Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

There was something else, though. These country boys—these hard young men, straight as an arrow, honest as the land itself—always engendered in him an inexpressible guilt. It wasn’t the purely military emotion of the officer toward the people he could send to their deaths—it was a more delicate, more intimate sort of emotion, like the desperate impotence of a loving father and husband who cannot protect the ones he loves. He felt guilty about his “high” birth; about his education, which inspired in them the traditionally Ukrainian, near-pious devotion; about the moments of pure exaltation he had experienced in Vienna before St. Stefan Cathedral and in the presence of Raphael’s Madonna with the Blue Diadem—he felt guilty for having seen the world they didn’t know, and would never see before they perished; even a shared death could not ordain them equal. It may have been the burden of this guilt that, with time, had made him more enamored, in a romantically zealous, innocent way, of the mysterious metaphysical force that blazed in those boys like peat fires and filled him with awe and trepidation. It was not rational; it didn’t come from books they’d been given to read or ideas they’d been taught—this force came straight from the very land that had borne them and from which they’d been shoved, and stomped, and kicked by rib-cracking Polish, Magyar, Muscovite, and who knows who else’s boots; this was the amassed force of its centuries-old, silent, dark ire.

One day in ’44 around Kremenets, he and three others stopped at a homestead to ask for water; while the mistress fixed supper and ran to the pantry, which in that country they called by the Polish word spizharnia, the master, a solidly built, not-yet-old man with a face tanned like boot leather, sat them all down in a row on the bench under the icons, like kids in a schoolhouse, and demanded to know what it was that they were fighting for. They pulled out a stack of brochures from their knapsacks, and a few issues of Idea and Action; Adrian, worn out and faint with the warmth, food, and domesticity, mouthed the usual, well-rehearsed statements like a somnambulant, hearing his own voice from a great distance and seeing nothing except the three transfixed little faces of the boys who watched them—and listened to them as though to a choir of angels—from the loft above the stove where their mother had ordered them to stay; and when they said goodbye and thanked the mistress for the supper, while she fussed over them and filled their arms with food—“Here, take this, for the road, of Lord’s bounty”—bread, salo, and pungent smoked ham, the not-yet-old man suddenly appeared among them dressed in his sheepskin coat, outfitted with an old Russian Mosin Nagant he’d been keeping who knows where, and a leather tote, nodded to his wife, meaning, me too, and when she wailed, “Don’t you go buck-mad on me, old fool!” he said simply, “Martha, look, it’s our army that’s come!” Adrian’s throat caught at these words and didn’t let go. It took all they had to talk the man out of it.

Later, he saw dozens of them, those middle-aged men, often side by side with their sons; he watched them fight—and remembered that lump in his throat. This war wasn’t simply fought by people with arms—it was fought by the land itself, fierce and implacable, its every bush and knoll, every living thing. A young village wife in front of her house, arms across the chest—laughing straight into the Reds’ faces—while he listened from the backyard, rifle cocked.

“Some hot thing you are, all by yourself—and where’d be your husband?”

“He is, indeed, Officer-sir, somewhere, lest your boys shot him already!”

He froze to the spot, ready for an explosion, but the woman better divined the balance of powers: the others sort of withered right there and, after shooting the breeze for a while longer, just for show, left, retreated.

“Gramps, you got some water to drink?” An old man, white-haired and white-bearded, towering over the fence like the Lord of Sabaoth, watching the crawl of exhausted alien troops, two and a half million of them, an entire front making its way back from Germany, where they’d been thrown, like an elephant against a pack of wolves, back in ’45—and too late: “Go on,” the old man called, waving them on with his hands almost in blessing, “the Bolsheviks will take care of you.” Every fence, every gulch, every haystack resisted. Never before had the land known a war like this one. Even that eternal peasant—bovine—patience and stamina, that had so grated on Adrian in the days of Polish rule, suddenly transubstantiated, like water into wine, into something with a higher, ominous purpose, something far from the dumb fatalism he had believed it to be on the sleepless nights when he, a student then, turned over and over in his mind Stefanyk’s blood-curdling vignettes and the caustic lines of Ivan Franko’s “Moses,” “For you knew yourself to be brother of slaves and the shame of it burned you”—now he burned with shame that he could ever have believed himself to be somehow better, higher than they.

In reality, the power of their self-sacrifice was far greater than his—perhaps precisely because not one of these men ever believed himself to be in any way special, and this innate humility concealed their inner dignity, their immutable core, hard as flint—and ready to strike a fire. Once lit by the blaze of war, they saw themselves, for the first time, inside history—and took it up, with a spit and a rub of their calloused hands, like a plow. “Martha, look, it’s our army that’s come!” The army waited for you, it was ready—it gave you a shot at glory and a band of brothers, “gain the Ukrainian nation or die fighting for it,” but also Stodólya and his firing squad, should you fall asleep on watch. Shouldn’t have fallen asleep, of course; you couldn’t fight a war with men like that. Our army is not just an army, and our cause is a special cause. Who couldn’t understand this?

Now, for the first time in years, he had many hours at his disposal and could think about all this. All the time in the world, as the funny English saying went. The shelter was equipped with a radio receiver, and sometimes he caught snippets of American broadcasts, but he only recognized individual words and didn’t have the textbook with him that he’d begun to study last winter; his German, against his rather naïve hope, did not help at all. Once he woke up, drenched in sweat, with a lucky guess that the “slaughter” he heard from the radio was the same as the German “schlachten.” He must have called it out before he was quite awake, because in the darkness next to him bedsprings creaked and something very dear, a breath of home, bread and fresh milk, brushed hot against his face, and he felt in his hands two warm hillocks like a pair of round-chested doves of the kind he’d kept when he was a boy, and held on to them so they wouldn’t get away.

“What is it now, easy, shhh, shhh,” the doves cooed their reprove, and he realized, in a flash—It’s Rachel!—and meant to beg her pardon so that she wouldn’t think ill of him, to tell her how vowel sounds travel from language to language, crawl across great fields of snow camouflaged in white robes, and how he came to unmask them, but she determined otherwise. “Sleep now, sleep,” and went to do something with his pillow or blanket; he never learned exactly what because he obeyed her order and sank back into sleep instantly, like a rock into water. And he made no morec serendipitous linguistic discoveries after that: the thorny thickets of English pronunciation got the best of him.

Or maybe, he thought in his more lucid moments, when the pain curled up like a small dark animal in his chest and only its slow pulse warned him it was still there, maybe he simply lost the knack for abstract reasoning, having trained his mind to aim for immediate and practical results. For some reason, this made him sad, which, in turn, also proved disconcerting: coupled with his physical debility, the forced mental indolence disrupted his routine and released a host of subterranean emotional currents he didn’t know how to manage—he flailed and bobbed in them, ineffectual like a poor swimmer. He couldn’t even give them names, label them—he’d always been better at numbers than words; he spent his first year in the woods toting around Krenz’s Collection of Mathematical Problems, until he finally had to leave it behind at a safe house—now he wished he had it back; it would’ve helped him keep his wits engaged instead of obsessing about God knows what nonsense.

Beside him, the infirmary bunker hid three other wounded who, for various reasons, could not be placed with village families; one man was brought in after Adrian—gangrene had spread to his leg and, when they unwound the bandage, the small shelter filled with a noxious cloying smell that nothing, not the excellent ventilation nor the nightly airings, could dispel. Once he caught a whiff of the same sugary-rotten-marshy scent on Rachel—it unnerved him: they all liked the nurse; she was so lovely to watch as she worked around them, moving smoothly between their cots, radiating her abundant, blazing aliveness throughout the room, as she cooked their food, or brought fragrant herbs from outside for the brew she boiled on the kerosene burner and poured into small stoups—all without a moment of rest, such a hard worker, bless her heart, and it was so wrong to have this rotten smell connected with her, until he spied her grabbing a roll of gauze before she ducked behind the curtain that cordoned off her bed and suddenly realized where the smell had come from. A hot flush of shame flooded his face then, and he felt like a boy caught spying around the girls’ convenience. He tried to forget this episode, along with the night he grasped her breasts, to remove them from his memory, as was his custom to do with anything that distracted him from the mission. The problem, however, was the mission had stayed up above the ground somewhere, outside the infirmary bunker, leaving him to cough and spout like an engine on half its cylinders.

He was no good at being sick. He made sure to communicate that to the doctor, Orko, the first time he saw him, a young man, a student by the looks of him, and always badly shaved—whenever he sat down on the edge of Adrian’s cot, the lamp illuminated a few stray bristles on his cheek. Orko was possessed of an attractive innate seriousness, often found among good students from poor families; Adrian appreciated how thoroughly and considerately, as if teaching a class, the doctor described what was going on inside his chest, where the bullet had entered, and what path it drilled—here Orko wiggled his fingers in the air and, failing to locate an anatomic chart or a chalkboard, drew with his index finger a parabola in front of Adrian’s nose and stabbed at the space above it. He also confessed they had feared he wouldn’t survive the pain of surgery—they had nothing with which to etherize him: ever since many of our people at the district clinic had been arrested, all drugs, not just ether or chloroform, had been difficult to procure, and they’d had to have their alcohol homemade, with an extra round of distillation. But Orko told him he was lucky to have a very strong heart, and a strong, healthy organism in general, knock on wood, so all they had to do now was pray that nothing got infected.

Orko spoke with a mechanistic, crafty practicality, as though puzzling out a fault in a broken mechanism: all parts and their functions were clear to him, and this inspired trust. Adrian would have loved to talk more with him, but Orko had little time to spare on chitchat: he practiced illegally and was called to do surgery almost every day, sometimes at the forest station and sometimes right in an open field, rushing from one village to the next to save whoever got burned, kicked, or mangled. Two villages over, there was a girl orderly, sent in by the Soviets from the other side of the River Zbruch, but the locals didn’t trust the sovietka, calling for “their own doctor” instead, and were often right to do so, Orko sensibly observed: the girl knew little beyond mustard plaster, fire cups, and, when she first got here, the Komsomol. Now, after a few conversations with Woodsman, she was thinking straighter, and had started working for us, but she’s not much help yet, young as she is and greener than grass. Adrian had to laugh, in his mind, at Orko calling anyone young, although there were, in fact, only a few older doctors with the insurgency—almost all of them emigrated to Europe after the Bolsheviks took over, and even if Orko never had a chance to finish his studies and obtain a proper diploma, Adrian was certainly not one to criticize his professional skills.

It was also a long time since he ate like this: in obeisance to Orko’s instructions, a steady caravan of village women passed through their shelter, bearing baskets of eggs, fresh milk, and sour cream. “You’d think we’d moved the market here,” the boys joked. He was regaining his physical strength quickly: first he could sit up in bed; then he made his way to the toilet, down a narrow fifteen-foot corridor from the 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 the infirmary, 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 hear shadows 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 of the possibility that Nusya liked him—but, come on, girls always liked him, all of them, as far back as the Gymnasium he had to put up with all their talk of how much he looked like Clark Gable, and it drove him to distraction because the boys at the Assembly paid him back with pure, unadulterated spite that made it that much harder to win their respect, and later to best them, demanding that he take, teeth clenched, the most outlandish dares and emerge the winner, every time. Nusya’s coy, kittenish mannerisms were, in his mind, a direct consequence of her conservative Polish upbringing (“Femininity above all!”), in addition to her having been born an incurable flirt, so it was only after that last, heart-rending scene that haunted him for long afterward that he wondered whether a woman was ever capable of sacrificing herself for an idea—for the pure, selbstaendige idea, an idea that’s its own justification—or only one that was embodied in a person she loved, a husband, a father, a son, alive or dead? Even Geltsia—although Geltsia was something completely separate and very different—rushed back home from Switzerland in ’41 exactly like her old man, Dovgan Senior, did in 1918 when he left his family in Vienna, and all but walked the last leg to Lviv from Krakow, arriving to catch the last, withering street fights—those for the Central Post Office. Then he spent a year torturing himself for being late—you’d think the only reason we couldn’t hold on to Lviv back then was not for the massive Polish reinforcements but for Dr. Dovgan’s absence at the front lines, never mind he’d been excused from the Austrian draft for being flatfooted. Twenty-three years later Geltsia also missed the best part—the June 30 Sovereignty Proclamation—but came just in time to see everything else, everything that followed and does not seem to end. In a way, she tied the score for her old man. She’s always adored her father.

Women. And yet Adrian had to admit that every one he’d ever worked with remained tough and loyal to the end. Women took risks less willingly than men—that much was true, but they didn’t go looking for trouble out of pure bravado; instinctively, he’d always trusted women more than men, as though their dedication to the cause drew extra strength from their devotion to the men they loved and took pride in, the twin bonds mightier than steel. He still disapproved when resistance couples got engaged or married—but only because he believed now wasn’t the right time—though no one could deny that the ones who did marry fought twice as hard, as if their wives supplied them with extra energy. Like batteries.

Rachel here—did she have a husband or a fiancé? Why didn’t she legalize in the first place, as almost all Insurgent Army Jews did when the war ended and we went underground? Although, that first wave rode the trains to Siberia—that’s a Bolshevik thank-you right there, for helping them fight the Germans—the later ones were more cautious, obtaining false papers that could get them over to Poland and from there to Palestine. Adrian heard about only one Jewish doctor, Moses, who refused to leave and perished not too long ago somewhere around Lviv in a raid—blew himself up with a hand grenade when he was surrounded.

Adrian watched Rachel’s unreadable back and felt an enormous, monstrous pity fill him—the sort one feels for an orphaned, abandoned child. He never felt this way about the Ukrainian girls in resistance; it stood to reason that they should fight along with the men for the common sacred cause, but why should this Jewish girl suffer? “Come with us, Galya, with the Kozak army, we shall treat you finer than your own mommy,” went the song they used to sing at student parties; and Yuzya, the linguist, once told them, swearing on his own mother’s grave no less, that the original version had Haya, not Galya—Haya, the young tavern-keeper—and it was only much later that the oral tradition reworked the unusual name into a native one that sounded similar. “By her braids to a pine tree they tied the young Haya...”—lied to her, lured her, took her with them, and then tied her hair to a pine tree in the woods and set the tree on fire. And she screamed and no one heard her. Like that Ukrainian teacher whom the Soviet partisans tied by each leg to a bent-over birch and then let the trees go—they did say one of them could not take her screaming up there and shot her, half-torn, in the head. “Who comes riding through the woods he will hear my crying...”—what a horrific song: trees screech, unbending, and you scream, and I can do nothing to help you, girl, only make sure you always have a grenade and teach you to pull the pin out with your teeth when they twist your arms behind your back, before they think to jerk your head up. “Hey, Haya, Haya, green woods left you crying...”—it even sounds vile, this Haya, Haya...like gasping for air, not singing...or are my lungs wheezing? Galya is better.

Adrian didn’t notice as he fell asleep, finally. He dreamt of Roman. The guide was the same as before, in his homespun duds and with the MP on his shoulder. Adrian followed him through the woods again, stepping into his tracks just as before, only the forest was somehow stranger, newly washed by the rain and threaded with sunlight, much like the green woods in the song; Roman seemed to be saying something as he walked, but Adrian could not make out any of it, no matter how hard he strained to listen. Then Roman stopped, and very clearly said, “Here’s where I live.” Adrian looked around him and saw a small, dark hovel, or rather a cabin, empty but for the icons on the wall and a large table in the middle—Roman appeared on the other side of the table, where Adrian couldn’t reach him.

“And where is your family?” Adrian asked, thinking that the cabin would surely be too small for anyone else.

“They’ll come soon,” Roman answered elusively, in his usual reserved way. “They’ll all come soon,” he said and added, “light me a candle.” Adrian was puzzled: Why wouldn’t Roman do it himself, if he’s not a Jew and it’s not the Shabbat? There was no candle on the table anyway.

He woke up from the dream with a vague sense of unfulfilled obligation, but also, for the first time, really rested, refreshed; this made him happy—it meant his body was coming back to him; the elemental, animal pleasure of this erased the inarticulate regret about Roman’s request. It felt good; he was good at slipping the grip of the past.

The new sliver of strength would serve him well that day. It was the day Ash died.

For the first time, Adrian watched a man die not in combat, and it proved a lot more difficult. The plan had been to take Ash to the forest-warden’s station to do surgery later in the day, cut the gangrened leg off, but he did not live that long.

When he woke up, he felt really well, unusually so, even sat up on his cot and smiled without a trace of delirium. Orko came and said encouraging things to him; Rachel busied herself preparing the tools for surgery. Back from his excursion outside, Adrian stopped next to her burner and stared with a convalescent’s eager curiosity at the stubby, oblong metal box: the water in it wobbled a little and glowing sparks of tiny bubbles rose from the bottom, growing more numerous and dense until they sheathed a pair of mysterious-looking metal tongues, not unlike the ones that used to accompany asparagus at Dr. Dovgan’s dinner table. Adrian was mesmerized by the interaction of water and metal: he had seen water boil around bullets and shrapnel when they fell, hissing, into the river—but here was the opposite, water heating the cold metal, warming it gradually, peacefully, surreptitiously almost; there was a strange harmony in this, a musical sensibility that held him captive, unable to turn away. The picture would stay etched into his memory along with the melodic word he’d never heard before, pyemia. Pyemia, aka death, one of its many aliases. Death is a great conspirator; she changes her names and guises whenever she pleases. So much work to unmask her, find her—and so often too late.

“Girls will love you anyway,” Orko said to Ash.

Something new hung in the heavy, stuffy air of the bunker; people lay, sat, and moved as though afraid to disturb this new invisible presence. Adrian asked for some water to drink and saw Rachel’s drawn face up close: her lower lip pinned with her teeth, her Arabian-stallion nostrils tense, flared, the tiny smudges of freckles around her nose dark and sharp as never before. Someone knocked on the vent outside, three—one—three: the code. Yaroslav appeared with some ether he procured for the surgery, carried in a tightly lidded stoup he didn’t open—the flame of the kerosene lamp could ignite the vapors, it was unsafe—but its availability made everyone, not just Orko and Rachel, feel relieved, breathe easier, as if the priest’s offering appeased the invisible force that had nested among them, gnawing at the beams and the walls until they threatened to collapse, a massive, crowded grave. Rachel packed knapsacks, clattering instruments, running Orko through a checklist: “Did they boil the bedsheets at the station? Did the girls bring alcohol from the village? Please pass me that large clamp.” Can they go already? thought Adrian, irritably. Let them take it all out of here, and the poor sap with it. Lord, please help, please let everything go well.

But it didn’t. While they were packing, Ash turned for the worse, and then worse yet. He degenerated faster and faster, like he was falling off a cliff. And then the agony began.

“Mommy,” Ash mumbled blissfully as convulsions shook his body and rattled his teeth. “Go, the bells are ringing...my horse, Bloom...”

“He is not in pain,” Orko said quietly to comfort everyone, himself included. “He feels good: the intoxication, the poison in the blood is making him euphoric like strong drink.”

Adrian covered his head with his blanket and sweated there, in the dark; the stench grew intolerable and he was afraid he’d have to throw up, and then afraid of coughing. Yaroslav asked a question in a low voice, someone answered, “Ash.” The priest didn’t know the men in the bunker by their aliases, but for Ash it didn’t matter any longer.

“Give me your hand, your hand, Marichka...the music’s so fine!”

“My son, you must make your peace with the Lord.”

The altered, deep sound of the priest’s voice, at once kind and resolute, made Adrian startle and recall, no, regain—because he never forgot it but simply put the feeling away, saved it so that he could retrieve it later and enjoy it fully when he was alone—the sensation of floating, weightless and powerless like a newborn, in an ocean of soft, ambient light—Forgive me my sins, Father. It was Yaroslav who took his confession when he was on the brink of death, when they didn’t know if his heart could take him through the pain; it was Yaroslav who gave him absolution, and he felt happy, as happy as only one having passed through a great passion that clears the soul can be, like a surgeon’s scalpel, of the gangrene of sin, so that one may know God is here, he has not abandoned you...thank you, Lord, for your mercy has no bounds, the dark cassock at the foot of the bed, the swinging light of the lamp that was now turned on to Ash—Yaroslav was administering last rites, not waiting for the boy to regain consciousness. Adrian squeezed his eyes shut and began to pray along with everyone else.

And still the end wouldn’t come.

Ash now talked to his commanders, reporting some ambush, a “herd” or a “hollow,” asked to be forgiven and thanked them for coming to his wedding, being his guests—his speech stuttered like a faulty telegraph, words came in mismatched chunks, but it was still clear: Ash was saying goodbye. His body could no longer hold its contents. If not for the smell, Adrian may have been able to stay there with him instead of standing up and risking his neck by climbing above ground in the middle of the day (although he couldn’t tell what time it was—they may have been watching Ash die for hours, days already), but the old Beast, the alter ego he was loath to give up despite the overdue need for a new alias, as secrecy demanded, raised his head and listened warily: outside, everything was clear, the air moved gently, the trees shuffled their fragrant leaves, and a brook rolled on somewhere close with the noise like wind in the treetops. A doe stepped gingerly to the water on her tiny hooves and froze, listening, not far from the lid over the back exit where they’d meant to take the patient, to carry him downstream to the station; she must have sensed the two-legged animal underground; but they were alone, the two of them, and could hear nothing else, no magpies or blue jays, who are always first to signal the presence of strangers, not a mouse disturbed, only the tinkling of cowbells far in the distance—the sweetest music of a clear forest. During raids, the Soviets didn’t allow people to take cattle to graze in the woods, so that no one could send word to the rebels. All clear, just a few meters away was life—and here was death, and its colossal mass squeezed him out of the lair, up, up, like a cork. He 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 survival.

“They lifted them up in the kolkhoz stable,” Gypsy said slowly; it looked like he was grinning with his very white teeth. “Ran the girth under the belly, like so, and ran it through a block, then pulled to lift them.... And ours, while they still took them out to the field, every night turned to our yard. He’d stand there by the fence and look in. He knew he couldn’t come in. A smart horse, he was. I took him my bread, and Mother cried...he recognized me on the train.” Gypsy spat off another nonexistent tobacco crumb and bared his teeth. “Gypsy recognized me, ye follow?”

A gnat buzzed thin and high in the air between them.

“He, while he still knew himself, said he had a girl somewhere,” Gypsy said abruptly, and without any connection to the previous topic. It sounded like a question, a feeling out. “Marichka she’s called.”

“’Round here, they’ve got two Marichkas in every yard,” Adrian grumbled, sharper than he’d meant it. Gypsy, however, nodded with almost visible satisfaction, as though it was exactly what he’d wanted to hear. As if it provided further proof for some personal theory of his: for example, that everything in the world is vanity of vanities and chasing after the wind. He must make a heck of a soldier, Adrian thought. A good—a tough—one. The angry ones—those usually burn out fast. But this guy—he’s already burned into slag; he’ll last forever.

They were quiet for a bit longer. The wordless understanding they’d found for a moment hung between them, then passed, and both felt it go. Gypsy stood up first. “Should we go, or what?”

When they came back, Ash was gone. He left behind his dead body, which needed to be taken out and buried.

That day Adrian really came to appreciate Yaroslav. Without him they would’ve turned into a pack of snarling dogs—everyone’s nerves had been worn to shreds, or, as Gypsy put it, gone to hell in a handcart. The priest served the parastás and stayed with them for the wake. Outside, a generous, thick rain fell watering Ash’s fresh grave—it seemed nature itself burst with tears, mourning the boy who couldn’t be mourned by a bride or his family; the drip-drop of water into tins under the vents coalesced in Adrian’s mind into the same, repeated bit of doleful song: “Neither Father’ll cry for me, nor my dear mother, re-la-re-mi-faa-mi,” and the next line clawed its way in, “only will cry after me three fair lasses.... ” Of all things, he could do without wondering who would mourn him if he died—he knew, however, that others were thinking about it, too, could feel the morbid, unwanted ideas about the inevitable end to their struggle take shape in their minds; these always came when one of them perished—you bury a bit of yourself—but he didn’t know how to change it.

He filled a barrel with rainwater simply to be doing something; Rachel boiled new potatoes, skin on, and Orko, in violation of the ban, mixed a sniff of his alcohol with water—to be drunk in the memory of the departed. Yaroslav told them the news: in such-and-such village they arrested a truck full of people who refused to join the kolkhoz, but our boys freed them in a fight around R., and there were wounded; in the other one, the turncoats wanted to ambush Woodsman, spent three days waiting for him in the village head’s house, got pissed as farts, shot holes in the ceiling, and Woodsman never came. Yaroslav purposely conveyed the simplest, most common news that everyone was curious to hear; Ash, too, would have been, had he been alive; and somehow Yaroslav made it feel as though the dead man had not left them at all, quite the opposite—could now, having been freed from the burden of his suffering body, join them at leisure and hear something he was curious to know. And Yaroslav kept talking to oblige him. In the same level, soft-as-silk voice, Yaroslav addressed the soul of the departed, inviting it to share their meal one last time; they prayed like respectful children at a village home where the oldest son had gone out into the world and learned something that they, the younger ones, were not yet to know—passed his leaving exams or joined the army.

The candle burned evenly in the corner; spoons clacked, noses ran—from the drink and the rich potato steam savored by Ash’s soul, side by side with the living, and a heavy, complacent warmth filled their bodies; without anyone really noticing, Yaroslav tamed Ash’s death, made it into something domestic, common and obvious, and the funereal weight disappeared all by itself. They were a family again, all together and Ash with them. Adrian watched Yaroslav with an adoration he no longer felt the need to conceal; the priest’s large forehead, as though made of two separate hemispheres and appearing even bigger because of the bald spots, glistened with tiny drops of sweat, which he wiped, again and again, with a handkerchief he kept unfolded on his knee in place of a napkin. When the moment seemed right, the conversation having found, like a river on a flood plain, new, discrete paths, Adrian acted on what must’ve been a purely military urge to report observations of anything uncommon to one’s superior (regardless of any rank Father Chaplain may, in fact, have held, his seniority was at the moment beyond doubt, silently and unanimously acknowledged) and told him his dream from the night before—about Roman in the tight hovel, his “Here’s where I live,” and his strange request to light a candle for him. Yaroslav knew Roman; it appeared the man hadn’t been seen or heard from since the skirmish in which Adrian was wounded.

“It means,” Yaroslav said, “that you were the last to see him alive.”

Adrian realized the priest was right—and it was like a hidden light went on in his mind: he realized he had known it all along—Roman died because he shielded Adrian with his body. In the dream, he had no proper home because the boys didn’t have a chance to build him one, didn’t bury him properly, in a coffin—the NKVD must’ve taken the body. What was it he said in the dream? “They’ll all come soon.”

“I will perform a service for the rest of his soul,” Yaroslav went on in his quiet and impassive voice, not a trace of steel—and yet it felt like he was building a fortress wall. “His soul is now passing through the twenty ordeals on the way to its judgment, so it’s no wonder it asked you for help. Thank you for telling me. May God bless you.”

Adrian stared at the flame of the candle, unblinking. His mind, overwhelmed, sputtered random, individual visions of the day: Rachel’s ashen face with the lip bitten down, the water beginning to boil in the metal instrument case.... Yaroslav possessed it—this willful softness of water that swallows steel and tempers it into surgical purity.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

His father—that’s who the priest reminded him of. His father, from whom he’d had no messages since ’44—since the day after the Soviets’ second coming, when he and his mother were taken on to the deportation echelon. Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake who will not receive a hundred times more.... Hundred-fold indeed—for he had yet to happen upon a home where they weren’t received as kin, and of brothers and sisters he gained thousands all over Ukraine, and who of them would not shield a brother with his own body? What a great smile Roman had—like a slow, hesitant glow thawed his face. Adrian turned his face away, into the shadows, and quickly drained the remaining alcohol from his cup: let everyone think that his eyes watered because of the drink to which he was unaccustomed.

“Father, pray for my parents, Mykhailo and Gortenzia.”

Hearing that Adrian’s father was a parish priest, Yaroslav glowed like a child, even his wrinkles smoothed out. With great conviction, he told Adrian that his father was chosen for a rare and great gift of God’s love: to provide spiritual consolation during the time of enormous trial—on the echelon, in prison, in deportation—only true shepherds merit such destiny; many are called, but few, as always, are chosen. Something personal lurked behind his words, his own long-borne plight. Adrian wondered for a few moments if he should also ask for a service to the health of Gela, but did not dare, could not let the very name of her leave his lips, as if he feared that once added—like a line to an endless list, to the myriad unknown Marias, Vasyls, Yurkos, and Stefans—it would lose not only its sovereignty but also its invincibility, fall subject to the laws of common mortality.

Yaroslav left first, walked out into the rain without the cloak the doctor had offered him saying, “You need it more than I do,” because he had yet to stop at the warden station to tell them the sad news that there would be no surgery, and only then, after Yaroslav had left them, did Orko explain, over the minute squares of paper into which he and Rachel began sorting the powders that the priest had brought, “You know, our Father here asked to be sent with an echelon...twice. They didn’t let him.”

“Who?” asked Adrian, confused.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “The church authorities, the ones higher up...the bishop did not allow him, or someone like that—I don’t understand their hierarchy very well. First time in ’39, after the first Bolsheviks, when His Excellency Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself pled to take up the suffering, thinking he might save us all if he lay down his life, but the Pope wouldn’t permit it. That did make an impression on our Father here, as you can imagine: if Sheptytsky himself is not let away, what’s a mere parish priest to say? And the second time, as I heard it, he asked of one...a stigmatic here, right before the Germans retreated. This stigmatic, when he fell into ecstasy, he would go into a trance and speak in other people’s voices, so people visited him to ask about their families, if they hadn’t heard anything for a long time, and other things, too...even from the Central Command, they said. Back then I was still studying, looked at such things very skeptically, thought I knew everything—I was young, what can I say. Later I saw things—things no hypnosis-neurosis could ever explain: Why does a man, with gaseous gangrene who absolutely should die, before morning, not die? A doctor, you see, is just a tool...an instrument in God’s hand. Only the instrument’s gotta be sharp too—sharp and straight!” He lifted his head at last and smiled ruefully like the skull on a bottle of belladonna, instantly looking as tired as he really was—not with a day’s hard work but with old, chronic exhaustion that can’t be slept off in a single night. Ash’s death struck him as irrefutable proof of his own inaptitude, and Adrian had no idea what to say to him—this was an uncharted realm in which the ignorant were better to keep silent.

“They brought him too late, Orko, that’s all,” Rachel said. “Had it been even a day earlier...”

“We dallied plenty,” Orko said, sharply, turning to Adrian again as if he was the ultimate appellate authority now. “And what can I do, when we don’t even have a way to run a blood analysis? I don’t even know when the pyemia began! We do everything by feel, groping in the dark; you should see our girls soaking wounds with whey to get the swelling down so that we can actually see what’s going on in there! And I haven’t had one man die on me yet!” he shot angrily before falling silent, shamed.

He shouldn’t be, Adrian thought—this wasn’t bragging—and was about to say so, but froze: Rachel, having moved between them, stood quietly stroking Orko’s hair—like a master calming a skit-tish horse, whoa, sweets, shhh—“sha” as Rachel said it. Orko let his eyes close and sat absorbing her touch. Are they...could they be together, somehow? Adrian wondered, feeling an unwelcome stab of something like jealousy on the top of his stomach. But why not, really, it would be quite natural; only how had he not seen it before? He looked around furtively—loath to be the lone witness to their unexpected intimacy, but the boys had all fallen asleep already, or were too exhausted to take part in the officers’ talk. Utterly at a loss for what to do, he blurted, finally and awkwardly (“like a fart into the campfire” Gypsy would say), “So what happened with that stigmatic?”

One could think this was his way of calling the doctor to order, and yet Rachel did not move away—she held her place next to Orko, her hand on the back of his head. What if it’s just a kind of therapy they have, to keep each other calm? At once, Adrian felt an urgent need to feel her hand on his own head; he could sense her touch on his crown so intensely that his skin crawled, a new current running through it.

“Tough news,” said Orko, forcing his sticky, reddened eyelids open again, and sobbed, once, like a miniature seizure. “The Holy Father said he didn’t even need to ask his question: the stigmatic knew what he was thinking as soon as he stepped into the room—that he meant to volunteer for a prison echelon when the Bolsheviks came again. So he said to him, ‘No, don’t even 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.

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 the rubber-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 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 like that 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 ever granted him such absolute power over her, there was something forbidden in it, almost terrible and therefore magnetic.... As if to confirm his insight, she kneeled in front of him, and he trembled—he gathered his essence into her soft, lamb-lipped mouth, ecstatic in her near-piety, as if performing a mystical rite of worshipping the power she herself was summoning forth from his loins, and the power came, stronger, more lasting than he could ever imagine, greater than himself.

For a while he ceased to exist—brushing off the feeble whisper of her warnings, he passed into dark un-memory, guided by the singular, indomitable urge to move forward, deeper into the supple smelt of burning lava that lapped at the red-hot dome of his skull; and this was impossible, incredible, intolerable, an ungodly sweet dying in arrested time, where there was no light, only the fiery darkness, at which he cleaved and pounded, a subterranean smith, until suddenly the darkness squeezed itself around him into a blissful quintessence of gratitude, a tender ring, like a soul-rending kiss, squeezed—and relaxed, and again, and again, until he could not take it any longer, and at the very instant he fired his handgun with a single triumphant cry and the shot-through body collapsed onto the ground, the darkness shuddered and gathered around the two of them into a dazzling fiery contour—a ring of electricity made manifest—and he fell supine onto the bare dirt floor breathing hard, face in the moonlight, and marveled, now completely conscious, that nothing hurt. Nothing, really, she worried for nothing—a happy, acute calm made his body ring like a well-tempered bell. Gently—amazed slightly at the heretofore hidden, untapped reserves of affection inside him—he ran his fingers over her shoulders; now her presence next to him was pleasant, it made him want to talk to her, stroke her, to keep what they’d experienced with them.

“You are a sister of mercy indeed—time to request you be recognized by a Headquarters’ decree: For selfless work at healing the wounded!”

After a pause, she answered, but not with a joke; her voice called back altered, somnambulic (a sound that filled him anew with the happy knowledge of his might), “I would like to die now...for you.”

“Fie on you, bite your tongue—don’t say that!”

But still he felt flattered.

“No, love, it’s true...that would be best. Because it’s never like this.”

He was still reveling in his new condition. “You know, I don’t feel tired at all,” he said, and then suddenly realized what she’d just said: not only he, but she too had experienced it for the first time—the fiery contour of electrical current stood before his eyes. “So you saw it, too?” He felt her nod silently more than he could see it, and instantly fretted, as men are wont to, over his newly gained property: “How do you know about this? Who taught you?”

She understood his anxiety and whispered straight into his ear, before licking off a drop of his sweat, like a cat, which sent another luxurious tremble down his spine.

“I haven’t known anyone for two years.”

This made him happy—it meant Orko wasn’t a contender—but it still wasn’t enough.

“And before?”

“Let’s not talk about that,” she asked of him, somber like a well-mannered child. “Listen.” She sat up with a heavy sigh, smoothing her skirt over her thighs again in the dark. “I know we will all die...”

“Everyone dies. Haven’t you heard?”

“That’s not what I mean. The war is over. You can’t seriously believe that the Alliance will want to fight Moscow? No one can take any more war.”

“We can,” he said. His own words resonated, made him shiver, listening, like an echo of a distant march. In different circumstances, this talk would’ve raised his suspicion, made him wonder if it weren’t a MGB provocation, but at that moment he truly loved her—for helping him articulate the simple truth, the mere knowing of which filled him with intoxicating pride, like in that Ólzhych poem he’d loved since his Youth Assembly days: “It fills you to the brim, this breathtaking thrill / Commanding your body and spirit / That death enters humbly and bows at your door, a handmaiden, baffled and timid.”

It’s true what you say, girl, everyone’s been broken, all the powerful, armed-to-the-teeth states wet their pants halfway through, let a half-victory be their cowardly prize, the 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 fingers to button up his shirt. Whatever had passed between him and this woman clumped together with other events of the day and tumbled, gathering speed, into the open abyss of the past, cleaved off his existence in dense layers of wet clay—and the clay-caked pickax that the doctor and the priest had used earlier to dig a hole for Ash, stood leaned against the wall, between a barrel of kerosene and a sack of grain, smelling of a fresh grave.

Rachel kept silent, smart girl; he did like her, but if she’d let something slip right then he was liable to cut her off, say something sharp instead of keeping his peace, and would feel guilty afterward.... But she was a good woman, very good; must’ve been with the resistance for a long time—she didn’t ask unnecessary questions. He, on the other hand, had a question for her, and then a few: First of all, why was she still illegal? Wouldn’t it work better for her to get a regular job as a nurse at the district clinic, or in Stanislav, or even in Lviv, since they needed people everywhere? No, she answered, mechanically as if being interrogated, that was not possible. She was legal already once, in ’45, and then last year the MGB arrested her, they knew she’d been with UIA before, and they ordered her to kill Woodsman. She came back with the news to Woodsman himself, told him everything, and he left her underground. So that’s how it was. He didn’t ask her anything else, figuring he would have a chance to discuss it with Woodsman later, and only asked, for some reason, if they’d beaten her. No, they didn’t, only the inspector cursed and screamed horribly, a Jew, too, which seemed bizarre to her—that it wasn’t a German who promised to pack her off to the camps, but a Jew; he kept screaming at her, How could you, you’re a Jew turned Bandera’s cunt, what, they...are better than our guys? She faltered; he didn’t say anything. It was unpleasant, as if that inspector had come between them and right away found the weak spot, and this moment of hesitation was to him the final proof that they both ought to erase their weakness as soon as possible, ought to forget that desperate explosion of nature that had thrown them into each other’s arms, to edit it out from their memories, as the instructions put it: not to remember too much. At the very least, do as was done with the most important documents: put them into a bottle, seal the cork with wax, and bury it deep underground. Sometime later, perchance, he could dig it up and think about it again—not for a second did he believe he’d have that chance—but now he lived again in the fleeting moment alone. The trap of arrested time that caught him when he was wounded sprang open again. He was well.

Already falling asleep on his cot, in the tenuous borderland between dream and reality, delicate like the lamb-soft lips of a woman brimming with love, he startled as if shoved. He could feel the fluffy cloud of her touch enveloping his body on all sides, like cotton padding a precious Easter pysanka, only his hands were tied behind his back and an irresistible, gale force pulled him into the open doors of a black Opel Kadett, the same as the one in which they’d taken him to the Gestapo on Pelchynska, and Rachel reached out her arms to him, helpless, and her face was white in the moonlight like a round of sheep cheese, and he shouted back to her, over and over, as he was dragged away, lifted off the ground, I am Adrian Ortynsky! This was what shook him awake, in terror, sent him scrambling, heart pounding, for a fingerhold in the real darkness of the bunker, where he remembered himself and breathed again: Thank God, it was only a dream—neither one of them ever did ask the other’s real name, nor Rachel for his alias.

Completely calm now, he slept—the deep, untroubled sleep of a healthy man.

***

Stodólya could tell him nothing new about Roman: no body had been brought to a village to be identified, and none had been put on display in the district town. Roman disappeared without a trace, dissolved into the green smells of a spring forest, became a dream.

Stodólya informed him that they were to spend the summer and fall together, as the Headquarters directed: due to significant losses this spring (he listed the names of fallen officers and the world went dark for a moment before Adrian’s eyes), there had been a major regrouping, and both of them were being transferred to newly unmanned terrain. He identified their new regional commander by alias, and Adrian nodded—he knew the man back from the fall campaign of ’45, when he led a hundred. “They’ll have their hands full, and they’ll have a secretary, Dzvinya, my fiancée,” Stodólya added—very formally, as if to forestall any potential infringement, like, she’s mine, alright?—at which Adrian nodded his congratulations, hiding a smile. Of all things he could imagine, Stodólya to be in love was by far the most outrageous. On the other hand, what did he know about the man? Well, he’d learn more, wouldn’t he?

Stodólya, as if reading Adrian’s mind, suddenly reached into the chest pocket of his jacket and unfolded a paper packet much worn along the creases to reveal a small photograph, which he offered to Adrian—for an instant, it seemed even his face, always cautiously drawn to a point, with that aiming crooked nose and the sharp eyes set close to each other like a wolf’s, softened, warmed from inside, and almost smiled.

“This is she.”

But Adrian never saw Stodólya’s smile, although he was very curious to find out how an enamored Stodólya might smile. It is quite possible that Stodólya was, in fact, smiling as he held the photo in his hand, but if he was, Adrian did not see it.

The woman looking back at him from the picture was Geltsia.