The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

main room, on his own, albeit by holding on to the wall; and then he was able to get outside to stretch his legs. The first time he climbed to the surface, the exertion of it sent him back to his cot, where he lay for a while gasping for breath and watching luminescent green circles spin in front of his eyes. He caught Rachel’s dark eyes and read in her gaze a strained, almost painful attention—she even bit her lip as though to fight back a moan, and that’s when he smiled at her as he used to smile to the younger, weaker soldiers, to cheer them up, and being able to do so improved his mood dramatically.
    He remembered the way she bit her lip—or rather held it with the just-visible edge of her teeth—later, when he sat playing chess with Gypsy, a man from Slobozhanshchyna, an Easterner, who was shot in the hip. Gypsy’s face, in the time he spent in theinfirmary, succumbed to a tar-black pirate beard that made his incredibly white teeth glisten ferociously from its thicket when he talked—and he talked a lot, a quick-hitting storm of words, choppy like the rattle of a machine gun. Adrian could make out maybe every sixth word or so, because Gypsy peppered his machine-gun delivery with unfamiliar sayings, interrupted, over and over, with the meaningless “ye follow” as if he were mocking someone hard of hearing, “Hey, you, ye follow, wait with your laundry up the stream, let me finish”—with talk like that, no wonder they couldn’t put him in the village; he was too conspicuously “not from around here.” Adrian found himself taken by surprise when this chatterbox turned out to be quite a competent chess player, who executed such a clever version of the old Indian defense that Adrian, playing black, couldn’t regroup and counterattack until mittelspiel.
    Nevertheless, the whole infirmary rooted for Gypsy, and even Ash, the lad with the penetrating wound to his leg, raised his fever-thinned voice from where he lay, too weak to get up, “Pin his tail, Gypsy!” “Show him how we do it!” the others chimed in. The Easterner was popular, despite his constant showing off and slightly superior attitude toward the Galicians, to whom he referred, always in the plural, as “Galich-men.” (“You Galich-men, you ain’t seen a tarred wolf yet, ye follow?”) How, exactly, one came to sight a tarred wolf was never clear—for all they knew, this mysterious creature was not unlike the tar-bristled Gypsy himself; his buffoonery always seemed to come from the outside, in third person, whom he alternatively ridiculed and reassured, and the Galich-men took no offense. Gypsy did not hide the fact that he once fought for the Soviet army; he even revealed to Adrian something he’d never heard before—that before sending soldiers into combat, Bolshevik commissars swore to them, “on behalf of the Party and the people,” that the kolkhozes would be abolished after the war. Adrian had to laugh at this—how stupid could Stalin really be?
    “Easy to say now,” Gypsy replied, with new and unexpected vile in his voice that made the room go so quiet you could hearshadows gather in the corners. “What else would I’ve fought for on the motherfucker’s side? For what they did in ’33?”
    The boys tsked and shushed him, but without conviction, as if instead of shaming Gypsy for his cursing they felt shamed themselves: “Hey, bite it, a lady’s listening!” Rachel, who was warming something up on her burner with her back to them, did not betray with a single motion whether she’d been listening, but in that instant Adrian became aware, suddenly and intensely, of how differently they all behaved, all the time—not because they were not well, but because of her. Because she was there.
    It only made it worse that he’d never been one of those who took every chance to revile “the skirted army,” averring that the “wenches” belonged at home and not in the insurgency, but, at the same time, he had to admit feeling, on multiple occasions, that he would rather manage without female assistance, although sometimes it was simply out of the question. Among the bleakest episodes of Adrian’s resistance career was his parting with Nusya, his courier of many years: her puffy red face, her mouth that kept slipping into an ominous twist followed, again and again, by bursts of uncontainable sobbing, and the things she said to him then, as he listened mutely and didn’t know how to respond. He was, of course, aware