The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

victory over Hitler, the weaker and stupider of the two, for they have no guts to finish the job—only we do, a stateless band without international support or even Red Cross assistance; we alone did not call the tyrant a victor, and that’s our truth, and that’s what we’ll die for. Sometime, in the future, the generations that will come after us will understand this. That “Westerner,” a Frenchman or a Belgian, who manned the radio transmitter up in the Carpathians, the one whose voice on the shortwave broadcast every night—“Attention! Attention! Ici radio diffusser Ukrainienne clandestine”—made us feel like the whole world followed our fates with bated breath, he said so, too: “You are the saviors of Europe’s honor.”
    He stroked her hair, comforting her like a scared child; funny, anytime a woman starts on politics, it’s like showing someone nearsighted the view from a mountain, and even in chess they don’t see beyond two moves ahead. But what is this madness—he wanted her again, more hungrily than before.
    “Come to me.”
    “Wait, love, my dear, my precious, my...my, wait, let me say this, I beg you; this is important. I’ve never said this to anyone, ever. From the minute I saw you, I knew this...I just didn’t know it would be like this, that it could be like this. Listen. If I perish tomorrow, I’ll have no regrets. Do you understand? I know now why I was spared.”
    “Sh-shhh. Don’t talk like that...”
    “No, wait...but if I shall stay alive...don’t be angry, please? I want you to leave me a son. So that you can stay inside me, and I could carry a part of you...in me.”
    He wasn’t listening—what was she saying? Madness. In his mind—like a speeding train running off a bridge, a blazing-white scream
Geltsia!
—Geltsia was the one he wanted to hear say that, why this other woman instead, what had he done to be punished so?—but the train flew, unstoppable, to where the tracks had been blown up, and the engineer could only squeeze his eyes shut against the inevitable, imminent catastrophe.
    “Wait, wait...don’t move, you just lie there; I’ll sit, like this...it’ll be easier for you.”
    And it was, in fact, easier—not right away, though; at first it was hot, dark, and moist, as it should be in the underground realm ruled by the Snake Queen—she was magnificent inside, a tightly coiled, elastic snake, and then it felt good, very good, unspeakably good—maybe it really never was like that and he was still dreaming? He felt himself being carried across a storming sea. No sooner did he roll off one giant wave, blissful and drenched, than he was pulled up again, raised with the next surge, higher and higher, to the desperate, intolerable zenith; he wished only that this would never stop, because with each wave he felt stronger as the new feeling took root and grew in him, the feeling that a man can only glean with a woman, and nowhere else—the joyous wonder at his own might, at his untapped capaciousness. He saw the fiery contour of the electrical circuit again, and, adrift on a calm patch between dying ripples, thought through the hum of pleasure that resonated inside his entire body,
If I had been killed, I
would never have known this.
This was clearly someone else’s thought, spoken to him by something other than his voice, an imprint of her words,
I know now why I was spared
, fed him drop by drop like medicine, to be digested by his mind as slowly and gradually as his flesh soaked in her body’s juices (and he’d thought they were the only thing exchanged when people made love!), and the warning signals flashed in his dimmed mind, hissing rockets above a dark battlefield: for the first time in all his years underground, Beast had truly allowed another person inside him.
    And that put an end to it all—he returned to himself. Happiness drying him, quickly like a dog, a Beast. Sweat grew cold between his shoulder blades and the crack—the fissure just rammed in his personal wall, the lightly charted, merely suggested zone of openness to another person, a person in her own right, regardless of her service to the common cause—was filled with new, quick-setting cement. For Pete’s sake, if he can be a stud like that, what the heck is he doing on his ass in the hospital? All fat and smooth like some Red captain shagging a resort nurse—while the boys are dying somewhere? You lazy bastard!
    Before he could really feel them, he worked his limp