the two healthy, strong, full-blooded people, the man and the woman before him, straightened up and stood at attention without even noticing.
    Who brought him to the hospital?
Woodsman’s men. A zero point zero of new information—of course it was Woodsman’s people, who else, those were the men with whom he’d set out.
How many made it out of the ambush?
They didn’t know.
Were there other wounded?
Yes, but with light injuries, to arms, shins, nothing serious, thank the Lord.
Killed?
They didn’t know this either—but they would have heard if there had been, someone in the surrounding villages would’ve known.
So they were not in a village?
No, the villagewas no longer safe, there must be a mole, NKVD came and stayed for a whole month before Easter, searched every house until they found the hideout with two wounded men—they must’ve known what they were looking for.
And? Took them alive?
No, the boys shot themselves. May their souls rest in peace. This bunker, in the woods, is safe; that’s where they did surgery—at the warden’s station; the one who carried him out on his back, the guy with the big nose, told them he was severely wounded, said he was an important person, a commander from the district, asked them to do everything possible.
    So that’s how it was. He was very grateful. He said another thank-you just to Rachel, who rushed off to bring him water to drink, good, spring water; the whole hospital seemed to be very well kept. “Now let the commander rest a bit.”
    “How much longer?”
    “That’s for the doctor to say when he comes back.”
    It seemed they really had nothing more for him to learn. He thanked them again; a record number of thanks per unit of time. He was, in fact, exhausted—limp like a beaten-out rug.
    The guy with the big nose—that was Stodólya, obviously: he had a distinctive, elongated physiognomy, with gaunt cheeks that made his nose protrude like a wolf’s. He certainly knew his conspirator trade, but he went too far this time: could’ve left him instructions about communication instead of dooming him to passive waiting. They carried full knapsacks of literature—did even a shred of it survive? Stodólya, huh. Carried him out on his own back, fancy that. Why did he think it should have been Roman who saved him?
    It was very good that Stodólya was alive and unharmed. It meant that while he was lying here, Stodólya was doing both of their jobs. Someone had to collect information about the local Bolshevik agents—they really wormed their way into the woodwork here. You should be pleased, Commander.
    He was not; at least not as much as he ought to have been. All for the simple and primitive reason he was ashamed to admit evento himself: he didn’t like Stodólya. Some barrier stood between them, and neither man had a burning urge to overcome it. Such things were rare in resistance where the spirit of brotherhood and a shared fate united everyone, where you were pleased just to see a comrade alive. It just had to have been Stodólya, of all people. The man who saved his life—Stodólya.
    Of the two most readily available strategies for handling an unmotivated antipathy toward someone who’s done you good—forgetting the good or identifying the motivation at the core of the antipathy—Adrian instinctively adopted the latter; his memory solicitously offered something he once heard about Stodólya: that he executed a boy who’d fallen asleep while keeping night watch. The boy was a new recruit, arrived from a nearby village the night before; he was seventeen years old. Stodólya did as The Code demanded, and no one would ever hold it against him, but still Adrian did not like to think about that boy and his last moments in front of the firing squad—as if it were he, Adrian, who was to blame for his ill fate.
    There was something