The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

giving himself a chance to rejoice at how readily she received him, eager, as though she’d been waiting for him a long time, all her life, and had developed the best, most befitting shapes for him so that she could envelop him instantly, like a glove, to enfold him without a trace, with all her pores and orifices at once, into the pulsing fiery gorge that opened before he realized he was inside it and could only growl to suppress his moan—and then it was over. In the moonlight he could see her face, her eyes squeezed shut and her lower lip bitten, and no longer felt anything except the annoying wetness and the urge to wipe himself clean. And shame, too, the same shame as when he went with other Gymnasium boys to a bordello and also spilled right away, after a few awkward, all-but-painful spasms, and the whore turned her head and leered at him over her shoulder, with one eye, like a hen, peering from behind thin streaks of her hennaed hair that hung over her cheeks.
What, kiddo, done already?
He had the same empty feeling then—and this is it. The familiar pain stirred in his chest, making him anxious, and he let go of her legs. Dog your mother, you’re no lover-hero—you’re a cripple. Another moment—and she would have appalled him, like that redheaded slut.
I loved one girl, then another, and a dozen after—four fair maidens, five Jewesses, and the rest with husbands
.... That’s it, lady. Back off.
    But this wasn’t all, and he knew it as soon as she lifted her heavy, puffy eyelids—slowly, as though returning from a great journey—and fixed him in her unmoving black gaze, the gaze of a snake, flashed through his mind. The Snake Queen who lives underground and guards treasures untold.
    Two narrow, cool little hands squeezed his face, “How ładny you are...,” and she corrected her Polish word, as if through sleep. “Handsome.”
    The Polish startled him—much more than if she’d spoken to him in Yiddish.
    “Are you one of those...assimilated?”
    Instead of answering, she buried her face in his chest—he felt she wanted to devour his smell just as she had swallowed his body a moment earlier—and muttered, words he could, incredibly, hear inside him, resonating off his bones, between his ribs, tickling the spot where she had extracted the bullet—“So the Lord God took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the two of them shall become one body.” The fast, chanted Jewish intonation vibrated inside him, rocked him like a bridge; this wasn’t the intonation of the marketplace as it had always seemed to him—not of trading, but of crying, wailing—how had he not seen that before? This was a dirge, a lament of garments rent and hair pulled out in tufts to fly on the desert wind: Shema, Yisrael, hear my cry! But there wasn’t anyone left to hear her, she had no one to cry to. He stroked her hair. Przemysl, she was from Przemysl, where, in the ghetto, her entire family perished—burned in fire, in ’42. That was before Germans started shipping the Jews out, before the death camps were built—so they simply set the ghetto on fire, and for a month afterward the whole city and the suburbs smelled of charred meat. And burnt hair. He shuddered—the blazing pine tree stood before his eyes again, the giant torch belching sparks into the black sky—he touched the tiny curls on her temples and found them much softer than they looked, and smelling, as unwashed hair should, of gristle and spice, a feral, raw-life smell. With her braids to a pine tree. Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Borukh, Sister Ida with her husband, little Yuzek-Iosele—all burned alive, no one escaped. And she left her own people: a Gymnasium friend’s family, Ukrainians, hid her. And then—then she was caught in a raid, the god of Israel wanted to return her to the dead, but in the train car she prayed to the Crucified likethat Ukrainian family taught her to do, and a miracle came: UIA attacked the echelon.
    Finally, he grasped it: it was not herself she told him about but her god who had abandoned her. The hard and cruel Jewish god who knows neither mercy nor forgiveness and takes his revenge for disobedience on women and children—it was the place of this god, now vacant, that she offered him, the man she herself brought back to life. Her body yearned for him, begged to receive him—he was her absolution of the sin of godlessness, of the terror of empty death. He felt faint again: no woman had