The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

found an excuse, too: someone had to take out the latrine bucket—high time really, it was overflowing, foul; others had been taking turns to do it, and now he was strong enough to pitch in. Gypsy readily volunteered to help; Gypsy was quiet today—silently got up, silently climbed the ladder (dragging his leg), silently pushed the lid open. A muted heave, like a sigh—
pfff
—and the cork popped out.
    Later he couldn’t tell how long he sat there, deaf and blind in the green-and-gold carousel, the piercing intensity of colors and smells of life. His head spun; his arms, when he leaned against the ground, trembled. He could barely help Gypsy with anything, leaving him to bury the waste more or less by himself. It smelled of near rain; the yellow genista flowers glowed bright as stars, and a smooth black caterpillar crawled across one yellow petal. Adrian lay on his back to catch his breath and saw the sky: big fluffy clouds, like clumps of down, sped across it. In his temples—the same persistent beat:
no
—like a mad radioman—
no, no, no
. No. A death like that—
no, please, God, no
.
    He begged the Lord for a single thing in this hour of weakness; he pled for a single mercy—a death in combat. Under fire, under bullets.
Do not fear the fire that is sent to test you
. If only it were fire alone! The beautiful, noble, honest fire—he trusted it, he’d been in it, fire from machine guns, and artillery, and tanks; he’d learned to kill with a single shot, and that was war he could understand. It was war he knew how to win—and, in his way, loved; the “old warfare” as the Insurgent Army’s veterans called it, nostalgically. Now the Soviets brought a different kind of “warfare.” More and more often, death at their hands meant typhoid in well water, paralyzing poison in a bottle, gas creeping through the vent into an underground shelter. Before taking your life, this death robbed you of your will and your body, turned you into a sack of pus. Adrian Ortynsky did not fear torture: he knew he could last through it without breaking because, ultimately, it always ended in unconsciousness (or death, he used to add, but after he learned of his strong heart, he became less optimistic). But, Lord knows, this slow, horrific, humiliating extinction—he didn’t want it. Did not want.
Weak I am, Lord, take this cup away from me!
    Gypsy sat nearby and smoked. Then he buried the stub and thoroughly covered the spot with moss. Suddenly, he spoke: “My father, he used to do woodwork. Made crosses.”
    Adrian didn’t say anything.
    “All his life he’d made crosses and they shoveled him in without one. Threw him into one big dump, and that’s that...”
    “The Soviets?” Adrian asked, noticing just then that Gypsy spoke without his usual “ye follow.” “Or the Germans?”
    Gypsy spat a fleck of tobacco that got caught in his beard.
    “Ours. During the hunger. The drag went around the village, picking up corpses. Mother was still breathing, but the driver said, ‘She’s got a day, no more; I ain’t making another trip tomorrow.’ So they shoveled her in, too.”
    They were silent again. Adrian wondered what a drag was. The strange word blocked his mind and didn’t let the rest through. But what about Gypsy himself? How did he survive?
    “I was gone by then,” Gypsy went on, in response to the unspoken question, as often happens between people who share the same bunker. “Grandfather, may he rest in peace, took me to the station when they drove the kolkhoz horses there, to the syndicate, for soap.... Stuffed me into the train car when no one was looking, so I rode all the way to Kharkiv with those horses. They couldn’t stand on their own anymore, so they tied them together, front to back...drove them to the station like that, tied up.”
    Suddenly, Adrian saw it with absolute certainty—as in dreams or when a difficult problem suddenly resolves itself. “Gypsy—that was a horse, wasn’t it? Your horse?” and instantly thought he shouldn’t have asked.
    The gunman’s eye turned at him, glistened strangely. A towering, black-bearded man—like a picture of a highwayman in a children’s book. Half-giant, half-bear. Adrian looked back at Gypsy and heard a rhythmic thumping in his ears—his own heart, or the wheels of the train: with a famished, half-dead boy in the car full of starved horses, skins, ribs, ribs and bones. The horses rode to their death. And the boy rode to