The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Lviv, November 1943

The man with a briefcase under his arm runs hard down the sidewalk, past the locked doors and padlocked shutters on the windows of ground-floor apartments; his footfalls, even on smooth unshod soles, thunder in the emptiness of the early morning, loud enough, it seems, to rouse the entire neighborhood; the cobblestones are wet and slippery under the film of the night’s lingering frost. A voice inside his head calls, “Watch out!”—the same voice that’s always warned him of imminent danger, that gives plain and concise orders: step off the path and hide under a bridge—moments before a Studebaker full of Krauts drives across it; or “Don’t go there!” two blocks away from the safe house—where, as it turned out later, in place of their liaison agents, Gestapo had been waiting for him since the night before. Some in the Security Service felt compelled to wonder if this was too much luck, if, by chance, he was actually the one to “spill” that safe house, having avoided the trap so handily, but to hell with them and their suspicions; everyone knows he’d come out dry, alive, and unscathed from much hotter waters, almost as though he was possessed, and perhaps he is, by this voice that whispers its spell over him, demanding that he obey, that he respond instantly, in his muscles, in his body, like a wild animal, not wasting a single instant on thinking. This is why the second he hears “Watch out!” he opens his briefcase and puts the still-warm Walther pistol inside it. The muzzle is still smoking after the shot, the smell of gunpowder and burned metal all but comforting, welcome in his nostrils; his hand still feels the springy imprint of the recoil that had pushed it up and back moments ago. Grabbing the briefcase by the handle with his other hand, he proceeds at a regular pace, a sparse, focused gait of someone on his way to the day’s business—a clerk hurrying to his office—precisely a moment before the milky-gray fog at the corner of Bliaharska expels the black shapes of the military patrol, glistening in their leather coats like wet tree trunks.

Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen. Adrian Ortynsky, aka the Beast (the alias he had taken for good reason) got lucky again. To walk past them without arousing their suspicion is nothing, piece of cake, done it a million times—the thing is to relax, not to clench up into an anxious knot, but to cease being a solid body altogether and proceed as though it were all a dream from which he could wake at any second, whenever he so chose. The November morning chill biting at his skin under layers of clothes; the particular grip of his hand on the briefcase handle so that he could drop it, should the need arise, simply by relaxing his fingers; the dark cupola of the Dominican Cathedral in the fog-distorted distance at the end of the street, floating weightless high above the ground; the frost-laced damp cobblestones—Katzenkopfstein, the dream readily offers in German—and the synchronous pounding of marching boots on them (iron-shod boots, made to last, made for stomping the will of the Übermensch into whoever is under them, for intimidation, not for flight), the pounding that comes closer, overtakes him—and passes, thank you, sweet Lord Jesus, passes without hesitation.

In that moment of passing—as the patrol leaves the man and his persisting luck behind as indifferently as if he’d willed himself to dissolve, right in front of their eyes, into shaggy strands of milky-white fog—a very important shift occurs in his own consciousness: the bullet he just fired into the chest of the Polish Gebiet Polizei’s Commandant when he stepped out of his office into Serbska Street (Kroatenstrasse, as they call it), and his flight along Serbska and Ruska Streets after that (to the young gunmen he schooled he always said the Germans were bears, and one must run from them the only way one can outrun a bear in the mountains—on a crooked path, diagonally uphill; the Magyars, they were wolves and only knew the language of fear; and the Poles, well, the Poles were rabid dogs; he knew that for certain, had known it ever since that childhood day when the Uhlans galloped into their village, dragged his father out of the parish, pulled his vestments over his head, and chased him around with whips, while one of them rode on his back, all of them yelling, “Long live Marshal Piłsudski!”—the Poles were rabid dogs and were to be killed like dogs, with a single shot), and everything that happened a mere minute before he slid as a single mass into the past like a load of dirt slipping off a shovel into a hole. It became just another completed mission, another assassination on Beast’s record, while the man himself strolls freely onward with his briefcase, away from it, toward his new, clear, and certain destination: the streetcar stop, his final rendezvous point with the courier girls who would relieve him of the murder weapon.

He glances at his watch—it would be impolite to make them wait—and hastens his step, through the modest park, past the wet tree trunks, their rutted bark like weathered weeping faces, on to Pidvalna, and every hair that stands on its end on his arms quivers as the seconds tick off.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

This has always come easy to him: parceling out his time, slivering himself up into its fragments. Shedding the just-lived like flakes of dry skin, pulling all his senses up by the root from the past moment and replanting them completely intact into the present. It could be said he really didn’t have a past in the sense that other men had, the ones who moaned and talked in their sleep. If it were up to him, he’d send them packing home: a man who calls out to the living and the dead in his sleep can no longer fight. Bullets find him in the next fight, and sometimes even without a fight, they just find him, as if made for the single express purpose of finding and pinning someone’s living past. But he is Beast and knows how to live in the fleeting moment alone. And he has luck.

Now he does not fear the echo of his own steps on the park’s paved path.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And what wonderful fog lingers this morning! (He is lucky with that, too.)

In the fog, or at night, or even without a single glimmer of light at all (especially since the Soviet air raids began and only a few ghostly bluish camouflage lamps smolder on the railway station’s canopy), he knows his city by touch, in his blood, like a lover’s body: wherever he may stumble blindly, wherever he throws his arm out for balance, the city offers itself to him, yields softly, opens a familiar alley, a warm odorous ditch, a moist crease between buildings. Zhydivska… Bliaharska… Pidvalna—it’s his lips, his skin, the slippery lining of his innards that rub and burrow and part the lightly breathing folds of stony flesh; it’s his city and it will never betray him; it’ll guide him through itself like a loving and knowing wife, his faithful one; it’ll spread itself open and take him in; if need be, it’ll hide him completely—inside, in the swampy, sinewy darkness of its underground passages.

He does not remember how long it’s been since he was with a real woman, even in a dream from which a man wakes with the sticky semen on his thighs—but in his city whose every cobblestone (every Katzenkofstein, pox on their German whoring mothers) he remembers not just with the soles of his feet but has learned, once and forever, with every muscle and tendon in his previous, long-gone life as a child, a schoolboy, a loafer, and a fop; here, he stays erect day and night, as it sometimes happens in the happiest of marriages—and the city keeps and protects him as no woman could. At times, the German presence in the city infects his own body: the black-and-white blemished eagles and crooked-arm crosses on buildings (Kroatenstrasse, ha!) feel like scabby calluses on a beloved body, a sensation first engendered by the Soviets in ’39, by their shabby, kitchen-smelling soldiers in stiff boots, their savage “Davai, davai, move on!” their ubiquitous patches of red (just like the German color later) fabric stretched over buildings with their slogans and pictures of their leaders, the entire wood-suitcased Asiatic horde of them that within a few weeks picked every store clean to the bones like an invasion of giant red ants and hatched instead, in the heart of the downtown, in front of the Opera house, a swollen welt of a flea market where the local crowd could be entertained in broad daylight by the sight of their women latched on to each other’s hair in a ferocious fight over a pair of satin stockings.

The fear that bred and burrowed through the city, which had never known anything like it, was the surest sign of their foreignness. When the Soviets ran away, this instinctive sixth sense of foreign presence remained with him, and that’s why he, unlike so many others, never doubted that the Germans would not stay long either, not even in the very beginning, before the arrests. They were also strangers here, just as foreign, though they maintained the appearance of human beings so much more than those other ones: their officers wore gloves, made use of handkerchiefs, and when they gave their “word of honor,” they did keep it, even while they were calmly and efficiently robbing people’s homes of anything that had remained after the Soviets. Just like the others, they spun the city into a spider web of fear, and just like the others, they were blind: they had no eyes to see how drastically they did not fit here, that they were a carbuncle, a pimple that the body would expunge, burn off with fever. Against the intimacy he had with the city—and he hadn’t really ever been this close with a woman, hadn’t ever had one he could truly call his—this innate rejection of the foreign raised in him, when he was on a mission, a sense not even of righteousness but of his own mystical invincibility. He was untouchable. How could he fail when every pebble was on his side? Afterward, he would always pray and ask God to forgive him for his pride, if this was pride—he wasn’t sure; he had lost the habit of deeper contemplation when he began living in the running stream of each moment, so in all moral questions he had placed his trust in God: he knew better.

And here’s the streetcar stop, a trifle left to do, a few minutes: give the briefcase to the girls, get on the streetcar with them, jump down at the convenient turn off the Lychakivska (Oststrasse, man, Oststrasse!)—and that’s it. He’s done.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And that’s when an invisible wave of heat washes over him, out of nowhere, and his blood thunders in his temples—never mind that his body mechanically continues on its course, at the same brisk tempo of an inaudible lively march. His lips grow instantly dry and he gasps for air like a fish, mouth open wide—he can’t breathe.

This is not a signal of danger—something else, something other waits ahead—something is closing the distance between them, heading to their inexorable collision at the streetcar stop, something that could not, should not be there. Something whose presence at today’s assassination of the Polish police Commandant is absolutely inconceivable—incompatible by blood type.

He has seen, but he cannot believe: his blood resists, all his many years of honed underground instincts, everything that made him invincible. A single memory shoots through all those years, incinerates everything they contain into ash, throws the heart of the once-lived time: the orchestra is playing tango with Polish lyrics—“I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one, I will let you go your way”—and the smell of a girl’s blonde hair under the electric lights, the intoxicating light smell, the sharp torment of unspeakable tenderness that turns everything inside you into a flower, a bloom of animate, tickling petals (and, at the same time, the nagging fear—what if she catches a waft of his sweat and it disgusts her—so delicate, so small and light that it makes him want to fall, drop himself as a shower of petals under her feet). He feels all this hit his chest with a force no lesser than that of the bullet he fired into the police executioner sentenced to death by the Organization—as if his own shot caught up with him in the middle of the street, and Beast goes faint and soft, about to collapse like the man he killed, and he will now see everything he did not stay to watch earlier on Serbska. This painfully clear, visceral realness of the memory is the most surprising part of it all—that it should be so perfectly alive after being pried out of some long-barricaded corner of his past that he considered irrevocably severed from his present: this is the amazement he felt as a little boy when, in the middle of the winter, he beheld the gleaming round smoothness of an apple pulled from the cellar where it had been kept in its underground nest of straw—by what magic did it preserve that smoothness, that deep, slightly bitter breath of autumnal orchards?

He does not collapse; he is carried forward, dizzy with the merciless shortening of the distance between them, and his past melts inside him with brutal, catastrophic speed. He sees himself as one does in one’s moment of death—or the instant after dying?—from outside: among all the people out walking on this downtown street at this early hour, he is the most vulnerable, an open moving target. A slow, wet, gaping wound.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

My name—Adrian Ortynsky.

He is happy.

He sees with great clarity the wet rounds of cobblestones, and the hem of ice at the edge of the sidewalk, and the shiny streetcar tracks. He sees before him, growing closer with every step, the two girls’ faces: one, Nusya’s, as though muted, dim, and the other—yes, he knew, he’d been told that there would be two of them, that Nusya would bring a companion, but Lord, who could imagine!—the other blazes in his eyes like a dazzling flare that remains after looking at the sun; he can’t see her features, but he doesn’t have to see them in order to know—with his entire being, his whole life at once—it is She.

She.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… “I have time, I will wait,” the orchestra plays, and the couples spin on the dance floor. How long he’s been waiting—all these years, and he didn’t even know it. And now the waiting is over.

Closer. Closer still. Another moment—and his hand would fall into hers. He is not surprised to notice that it suddenly begins to snow—someone up above also waited for this moment to give his signal, to let large white flakes spin in the air, settle on Her hair, the golden curls around the small beret, on Her eyelashes, instantly fuzzy as though bleached. Her eyelashes. Her lips.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a watchful half-thought perks up, as if transplanted from someone else’s mind, that snow is bad news, he’ll leave tracks when he runs across the park—but nothing of this kind has any chance of rising to the surface of his consciousness at the moment. Does she recognize him? She is snowflaked. Smiling. Serene. Snow Queen—that’s what he called her that night when he walked her home, to the Professors’ Colony far up Lychakivska, her tall lace-up boots leaving tiny, miniscule impressions in the snow, child’s tracks, and when he pointed it out to her, she indulged him with a small laugh, slightly coy, “What fancy is that, Mister Adrian; it’s just my foot, it’s plenty common.” “But I insist, Miss Gela, be so kind as to compare,” and he carefully planted his bear paw next to her little delicate trace like an imprint of a flower petal with the minute bud of her heel at the bottom, and it felt as though he were protecting it from a stranger’s prying eyes, shielding her with his own imprinted presence—“Take a look, be so kind, I insist”—once, and again, and the whole way home. To see their footprints next to each other, again and again, was rapture beyond compare, like touching her in some mysteriously intimate way, and when she flitted away from him, almost startled, when she drew back her hand and hid in her towered fortress—her eminent professorial villa guarded by a quietly watchful army of relatives and maids, invisible at this late hour, and with doors that creaked like a living baritone in surprise—he remained standing just outside her porch, rooted to the spot where she had abandoned him, without the slightest idea of where he should go next or why.

The sparse garland of petals threaded by her tiny booted feet led away from him and ended, like his thoughts, at the door; then a second-floor window lit up and her shadow swung onto the curtain, filling him with a new wave of joy, so he stood there for a long time not taking his eyes off that tall window, haloed like a beatific fresco in church, where her shadow moved as though on a movie screen: retreating, then surfacing again, and then holding still for a while, allowing him to imagine that she was looking at him, and he could no more stop the flood of whispered insanities he muttered to himself than if he’d been wrung by a fever. He laughed and felt no cold. The window went dark eventually, and it took him a while to realize what that meant—she’d gone to bed, and he told himself so, muttering under his breath, shaking his head and smiling a little, as if he were lulling her to sleep in his own arms, as if he’d just been granted another proof of her incredible closeness, a sign that the two of them belonged to themselves: she asleep upstairs, in her boudoir, the seam of her steps needling up the snow-white stairs; and he, bearing witness to both these marvels, and thus drunk on his ecstasy, remained there guarding her tracks until light, with no recollection of when and how he got home.

And the most amazing thing—he didn’t even catch a cold.

The fact that she now approaches—in the same gliding walk instilled by Lviv’s most glorious tuteurs (only the legs, my lady, we’re moving only our legs!) beside Nusya, his regular courier, and carries toward him that serene, unattainable smile of hers like a discrete source of light in the November cityscape—is equivalent to the heavens collapsing in pieces onto the earth below—he wouldn’t blink an eye if they did collapse. Snow falls and carries the smell of her hair, the dizzyingly tender, humid blonde smell; a flake alit on his lips and its featherlight, barely perceptible kiss pulls his mouth into the long-forgotten smile of that night, a blissfully silly smile, reflexive like the contraction of muscles when a doctor taps your knee with his little hammer, and instead of letting them both know that he had completed his mission, that everything was okay and went according to plan, Adrian Ortynsky exhales, equally unconsciously, and blurted out like the village idiot, like a green, greener-than-grass rookie… “Gela…”

The sound of his own voice brings him back.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… “Does the gentleman know himself?”

That’s Nusya speaking from somewhere at his side, almost out of his armpit—she’s such a little button of a girl and always when she’s nervous this awkward Polish syntax spills out of her: she bragged she’d graduated, in the old days, from the Madame Strzalkowska’s Polish Gymnasium, and it’s a marvel indeed that they hadn’t quite managed to craft a first-rate Polish chauvinist out of her—my dear pal Nusya, Nyusichka, who wouldn’t love you, you nugget of a girl? He is suddenly gripped by a wild, predatory joy, reckless, drunk, like the thrill that swells his veins in the middle of a street fight, that explodes out of his chest as song, as uncouth howling (once he caught fire as he ran through yards, balconies, and roofs, firing back, and his head roared, like a tavern band getting people to the dance floor. “Tell you once I went to L-viv! Saw me many pret-ty things!”—wzzz! a bullet zapped the tin roofing next to him, and a tambourine rattled inside him, answering, and the fiddle squealed higher and faster, rabid, presto, presto: “On a bal-cony up high sat a la-dy stool-a-stri-de! Shame to look and shame to see, but she’s right abo-ve me!”—dog your mother, missed me, didn’t you?)—he’s swollen with it; he’s lifted above the earth; he could grab both girls under his arms, like a fairytale giant, and make a game of kicking open the trap of time that has closed around them—the three of them, encircled in a single reality available to them, however you slice it: a dead body on Serbska Street, a gun in a briefcase, the briefcase in their hands, and the police will start searching the city any minute if they haven’t yet. Tick, tick goes the blood in his veins, counting seconds—they’re all tied together into this one sack, and some giant invisible magnet has pulled Her toward him and pressed Her into his chest, and their dance isn’t over until the orchestra stops.

So, come on, whoring mother’s son, play! Play, damn it, play till your ribs crack!

And before any gentleman who might indeed know himself has a chance to utter a word, copper cymbals slam together in his head, a deafening, thunderous clatter descends upon him, a loose ringing like the sound of a crashing crystal palace, the shattered ice palace of the Snow Queen. A streetcar pulls up, the hoped-for one—everything as it should be, yes, ma’am, everything as the good Lord ordered and the General Staff had planned, and the eye coolly counts, as though through the gun’s sight, the doors: let the front wagon pass; it’s nur für die Deutschen and almost empty at this hour; people at the stop huddle closer to the rear of the car, mostly womenfolk who can’t easily jump up into the middle while the car is still moving, let us climb in now, my girls—please, my fair ladies, go ahead—“Sir, mind your step!”—what a shame, I did step on someone’s toes—“Please excuse me!”—a wench in a headscarf, then a lady in a fox fur collar, and that’s when you clutch your purse anxiously, blocking the way for the folks behind you, nicely done, a sudden shift, a short commotion at the door—I learned this trick back in Polish times, when I did time on Lontska Street in the cell with pickpockets, but where did you pick it up, my pet, how do you know what to do next?—and it is your narrow gloved paw, not Nusya’s, in the midst of swirling bodies that takes my briefcase with the precious Walther, also corpus delicti, in the moment when I’m lifting you onto the step, and then you’re up, in the car, catching the swinging ceramic loop in your other hand and regaling the conductor with your easy, luminous smile. The way you clasp the briefcase is so sweet, so femininely helpless, but you have taken on the burden of mortal risk, albeit the lesser share of it because the police don’t stop women in the streets to search them, do not subject them to that disgusting groping that always leaves you feeling dishonored, clenching your teeth until your brain cramps.

No, they do not touch the women and, God willing, Nusya and you will get the weapon to its secret cache without any trouble, only no one will tell me if you did, just as no one had told me that you were here—here and not in the safe Zurich where you’d gone to study before the war, and we’d never had a chance to say goodbye because I was chasing lice in the cell on Lontska when you left, and then Poland fell, and the Soviets came, and I had to flee to Krakow because the Poles handed over the lists of their political prisoners to the NKVD, most of them Ukrainians, and our boys started getting snatched again, and of those who did get snatched, none ever came back.

All these years I kept seeing the same dream—I remember it clearly, and I’ve always thought I don’t dream; I was sure I didn’t, but maybe I just forgot my dreams as soon as I woke up because my mind, once conscious, bolted the doors to the rest of it, so maybe I did moan and call for you in that dream—the dream in which we are dancing in a great dark hall, like the one at Prosvita or the People’s House, only bigger, and at some point you vanish, and I don’t even notice how and when, just suddenly realize that I am dancing alone—an instant of abysmal cold, of sticky terror: Where are you, Geltsia? I dash around looking for you, run around the hall like a madman, and the hall is growing bigger; it’s not a hall anymore but a giant open space, a drilling field, only dark as night, but I know that you’re somewhere here, you must be here, only for some reason I can’t see you…. And now here you are, you’re found again, my girl, the gears of separated times have locked back together, and we are together and have already executed the first movement of our dance, the pas de deux with a handgun. Somewhere an invisible master of ceremonies is calling out the dances inaudibly as I lift myself into the streetcar behind Nusya, and for another ten or twelve minutes will have the pleasure of beholding your face over people’s heads, my brave little girl—this is the kind of music they’re playing for us, nothing to be done about that; we must dance until the end, until the last breath as our oath commands—we were always such a glorious couple, the best on any dance floor. They said the two of us were the spitting image of Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable; all your friends must have envied you, so have no cares and fear not. It’s not for nothing that I have luck, and there’s always been enough of it to go around, to cover everyone who went with me, and those who went alone and did not come back—Igor, whom the Bolsheviks tortured to death in Drohobych jail so that his mother could only identify the shirt on the body; Nestor, who perished somewhere in Auschwitz after they arrested him in September of ’43; and Lodzio, Lodzio Daretsky, the most talented of our class, who went to Kyiv last summer, after the resistance there had already fallen, and one day, God be my witness, I will find that son of a bitch who sent Lodzio there, to be shot like a rabid dog by Gestapo the day after he got there—all of them, and there’s more every day, stand in the gloom along the dance hall’s walls, or maybe in formation around that drill field, and follow us with their eyes—Igor and Nestor and Lodzio, and God alone knows how many more. In my dream, I run past them without looking because I am searching for you alone, and only now that you have come back and the dream surfaces as a drowned man comes up from the bottom of the Tysa River when the highland pipes sound their call, do I realize that it was they who filled the hall; it had to grow bigger to make room for them all, all who stepped out of the dance and will never come back—but they stand there, mute, and do not move, and watch us, and wait, and this means that our party, Geltsia, is only now beginning.

“Grand rond! Avancez! A trois temps!”

“Time!” the voice urges, shoves, hard, from inside his skull. Gulp, one last time, an eyeful of her face, inhale her, almost taste her on your lips—what fool said you don’t drink off a face?—and off you run, brother, à trois temps, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta, trá-ta-ta; the streetcar screeches as it contorts its body through the turn; stones of nearby buildings speckle your vision—jump, you useless fool!

Down, down the hill, ahead of the streetcar, with his hands now free and his eyes slashed raw, heavy as a pound of bleeding flesh severed from her radiant face in the gloom of the crowd, hammered now with endless rocks, stones, cat’s heads, Katzenkopfstein, run!

Run. Run. Run. Round the corner… through the gate… park… down the path… trees… trees—black stumps. Is it someone’s labored breath behind you? No, it’s your own raincoat, rustling. And why are your cheeks wet, and what are these tiny streams running from your nose to your lips—is this sweat, already?

I am crying, flashes in his mind. Sweet Lord, I am crying. These are my tears.

Without noticing, he slows his flight—à deux temps, à deux temps—and touches his cheeks with his hands, with his fingertips, carefully as though it were someone else’s face. Woe to you, Adrian, pulses in his head, woe and woe and endless woe, you’re done, you’re finished…

Why woe?! Everything went just fine!

He blinks at his watch again: the entire operation, from the moment his mark stepped into Serbska Street, has taken twelve minutes. Twelve and a half to be exact. Actually, almost thirteen. Thirteen.

So what—he’s never been one for signs—what is happening to him? A premonition? A hunch? What is he afraid of?

“And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said unto him, ‘Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?’ And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.”

He never really understood that Gospel episode of healing the bleeding woman, even when he got older and learned from his friends—in lewd, draffish words that did not accord with the Holy Scriptures—what that meant, that the woman was “bleeding,” and it tormented him for a long time, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. His dad read the Scriptures out loud to him when he was little; later, he didn’t dare ask him about it. The story remained a mystery to him: how could He, without seeing, feel that someone had taken of his power?

Now he knows. The Gospel was as precise as a medical diagnosis. You couldn’t have put it better. There are no better words, that’s it.

That’s exactly what he felt.

Something has changed—and he already knows what it is: of those twelve (no, thirteen, damn it, thirteen!) minutes, the last ten remain with him and do not pass. The minutes he spent with Geltsia. She remains with him. He carries her inside him and does not want to let go, not for all the treasures in the world. He knows this is how it will be from now on.

All these years without her he sped across the surface of time as though on smooth ice—light, unstoppable—and now it has cracked, opened a hole, given under his new weight. The power that had held him above time has left him.

Adrian Ortynsky, alias Beast, registered as a Fachkursen student at the Polytechnic, also Johannes Weiss by other papers, also Andrzej Ortynski. Twenty-three. Invulnerable. Elusive. Invincible. Immortal.

And, in this very moment, fully and clearly conscious, he is about to die.

His death has already set out for him; it began its countdown to their rendezvous precisely ten minutes ago. How long before it runs out—hours, months, years—doesn’t matter; he and death are out to find each other and will rendezvous as certainly as lovers who’d set a date.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… The beast inside him reaches for his throat (how defenseless the moving pulsing bulge under his fingers, how easy it would be to crush the cartilage and shred the tendons), throws his head back at the snow-swollen sky, and bares its teeth as though to show his perfect mandibles to the invisible dentist somewhere above.

He may have seemed to be screaming—but mutely, without noise. Or laughing—also without noise. A single living soul under the war’s November sky, with his face turned up. The dead can rarely enact such a feat; only the luckiest of them fall down face-up, because, yes, even death has its share of luck to give to its chosen few. The rest die with their eyes down, into the ground. Into the ground.

Kyiv, April 2003

A hospital? White coats, no, not coats, more like white sheets wrapped around people’s torsos, very strange… it must be a hospital.

A black Opel Kadett—very fancy—black uniforms, black shiny peaks on uniform caps—Where are they taking me?

Wake up, Adrian.

The vision slips away, as if sucked through a dark tunnel, grows smaller, shrivels into a tiny dot, and is gone.

To lie a little longer with my eyes closed, listening to the noises around me, feeling out the room like a blind man, inhaling its familiar scents: this is my room. The bed—empty; my arm, when I reach out, falls as if chopped off onto a crumpled pillow, nothing else. I hear myself growl in protest, and the noise wakes me up completely: this is my voice. Eyes still closed, I think beyond the doors, listening in my mind to the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen. All quiet. I am alone. There should be a clock on a bedside table on the other side of the bed; I can reach it with my other hand. Wow. Lolly must’ve dashed out before dawn. Of course—she’s got the early morning show today. Which I have already missed. Slob. Darn it. What is it with me and sleeping these days?

Inside my head like the smarting trace of a needle: the black Opel Kadett full of foreign officers (What uniform is that?), a woman in a white coat, or rather a sheet wrapped around her body; a spatula, or what do you call it, being boiled in a shallow metal dish…. To heck with it, shake it off.

Outside it’s raining, a nice spring rain that brushes the trees and the grass with a gentle lisping noise. Open the balcony doors and breathe deeply: the air is warm, moist. Beautiful. In the yard below, a smattering of tiny bubbles spreads like a new skin over a silver Mercedes that has a tiny flag on its parliament-issue license plate; my trusty Volkswagen huddles behind it like a village accountant next to the Terminator. The Mercedes’s Representative owner lives next door—a quiet type, must be really new, first-term, not a real politician yet.

I know where he lives because someone broke into his flat last year, and the cops went door to door, thorough as plumbers, and had everyone sign a piece of paper stating that we saw and heard nothing. They were the ones who told us, spilled the beans on the Rep., so to speak. Before, when the family from the first floor was robbed, no one came to ask any questions whatsoever; the folks simply put iron bars on their windows. Now, when you’re coming home late at night, the sidewalk is divided into regular squares of golden light from their grated windows, like a medieval fortress. You’d think kids would like playing in that light—they’d be fairies, or kings, or knights with their fair ladies—only kids don’t pretend things like that anymore. And they should be in bed anyway, which is too bad. Somehow thinking of the kids makes me feel sad—I don’t know if it’s because I’m not one of them anymore and can’t make good use of the fairytale stage, or because when I was little we didn’t have such golden-crossed windows. We had a hedge of dirty-gray, nine-floor apartment towers, tiled on the outside like the insides of water closets, the yards between them dotted with the toy-size white huts mysteriously designated “trash-collector”—they stank ferociously, but we still liked hiding there, in between the large trash cans, big enough that if you crouched, no one could find you; and it was in the dark intimacy of that stinking refuge that I learned how girls pee. The girl’s name was Marynka, and she wore bright, fire-engine red leggings. Since I could not believe my eyes, she kindly permitted me to investigate by touching the wet furrow between the tiny flaps; I must have had the instincts of an experimentalist already. Experience is experience, even when it’s gained behind a dumpster. Nothing is wasted.

Lolly must have been running late: her cup and the spoon she used to stir her coffee tossed willy-nilly in the sink, the squishy grounds in the rusty-brown filter still warm in the coffeemaker. The bowl with unfinished muesli she left on the windowsill makes me go all warm and fuzzy, and I catch myself smiling: I know she stood here, eating, looking out the window into the well of our yard, as she always does when she eats alone. Walking around the kitchen like this, retracing her steps—it’s like pulling on a still-warm robe she’s taken off and left hanging invisibly in the air; you can wrap yourself in it, you want to rub your cheek against her, Lolly. And the smell—the waft of her perfume lifted off the pillow where she slept, warm with the sweet, yeasty, bread-dough smell of her body—it follows me around, grows stronger by the window where she stood, washes over me at the door where she put on her boots. I press my fingers against my nose and inhale a slightly different version of her—a sharper, saltier tinge like the smell of seaweed drifting in from a distant beach—draw it in, and hear myself moan, unwittingly. What a joke! I’m like a dog left in the house alone, nosing his way around, looking for his master. When she first began staying the night, I did exactly what a dog would do after she’d left: I burrowed into her bathrobe and went back to sleep until she returned. The only social gesture I could muster was to call the office and lazily lie to them about feeling under the weather—I’ve no idea whether they ever bought the excuse, delivered as it was in a blissed-out drone; and I didn’t care, and when you don’t care, you’re always ahead because no one can do anything to you. I’d lounge in my nirvana bed until noon—sleeping, waking, dozing off again, marveling joyfully at the change of light and the objects in the room that seemed unrecognizable once they’d responded, like salient creatures, to Lolly’s vibrating presence—and never had the guts to tell her about it. But it was then, actually, that I started having these dreams.

In the daytime, they fade, melt, sink under the surface like shards of cracked ice floes. They’re all thin around the edges; I lose the plot, only grasp the biggest pieces, stacked on top of each other but disjointed like pages from different chapters caught by a single wayward staple: the black Opel Kadett, some sort of place like a hospital, the spatula or whatever it is, the white-sheeted torso. Normally that’s how it is with dreams, especially when your mind is stuffed fuller than your in-box, and you wake up like someone slammed your face against a table: not this again, damn it, can I please think of something else? But these dreams, they were different from the get-go. First of all, they aren’t just a fantastical reworking of whatever happened the day before; they’ve no relationship to anything I could ever have personally experienced. No déjà vu whatsoever. As best I could articulate this to Lolly—because it is always when I talk to her that I can best verbalize my ideas, even when it’s the operational principle of a thermionic generator or something else she has no clue about—these dreams feel like I’ve been put inside someone else’s closet, and I’m looking at a stranger’s clothes, hung around in strange order. What I see and manage to remember certainly means something to someone out there, but I myself feel like the person who accidentally got plugged into someone else’s phone conversation.

“Do you mean to say,” Lolly then inquired, frowning and biting her lower lip in concentration, “that you are seeing someone else’s dreams?”

“No, that’s the thing, that’s their other distinction: it’s more precise to say that I’m dreaming someone else’s consciousness.”

“Meaning?”

“Um, how do I put it… it doesn’t look like a dream—more like a memory, a very vivid, visceral memory, with touch and smell—only I am absolutely certain that whatever is happening has never happened to me. I know it’s not my memory.”

One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language, plus your vocabulary expands to such unprecedented levels that sometimes people think you’re the one who writes for a living. So, here’s the picture—stuck in my mind after I dreamt it a least a dozen times: a forest in springtime, tree trunks spotted with sunlight, the smell of wet bark and sap, a very green smell, and the man walking in front of me is dressed in a gray-blue military uniform with a Schmeiser over his shoulder, only his belt is not made of leather, for some reason, but woven, with stitching. We are walking through the forest “goose-file”—somehow I know that’s what it’s called—and this sturdy peasant back, girded with its woven belt, is the last thing I see when a dry stutter explodes from behind the trees; something shoves me hard in the chest, and everything goes black. After that, I don’t remember anything—it’s gone like a piece of paper in dark water. A bit later, after she’d had a chance to confer with knowledgeable people—she knows more experts in various fields than the State Reference Library, all she has to do is pick up the phone—Lolly, excited as Sherlock Holmes on a case, reported that such woven, stitched belts do, in fact, exist, and have for quite a while—as part of the US Army uniform. You see, that’s what I mean—how would I ever know that?

“Okay, what about that Schmeiser? Are you sure it was a Schmeiser?”

“Absolutely, and the forest looked very much like our forests here, not the American woods, and more than that—in my dream, I knew what everything was called, not just the trees but even the bushes: thorn apple, heather, juniper.”

“Well, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all—you could have picked those up somewhere, in passing, like when you went hiking with your mom when you were little, the time you climbed Goverla, and then just forgot…”

“But by this logic, is it the same with the American uniform: I knew it once, then I forgot? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

In response, Lolly arranged her face into one of her proprietary contortions: one lip thoughtfully pursed, brows scrunched together, eyes like a pair of tiny pointy horns—“the silence of the wolves” it’s called, when she runs out of arguments but doesn’t want to admit defeat (she also has “the silence of the lambs”—with big, piteous eyes, when she’s begging for mercy)—and, of course, as always, I had to laugh and hug the little imp. But I also had to wonder: Heck, what if I had seen a uniform like that somewhere before, like on one of those shoddy posters in military prep classes? We’re all Cold War children after all, and those with technical education especially—all groomed to work for our dear ol’ military industrial complex, which, may it rest in peace—met such inglorious demise that I’m the last one of our class who still, at least on paper, counts in the ranks of our profession, although others never relied on it for their bread and butter, and it’s good they didn’t because it wouldn’t get you a single dry a crumb now. I’m lucky I liked playing with Uncle’s cigarette holders when I was a kid—who knew I’d start a business out of that, ha!—but I still remember the u-es-es-arr’s terrible military secrets, like the fact that the diameter of our noodles matched the caliber of our bullets, and that our cocoa factories were engineered to switch to manufacturing gunpowder in twenty-four hours, so why shouldn’t some rotten layer of my collective unconscious spit up a long-forgotten detail about those dirty imperialists we were so keen to fight?

A logical explanation, to be sure, but I didn’t like it: it was inelegant. It lacked insight, an inspired suddenness of association that makes everything click together like pieces of a puzzle, with no loose ends left untucked. I can certainly ignore my gut feeling here—no matter how loudly it screams that what I saw in my dream is someone’s death as it did, in fact, happen—but I’m still physicist enough to know what makes a good, true solution, and that, Lolly, is elegance; a single inspired maneuver that puts everything into place.

“I understand,” Lolly sighed, giving me the lamb look. “It’s not only your formulas that work like that.”

“That could very well be true, but you know what else? Now that you mentioned Goverla, I’m convinced it was a Carpathian forest.”

I really don’t want to go shower and wash off her smell, even after I eat. “Sloppy McGrimes!” Lolly teases when we eat breakfast together: nice natty girl that she is, she won’t take a sip of her coffee until she’s showered and put on her underwear at least—she doesn’t understand what it’s like for me when she’s so squeaky clean. Stop, right now.—I’m afraid that is not possible.—Where’s your willpower?—Gone, never to be seen again.—Maniac!, but raspy, tender already, eyes misty, my sweet girl, white undies slip down like a flag of surrender, and then she whimpers softly like a teddy bear, and it makes everything inside me turn, all over again. “You know,” she said one morning—after we made love like that in the middle of the kitchen and she sat there on her chair so totally, unbearably mine, languorous-luxurious, with her hair wet at the roots, and contemplated her lazily parted thighs—“you know, men are so doglike in their instincts: always in a rush to mark a woman as their territory.” I could only mumble something back at her then, like a happy idiot, and didn’t feel jealous until later, when I could think again, remembered the barn door after the horse bolted, as Granny Lina would put it. Although, really, what’s there to be jealous of? Her memories? Please. Only for some reason, when a woman hears a man say something like “You women are all the same,” she triumphantly interprets it as more proof of her being right—“See! I’m not the only one.”—and a man, by contrast, gets all worked up over the mere possibility of just being one in a lineup of previous offenders.

But hey, I know my way across this minefield; I’m not one of those morons who ask something like, “How many did you have before me?” I’m not one to ask questions, period. Lolly and I mapped out our sandbox a while ago sharing bit by bit, scoop by scoop, the things that were most important for the other to know; I even shook hands with Sergiy, her ex-husband, once at a large party, and I remember I almost liked the guy—he had an open face and a boyish smile that must still work wonders on women—if not for his handshake: limp like a dead fish, like all the air had been sucked out of him a long time ago and he keeps dragging his shell around because these burdensome social obligations force him to do so. An aging boy, one of many.

The one thing I really wanted to know I went ahead and asked—“Why did you split up?”—but never got an answer, split up and that’s all, as if that in itself was the answer; it certainly was the only answer she needed, and she didn’t feel like coming up with another one just for me. Okay, that’s her right, what can you say? Worse when she lets something slip, a phrase, or a reference, something that sounds sentimental, nostalgic, and when I jump in—sometimes a bit too sharply, I’ll admit—before she goes all doe-eyed reminiscing—sure, that one, the guy that you went to the Baltic sea with, the one who taught you to eat lobster—she’s stunned, every time, “Did I tell you that?” She doesn’t remember. Fortunately, the number of love stories in our lives is finite. (And I still don’t know how to eat lobster, pick at it like a retarded monkey, no fun at all, just more trash on my plate.) The number of stories is finite, but the number of memories is infinite, and that’s a big difference—Lolly mentioned that man because she thought of something completely different from what she’d told me about him before, and that’s why she’s always surprised: the lobster had nothing to do with it. She doesn’t remember, but I can see it all perfectly: the broken red shell on a white platter, the plump, juicy half of a lemon with the lobster’s ravished flesh, the ecstatic licking of fingers, the plastic bib the waiter solicitously supplied shamelessly splattered with juices—to eat a lobster it’s almost a sexual act, if you know how to do it, of course, and I’m not even talking about the smell that lingers above that table—softly salty, so much like the smell of my girl herself, which, naturally, may not be something that occurs to her at that table at all, but most certainly occurs to her companion if they’d spent the previous night together and if he is not a complete idiot… okay now, that’s enough. I’ve no business in her memories. Especially since she wasn’t talking about the lobster this time at all, and the number of memories is infinite. Like natural numbers—a countable infinite set. That’s the thing.

The thing is, toots, you cannot ever tell yourself fully and completely to another person, no matter how close you are, even to the one with whom you mix your breath by night and share the world by day. I don’t know; maybe identical twins can do it, but only for a while, as children…. It’s like finite and infinite sets: regardless of how they depend on each other, the first one will have a limit, and the second one will not. End of story. Instinctively, you try to help things along by adding as many shared experiences as you can; you make the woman you love a constant witness to your life—hoping, vaguely, for a purely arithmetical advantage, for strength in numbers: to have the sum total of hours lived together outweigh that of the time spent without the other. (And why hours? Why not minutes, or seconds, or milliseconds? How long does it take you to experience something, to pick up an impression, a feeling that would morph somewhere in the deep dark mines of your subconscious into a memory I have no hope of accessing, like chlorophyll into coal?) Only it’s all for naught—Love’s Labour’s Lost, as Grandpa Shakespeare wrote. (Am I right, Lolly? Do you appreciate my English?)

The math doesn’t work for the simple reason that even the events we experience together (Remember the time we went to buy our first desk lamp at The Guiding Light, and you were so taken with those tri-jointed arms, playing with lamps all over the store, folding and bending, and I was trying to explain the advantages of halogen bulbs over the incandescent ones, and you listened like a straight-A schoolgirl, so attentive you let your little mouth open a bit? And later, after we left the store with our purchase—not something with a jointed arm, but a totally different, stylish one with a heavy chrome column—you asked just as enthusiastically, on that same brainwave, without even changing your voice, “Didn’t that salesman look like a mole?”—and all I could do was stare like a slow-witted goat, not knowing what to say, because the very fact of that salesman’s existence had escaped me, let alone what he looked like.), all those things we live through together, Lolly, leave each of us with discrete memories, and the number of these is also infinite.

This, if you think about it good and hard, can drive you nuts. I did go a little crazy with this idea back when I was a student: let’s say we have two infinite sets, say of natural and real numbers—how are we supposed to compare them? Which one is “less” and which one is “greater” if they are both potentially endless? It’s just like that with us—we have two infinite sets: one is the number of all your memories (X) and the other, the number of memories you share with me (Y). Mind you, there’s also the concept of a set’s power, as when every member of Y directly corresponds to a member of X, but not the other way around; this means X is more powerful than Y. Example: I remember that there was a salesman at The Guiding Light—that there had to have been one!—but not whether he looked like a mole, a camel, or an ox. And even if I spend the rest of my life holding your hand—which, of course, would cause certain inconveniences—X would still be more powerful than Y, and no feat of my imagination would help me see the man the way you did. So.

Eggs, that’s what I want.

What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but given to you anew every minute—all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other’s sentences—“that’s just it, exactly, that’s what I just thought”—thrilling us as if we’d just found a secret door in a shared home, but I bet had we tried to write out our individual trains of thought, separately, and then compared notes, we’d see we weren’t thinking the same thing at all—only about the same thing. The difference is obvious. X remains more powerful under all conditions. That’s why it is so rare for two people to dream the same dream.

But they do, don’t they? Late Granny Lina told about the time in Karaganda, where they’d been deported, when she and Gramps dreamt the same thing on the same night: that the ice had cracked on the river and all three of them—she, he, and my eight-year-old dad—leapt from one ice floe to the next, holding hands, until they made their way to the shore, where they could see a white house on the green slope, the table draped in a white cloth and set for a meal out on the porch. Gramps then said, “Looks to me, Lina, like we’ll be going home soon”—and later it turned out that it was that night (or almost that night) Stalin died, and in about a year they did go back.

It’s different, of course, in that I wouldn’t want to share a dream like that with Lolly for all the tea in China, thank you; a dream like that is a glimpse of the future when the same danger haunts both. It’s borne of a forced intimacy, when you’re being squashed into each other by outside forces, melded into a single mind because you’ve got nowhere else to go. That’s some kind of marital bliss, right there. Who knows how they’d fare in normal life. But what if the threat comes from inside, not from the outside? What if it’s enough that my girl’s memories are an infinite horde, and I have no way of knowing which one of them will turn against me?

By contrast, these dreams of mine have become a kind of a shared secret—the kind that married couples have. I’ve never been married before, so I love stuff like this, probably more than she does; I think it’s so cool that she wants to remember these dreams, writes some of them down, generally treats them with the utmost seriousness, like a homegrown Dr. Freud. I’m the same with her cycles—always keep track of them in my mind, so that I can reassure her whenever she worries for no reason. She is pretty good, though; she really studied psychology. When they had the course, she said she spent the entire semester in the reading room, bingeing on specialized literature, even talked her way into an internship at an asylum: first, because the kid must have itched to find out exactly how she got left without a father, but also, I bet, because she was not without doubt—what if something was really wrong with him, the diagnosis not a sham? As a result, what she knows about the discipline goes way beyond the usual intelligentsia erudition, which is, by itself, vastly beyond my grasp—all I know I learned from my sales practicum; I’m a self-made psychologist (“psychomite,” as Lolly says). It must have been because of her that I’ve grown to love these dreams. Because they are not just mine, but ours, together.

Although truth be told; they are no one’s, and there isn’t much to love about them, either.

They just stick in my mind like burrs.

Last night it wasn’t the death in the forest (and not so much death, as the back of that guy with his Schmeiser), no, there was something else equally unnerving. All these dreams are unnerving—not in their mood, but in their stories. Inside the black Opel Kadett there are people in unfamiliar officers’ uniforms, up in front, to the left, and to the right of me; I’m in the back seat, and they are taking me somewhere because I’m a suspect in a murder, but I know that I’m not in any real danger, that it’ll all resolve itself somehow. Another image: must be a doctor’s examination room in a clinic because surgical instruments are being boiled in a small metal pail on a spirit lamp; I can see very clearly the tiny bubbles as they rise to the surface and burst around the tools like sparks…. And there was a woman there, the one wrapped in a white sheet; I don’t remember what she looked like—in the next frame she gets up and walks somewhere with me, down a low-ceilinged corridor, to a ladder, phosphorescently white in the moonlight, where I lean her against a log wall and raise her skirt…. Darkness pulses with widening concentric circles of fire, and a slow female voice, impassive like voice-over, says, “It’s never like that, it never happens like that—twice out of three times in a row.” This feels piquant. The woman must know such things. Of all things, an erotic dream this one is not. I feel nothing. Not just nothing approximating an orgasm, but nothing at all. Not a thing. I only register the facts, as an outside observer: two fiery contours and it’s never like that, apparently, twice out of three times. And how is it, then? With Lolly, I see all kinds of things, but no fiery circles that I can recall.

That’s another thing all these dreams have in common and the reason I thought of them as something alien from the very beginning: unlike regular dreams, they’re utterly emotionless. No joy, no fear, no anxiety, no arousal, nothing—only stories; the colors, smells, sounds, the feel of things—all there, no problem, all senses amplified like when you’re high on something, but the emotions are missing. If these are, in fact, memories, they must come from a disconnected brain. A zombie. The raving of a severed head, as Granny Lina would put it.

Without Lolly, that’s what I would’ve thought, most likely: I’m losing it. So what if it feels good—feels like a glimpse of another world, like in the mountains, when you can suddenly see a distant valley from between the peaks—loonies dig their trips too, no? But Lolly already told me—very firmly—no. She said they are incredibly unhappy, those people, except the ones who go through manic phases, but those spells don’t last very long before depression sets in again. This did not describe me at all, and she also told me to quit messing with things I know nothing about. She said it almost like she was offended, like I strayed into someone else’s misfortune, a very limited-access territory. Like it was a privilege I didn’t have. Sorry, toots. This I understand; I’m not a knuckleheaded lobster-eater eager to take a pretty reporter for a ride around Benelux (the Be and the Ne may be out of my reach, but a nice vacation in Croatia is very much in the offing this summer—Lolly doesn’t know yet, I’ll tell her in another week or so)—I know there must be some dark things in her memory, especially where her father is concerned, dark and heavy like boulders that she piled into a wall around herself, a fortress of self-preservation locked even to me. A closed subset of memories we’ll say—literally and figuratively. Alright, if that’s the deal, I don’t mind. And I still feel a pang of something, funny human creature that I am: like if I were a full-blown lunatic I’d be more interesting for her, more heroic or something… as if it really mattered to me to stake a claim on whatever part of her life she’d cordoned off for her father—who, let us be completely accurate, was not really mad either, so you, Lolly, need to re-examine your self-appointed position as the Crazy People’s police. Every man has a right to his own lunacy. Or something like that. You bet I’ll exercise mine every chance I get.

The bacon nice and crisp. Crack-splat, crack-splat, crack-splat—three eggs into the pan and the kitchen instantly fills with assertive hissing. An inquiry into the fridge yields cucumbers, a disheartened bunch of radishes, and a few shoots of chives. Life, ladies and gentlemen, is not all that bad. Add the Chumak mayo (buy Ukrainian!) and we’re a chop and a toss away from a Vitamin Salad, a happy throwback to the era of geriatric socialism. Oh, wait a minute, I’m lying—there was no mayo in socialist stores; we relied on farmers-market sour cream. When we were students, it took a special trip to the Theater Café on the corner of Volodymyrska, on the spot now occupied by the five-star condo high-rise, for the marvel called “egg under mayonnaise”: a hard-boiled egg garnished with a teaspoon of mayo. Best bite you could take with a drink. If I ever decided to go into the restaurant business, I’d have a hard-core period place, fierce eighties. I’d call it something appropriate, like Caféteria or Obshchepit, Shcherbytsky’s as a last resort, but still, no fads, no frills, no vulgar falsifications like that Co-op chain that’s “co-op” in name only. No siree, we’ll do it right, and we’ll be true to the last archaeographical detail: rickety tables on duralumin-tube legs, always with a piece of folded paper under one of them so you don’t spill your borsch; forks and spoons of eternally greasy bendable aluminum, no knives in sight, obviously; and for the napkins in the middle—plastic containers repurposed from the office-supply inventory loaded with hand-cut little squares of dense smooth paper, the kind that goes transparent under the lightest touch, catching your fingerprints better than the cops. On the menu, aside from my favorite Vitamin Salad, of course, we’d have mystery cutlets breaded with prickly stale crumbs, to be served with blue-hue mashed potatoes; fried hake with steel-colored, weapon-grade noodles; pelmeni with vinegar; borsch; and dried fruit compote, always with a dark-brown layer of silt, most likely of plant origin, on the bottom of the glass. Oh yes, and the chopped beet salad. Glasses of the thick-walled, octagonal variety, vodka with beer, and the puzzle of “a choice of desserts” for dessert, represented most often by a sizeable pile of sugar-dusted chopped dough appealingly called Finger-Licks—when I came to Kyiv, in my first year at the university, which, not to spoil anyone’s breakfast, also happened to be the Chernobyl year, I lived almost exclusively on these Finger-Licks until I figured out how to cook. For old times’ sake, I’d serve “eggs under mayonnaise” too, but only when I got really sentimental, as the spécialité du jour.

Done right, with the walls painted shoulder-high in green oil paint, some vintage-scary posters, light bulbs in only half the lights, and a guaranteed half an hour before a waiter acknowledges your existence—basically, with a full immersion into the period atmosphere—a place like that couldn’t keep people out if it wanted! And not just Western tourists, although that’s a gold mine right there. I’ve got to sell it to someone. How about that character with the silver Mercedes, next door? I can’t believe no one has done it yet—boys must all be embarrassed about their valiant Komsomol youth; they all want new and foreign stuff, some weird fruits de mer and Château-de-Fleur, they’re all gourmands from Konotop—not much better, really, than the hillbillies in the old days, who all craved high-shine East German dressers and made room for them by getting rid of old hand-painted chests and Petrykiv step stools. The grandkids would now give anything to have those back, but tough luck, it’s all gone. Now we have to buy classic Kyiv china back from Europe, import our own stuff, and not just the china. And still every auction is packed with the French Empire; it sells like pancakes, and dudes bid each other out of sight, ’coz that’s how cool they are, and it makes me want to say—brother, be yourself, whenever did your granny ever lay her eyes on French Empire? Why are you buying someone else’s past? Now a genuine Shcherbytsky’s setup I could supply in a blink—heck, it’d be the hottest thing in town! It’s bound to come around sometime in the next twenty years anyway, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway.

To heck with historical authenticity, I dump about half a can of olives into my Vitamin Salad on a last-minute impulse, it’ll be a Greek Vitamin Salad, a post-Communist hybrid; too bad there’s no cheese, some feta would be nice, or, better still, some fresh Carpathian bryndza… alright, this’ll do. Now, bread into the toaster. Nothing like the smell of toasted bread. Finally, I’m fully plugged into the outside world—and drooling. Time to turn on the TV; it’s tuned to Lolly’s channel, but of course, inane slob that I am, I’ve slept straight through her segment and land into the latest news. Which will tell me that Americans are still bombing Baghdad. Fucking blitzkriegers.

No sooner do I settle in front of the TV and stuff a heaping, steaming, awesome forkful of eggs and a bite of warm, crusty wheat toast into my mouth than the outside world mounts a surprise attack: the phone rings. Screams like it hurts. Should have set the answering machine to pick up.

“Gud mornin, Adrian Ambrozich.”

It’s Yulichka, my busy bee—already up and running the office, bless her heart. If only the sweet soul could find it in herself to speak Ukrainian, so I wouldn’t have to lose ten seconds of my life every time this Adrian Ambrozich comes up and I have to merge him with myself (which is, at the moment, chewing). Some clients, aware of my principled distaste for patronymics (“Oedipal complex,” I usually explain, kidding, of course, but many still get somber in the face, and go “Oh, sorry, sure thing…”) pitch something totally outrageous, like “Mister Adrian”—somehow they think it’s the Russian equivalent of saying “sir” in Ukrainian. It’s ridiculous and ungrammatical, but really popular—another post-Communist hybrid, like my salad, only far less appetizing. So why should a man have his breakfast interrupted?

“Adrian Ambrozich,” Yulichka is clearly excited because she doesn’t even apologize when I mumble with my mouth full—“I hev some hick here, from a villadzh, somevere next to Boryspil, he brot a Swiss knaiv, from var-taim, with a small so, in gud condishn. He ses at home he hes a kukoo clock end a walnut wardrobe, used to be his grandpa’s, he sed.”

Whoa! No authentic cuckoo clocks have been sighted since about a year ago; Bray has scrubbed the market clean of them, no prayer for small fish like me. Is this for real? Yulichka certainly has the nose, that’s the main reason I hired her. Walnut ward-robe—that could be anything, but we can’t let this redneck out of our sight!

“Hold him there, Yulichka,” I hear myself say in Russian. Wow, I didn’t think I could: that’s what money does to a man—and not even money yet, a mere providential waft of it in the air. Makes me think of Les’ka, we were at the university together: she and her husband went into the gas business under the tutelage of some Petya from Moscow, and later Petya turned out to be gay and would come visit every time he got the itch for Les’ka’s hubby—Les’ka would move out to the guestroom then. Do not judge so ye will not be judged, indeed.

At the moment, though, Yulichka couldn’t care less about what language we’re speaking: We’re both breathing hard on our ends of the line, like a pair of lovers (like with Lolly before dawn, I think, irrelevantly).

“I meid him koffi.”

“Good job,” I say in Ukrainian, having regained my self-control; she does know what she’s doing. “Keep him entertained for just a bit longer, I’ll be right there,” I almost add “just let me take a shower.” To heck with the eggs, leave the pair of warm golden eyes to grow cold on the plate, but I have to shave at least—I can’t very well roll in all stubby! Have coffee at the office: I sourced me a mean espresso machine, no shabbier than Bray’s.

A catch, finally! Man. About time—been scraping by on small stuff for years already, junk, bric-a-brac, whatever I can find, totally like that runaway goat from the nursery rhyme, as Lolly recites, “Ran past a stream—snatched a gulp to drink, ran past a trash heap—snatched a bite to eat.” No way to run a business, really. But now if I could take a spot at a good show, Doroteum’s coming up, for one, with a few really nice pieces…. Alright, stop it, enough daydreaming—go already!

Turning off the TV—like clearing the table: erase the picture. Salad into the fridge, the egg dregs glowing with protein—into the mouth after all, albeit on the run, plate into the sink—and I’m in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, with the water splashing and the Gillette buzzing as happily as a bee on my face, when my mind suddenly registers, grants access to the footage that was on TV while I talked to Yulichka, the ochre-and-mud vision of Baghdad that’s been on every channel for the last couple days: far below, a bridge in the clouds of sand or blown-up brick dust, and a thread of American Abrams tanks crawling onto it, out of palm-tree greenery, from left to right—from the distance they look like a pride of monstrous prehistoric turtles. This turns out to be the last shot filmed by one of our own—Taras Protsiuk, Lolly knew him—from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel moments before the first turtle, which had already begun to turn its turret toward the camera, fires, and the next shot every TV channel in the world shows is one of Taras’s dead body, face down on the concrete with his legs folded under him and arms thrown wide, no longer holding his camera. The sound—I can’t remember if I heard any sounds. The guttural menacing growl of the tanks as they rolled onto the bridge—did I hear it on TV, or somewhere in my mind, after the dry rattle of the machine gun, in that dream last night?

I go cold all over. I stand in the middle of my bathroom, on the mat, barefoot and stripped to my boxers—and shiver. Something’s short-circuited. Something—an idea—illuminated everything in a flash, and I must find it again, hunt it down and catch it before it vanishes into the chatter, into the thick of all other thoughts that came with it and now crowd inside my head like a drunk party in a small living room; shove them aside, look for the one that flashed, not quite whole, snippets of conversations with Lolly. Associated Press pledged assistance to the dead cameraman’s family… Ukraine in deep dark ass again, because how can a country demand any sort of investigation of anyone else if it routinely whacks its journalists right at home, and cuts their heads off for good measure, like scalp hunters… Lolly once drank with Taras, may he rest in peace, at some TV-people party of theirs… to the guy in the tank, the gleam of the lens may have looked like a signal for enemy fire, war’s war, God damn it, or as some insist, it looked like a sniper—only why would a sniper be a threat to a tank?… the Americans have really gone nuts in Iraq this time around, keep shooting their own like they’d had their heads spun around, as Granny Lina would say, Well, shouldn’t have gone a-hunting after those desert demons, should they?; our boys said they lost their wits like that when they were in Afghanistan…. Where the hell is my aftershave? I always put it on this shelf, where did she put it? I hope the Rep.’s ride isn’t blocking the driveway, better to just call a cab… phone numbers for Taxi-Lux and Taxi-Blues, damn it, I’m late and the redneck with the cuckoo has nothing to do at the office but add zeros to what he wants for it. A close-up of a weeping Latina reporter in a white T-shirt, it’s blazing hot in Baghdad, the coffin with Taras’s body being loaded onto the plane, and one of the guys who’d sat with him in the hotel bar just the night before holds the camera steady, and even if he’s crying, too, no one will see his tears, because his eye is the camera, and it’s outside him, external, impersonal, and pure… Stop. Stop, stop. Here it is; I’ve got it… slow now, easy, don’t lose it.

The image of the tanks on the bridge that Taras captured on film and that now runs on every channel—that was the last thing he saw in his life, right? The last memory fixed by his mind. Only he had a camera in his hands—he was lucky (that’s so wrong to say!) to have the whole world see the last thing he saw before he died.

Question: What would happen to that last shot captured by his consciousness if he hadn’t had the time to transfer it from the retina of his own eyes onto that other one, the mechanical eye of the camera?

A camera can be turned off. It can be set to play. A camera is a very simple device. But where does it all go from your own, human eyes if it’s you who’s been turned off?

Why do we choose to believe that it all just disappears, fades into nothingness with the person? Because there’s no play button? But we don’t get to watch it when the person is still alive just the same. No matter how close we are, how intimate, we’ve no way to glimpse that footage, as I have no way of entering Lolly’s memories. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The back of the man ahead of me, in the uniform with a woven belt, the dry rattle from behind the trees—and blackness. After that—blackness. This picture, this last picture, with the back, the grass and the underbrush, the thorn apple and heather and juniper, the sun bunnies on the tree trunks, the smell of humid earth and soggy greenness—where does it go? To what posthumous vault?

The black Opel Kadett with the unknown army’s officers, the spatula boiling in sparkly bubbles, the stairs phosphorescent in the moonlight, the woman’s voice keeping a methodical count of our orgasms… I am not mad I tell myself as I try to suppress the shakes; I am not mad. Calm down. I’m not mad. I’m just watching someone else’s footage.

Made by a dead person who didn’t have a camera.

He doesn’t care that I don’t deal in that kind of antiques.

I know this is true because I am shaking. The puzzle has fit together, no loose ends. Dreadfully simple, elegant really, as it ought to be with the right solution. The only thing missing was this basic, obvious premise: the footage kept in one’s mind does not disappear. And why would it? Just because a man didn’t happen to have a camera? Please, the camera is incidental; all it does is prove that the film is there.

Just like these dreams.

The absolute, inviolable certainty that I am right calls up, for a moment, the half-forgotten sweetness—that blissful, triumphant unclenching of brain cells that used to come in abundance from lab research and that can never be fully replaced by the satisfaction of a well-done business deal, no matter how complex the scheme. Nothing to write the Nobel Committee about, to be sure, but the thrill is just the same—and perfectly sufficient. The world can be explained. Specifically, somewhere out there lies buried a humongous, immeasurable—infinite, that’s it—vault, an archive of things once witnessed, of footage that wants to be watched. How, by whom, those details are not important. This, one must admit, is a comforting thought. An idea that offers a man, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, a shot at non-lonesomeness (that’s a Lolly word). As in: my memory, in its entirety, I bequeath to Daryna Goshchynska/Adrian Vatamanyuk (choose one). Okay, maybe not in its entirety; that may be too much, but wouldn’t this make for a great sci-fi story? I’m full of ideas; I’m shedding ideas this morning. Spawning. A morning of high ideation. A high-yield morning. I’m Ideating Adrian. Mister Adrian Ideatov. No, better, like an emperor—Adrian the Idea Bearer. Wow. Watch out, Boryspil redneck, I’m gonna get your clock and your little cuckoo, too!

Snickering at myself (no one else to snicker at in the empty apartment), I rub into my cheeks a pleasantly cool squirt of silky Egoist (never did find that aftershave)—soon as I get to the office, I’ll desire a double espresso from Yulichka. Pull on a brand new, just-out-of-the-plastic, crinkly Hugo Boss shirt—a T-shirt won’t look respectable enough—snip off the hateful plastic whiskers that stick in the seams where labels had been attached, straighten cuffs, admire the package; cool and style all around, good to go to Sotheby’s, or to a Swiss bank, yes, definitely, Sotheby’s first, then to the bank to unload the cash—and then it finally catches up with me, like late-night heartburn, this very simple, little tail end of my earlier idea, sudden and undeniable like a door slamming into a face: Why me?

Sweet Jesus, why me? Why did he, the one that gets shot in the dream, whoever he was, choose me to sit through his archival reels—if I didn’t ask for it?

And, while we’re at it… who was he?

Black Woods, May 1947

“Father,” he said, and wanted to say again, Father, but his voice failed him and only a low groan came out. Someone shone a battery lamp at him; the circle of its light swung back and forth across the wall, a log wall like that of a village church; and in the shadows, outside this circle of light, he thought he saw a priest’s dark cassock. This made him happy: Papa’s here, he thought, and the overwhelming joy of it almost brought him to tears—he felt so weak and tender, softened with love and gratitude to his father, so worn out he couldn’t even get up to kiss his father’s hand and ask for absolution as he’d longed to do: Father, I killed people, I abandoned my studies back when the Germans first came—how many fell at my hand? I did not forget, Dad, what you said to me when I left, when you gave me your blessing: Do not shame us, son. I was a good soldier and I am clean before Ukraine; forgive me, Father, my blood-spilling sins. But then he remembered, the gash of the memory clean and sharp in his mind like a knife wound, that it had been three years since they sent Mom and Dad to Siberia, and he moaned again and closed his eyes, still feeling, like a blind man, the tightly packed, hard-breathing human mass all around him. The air was heavy—the animal pall of human flesh mixed with the acerbic tinge of medicine and disinfectant; it wheezed, mumbled, and bubbled; it heaved like a dog coughing up a bone; once, a young voice rang out from the dark, wild and loud, “Throw the grenade!”

“Shhh,” a whisper rustled toward the voice, soothing, comforting. He heard clothing move, sensed the air stir around him, and the circle of light lifted from his eyelids, went to the young voice, but still he felt like the Holy Father remained at his bed, not leaving him. The other smell, that’s what it was—sap, or as they say around this country, firring, the woods. Pine trees. The logs of the wall, he noticed when he opened his eyes, also seemed fresh, stained with sap. An infirmary then, not a jail.

He was safe—someone was looking after him: his body was immobilized, swaddled and feeble, blissfully freed of the need to move for the first time in many years. Someone worked at his side as he lay unconscious, worked to do good for him—the attention he discerned on the other side of the lamp was also kind and comforting, caring, and his forehead retained the feeling of being touched by a delicate, cool hand. He was so moved by this sweet, blessed peace that had been given to his body that he just lay there enjoying his helplessness, feeling his every cell vibrate with joy, glowing inside, the hot wash of gratitude barely dammed by his closed eyelids: kindness, he was filled with kindness; it flowed through him; it emanated through every pore of his skin; it inundated and washed away his feeble self, his memory, his past, even his name—he was nameless, helpless like a new babe bobbing on the waves of an endless, resplendent ocean, washed on all sides with love so abundant it made him weak with awe and marvel.

Where did it all come from, or had he died already, unbeknownst to himself, and gone to heaven? But he’d had no chance to confess; he’d wanted to confess, but hadn’t gained the strength to speak, and yet he felt he’d been heard and forgiven—so this was what it was like to have been forgiven of your sins. He willed himself, for the last time, to open his tear-streaked eyelids, open wide—like the dead eyes of murdered rebels that the NKVD pins with matchsticks when they put their tangled bodies on display in city squares—and from his alien, heavily numb lips happily peeled off the single and most important thing he had to say: “Thank you, Father.”

At this, the ocean shifted, and in front of him stood a solid wall of gold, high as the distant heavens, and he knew he had to scale it to get to the other side. This was incredibly hard and he could not hold on—he collapsed, everything collapsed, and darkness fell.

Later still came long, viscous dreams that trapped him like the knee-deep bogs that filled his boots when they’d marched north in spring. Mother came and poured milk from a jar into his mouth; there was too much, it filled his nostrils and he couldn’t breathe; he fought and turned away until he saw it wasn’t milk at all but cherry liqueur, hot, thick, and ruby red.

Then he was in Lviv again, at Sapieha Palace, and boys marched at him out of the gates of the Academic Gymnasium, while he stood with his hand raised in salute waiting for them to pass so that he could march after them, but he never got to go with them because Lodzio Daretsky called out of the ranks to him, laughing, “You dope, what are you doing walking around in a uniform? The Soviets are everywhere.”

“And you,” Adrian called back. “What about you? Are you allowed?”

“We’ve nothing to worry about now!” Lodzio answered and laughed, a free, raucous laugh, such as he never had while he was alive; only then did Adrian make out, next to Lodzio, Myron, who’d blown himself up in a bunker not too long ago so he wouldn’t be captured, and Legend, tortured to death back when Germans first came by the Gestapo on Pelchynska Street, and that doctor from the East he’d met a few times in the Red Cross office, Ratai, they called him; he had that Poltava way of rolling his l’s so soft, smooth as silk, and he’d perished, they said, this last winter somewhere in the mountains when the Poles dropped grenades into his infirmary. They were all dead, those who marched past Sapieha; they’d never even met each other alive. He recognized some but not others, and could only ask as he watched them pass, “Where are you going, then?”

“To St. George’s,” someone said, maybe even Lodzio, “to pray for Ukraine. You better get going too, enough lollygagging already!”

He felt shamed, and wanted to run after them, but something held him from behind. He turned and saw it was Obersturmführer Willie Wirzieng himself, the hog with a butcher’s jaw—only changed out of his Gestapo uniform into new NKVD rags, with enormous epaulettes studded with living, blinking human eyes instead of stars, and an invisible voice told Adrian that those were the eyes of Ukrainian political prisoners that Wirzieng had personally gouged out—who grinned at him, strutted and hissed, “Never did kill me, did you?” Adrian protested that he tried, twice, and both times the failure wasn’t his: the first time Wirzieng unexpectedly took a different route, went the way he’d never gone before, and the other time something else made him abort the mission.

“Alright, try again!” said the one who was Wirzieng, and Adrian opened his eyes at once, as if shaken: above him, a woman’s face floated in the dull yellow glow of a lantern, now coming closer, now pulling away. Geltsia!, he thought, thrilled—it had been so long since her last letter he’d begun to wonder if she’d moved out west with one of their convoys, then suddenly remembered he wasn’t supposed to call her Geltsia, should have said Zirka, but it wasn’t her anyway; the kiss that moistened his parched lips wasn’t hers—and in the next instant he knew it wasn’t a kiss, either. He was nailed to a cross; he rose and fell on his pierced hands as he fought for air, and every time he lifted himself, a terrible, infernal pain filled his chest and the centurion below shoved at his mouth a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of his spear. How long can I last like this?, he thought, terrified, and saw below, on the other side of the cross, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill: they sat there like the myrrh-bearing wives in Brueghel’s Crucifixion, at the foot of a little knoll, and played cards like in Yalta, with cut-up pieces of a map—he strained, against the piercing pain, to see who’d gotten the map of Ukraine, but it wasn’t there; he realized it was long gone, played to the bottom of the discard pile, and would never come up again in this game. He wanted to shout in anger at the glib Churchill, who looked a little like Wirzieng, What about your Fulton speech—didn’t you promise to wage war on the Soviets?—but asked instead, Lord, why did you abandon me? The centurion popped up again, bared his teeth at him, and pointed to where Geltsia, no, Zirka, kneeled, bent at the waist, loose-haired, in a fitted uniform overcoat that had parted, very Brueghel-like, to reveal a bit of raw, purple lining that pulsed like freshly skinned flesh. He gathered his remaining strength to call out to her, to catch her eye at least, so she’d know he was there, but she did not see him, someone’s shoulders blocked her view, and he couldn’t figure out how it was that he could see her but she couldn’t see him, and then wondered, with a new pang of horror, if she no longer lived.

“She lives alright, lives just fine,” the centurion said in the exasperated tone of a peasant telling his old cow to stand still; Adrian looked closer and went cold: under her coat, Geltsia’s body was wrapped in a white sheet spotted with blood.

“And we’ll see each other again?” Adrian pleaded, because he no longer feared anything, even a no.

“Sure you’ll see her,” Roman howled menacingly, for some reason in the Boyko dialect and sounding as though he called from the bottom of a well. “Moy-ye, you’ll see her good and right…”; then, he took aim and hit Adrian between the ribs with his spear, so hard that all the stars tumbled out of the sky and darkness fell again.

And a bit later he clearly heard a woman’s low voice say above him, “His fever has broken, Father Chaplain.”

And another voice, a man’s, padding softly but surely, as if with felt-slippered feet, answered quietly, “Thank the merciful Lord.”

This was no longer a dream.

He opened his eyes and tried to move; the same terrible pain rang through his chest, making him hiss and freeze, eyes bulging, waiting for his body to tell him where it did not hurt. The man stood at the foot of his bed dressed not in a cassock, but in civilian clothes, wearing a vested suit and a cravat, and the woman, whom he could guess to be young and swarthy, lingered right above him, so that in the dim light he could clearly see the lush, oblong hillocks of her breasts under her blouse—like a pair of doves, he thought with a sudden lively interest. And at once felt angry at this most inappropriately eager metaphor, and at the even more inappropriate urge to stroke these doves, and his inability to move, and at the next thought that came on the heels of the first: how scrubby, hairy, and foul-smelling he must’ve grown, a beast of the woods indeed, in contrast to the man at the foot of his bed, who, although no longer young, with large bald spots on his bulbous forehead, was clean-shaven, sharp-collared, and seemed to emanate the unmistakable aura of a good cologne, which made it all the more humiliating to be lying in front of him like this. These were all rotten, sordid thoughts, noxious muck—all occasioned by this woman, her near warmth and scent, and this made him truly and finally furious: Why’d she have to go and stand there?

He was also nettled at the vague, elusive connection he felt between the man and something extraordinarily nice, something precious and joyful—like a sun shower in a glen when he was a child, a veil of gold nuggets thrown over the iridescent green and held up with pillars of sunlight—but what it was—so fine, and perhaps recent—Adrian could not recall, the woman’s presence distracted him; he did, however, recall a different glen, and the recollection lifted him above the last traces of his delirium and made him forget the pain that had pulled an iron brace around his chest again: How long has it been, and what about the boys? What happened to them?

They were trekking through the woods and the last thing he remembered was the sunlight spotting the trunks of the pines and the rectangular back of their guide, Roman, ahead of him, outfitted in a homemade uniform and girded with a thick, stitched, woven sash, instead of a regular leather belt—men ragged him about it (the girls liked Roman so much they didn’t want him to leave, stole his belt and kept it!), as men in resistance always rag agreeably quiet types. Roman, in response, only smiled his reserved, farmhand smile and kept at whatever he had to do; belt or no belt, he was good at it, his rifle—an MP44, a beauty—was a piece to prize. When Adrian asked him about it, Roman simply said he “borrowed it back in ’44 from one SS man,” and Adrian liked that about him, too—the way he said it. Anyone who’d seen Roman walk through the woods would also know he was a veteran: he had a light, capacious gait, noiseless as a cat’s, not a twig cracked underfoot, not a puddle stirred. Adrian appreciated it right away—this inborn skill of a native who didn’t have to learn the woods by camping with Plast Scouts—and tried to walk like that, too, light and agile, happy to have the man lead him.

He’d felt out of sorts since the night before, trailed by a premonition of some vague ill, irritable and distracted, and then the strap on his map case snapped right as they were about to set out—another bad omen—so this sturdy rectangular back ahead of him felt reassuring. Adrian was glad to be looking at it, this dependable construction as though especially designed for the purpose of hefting horse-size loads—carrying sacks of grain, bringing sheep out of a snowstorm into the warmth of the barn, and the wounded, sure, why not dragging wounded friends off the battlefield, too.

Of course you never thought of it like that—you didn’t say to yourself, Let’s take this guy with us because he could carry me if I get hurt, or finish me off—but no combat unit could persist without this gut-felt certainty. It was the primeval raw goo, the only substance that could bind a handful of discrete male selves into one—a unit, a pack, a swarm, a hundred—only then could an idea transform them into a working army, a self-propelled force that gathered speed and multiplied its strength, so that one day in ’45 a field up north might have turned from rusty-brown to gray with sheaves of rag-doll soldiers that the Bolsheviks kept herding onto it, hundred after hundred, until they had to give up and retreat, never to realize that it was a single swarm of UIA, not even forty souls, that turned them back. The idea, no matter what our political teachers told us, is like yeast and will leaven only the finest flour; and the boys who came from behind the Curzon Line and told stories of how they sang duets, from their trenches, at the Poles on the other side before the fight—“Antko, Antko what are you fighting for?”—“My father Sta-a-alin!”—until one of the Antkos, driven to distraction, would snap back, “No more mine than yours!” which eliminated any possibility of further fighting on the spot, and those boys, proud and very conscious of what they fought for, and by that faith made invincible—were first and foremost good stock, the finest flour that could wrap you like a second skin, so that you and the man before you, and the one behind, and those to your right and to your left, all of you, once mixed together, became one flesh, an army of the people. This was the feeling, lost for several years after the army split up into small groups and went underground, that he experienced again behind the shield of Roman’s rectangular back as they moved through the humid early-morning woods, in unfamiliar terrain, goose-file.

There were five of them, too many he thought, but the dark-eyed security-service character with hollow cheeks, Stodólya, had insisted they take two guards where one would have been plenty, and nothing, nothing in him snapped or dropped—no time!—when Roman suddenly froze in his tracks and the next instant they caught machine-gun fire from behind the bushes… Sweet Lord Jesus, what happened after that?

Who carried him out? Who dragged him to the infirmary (something made him believe it was Roman)? How did it all even happen—reconnaissance said the raids had passed—how did they drop right into the ambush, like a ham hock into stew? And who to ask about it all now—the one the dark-eyed nurse calls Father Chaplain?

Two pairs of eyes, black and gray, gleamed at him expectantly from the dusk. Well, there you have it—he’s awake and alive, no worries. And mad as hell—nothing inside him but anger: as though the very refitting of him back into reality, from which he had been so abruptly disengaged, scraped him raw and left him fiercely itching. Doggone it, if only the pain in his chest would let up! He, who had always scorned any corporeal weakness like a mistake in a mathematical equation, now must be compelled to lie hobbled on his cot and wonder if he’ll make it up to relieve himself.

The priest coughed gently, as though tuning his voice to a pitch that wouldn’t add to the pain, and then smiled—an unexpectedly open smile that made his whole face glow, every scrunched-up wrinkle of it, “Glory to Ukraine, Commander.”

He returned the greeting, barely catching his breath before falling into a cruel fit of coughing that made him break out in sweat. He wasn’t a commander, just the management adjutant, but they didn’t need to know that. Where the hell was he?

“You’ll have to stay with us a bit until you get stronger. I am Yaroslav, and this is our nurse, Rachel.”

Rachel, huh. Now it would’ve been impolite not to look at her straight, and, trained as he was in the German days, he took quick stock of her features; his eye gathered and arranged them, like a picture in a kaleidoscope—noticing the unmistakable signs of the persecuted race, small things you normally don’t see until someone pointed them out: a meaningful tuck of the plump upper lip, distinct like an Arabian stallion’s; the cut of her nostrils; the smattering of freckles on her olive skin; and her large, prominent eyes like jet stones, half-hidden under heavy eyelids. He remembered then where he had seen this face before, now heavily retouched by shadows: it was she who leaned over him to put a cool cloth on his forehead; she who washed his body and gave him water to drink, wiping his mouth and chin dry.

Suddenly and inexplicably embarrassed, he asked, “So it was you who cared for me?”

She laughed and spoke fast, with the melodic Hebraic intonation—almost as if she felt a bit shy herself and rushed to sweep her unease under the pile of words. “Me and our doctor, he’s the one who did the surgery, took out the bullet, and repaired your pleura. The bullet came close but didn’t touch the lung—you must have special luck!”

“Thank you,” he mumbled, disoriented: he was being swept up in the forgotten prewar hustle of the Galich market, the clamor from the Jewish rows where quick, black-eyed merchants outyelled and outclucked each other praising their goods, and he wanted to close his eyes again—this woman had too much life in her; she spouted it thick and heavy as oil and he was too weak. The priest and the nurse apparently understood how he felt and exchanged a quick, short glance—adult conspirators over a small child’s head—but he did not get upset with them; he had no more energy for that, and he had to conserve the little he did have if he hoped to find out anything. It was imperative that he keep them there, that he speak to them, so that they wouldn’t leave him alone with the picture that had been branded in his mind and still burned there: the sun spots on the trunks of the trees and Roman’s rectangular back with the assault rifle and a hand grenade in a holster, girded over his shirt with the homemade woven sash. They did not seem to want to step away from him either, and Adrian read their hesitation. The two of them, no, three, counting the invisible doctor, had fought Death for him: he was their small personal victory and they deserved to enjoy it for a little while longer—and he had to exploit this.

He pinned them to the spot with questions, quick and straight as darts, concise, dry, to the point, Security Service style—not leaving the one being questioned any chance to think—asked in a low voice because his breath barely squeezed in and out of his chest and he was afraid of coughing again. Gradually, however, the strength came and took his side—the anonymous, faceless strength of the Organization, blind as the laws of physics; he managed to claim it again, if only for a few minutes, and he was no longer the patient—he was an officer, and the two healthy, strong, full-blooded people, the man and the woman before him, straightened up and stood at attention without even noticing.

Who brought him to the hospital? Woodsman’s men. A zero point zero of new information—of course it was Woodsman’s people, who else, those were the men with whom he’d set out. How many made it out of the ambush? They didn’t know. Were there other wounded? Yes, but with light injuries, to arms, shins, nothing serious, thank the Lord. Killed? They didn’t know this either—but they would have heard if there had been, someone in the surrounding villages would’ve known. So they were not in a village? No, the village was no longer safe, there must be a mole, NKVD came and stayed for a whole month before Easter, searched every house until they found the hideout with two wounded men—they must’ve known what they were looking for. And? Took them alive? No, the boys shot themselves. May their souls rest in peace. This bunker, in the woods, is safe; that’s where they did surgery—at the warden’s station; the one who carried him out on his back, the guy with the big nose, told them he was severely wounded, said he was an important person, a commander from the district, asked them to do everything possible.

So that’s how it was. He was very grateful. He said another thank-you just to Rachel, who rushed off to bring him water to drink, good, spring water; the whole hospital seemed to be very well kept. “Now let the commander rest a bit.”

“How much longer?”

“That’s for the doctor to say when he comes back.”

It seemed they really had nothing more for him to learn. He thanked them again; a record number of thanks per unit of time. He was, in fact, exhausted—limp like a beaten-out rug.

The guy with the big nose—that was Stodólya, obviously: he had a distinctive, elongated physiognomy, with gaunt cheeks that made his nose protrude like a wolf’s. He certainly knew his conspirator trade, but he went too far this time: could’ve left him instructions about communication instead of dooming him to passive waiting. They carried full knapsacks of literature—did even a shred of it survive? Stodólya, huh. Carried him out on his own back, fancy that. Why did he think it should have been Roman who saved him?

It was very good that Stodólya was alive and unharmed. It meant that while he was lying here, Stodólya was doing both of their jobs. Someone had to collect information about the local Bolshevik agents—they really wormed their way into the woodwork here. You should be pleased, Commander.

He was not; at least not as much as he ought to have been. All for the simple and primitive reason he was ashamed to admit even to himself: he didn’t like Stodólya. Some barrier stood between them, and neither man had a burning urge to overcome it. Such things were rare in resistance where the spirit of brotherhood and a shared fate united everyone, where you were pleased just to see a comrade alive. It just had to have been Stodólya, of all people. The man who saved his life—Stodólya.

Of the two most readily available strategies for handling an unmotivated antipathy toward someone who’s done you good—forgetting the good or identifying the motivation at the core of the antipathy—Adrian instinctively adopted the latter; his memory solicitously offered something he once heard about Stodólya: that he executed a boy who’d fallen asleep while keeping night watch. The boy was a new recruit, arrived from a nearby village the night before; he was seventeen years old. Stodólya did as The Code demanded, and no one would ever hold it against him, but still Adrian did not like to think about that boy and his last moments in front of the firing squad—as if it were he, Adrian, who was to blame for his ill fate.

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.

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 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.

Finally, Stodólya came for him, with a guard and another lad, a local: they intended to move him somewhere to a more distant village, to convalesce on fresh milk in some good people’s hayloft, but he refused, declaring he was fully fit for any work already. Orko confirmed that he was out of any immediate danger and only needed the dressing on his wound changed regularly. And as far as convalescence went, really, doctor, nothing makes a man stronger than honest toil, and few things weaken him faster than forced idleness; shouldn’t medicine take this into account? They had to admit he had a point; he won. He always won.

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.