The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

think about it. You must stay.’ After that, our Father finally found it in himself to obey, and joined the UIA, as a chaplain. Our gain, I say, no?” He tried again to arrange his cracked lips into a smile. “I figure it’s better to have Father here and not somewhere in Siberia.... I am sorry; I shouldn’t have said this to you.”
    “It is good when there is a priest on an echelon,” Rachel said, as if chiding him mildly for something they both knew.
    Orko faltered, and then busied his hands on top of the table, carefully folding an already folded piece of paper. Adrian looked at the woman as though seeing her for the first time. She stood there, her arms hanging limp at her sides, all of her somehow exposed, proffered, while the words she’d spoken hung in the air like a hand that’d been extended and ignored. What exactly did she mean by that? And to whom?
    He felt hot, heard the hum of his own blood in his ears. She stood before him and shone her black cabochon eyes at him, and he caught her smell in his hungry nostrils—raw, milky-fleshy, cheese-and-sour, fermenting, incredible...the smell of a woman with smooth skin and hot, creased body, rich in fragrant nooks and crannies. Lord.
    “Boys fought Rachel off a German echelon, back in the day,” Orko’s slightly alarmed voice reached him slowly, from a great distance: the voice tried to wedge itself between them, to shush, to gag them with its unnecessary explaining, to turn them back, but it was too late—the woman’s eyes revealed that. Her stilled, wide-open look, like a gate flung open—Adrian had forgotten a woman could look like that. Fort comme la mort. To hell with it. To hell with death, with its grinning rotting maw—he was alive; he had forgotten anyone could be as alive as this. Life filled him, swelled in him in one fast, incessant ascent; it pulsed in his groin and in the tips of his fingers that screamed for a feel of that smooth, so-near skin. To hell—he won’t die. Not ever. Not now.
    Something in him shifted, a lock turned. Something that a moment earlier would have seemed outrageous, unthinkable, nigh blasphemous, now appeared as the only possible event in the series that had aspired, from the very beginning, to gain this singular point: Roman’s death, Ash’s death, the bunkers, and the raids, and the endless echelons peopled with sorrow and tears—Westbound yesterday, Eastbound today—and the fiery pine, tall as the sky, and the crackle of a woman’s hair as it curls on her temples and burns, and the struggle, to the end, no matter what lies in wait for us up ahead; everything suddenly melded together with violent, intolerable intensity like the bright daylight that blinds after the bunker gloom and scorched him, in the hollow of his aching chest, with the terrible and indomitable force of raw life, hot as a naked wire, like a woman’s body under a woolen skirt and a Soviet gimnastiorka. He could see the tiny stiff curls at her ears, could see, through the toad-colored blouse, her shoulders and her breasts, and remembered them, somehow, tightly wrapped by a white red-dappled sheet. (Was that during his surgery? But he thought he was unconscious...) Her body smelled precisely like the body of a woman who is meant for you and you alone. Everything was as it had to be because it could not be otherwise.
    He rose to his feet—her gaze his lifeline. “Could I offer you my assistance?”
    “We’re about finished already,” answered Orko, who was not addressed by the question; his voice rang with offense, but it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. Without looking away, she slowly raised her renascent arms and smoothed her skirt over her thighs: a single motion to bestow herself upon him.
    Sleep, sleep
—he remembered her voice in the night.
    And it didn’t matter that the rain had stopped and that Orko stayed at the bunker having no way to go back to the village alone on a moonlit night, and whether Orko did fall asleep, whether anyone was really asleep when the two noiseless shadows, one after another, slipped into the corridor. In the dark, the heat she radiated seemed visible, and her thighs above therubber-banded stockings were smooth like freshly scrubbed fishes, only hot; the hatch, lifted, let in a flood of moisture-laden, swooning air, and the merciless moonlight poured over the ladder above—only then did she turn to face him and he pressed her, hastily, even brutally, into the rough log wall, not even