The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

else, though. These country boys—these hard young men, straight as an arrow, honest as the land itself—always engendered in him an inexpressible guilt. It wasn’t the purely military emotion of the officer toward the people he could send to their deaths—it was a more delicate, more intimate sort of emotion, like the desperate impotence of a loving father and husband who cannot protect the ones he loves. He felt guilty about his “high” birth; about his education, which inspired in them the traditionally Ukrainian, near-pious devotion; about the moments of pure exaltation he had experienced in Vienna before St. Stefan Cathedral and in the presence of Raphael’s
Madonna with the Blue Diadem
—he felt guilty for having seen the world they didn’t know, and would never see before they perished; even a shared death could not ordain them equal. It may have been the burden of this guilt that, with time, had made him more enamored, in a romantically zealous, innocent way, of the mysterious metaphysical force that blazed in those boys like peat fires and filled him with awe andtrepidation. It was not rational; it didn’t come from books they’d been given to read or ideas they’d been taught—this force came straight from the very land that had borne them and from which they’d been shoved, and stomped, and kicked by rib-cracking Polish, Magyar, Muscovite, and who knows who else’s boots; this was the amassed force of its centuries-old, silent, dark ire.
    One day in ’44 around Kremenets, he and three others stopped at a homestead to ask for water; while the mistress fixed supper and ran to the pantry, which in that country they called by the Polish word spizharnia, the master, a solidly built, not-yet-old man with a face tanned like boot leather, sat them all down in a row on the bench under the icons, like kids in a schoolhouse, and demanded to know what it was that they were fighting for. They pulled out a stack of brochures from their knapsacks, and a few issues of
Idea and Action
; Adrian, worn out and faint with the warmth, food, and domesticity, mouthed the usual, well-rehearsed statements like a somnambulant, hearing his own voice from a great distance and seeing nothing except the three transfixed little faces of the boys who watched them—and listened to them as though to a choir of angels—from the loft above the stove where their mother had ordered them to stay; and when they said goodbye and thanked the mistress for the supper, while she fussed over them and filled their arms with food—“Here, take this, for the road, of Lord’s bounty”—bread, salo
, and pungent smoked ham, the not-yet-old man suddenly appeared among them dressed in his sheepskin coat, outfitted with an old Russian Mosin Nagant he’d been keeping who knows where, and a leather tote, nodded to his wife, meaning, me too, and when she wailed, “Don’t you go buck-mad on me, old fool!” he said simply, “Martha, look, it’s
our army
that’s come!” Adrian’s throat caught at these words and didn’t let go. It took all they had to talk the man out of it.
    Later, he saw dozens of them, those middle-aged men, often side by side with their sons; he watched them fight—and remembered that lump in his throat. This war wasn’t simply fought by people with arms—it was fought by the land itself, fierce andimplacable, its every bush and knoll, every living thing. A young village wife in front of her house, arms across the chest—laughing straight into the Reds’ faces—while he listened from the backyard, rifle cocked.
    “Some hot thing you are, all by yourself—and where’d be your husband?”
    “He is, indeed, Officer-sir, somewhere, lest your boys shot him already!”
    He froze to the spot, ready for an explosion, but the woman better divined the balance of powers: the others sort of withered right there and, after shooting the breeze for a while longer, just for show, left, retreated.
    “Gramps, you got some water to drink?” An old man, white-haired and white-bearded, towering over the fence like the Lord of Sabaoth, watching the crawl of exhausted alien troops, two and a half million of them, an entire front making its way back from Germany, where they’d been thrown, like an elephant against a pack of wolves, back in ’45—and too late: “Go on,” the old man called, waving them on with his hands almost in blessing, “the Bolsheviks will take care of you.” Every fence, every gulch, every