The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

And we will dream the same dream. The same dream, my love—only we will be watching it from different ends.

Where are you, Adrian? I cannot see you. I’m here. Don’t be afraid. Give me your hand.

At night, the wind howled and wailed in the vents, mournful like the clamor of the lost souls it drove through the dark, host after weeping host. The giant firs at the entrance to the bunker flailed their boughs, clawing at the air, and for a moment Adrian thought dozens of hands were pushing the branches apart, splitting and cracking their way through the forest, and heard in the howling of the wind a distant echo of foreign voices calling to each other and the baying of dogs. But it was only the wind—lem wind, as the Lemko people from beyond the Curzon Line called it.

They—who had wandered the entire summer in a wasted, deserted land, among the villages burned by the Poles, where only feral cats, remembering people, ran out to greet them—believed that air could hold echoes of voices that had once rung through it, and insisted that the wind often brought, mixed with the smell of the charred homes, the clamor of a great human mass—children crying, cattle bellowing, engines running—all those unmistakable sounds of a twenty-four-hour deportation, which in reality happened already two months ago.

Every time, Adrian patiently explained to them that it was not physically possible for a sound to exist without its source and even used a stick to draw on the ground the range of fading fluctuations. But, of late, he himself experienced such auditory hallucinations more and more often: his nerves were wearing thin, which was bad because ahead of him loomed the entire unbroken winter like a wall that could not be scaled—only dug under, crawled beneath by the patient marking off of days, one at a time, on the calendar in the bunker.

“I’ll craze!” he thought suddenly, in a flash—and got angry at the thought, jumping onto the trunk of a fallen spruce, slipping under it, hugging it with his arms and legs, delighting without shame in the joy of his body roused from immobility, each muscle awake (pure sport, a child’s game—he could’ve just as easily walked on top of the log, sweeping over his tracks with a handful of fir brush). His body responded, engaged, instantly recalling its long-forgotten skills, the deeply buried spider-like four-handedness of a mountaineer, which a long time ago, in a different life, had carried him over mountain gorges on Plast climbing trips; this was the same body, limber and lithe, and it was a blast of true delight to move it ahead like this, bear-fashion, under the log, trying not to disturb the feathery cap of wet snow on top. Instantly sweaty, warmed from inside with a healthy heat, dry as a fire’s, he crawled to the spot where he was to leap down into a quick, nonfreezing stream—the “warm-run”—pulled himself astraddle the log and drew a triumphant breath, looking over the whole wooded gulch, lit by the snow’s glow in the predawn dusk.

And that’s when it struck him, sharp as the proverbial stick in the eye, the thing they’d feared: the snow had betrayed them. The first, fleeting, phantom November snow—as soon as the wind changed and breathed warm from the south—didn’t hold, it sank and opened above their underground bunker, a thawed-out window of dark earth, clear like a circle of breath on cold glass.

Even from where he sat, he could see the rusting of last year’s leaves in it. Aw, for the love of tripe!

The wind “spilled” them, undid all their conspiracy. Even a child would know that under that patch of earth people lived and food cooked—on a tiny gas flame that smoldered for three hours to make a pot of gruel. Rot it. This bunker was never any good. He didn’t like it from the moment he saw it: not dug deep enough, shoddy (loose earth kept falling from the ceiling with a rustling noise, over and over, grating on their already ragged nerves) and fatally tight for the five of them. But at the moment they had no other choice but to stay and wait. And now he was walking away to the city, leaving his comrades to the mercy of fate—and the southern wind. By noon it should thaw more, speckle other open spaces with the same ice-hole blackness, and mask their hiding place anew—the air he drew in was humid, only the wind had to hold. Nothing to be done now—dawn was near. He had to go. Over the same wet snow.

He freed one hand from his overcoat’s sleeve and with a quick motion, like his mother used to do whenever he had to travel away from home at night, made the sign of the cross over the bank, which seemed to have held its breath in the predawn stillness, with the black stain against the white.

And plunged into the creek.

“De-vil’s winds! Accur-sed winds!” That’s how Geltsia recited the poem for them—she knew myriad poems by heart, while he had forgotten everything unnecessary that he had ever learned and could not stop marveling at her, making her recite again and again, so he could exist in the presence of her voice, whose sound in the darkness packed thick enough to cut with a knife the breath of four lice-ridden men (and she—She!—had to breathe their miasma), spilled like cascades of silk, seemed to glow like silver. And that’s Tychyna? Really? The same one who now writes odes to Stalin and the kolkhozes?

Ever since his Gymnasium years he loved no poet more than Ólzhych, his “To the Unknown Soldier”—that was about him: his life. But Ólzhych had been tortured to death in a German concentration camp by, they said, none other than Willie Wirzieng himself, whom Adrian was supposed to liquidate back in Lviv in ’43. Twice he tried, and both times something had stood in his way—that Gestapo man must’ve sold his soul to the Devil; the Huzuls say about such people that they have “help”… Adrian buried Ólzhych for himself then, together with the guilt about the failed missions; nothing in the world could make him recite one of his poems now. Even to Her. No, especially to Her.

De-vil’s winds. At least it’s safer to travel in this wind: his steps cannot be heard in the woods. Although it’s not just his steps that cannot be heard—those other ones, if they came, wouldn’t be heard either.

He once had the alias Beast—a long time ago, back with the Germans. Later, when Beast got on the GB wanted list, he had to change his alias, but, thank God, did not lose Beast’s sense of danger, which had kept him alive through the years in the underground and now whimpered inside him like a squashed pup: the wind carried the smell of a raid.

But after all, he thought, trying to reassure himself, wading in the free water of the warm-run (he would walk another two hundred yards, just to be sure, as far from the bunker as possible, so he wouldn’t betray its location with a stray footprint)—after all, this was no surprise: this raid covered the entire district and had been going on for more than a week already; it was the reason why they had to halt in the woods in this opportune makeshift bunker—still a ways from the village where they planned to winter.

The village turned out to be occupied by a Bolshevik garrison, which went searching house to house; several families, their courier informed them, had been taken right away in the middle of the night, and people lurked in their yards like shadows—at night, no one put any lights on, except in the village council building, the former parish house (the priest with his family having been shipped off to Siberia the previous winter), where the Reds sat in their meetings with the turncoats all night long and drained, for bravery, buckets of homemade booze they’d looted earlier in the day. The villagers quickly surmised that drink was the Soviets’ preferred currency, and there was hardly a home left that wasn’t at work brewing some; but it didn’t protect people from being robbed, because, in addition to the alcohol, the others, like locusts, swept up everything within their reach—in a widow’s home where an insurgent hideout had been prepared, they skewered the whole pantry with probes and when they didn’t, thank God, find the hideout, they took the single thing of value that was in the home—chrome leather for a pair of boots. They’re the horde, said the courier with unconcealed contempt; he was an older man who’d been with the partisans for a long time and knew very well that in any decent army, just as in the UIA, looting was punished by firing squad—but, he added, at least this time they weren’t setting homes on fire.

They no longer had need to torch villages as they did right after they came, when they treated the Western Lands as enemy territory—and sent whole villages to Siberia with only the clothes on their backs, murdered people on the spot without trials, raised them on bayonets, tied them to horses, sliced pregnant women’s stomachs, and raped girls in front of their mothers’ eyes. Now Stalin had called off those orders, now this was territory they considered theirs—and demanded obeisance and duty: seven metric centners of grain per each hectare of land, regardless of whether it was arable, four hundred liters of milk from each cow in a barn—just like the Germans before them, only the Germans didn’t trouble themselves by lying so shamelessly, never promised the Jews the happiest life in the world as they herded them into ghettos.

There was already a kolkhoz in the village: back in August, in the heat of the harvest, when everyone worked around the clock, the garrison rolled in without warning, toting a Ukrainian lobcock from the Eastern regions, who, waving his submachine gun, rounded up all the men into a fold, locked it, put soldiers around it, and said none who don’t sign up for the kolkhoz come out alive. They started coming out, with hands in the air, on the third day, when they had to drink their own urine.

And so the new Molotov Collective Farm was founded. The grain that had already been harvested was confiscated with the announcement that only those who work for the kolkhoz would receive some back, fifty grams for each so-called workday—pure scorn, people said, what this world’s come to, worse toil they’d never endured, even as serfs a hundred years ago with Austria, may it rest in peace! But bread was still taken away; those villagers, the poorer ones, who didn’t manage to hide theirs, now received assistance from the ward—out of the reserves meant for the insurgents. How long those reserves would last was something Adrian had to find out. In two days, one of his management adjutants was due with a report, and then he’d have the complete picture. Fortunately, back in the spring, when the hungry from Greater Ukraine and Bessarabia rolled into Galicia like thunderclouds, the Supreme Commander ordered the UIA to release part of the strategic reserves of grain they had won back earlier from the Germans, so they had enough to help the hungry and, according to the courier, last until the new harvest, so the people weren’t yet really affected by this kolkhoz.

The lobcock received an oral warning: the local Security Service detail picked him up for an hour-long conversation when he was traveling through the woods with his wife. There was some unpleasantness: the woman panicked at the sight of the banderas popping out from the bushes and fainted, and the husband later had to send her to spend a month in Lviv in the Kulparkiv clinic—to help her nerves. The man himself had cooled off since then, the conversation made its impression: he’d become decidedly nicer to people and even warned the warden about the current raid, but he still wasn’t trusted in the village—neither he nor his poor wife, who returned from Lviv, the courier said, all sort of beaten down, like a hunted rabbit.

Adrian was irked, as always, when he heard of innocent women being harmed—but in the same instant, he saw, as though sketched out in charcoal, Stodólya’s face, every muscle still; and it seemed he could almost hear the hidden ticking of the man’s thought, like that of a time bomb. Did that woman really see doctors in Lviv, or did she go through GB’s schooling? It was precisely the rabbits like her that often turned out to be the most dangerous informants—they were so terrorized by the GB that they lost their minds, became unpredictable. And Stodólya was an expert in that. This was his war; he fit into it perfectly. Adrian could only be grateful for his good fortune with Security. And he was very fortunate indeed. Wasn’t he?

It was a strange condition, dreamlike. For the seven months since he left the infirmary after being wounded, he’d been living as if dreaming with his eyes open (only in rare moments when he was, as now, alone, he could see all three of them at once, from outside—himself, Geltsia, and Stodólya, whom she called Mykhailo)—and marveled, impassively, as if in an ether-induced haze through which no thoughts could reach to the deep layers of living pain, half-consciously: How could this have happened, and why did it have to happen?. And in that dream he did, in fact, have many occasions to feel grateful for his Security Service, thrilled at every successful mission, of which, knock on wood, they’d had quite a few. It had been a busy summer, the summer of the Lord’s year nineteen forty-seven, when the movement faced the joint special forces of USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, a giant red octopus spread over three countries, and they didn’t waste this summer, nor did they mar their honor and oath.

He and Stodólya did work rather well together—like two mountaineers roped together, each one outdoing himself to prove his worth to the other. They fed each other a sort of constant reciprocal charge that kept them from giving in to fatigue, kept their minds sharp even after a sleepless march—like that time in the middle of summer, when they had a rendezvous and Adrian arrived not having slept for three days: he was shutting down as he walked, falling, for a few seconds at a time, into a dark well while his alert body continued to move on its own. Stodólya’s people were also exhausted, and Stodólya had eyes like those prisoners their boys had fought off down by the town of S.—bloody like meat in an open wound, with eyelids drawing pale circles on his blackened face when he blinked. It wasn’t Stodólya, but Adrian who noticed Stodólya’s guard sitting down to clean his weapon and said to the man—straining as if to shout from under a mass of water—make sure, friend, you don’t have a bullet in the stock. And it was good he said it, because it turned out he did. And Geltsia was there; he remembered the way she looked at him. Was happy then and not only because he prevented a grievous accident—there’d been a few already in their territory, two riflemen had died after getting wounded like that, cleaning their weapons when they’d lost their vigilance to fatigue—but also because he kept his, and She saw it. And Stodólya did, too. Lord, how he slept then—catching up on the whole summer…. And afterward, wolfing down hot grits, abuzz with new strength and energy that were flooding his body, Adrian told them how he and his unit mowed down a hundred Reds just a few days before—those crowding a clearing in a hollow like a herd of sheep brought to slaughter really—how they could barely keep their machine guns loaded, sweeping at them from the brush…. Even the usually tight-lipped Stodólya said he wished he could have been there.

No, they really fit themselves to each other quite well—you couldn’t have come up with a better personnel match if you tried; no great mind in General Staff could have devised this on purpose. Adrian wished sometimes there was an organizational adjutant he could pat on the shoulder, whoever it was that had brought them together like this, be it even the Devil himself. And more, somewhere at the bottom of this months-long, eyes-wide-open dream, he felt a pulsing vein, a warm-run of secret pride for not having yielded last spring to a moment of weakness, for having overcome himself—and not having asked to be transferred to a different territory for personal reasons.

Because it did occur to him at first. He could not conceive how he would work on the same territory with the other two. Friend Dzvinya, friend Stodólya—the thought made the hair on his head ache. Once he even tagged along with Woodsman’s people when they went to a village wedding—he’d never done that before, even when an insurgent family was celebrating a marriage and asked him to come—dragging himself out in public like a lout, hoping for a temporary distraction. But at the wedding the girls seemed to sing for his ears alone—like it happens with a fresh wound: no matter how you turn, you’ll manage to worry it, moan through your teeth—“Now eagles fly to drink from that well, now that girl stands under a wedding veil…”

In that instant he saw it clearly, as though through a brightly lit window at night: Geltsia weds Stodólya, and the one officiating is Father Yaroslav! He didn’t notice how he crushed a glass tankard in his hand—only saw it when the blood mixed with his uzvar drink and ran into his sleeve and people around him raised a fuss—“Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her since he was little, loved but didn’t take…” Two things stopped him then: first, that it would not have been easy to find anyone to replace him, especially at the moment, in May, when the place boiled like a hell-cauldron—no one starts redistributing troops in the middle of a battle!—and second, second was that Stodólya had saved his life. Carried him, wounded, from under fire, on his own back.

He had to love Stodólya like his own brother. That was the task he had set for himself—never mind that Stodólya, armed with silence like a dynamite cruiser (always, after he was gone, he left upon the others’ memories an impression of a much larger man), did not make it especially easy to love him.

Stodólya had saved his life.

And Stodólya was the man She loved.

Geltsia.

Friend Dzvinya.

(She protested, knotting her little brows, while her eyes flashed from under her frown with irrepressible joy at seeing him again, because he was her joy: her youth, Lviv, the first tango at a People’s Prosvita Hall ball, “I have time, I will wait, should you find a better one”—well, she did, didn’t she? For the first few moments, the play of light and shadow on her face, like on the surface of a mountain lake on a breezy day, blinded and deafened him; he drank her with his eyes like precious, thirst-quenching water, and did not comprehend what she was saying: “I’m a friend to you like all other men!”—and then she lowered her voice to a whisper which broke, with a small ding, a secret string, invisible and taut inside him: “Or we could address each other by name… Adrian?”)

Can dreams possibly be this clear? So you understand everything, so precisely—as if you’re watching a film with voiceover?

This is not a dream.

What is it then? Who is this man?

I don’t know. He is dead.

How could he possibly be dead? Don’t you hear how alive he is? Only, something is tormenting him. Something too big for one person.

Could this be why he cannot die?

“Mourn you have, my fair sir,” a Gypsy woman clucked at him at the fair in S., latching on to the sleeve of his gimnastiorka and pushing her face up close to look him in the eye. “Moi, such fair officer sir, and such mourn has you!” her low voice rang hypnotic, from deep in her chest, but to him it seemed to mock. “For your mourn, I’ll read for naught, just so you know what to watch for”—something about her reminded him of Rachel, the memory rose in his body and screamed in such a yearning spasm of desire that he bolted from under those eyes of hers that were pointed at him like two black craters framed by their blazing whites, tore away roughly, like a real Soviet captain—and barked over his shoulder, in Russian, “No need!” He wanted no witchery; he never wanted to see into the future, especially right before a mission, and that day in S. they managed their mission gloriously, broke apart a whole caravan in their Soviet uniforms—“Documents check!”—sending the trucks that carried weapons on a detour to an ambush, and then another unit neatly potted the general’s black GAZ-M20 that zigzagged among the trucks loaded with people and goods leaving the fair. The Bolsheviks already knew that the banderas did not attack where there were civilians and hoped to slip by in this manner, only they didn’t know we had people among the peasants riding those trucks, so they heard the “Down!” command precisely an instant before the machine guns opened fire from the forest, and no one outside the GAZ-M20 was hurt. Inside it, the driver and the emissary general from Kyiv were killed, but the one the boys were after, a major from the regional GB they wanted to interrogate, was lifted from his hiding place under the backseat, where he lay curled up like a babe out of cradle, alive and unharmed, and, over the course of the summer, this major gave Stodólya, man by man, the GB agent network across the entire region.

On several occasions during that time, Adrian found himself in a state of a strange arrested amazement toward Stodólya: he watched the man hunt down the octopus fanatically, pin it in, methodically, from all sides, setting his traps so tight a mouse couldn’t slip through, and then with one or two sudden strikes, sever the writhing tentacles with an expert surgeon’s precision. He witnessed more than the mere thrill of the hunt, as in combat such calculated, multistep operations obviously gave Stodólya his own, special satisfaction; and when, after each success his peculiarly molded face, dark as though burned from inside, with its close-set eyes and the protruding, slightly hooked nose (wolfhound, flashed through Adrian’s mind again: once he gets a hold of someone, not a hair will fall without his permission!) would assume for a short time a contentedly sated expression, lit with a quick, cunning squint—rebel, blast him!—and Adrian, however much he thrilled with their victory, felt somewhere deep in his heart discomforted as one feels in the presence of a rival who has an advantage. And this vexed him, and spoiled the joy.

On one such occasion, Stodólya loosened up so much that he allowed them all to be photographed—this was unusual indeed because Stodólya was religious about secrecy and fastidiously controlled circumstances in which any of the rebels might accidentally be caught on camera—and now it was he himself who permitted the courier to bring a photographer to the forest, from three villages over. The photographer, however, was reliable, checked many times and thoroughly instructed about where and how he was to hide the negatives; he took a picture of all five of them—Adrian, Stodólya, Geltsia, and the two Security Service guards, Raven and Levko (the young man with rosy cheeks whom Adrian warned about cleaning his weapon).

Right before that, Stodólya’s unit eliminated one of GB’s provocation groups that had been operating on their territory since winter, terrorizing civilians, and Stodólya, usually gloomy and short-spoken, uptight and buttoned-up, was openly celebrating, letting the success soften and thaw him. He told Adrian how long he’d been hunting those bandits—he found two traitors in that GB group, guys who’d been born around here. A year earlier, GB had taken them alive and recruited them in jail, so during raids they spoke like locals and the horrified peasants believed that it was really “our boys” who went on a rampage, and wished they could now hide underground themselves, not knowing what was going on and where they could turn for protection. But as luck would have it, the bandits made a mistake: got, as was their custom, drunk, and when killing a teacher’s family one night, dressed in the rebel-style mazepynka caps and embroidered shirts, failed to notice they hadn’t finished off a twelve-year-old boy, left a witness.

At this news, Stodólya’s eyes flashed with that predatory, quick flash of wicked triumph, instantly hidden by his characteristic squint, giving Adrian the feeling of a creeping, unpleasant chill that told him they were different: Stodólya spared no thoughts for the murdered family, and the wounded boy, in his mind, had played his part once he relayed the information and gave them the lead. Stodólya enjoyed the revenge itself, knew how to enjoy it. And not the way one enjoys winning a complex combination in chess, but almost lustfully, like love. Adrian did not know how to do that. The hatred toward the enemy, by itself, did nothing for him; he didn’t know how to savor it.

That was the first time it occurred to Adrian that Stodólya outdid him in something important. Or maybe that’s what a real counterintelligence officer was supposed to be—immune to sentiment. When a village courier, a very young girl, sitting with them around a campfire, blurted out, like a little kid, that she dreamed of studying to be a doctor one day, “when we have Ukraine,” she touched a nerve in all of them: Raven remembered how, in Polish times, he dreamt of becoming a barrister, defending the wronged; and the rosy-cheeked Levko, when he was little, acted in theatrical performances at Prosvita and everyone said that he would make a fine actor, but what kind of job is that for a lad? Adrian tossed in his two cents with a story about how he surprised himself when he discovered he could use trigonometry in battle after having been best in his class at it in school. Only Stodólya said nothing. As if he had no life other than the one he had now, none in reserve and none he wished for.

Another time they started talking about the assassination of Colonel Konovalets in ’38, and how differently, had he been alive, the Ukrainian card would’ve been played between Hitler and the Allies during the war, with an incomparably more winsome outcome for us. Stodólya regarded such high-minded speculations with open scorn, saying that such politicking nowadays was no more use than mustard after dinner, and, of course, he had a point; but the assassination itself, its technique and execution—with the bomb camouflaged as a box of chocolates—aroused his genuine curiosity.

“Colonel let his chocolate get him,” he grumbled, curtly, not as a reprove to the departed for having been fond of such high-society luxuries, as one might have expected to come from a peasant’s son (although Adrian never did know for certain whether Stodólya really was a peasant’s son, had no concept of what education he might have had—Stodólya never said anything revealing and kept his true identity a secret), but more with disappointment that even a great man such as Colonel Konovalets could have had a weakness, even one so tiny—hardly worth a haw—and one could hear in his voice the lesson he extracted from it and learned like Paternoster: that you dare not have any weaknesses the enemy could exploit. That’s who Stodólya was—a man without weaknesses. And that’s why he was disliked in the underground.

And feared a bit, too: Adrian wasn’t the only one Stodólya kept on edge.

From the day they had themselves photographed, when they celebrated eliminating that provocation group (every tentacle severed like that gave them, for a while, an illusion of breathing more freely), another conversation stuck in his mind, one that fell like a spark on straw and, word after word, flamed up into an almost serious quarrel between Stodólya and Geltsia. They were talking about the hungry that were coming from the East—for some reason, the locals called such people “the Americans.” Levko, of the rosy cheeks, had gone to the city to reconnoiter, dressed in woman’s garb (“You should see what a fetching wench he makes!” Geltsia laughed), and had seen, at the station, a freight train full of these people: they climbed down from the cars and fell right on the spot to rest, having no strength to drag themselves any further. Close by stood a canvas-covered army truck, and soldiers picked up and tossed into it, like logs, those who could not get up again.

Adrian remembered Gypsy from Slobozhanshchyna, one of the men with whom he had made acquaintance in the infirmary: he, too, had told of similar things happening in ’33 in Great Ukraine. When kolkhozes come, the Easterners then said to the Galicians, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Geltsia, agitated, told a story of her own: one spring she had to wait out raids in a different territory, stayed at a homestead with a reliable family, with the cover story of being their niece, when one day a very young girl, from somewhere around Poltava, wandered into their yard asking for work. “You mean that’s what she’d told you,” Stodólya interrupted, seemingly beside the point; it was obvious they had argued about this before, and now he was taunting Geltsia on purpose by treating her like a child (in response she merely glared at him from under her knotted brow, a single affected glower that pulled Adrian’s insides into a knot).

“The girl was called Lyusya,” Geltsia continued.

What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s short for Lyudmyla… a fine name, thought Adrian—it warmed him with some long-forgotten radiance, this name that could belong to a little doll, Lyusya-Lolly-little dolly, white lacy frills below the hem of the dress, fragrant girlish hair plaited into thin braids, the glossy silk of it in his hand. (Long ago, when he had just started at the Gymnasium, a young girl in a sailor suit appeared in the gates of the building next door every morning, with hair plaited into two thin braids—and, giggling, hid behind the gate as soon as he approached, until one time she lingered, stepping forward bravely and informing him, with the composure of a grown woman, in Polish, “Mama washed my hair, would you like to feel it?”—and offered him her bowed head, smooth, acorn-glossy with a little groove in the middle, pale like a June bug’s maggot, which he could not keep from touching, ran his finger over it—and was scorched, for the first time, by the silky defenselessness of woman, little doll, lolly, who trusts herself to you as innocently as nature itself, like a chrysalis that knows nothing yet of how fragile it is, pulled from its underground nest.)

“I told her,” Geltsia continued, “we had no work at the moment and we didn’t keep hired hands, and when she heard it she suddenly went all aquiver like a sick chicken, it scared me—my owners were having a pest on their chickens right then…” and, catching Adrian’s look, interpreted it in her own way: “Please let it not surprise you, I have mastered all farm chores already; I even know how to muck horse stalls! Only I don’t have the knack for milking,” she added, honestly. “So I ask her—and she’s so famished, so wasted, all eyes—‘Miss, are you unwell?’ And she tells me that she’s tugged there all the way from Poltavshchyna, that they have terrible hunger there, already ate their dogs and cats, and at home she left her mom and little sister Olyunka who cannot get up anymore, born in ’39—turns out, and I didn’t know this, Stalin forbade women to have abortions before the war.”

“Sure,” the boys chimed in, “he had to re-sow what he’d mowed in ’33!”

“Ain’t got enough of his own stock to people Ukraine—but he needs someone to work!”

“And to war for him too—they don’t spare their people at all! Look at the herds they drive at us—like lambs to slaughter.”

“In the mountains, after they had two hundred of their own killed in a battle, they poured gas on them and burned the whole lot.”

“You’re kidding! Whatever for?”

“You know why—to hide their losses. So the number’d be smaller.”

“And how’s that supposed to work—two hundred living souls gone from the face of the earth and what—no one’d cry for them up there in Moscow-land?”

“Like the Bolsheviks care! For them, a man’s life or a chicken’s, ’tis all the same.”

“And when they first came in ’39, some buffleheads in our village were so happy—they made it out, you see, that when it said the Bolshevik Party was krasnaya raboche-krestyanskaya, it meant Christian and for that reason krasna, fine. Asked of those: Where are your chaplains?”

Someone laughed, spoons clicked faster against the canteens, and Geltsia remained quiet, her eyes fixed on a single invisible point, as though she was overcome, for a moment, by that ancient, viscous fatigue that makes one fall out of the conversation or forget about a bullet in the stock, and at once something exploded in Adrian’s head, lighting, like a flare, the dark vista. He remembered who it was that wore that sailor suit—it wasn’t that little Polish girl next door, no, it was a different, older girl: down the steep Krupyarska Street the hoop rolled, bouncing on the cobblestones and throwing off dazzling flashes of the late afternoon sun, and a shaggy red cur chased, barking, after it, and up flew the kicked-up pleats of the sailor-suit skirt—“Lina!” Geltsia called and, turning to him, said with loving pride, “That’s my little sister.” He did not remember the younger girl’s face. After looking at Geltsia, it remained on his retina as a bouncing flare, like after looking at the sun—he only remembered how when she ran up to them, breathing hard, the tiny hillocks of her breasts rose under the sailor blouse and that fresh, apple-crisp waft of a young body that he always associated with Geltsia and the Dovgans’ home—the scent that is only found in homes with growing daughters.

He understood: Lyusya from Poltava and the little sister, Olyunka, she’d left at home reminded Geltsia of her own little sister—where was she now, the younger Dovganivna, for whom (now he remembered this, too!) he used to buy éclairs in the Mikolyash Passage, not yet bombed into dust then, in the center of Lviv—what had this blood storm done to her?

Since the spring of ’44, when the NKVD ordered the families of insurgents arrested en masse, small children included, every one of them carried inside the same burning wound, the knowledge that it was not just their own lives alone they offered to lay down—as the Gospels say, for their people, because that’s what they’d chosen freely, and their yoke was their freedom, and their burden was light—but that they also condemned, inadvertently, their loved ones to following them into suffering, into torture or Siberia, or at best—if they fell in battle—to the sight of their mangled, vandalized bodies—stripped naked, girls’ breasts or men’s genitals cut off, a trident carved into the dead forehead—and mothers and fathers unable to mourn their children or to bury them but bound to say, as they turn themselves into stone, not thrice but thirty-three times, like Peter, if he could bear it: I do not know this man. I do not know this woman. Mama, forgive me…. (And they forgave—they all forgave, only not all of them endured: the mother from Kremenets, when they stood her up before the bodies of her six sons, also said, “I do not know them”—but never spoke another word until her heart broke under the burden of six-fold grief, and the mother fell dead next to her children.)

It was easier for him: His mother and father were in Siberia already, and his mother never saw his brothers—arrested in ’41—dead. In the pile of massacred bodies the Bolsheviks left when they retreated, the family could not find either Henyk or Myros. One could choose to think they survived (and that’s what Mother believed), that they were safe somewhere, abroad, on the other side of the ocean.

He understood—and smiled at Geltsia from across all the past years at once, the way he smiled at her on that long-ago day when he stood at sunset on Krupyarska awash in the apple-crisp aura, the fresh air of young girlhood.

“And then—did you help those Poltava girls?”

Their eyes met—and such a depth of gratitude was in her gaze that he felt his entire chest flush with heat: she needed him, after all!

The men grew quiet and she spoke again, and he saw it all as though with his own eyes—he saw the girl Lyusya. He knew that type of Poltava girl, beautiful (Geltsia said the girl was beautiful) with the beauty of antique statues—tall, majestic as Roman matrons, with classical sloping shoulders and profiles destined for Carrara marble. He’d glimpsed their breed in the refugee waves more than once: The steppe-borne daughters of Ceres, Amazons, Kozak women—how dare the demons of the twentieth century turn them into highway beggars? Geltsia (bundled in a kerchief up to her eyes: “If any strangers came to the house, my story was I had toothache”) had fixed a bowl of thin gruel for the girl, fearing that fresh bread with milk might hurt her after she hadn’t had any for so long, and then took her to the pantry and filled a sixty-pound sack (“Took both of us to stamp it down!”) with wheat flower—of the stores reserved for the insurgents (“I wrote out a quittance for the warden, a very nice man, he just said, ‘We don’t keep count of that,’ said he’d have given her of his own grain, and flagged a wagon right there, to take her to the station, to get on the Zdolbuniv train”). And it was there, in the pantry that it happened: As they went to pour the grain into the sack, Lyusya from Poltava suddenly froze, her face changed.

“She was looking at my hands,” Geltsia said, guiltily raising her delicate, so unmistakably intelligentsia-bred fingers, and Adrian felt his stomach knot again in pity at the sight of them: they were fit for a typewriter or a radio, but to muck stalls?

“She knew you?” Levko whistled.

“Told you so!” Stodólya cut in, with a kind of venomous satisfaction. “Hands and lingerie—how many girls already got caught on that!”

“I took off my underthings when I changed, and I was going to soak my hands in brine-water and rub them with ashes—it makes them look like you’d farmed all your life, never fails. But, it’s a chore—so I hadn’t had the time! So we are standing there, the two of us, looking at each other: I know that you know that I know… and then she started crying.” Geltsia’s voice gave a suspicious din, like cracked crystal. “Fell to her knees, grasped my hands, kissed them. I yell ‘Get up, miss!’ and she, ‘I won’t tell anyone! I won’t tell a word to anyone, I swear to you!’”

She stopped, fighting the emotions. The men were silent, too.

“And that’s when she told me that as soon as they got off the train the MGB picked them up, right there at the station…. Kept them for half the day telling them horrors about the banderas and instructing them, when they go to the villages, to watch and report if they notice anything special…. Fed them pea soup for that.”

“And if they’d given her sixty pounds of flour, would you’ve vouched she wouldn’t tell on you?” Stodólya asked dryly.

This was no longer a man teasing a woman he loved; this was a superior analyzing the situation for the benefit of the younger riflemen, and Adrian, who had no grounds on which to intrude upon Security’s business, could only listen as any other accidental witness and concede, in his heart of hearts, that Stodólya had a point: Geltsia behaved in that situation dangerously indeed, she could have gotten caught herself and implicated her hosts. (Someday, when we win our Ukraine, we’ll build a monument, somewhere in the Carpathians so it’ll be seen from far away—a monument to the rural families that helped us, and went into Siberian exile for us, and died by the hundreds of thousands, but never once, not at one door said to us: go on, boys, God keep you, go on your way because we have children and want to live. No, instead they said: it’s one God’s will for all, what he gives you, children, we’ll take ourselves. You’re laying your lives down and we won’t spare you a piece of bread?)

Still, despite all the rationalizing, he felt that Stodólya pursued not so much Geltsia’s old (before she was under his command?) mistakes but something else, something more important perhaps, something unsaid: quite simply Stodólya did not believe any of those strays, even if they vailed before him—just as he did not believe anyone he couldn’t check and verify.

That was the most important thing.

Whichever portions of the world were not subject to his control represented, for Stodólya, enemy territory where there was no room for sympathy. Adrian had met other men who lived by the same notion—there used to be more of them when the war first began.

This was Poland’s legacy, he thought: for twenty years Poland handled us as tools, with a condescending, speak-to-you-through-the-teeth certainty that the Rúsyns were not people but pigs, and honed and tempered us to respond, like a good ax, symmetrically, in kind. But Poland fell and was forever banished from these lands, and so did Hitler’s Reich that had come armed with the same blind scorn for us, the üntermensch, and now came Moscow that knew no people at all—they gave no more thought to blowing their own into ashes than strangers. Tens of armies and hundreds of tribes had stampeded through Ukraine (from the happy Italians, handsome lads and inept, take-it-all-just-leave-me-alone soldiers who would’ve gladly given us all their ammunition if we’d let them go home without a fight, to the motley swarms of narrow-eyed nomads that erupted from the depths of the Asian steppes—like a new European invasion of Genghis Khan’s hordes, except that, for some reason, so many of them wanted to join our side when taken prisoner, almost as many as from among the Red Army Ukrainians). And over the shattered borders, through the smoke of the pyres, we glimpsed the Great Ukraine, the dream of our fathers, and learned, on our first marches east, from it, crippled and tortured in ways we never imagined, what neither Poland nor Germany could teach us: that there is no free country without free people, and he who forces his will upon others imprisons himself.

And when our military force, like a swollen river, reached the floodmark and began to spill into vengeance, and fires swallowed the manors of Polish colonists in Volyn and Podolia, we found another force that dammed the rush that careened toward blind retribution: the pontiff of St. George’s Hill, and with him the stigmatic martyrs in the underground put up a halting hand holding a cross and begged our people not to stain their holy weapons with innocent blood in the face of the Lord; and the Supreme Command spoke to us through its Third Congress ordering us to be reborn for the struggle ahead—because our force is called to serve not vengeance but liberation, and he who wrongs the unarmed, imprisons himself.

And we were reborn; we recast ourselves in the furnace of battle; we tempered ourselves into steel, shedding the irresolute into the winds of the crisscrossed frontlines—the accidental avengers, the forcibly mobilized, all those who had grown weary and yearned for the plow more than the sword and who valued life above freedom; only death’s volunteers remained, the bridegrooms of death—a noble metal that rang clear as a bell. And when the Soviets came, hanging us publicly in the squares (and quit as soon as they realized who they were dealing with), every such execution fed our strength—our boys stepped up to the noose with their heads held proud and high, called out to the crowd with their last breath, “Glory to Ukraine!” and the human sea rumbled, swelling with the wrath of forced silence, and at night dozens more ran off into the woods to volunteer and win themselves a death like that—a death of free men. And we already knew: for every force that enslaves, there will be another, greater force—German for the Polish, Russian for the German. Only the force of liberation has no match: it is the one and the same and combats all tribes and peoples, however many there are on this earth.

Our new war is no longer fought by the doctrine of Von Clausewitz, whose books we studied in underground training—not for a bridge, or a railway station, or even this or that inhabited locality. And although we do maintain our ward administration in all Western Ukrainian lands, we can’t afford to keep paying for it with growing losses and deportations the enemy chooses when they can do nothing else to us, because in another ten years of this contest the Soviets may just win for themselves a Ukraine without Ukrainians, as the Poles had already done with our lands beyond the Curzon Line. We stand against Moloch who stops at nothing, but we are the ones who are called to account to the thirty million souls of the nation whose freedom we have vowed to win. We fight for nothing if not for people’s souls, every day and every minute, and in this war we have a singular right—to die. And the right to lose is not ours.

All this Adrian should have said to Stodólya—but didn’t. Didn’t know how to say it. Such conversations were ill suited to Stodólya—he was too certain of his own strength. He was stuffed full of it like a strongbox with dynamite. A rock of a man, that Stodólya, hard as a rock wall. Listening to him upbraid Geltsia—it was like he turned her into an inanimate object, a lecture prop, an SMG taken apart and cleaned for the benefit of rookies who’ve yet to see fire, and she sat there blushing all the way down into the collar of her gimnastiorka and didn’t dare breathe a word in her own defense (after all, Stodólya was her superior, and she was his secretary)—Adrian worried above all that she would burst into tears. (It was afterward, much later, that she confided to him that she had lost the ability to cry in the fall of ’45 when she lost her most intimate friend—the girl had a wound to her stomach and she, Geltsia, then still Zirka, sitting up with her waiting for medical assistance, let the exhaustion put her to sleep—and awoke when she brushed against her friend’s already cold body; she showed him photographs of that friend—a thin-faced, dark-haired girl, pensive as if in anticipation of the near end. The deceased sometimes have that expression not long before death—as though their flesh, already sentenced by fate, wears thin, becomes threadbare, and lets through the imminent otherworldliness. Geltsia looked at the photograph, too, along with him, and her eyes, although red from lack of sleep, were dry.)

He did find a chance to edge into Stodólya’s diatribe, break up his verbal offensive with a few apt lines, ease the tension in the room—he had the knack for it. The underground had given him much experience in getting along with people of all temperaments. He reminded all of them together, in the world’s calmest voice: we have the order of the Supreme Command—feed the hungry. And that’s it. Period. No use flogging a dead horse. They are our brothers and we are saving Ukraine’s next generation. And another thing: if we won’t give a hungry man a piece of bread, how are we different from the Bolsheviks who feed only the ones they choose, their handmaidens—some with pea soup and some with the caviar from officers’ rations? Stodólya’s face grew even darker at that, but he said nothing. And then the courier came with the photographer, and they went to arrange themselves for the picture—he on one side, Stodólya on the other, next to Geltsia.

A sort of effervescence came over everyone then, and they laughed and joked with the photographer. Geltsia did, too—as though there had been no unpleasantness whatsoever.

Maybe he just didn’t understand women? Maybe she actually liked Stodólya’s annihilating upbraiding, being dragged over the coals by a tank like that—maybe she liked it when he showed that he was in command of her? And when Stodólya reproached her for carelessness—was it his way of showing her that he cared?

He knew nothing about that. Had no experience with women. Where would he have gotten it?

At that wedding in P., when he crushed a glass goddard in his hand, something else happened that he preferred not to recall: the alarmed womenfolk rushed to stop his blood, all but falling over each other, and in the end he found himself somewhere dark on a bed of hay with a fiery-eyed young wife who had fussed over him most of all, rubbed against him with her breasts, as if by accident, winked and made eyes at him, and finally teased him into an angry muddled confusion—alright, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll let you have it, you’re all the same! In the dark, through the hay, the woman gave off an intoxicating smell of sweat, mixed with the scent of the fire from the hearth, and whimpered with pleasure under him like a little dog, thin and high, on a single note—ee-ee-eeh, ee-ee-eeh. Outside, in the distance, the chorus of girls’ glass voices pealed the same song, the same record stuck on a gramophone inside his head: “Hey, pity-pity, loved the girl since he was little, loved her fine since he was little, loved but didn’t take….” And then came the moment when he realized, with disappointed, unquenchable irritation, that it was not Geltsia that he’d been yearning for with his flesh all this time, it was Rachel. Rachel who had nursed him back to life and did so in such a manner that any common woman after her simply had to seem bland to him. He all but cursed out loud at the unyielding, unavoidable, unclean whirlpool that had trapped him and dragged him further and further away from his love, and he promised himself, right there, barely having unplastered himself from the generous, sultry woman, that this would be the end of his romancing, once and for all. He couldn’t be allowed to think about women, couldn’t be distracted by them, and certainly couldn’t entertain any dreams of personal happiness—not until the struggle was over.

Unless, he quickly tacked on, leaving himself room for maneuver, there was a miracle.

But none came.

Afterward, he asked to keep that photograph of the five of them for himself—the only photo he had of Her. He never had any others: back in their Lviv days, she did not gift him any. They weren’t engaged, after all—they were friends, comrades from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Youth Network, and later, under the Germans, comrades in the underground, and that is who they remained. He never once kissed her—they hadn’t had the time together for that. Even in his dreams she vanished every time he drew close, in the agony of bliss, to her radiant face. The fact that this face was now Stodólya’s to kiss—that Stodólya could, with the same panzer-force as he talked, crush her entire delicate figure, made even smaller by the uniform, fragile like a chrysalis, with the mass of his thickset, tight-jointed body (he had to be heavy, not for nothing did he always leave the impression of being larger than he really was…), that he could bore into her with the lover’s careless cruelty, and everything that happened between a man and a woman in private could very well occur between them—all this had plainly failed to reach Adrian’s awareness, as though he had an impenetrable shutter closed on that part of his mind.

In the photograph he saw it—as clearly as if it were real. As if those two were making love right before his eyes. That photographer must have come from the mólfar, the witching tribe—pagan worship was still alive in the country around them, the girls here wore wormwood under their clothes as protection from pishogues, and fern flower still bloomed in the heart of the woods on St. John’s night, and Adrian’s bodyguard, Raven, believed it, too. Or maybe, the war was the reason—the war that had roused not only people, but spirits? On their march to Volyn, rumors of various marvels swirled around them: that at the Pochayiv monastery on the feast of Assumption, Our Lady cried living tears before the people, while in the cave below stirred the silver coffin of St. Job Zalizo, the confessor to Duke Constantine of Ostrog, and, in Ostrog itself, Constantine’s voice was heard above the ruins of his castle, as it had once been prophesied to awaken the spirit of our people down to the twelfth generation. And every night in the fields around the village of Berestechko roared the invisible battle from three hundred years ago—sabers rattled and clashed, horses neighed, and the wounded screamed so you could hear each man’s lonely call for help, and in the year of our Lord nineteen forty-two this, obviously, could not portend anything good. But at least then the church still endured and gave people comfort and help. Now, with the NKVD men running the churches and the batyushki they installed questioning peasants who came to confession about any guests “from the woods” who might visit at night, one had no one else left to believe but the mólfars.

That was a mólfar picture. He could find no other explanation. This was the way people’s faces appear when a spell was cast on water—to make everything hidden rise clear to the surface. A single glimpse at his own visage (it jumped out at him, the first from the whole group) made Adrian remember the Gypsy woman from the fair: so this is how she saw him! The witch didn’t lie, it was truth she spoke—he had sorrow. A beast of a sorrow; pox on it. In the picture it could not be hidden. Like the smell that wafts off a man on the day of his death—as when, say, seven men are in a bunker together or camp to wait out the day in the woods, and all of a sudden one of them starts to reek of earth: that’s a sure sign that he’ll fall before sundown. If he’d spotted among his men anyone with eyes such as he had in the photograph (didn’t even look into the lens, the wretch!—looked somewhere to the side as if listening to a distant choir of glass voices, hey, pity-pity!), he’d take that poor slob and send him posthaste somewhere quieter, up to the mountains, to rest. Or, better still—legalize him: men don’t war for long with eyes like that. He felt bad about this mishap before Raven—the boy, just like Stodólya’s Levko, came out really well, while Adrian’s face seemed covered by a shadow cast by nothing. He looked a lot swarthier than Stodólya on the other side of the group—only the whites of his eyes glowed. Like a Gypsy’s. Or had the witch in S. put this jinx on him, to teach him a lesson?

Generally, there was all manner of wrong with the light in that picture: it fell seemingly from nowhere, obeying no optical law. By itself, the light of the summer day that glimmered here and there in the background could not possibly create this effect. If he didn’t know better, he’d say they had the picture taken in a church, not in the woods, but in a nave, where sheaves of slanted glow come streaming down from above, from under the invisible dome, streaming—and refracting around Geltsia.

Geltsia in her oasis of light looked as though she was rising through the air to float above the rest of them—it wouldn’t have surprised him to see that she did not touch the ground with her boot-clad little feet—so fair and serene, and smiling such a mysterious smile, as if she knew she’d been put there to watch over the men, but this was not for them to know, and for that reason her life-giving—he wished to drink it with his eyes and never stop, for the rest of his days—beloved smile that he had never seen before, had not quite come out, was halted halfway, only touching ever so slightly her daintily tailored lips, but not quite changing her expression, and her precious—nothing was dearer in the world!—clear-eyed face appeared to be lit from inside, as if Geltsia herself were the source of the fantastic light brought forth by the mólfar’s Fotokor, and the sheaves of slanted glow streamed and shifted to her and from her at once, creating, the longer one looked, the effect of a living, pulsing shimmer.

And with this radiant shimmer, Geltsia sheltered, like Our Lady of Pochayiv with her cloak, the impenetrably dark shape of the man who stood next to her—and one could see they were selfsame. In between them there was no line that divides human bodies. Never mind that they stood not touching one another, but half a step apart, and Geltsia held her disciplined left hand on the grenade at her belt, jutting a resolute cautioning elbow in Stodólya’s direction, as if precisely to emphasize the official distance between them.

But there was no line.

They were one, just as it said in the Scripture: “Therefore shall a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

He saw it for the first time—it hit him like an electric shock and the shutter fell in his mind.

Why him? Rot it all to pieces, why him—what does he have that I don’t?

For an instant—for a single short instant, but yes, he did, although he wouldn’t confess it even to save his immortal soul—he hated Stodólya. Everything about him—at once: that grim face of his with its hooked nose that jutted forth like an ax, the Red Army cap pushed down almost over his eyes, and the way he stood there with one foot forward like he owned the place—the rascal, you couldn’t help but admire him: “at ease” as all of them, but still alert, watchful, as they all should be—like a loaded bundook full-cocked, like a wolf on hunt, ready at any moment to leap up and tear into a stranger’s throat—and Adrian felt hot with shame for his impulsive outburst. Dog your bones, brother, this guy carried you under fire on his own back! It was this man’s efforts that dismantled the enemy agents’ network in three districts; this man’s intelligence service worked like a Swiss watch and knew of the Bolsheviks’ plans five minutes before the Bolsheviks themselves did—so what if he could not, did not know how, to let go of his abundantly tight grip without need? Adrian could indulge all he wanted in his nostalgia for the old warfare, in which the enemy came bearing arms, but that warfare was, indeed, over, and the one that was left for them to fight was incomparably harder: the housewife who put GB-supplied poison into the bread meant for the insurgents, and that batyushka who interrogated his flock when they came to confession—they did not bear arms—they were the arms, weapons of war in the hands of the enemy who wished to stay invisible. So was it really any wonder that Stodólya, constantly dealing with the darkest sides of human nature, had learned to treat people as tools to be used to achieve his goals?

Including the woman he loved?

Because Stodólya did love Geltsia. Adrian saw how he followed her with his eyes, how his face changed when their eyes met. On her name day he presented her with cyanide in a sealed, lightproof blue vial—he didn’t have any himself, such a luxury rarely fell into their hands, wherever did he find it? A few people Adrian knew resorted to arsenic, but it was not reliable—the Soviets could always keep them alive with a simple stomach lavage. Except cyanide, nothing was reliable: the last bullet you kept for yourself could jam, a grenade could fail to explode. Adrian was happy to know that Geltsia had a vial of certain death, pure as lightning, sewn into her collar. He was grateful to Stodólya for that.

And still, looking at their group in the photograph—looking at them all from outside for the first time, as though he had been asleep before and just awoke—he clearly felt unease, like the ticking of a bomb.

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

The unease emanated from Stodólya. The trusty Stodólya, solid as a rock wall. The Stodólya to whom you could yield—or die.

It could not have been easy for her. It was his life she eased, his power that she softened with her light. How long could she bear this double burden—the underground’s and the husband’s?

He felt the same unease again when they were informed that Stodólya’s winter bunker fell. Fell in the middle of October, when it was already too late to build a new one. They were lucky they hadn’t yet stocked it with a winter’s worth of food and hadn’t transferred their typewriter there. There had to have been a traitor, the courier said; around the same time, in the same territory, a Security Service courier girl got turned in by her own boyfriend—the gump believed the GB when they promised they’d leave them in peace as soon as the girl parted with the underground. When the girl said nothing under interrogation, they nailed her tongue to a board—right before the boy’s eyes. He may have been the one who somehow found out about the bunker and spilled it, but there was no way to find out: he lost his mind.

Stodólya and Dzvinya were left without a bunker. Someone had to share quarters with them. Only no one was in a big rush to winter with Stodólya: four months in a bunker with him was no picnic.

And, with a sudden sickening feeling in his stomach that usually occurs when you are staring into the black eye of a gun barrel, Adrian realized—he would do it. He asked the courier to wait and wrote a ciphered dépêche to Stodólya. With his secretary and bodyguard—Adrian’s own bunker had just room enough for five.

“Geltsia! Lolly, oh… are you here?”

“Shhh… can you hear it?”

“What?”

“The wind…”

“Listen. I was dreaming about that again.”

“Me too.”

“What?”

“Don’t shout. You cried out in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“All kinds of very intelligent things, only really loudly. You woke me up. You were talking in your sleep—but in full sentences, like you were reading notes.”

“And what did I say?”

“That the set of memories is finite.”

“Really?”

“I’ve no idea what it means, but you repeated it several times.”

“Wow. That’s something… anything else?”

“I couldn’t memorize everything, Aidy. Something along the lines of everything that happened to us already happened to someone else before. The set of memories in the world is finite. A girl that lets you smell her. Who is that?”

“Marynka. We played together behind the trashcans, and she let me see her pee. Let me run my finger along her groove, down there.”

“Little slut.”

“No, wait… I remember what it felt like to touch her—like silk. But why would she be speaking Polish?”

“You don’t speak Polish.”

“It was in my dream. Only it wasn’t my dream; it was his dream. That other man’s. The dead one.”

“Did the dream have a different girl in it?”

“The girl may have been different, yes, but the memory was the same. A finite set. Actually, that’s a thought! It’s great that you woke up and heard me—I wouldn’t have remembered this on my own.”

“It’s my new vocation—a night secretary. I’ll be turning on my dictaphone before we go to bed and keeping track of your dreams.”

“No, really, Lolly, what if it’s true? What if the set of humankind’s memories is really finite and everything that is happening to us now already happened to someone else before? Then, in principle, this is a set that can be measured—theoretically, at least, you could pack all the memories in the world into a dozen hard drives, you know? It’ll be the only reasonable explanation for all that déjà vu, no?—just a shred of someone else memory getting caught in your mind, like a speck of dirt in your eye… a couple hundred kilobytes, that’s all…”

“Sweetie, you’ve gotten me all messed up with your kilobytes. Now I can’t remember anything I dreamt myself.”

“Neither can I—it’s all bits and pieces… but a finite set—that’s a great idea, Lolly! I’ve been thinking about it, just couldn’t find the answer—and it’s right here: if different people’s memories match, not because of the experiences they share, but by the random-numbers principle, like, you know, cards from the same deck, when sometimes you draw four sixes in a row—that’s a different picture….”

“The photograph!”

“What? Why?”

“You said picture and I remembered: there was a photograph. In my dream. The same one, of Gela in the woods.”

“No kidding?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure… a picture of a woman taken not long before she died. Vlada, when we shot that interview with her, in the Passage, for a moment had eyes like that—as if no longer hers. And I also, for some reason, remembered Aunt Lyusya, my mom’s sister—you haven’t met her, she died in 2000…”

“Of what?”

“Breast cancer. She had this tremendous will to live, believed to her last day that she would get better. Mom was with her, and she said when her heart stopped, she had this baffled expression on her face, like—what, this is it? She looked like that in the coffin, too…. She was a very strong woman, one of those, you know, that hold the family together—way out of Mom’s league in that respect. After the war, during the famine, she went after bread somewhere to your neck of the woods, schlepped a sack of flour all the way back from Zdolbuniv, no one knew where she got it…. That flour fed them through that hungry year—and Mom was so weak with hunger she couldn’t get up. Later, when Mom left to study, Aunt ferried food to her in Kyiv too, every Sunday…. But what made me think of that?”

“Must be that kind of a night. With the dead in our dreams. Means it’ll rain, no?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be. Here, be quiet a sec. Can you hear that?”

“What?”

“The wind.”

“No… isn’t that the fridge?”

“No, be quiet now. You’ll hear it howl. Come to me. Here… Lolly, my Lolly… my apple-crisp girl…”

A bird cawed once, waking. Another one clapped its wings against the wind from atop a spruce and answered with a sad cry. (He would say—couriers calling out to each other.)

Did it hear a human walking, or was it a sign of nearing dawn?

He had to leave the forest while it was still dark. He had to walk through the city in broad daylight in his officer’s overcoat with ripped-off stripes like the ones commonly worn by discharged Red Army soldiers—who were clean-shaven and even sprayed with the tear-inducing acidic chypre (all Soviet military men seemed to take baths in the stuff; what is wrong with those people?)—all in order to meet, practically in the enemy’s own lair, in an old apartment building already half occupied by the new “owners,” a dying man who had no right to die until he told him what he knew.

His father used to go out like this in the dark too, in rain and snow—to administer the sacraments to the dying. Little Adrian would wake to the creak of the plank floors and the shuffle of steps behind the wall, and would see a golden stripe of light creeping under the nursery door. Something groaned in the big stove and the wind wailed in the chimney; younger, sounder-sleeping Myros and Henyk puffed together, like a pair of hedgehogs, in the dark under the down blankets. Outside, black furry forms shifted behind the windows—the men set out because someone needed them. And a sweet, minty chill squeezed the boy’s chest from inside because he knew that one day he would become one of those men and would also set out somewhere in the middle of the night, because such was the duty of men.

And now he had to set out, had to reach the dying man while he was still alive. Had to take from him information that determined the course of hundreds of other people’s lives. Was this, then, not a sacrament?

“See you later,” he said when he left; that’s how they always parted in the underground. See you later—never Farewell!

“God help you,” breathed the watchful darkness in response, in four distinct voices, the way his mother used to bless his father with the sign of the cross when he set out, and later blessed all her sons, one after the other: God help you! Geltsia and the boys—they were his family now; he had no other. His entire past was with him now, from the earliest years of childhood—the entire length of his life wound onto the bobbin of his sleepless, tense, twenty-seven-year-old body.

He carried it all. Had to carry it all the way there and back, intact and unharmed. Knew too much to fall. And would know even more on the way back.

The other man, the one fighting death at this very hour, also knew he didn’t dare succumb until he passed on his secrets. Adrian was on his way to relieve him of the burden of his earthly duties—to release him unto death.

Was this not a sacrament?

He didn’t know who the man was, was afraid even to think of that (it had to be someone he knew, someone from the regional command)—only knew the password to enter: “Do you have Brits to sell?” And the answer: “Yes, but only size 10.”

Brits—English chrome boots, not more comfortable but decidedly better looking than the American military boots and, for that reason, especially loved by the small-time thugs who’d flocked “in Western” Ukraine from all over the Soviet Union to grab whatever the comrades hadn’t already stolen—would actually come in handy: his own boots, a German trophy, were worn out. They had served him well though—not once did he trip or stumble on forest paths.

The forest grew thinner, sensing its edge. In the hum and groan of the wind, Adrian’s sharp-tuned hearing distinguished the drip and slide of melting snowcaps from the tree branches: it was getting warmer. Snow no longer cracked like gunshots underfoot; with every step, he found more cushion from last year’s leaves, moss, and mulch under a thin dusting of white. New snow, especially when wet, is the most dangerous—not like dry powder. Worse yet—old snow caught under a crust. But this—even if he left an accidental footprint in the dark somewhere—would soon hollow out, collapse, wash away. By light, they won’t find anything. Unless, maybe, they bring dogs. But then again, they train their dogs to the smells of a rural home—and he stinks like they do, of chypre. Reeks to high heaven—exactly like all dog bosses with red stars on their caps.

So why did he feel so weary-hearted, why?

He had dreamed something bad, that’s why. And he could not remember what it was.

Couldn’t even put shards of that dream together. Of one thing he was sure, though: the dream boded ill. And this feeling—that in the dream he was entrusted with a terrible secret that touched on the fate of many people, and he lost it, like a nervous rookie on his first courier run—would not let go of him. The beast that lived inside him lost its bearing and pawed at him, restless, not certain where the danger was coming from—from the raids in the forest behind? From the city ahead? And was it he himself that was in danger, or the friends he left in the ill-fitting makeshift bunker?

In Von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege, he once underlined something that struck him as especially apt: four elements constitute the atmosphere of war—danger, tension, chance, uncertainty. This was the formula he always chose to begin the course he taught at junior officers’ schooling: when you have a ready formula it becomes incomparably easier to act. Was he not well used to uncertainty? To the feeling of danger that filled the air? What, in heaven’s name, was happening to him—all he had done was forget a dream!

And yet he felt disarmed.

He stood at the edge of the forest—awash in the inky-blue clearness that quickly, too quickly, with the swiftness implacable to any human prayer or curse, thinned the November night (somehow, all his riskiest missions, just like all the most significant collisions of his life, always happened in November)—and felt a nasty, uncontrollable tremor rise from the depths of his sleep-deprived body and swell in his throat, unstoppable like vomit. He tore off one mitten, fanned his fingers in front of his face—but it wasn’t light enough yet to see if his hand was shaking. Dog your mother! Had he gotten so he was afraid to step out of the woods?

Stodólya. Stodólya was the reason—Stodólya wrung his memory dry of dreams. From the instant he woke, the man weighed down his consciousness with the full mass of his presence (oh yes, he was constantly aware of Stodólya’s presence as of an external force!) and stole that portion of Adrian’s attention that was supposed to keep his dreams afloat. Stodólya was heavy; he left no room, not the tiniest crack for anything that was not him. He was stronger than Adrian, yes, that was the thing. Finally, he’d said it to himself. Stronger than himself, Adrian Ortynsky (aka Beast, aka Askold, aka Kyi), Ukrainian Insurgent Army Lieutenant, the region’s administrative adjutant, decorated with the Bronze Cross of Service and the Silver Star…. None of which meant anything against this simple fact: Stodólya was stronger.

And Geltsia knew it.

That’s why she’d chosen—him.

A woman, of course, she was a woman in everything—how do they say it in French?—a woman par excellence. And you can’t fool a woman; a woman sees the strongest man way before his commanders—and more surely than the men he commands. Stodólya had will enough to bend, not dozens, but hundreds, even thousands of people. The sector was too small for him—he’d do well with the region. Or even in the area’s Central Security Service Command. One day, if he doesn’t get killed, that’s where he’ll go, most likely. While he, Adrian Ortynsky (Beast, Askold, Kyi), always felt best in open combat—and when it ended without losses. Hated nothing more than sending people to their deaths. And that’s why, however much longer he had allotted to him, he would never rise to regional command.

For some reason, he remembered the story Levko told him the day before—a story that was more like a confession. Levko did have an artistic temperament, and Adrian liked him: the boy was sensitive. Of them all, Levko was the first to feel uneasy—as soon as they stepped into that bunker to wait out the raid. He joked and bantered but it all came out somehow nervous, and Adrian could feel it: he and Levko, whom he had once prompted just in time to check for the bullet in the stock before cleaning his rifle, were connected by that special, wordless link that occurs between the rescuer and the rescued—the one Adrian could never sense with Stodólya. When they found themselves alone, Levko started talking as though he’d been waiting for the opportunity for a long time. He told Adrian how they had to liquidate an MGB major they’d captured during the operation in S., one they’d lived with in the woods for six months, until he gave them every single agent he knew in the territory. That major was great help—he cooperated willingly—and in the six months they spent together they all got so used to each other that near the end they didn’t even guard him anymore. Where would he escape to anyway, back to his Bolsheviks? To be court-martialed and shot?

When Stodólya gathered his Security Service troops and announced that the operation was completed and they no longer needed the major, it became so quiet you could hear a pin drop. They knew more about the major than about each other. They knew he was a Ukrainian, from around Zaporizhya, that he’d been mobilized to NKVD when he was very young, that he’d brought his wife and child to Lviv with him, that he had an elderly mother back in Zaporizhya to whom he sent money every month—they knew lots of things. Stodólya asked if any one of them would vouch with his life that the major could be left with the underground. That if they kept him, he would pledge allegiance to Ukraine and would fight on our side. None of them were ready to do this; the silence held. Stodólya asked if anyone would volunteer for the liquidation. No one did. Stodólya then chose two men, who later came back as good as dead themselves.

The major told them that he hadn’t expected any other end for himself. That he was a military man, too, and understood. Even though he wasn’t a military man—he was from the NKVD, which meant he, too, must have had to shoot at an unarmed man with a blindfold over his face. Service like that makes men into no-good soldiers: they can’t fathom that the gun barrel can just as easily be turned on them, and when they first chance upon such an impossibility, they lose all human semblance on the spot; it’s hard to watch. But in the six months he had spent with them, the major also changed, had been reborn—and faced his death as an officer should, as if he wished for nothing more than to earn their respect, to be seen as their equal. He said under no circumstances were they to send word to his wife, because it would only put her in danger from the bureau. It was better for her to know nothing and receive his pension with a bonus for death in service. He asked them not to blindfold him. And for a smoke. They smoked, all three of them. Get on with it, boys, the major said.

That wasn’t a liquidation; that was murder. Everyone knew it. Those two boys fell soon afterward—first one and then the other volunteered for “dead missions,” the kind from which no one comes back. They were looking for death, Levko said. What they had done broke something inside them. Levko said this without judgment, as if he were speaking about a random bullet or a change of weather—in no way did he intend to discuss with Adrian his commanding officer’s actions, which he did not doubt; something else tormented him, and Adrian saw what it was: Levko blamed himself—for not having vouched for the major at that decisive moment. For not having had the courage to step forward, click his heels, look Stodólya in the eye and say, “I vouch for him.” And to hell with what comes next.

He was a good man, Levko—and it pained him that he had not had the courage. That it was his, Levko’s, faintheartedness, and his faintheartedness alone, that cost these people their lives. All three of them.

“You are not a coward,” Adrian told him. “But it is good that you’re afraid of being one. A man is always afraid of something; only fools have no fear. The question is what are you afraid of more? Then your greatest fear snuffs out the lesser ones—and that is true courage.”

This was an idea Adrian cherished; he’d had it since long ago, since the Germans, when he first took part in an attack on a Gestapo jail: the idea that courage, true courage in which you never falter, is simply a question of the hierarchy of fears—when you fear dishonor and a traitor’s brand more than death (and more than that, most of all, so much your blood turns to ice in your veins, you fear Shevchenko’s poetic warning: “You’ll perish, vanish, our Ukraine and no trace will be left on earth”—nothing more horrible could befall you than bearing witness to that, and no force in the world could ever stop you from fighting to avert that horror). But he couldn’t be certain Levko understood the word hierarchy. Although, really, he was saying it all just to say something. Not to be silent. Talking to shut up his own conscience. Because, had he been in Stodólya’s shoes, wouldn’t he, Kyi, have given the same order?

It was like he comforted Levko in Stodólya’s stead. And Levko did cheer up a bit, brightened like a finch brought in from the cold (looking at him made Adrian think, for no particular reason, shame about your rosy cheeks, brother; winter’ll paint you green like potatoes in a cellar…). And it was only now, as he waited at the edge of the forest for the clouds that raced across the sky, swiftly unspooling into ribbons of smoke, to cover the moon and allow him to come out, that the conversation came back to him, like a bitter heartburn after a heavy supper, and he thought, coldly and clearly, yes, he would’ve given the same order but under his command Levko would have found the courage to step up. He would have clicked his heels and said, hand to the peak of the cap in salute, “Permission to speak, friend commander, I vouch for him.”

And to hell with what comes next.

Adrian was now finally awake, completely. Inside he felt empty, like before stepping into the line of fire. With a quick sharp whine, time came together, squeezed like a Moscow harmonica’s bellows—into the streaming minute, a singular chink open for immediate action. And that disgusting tremor inside faded, went still. And his hands weren’t shaking.

He was free.

Around him, his land breathed in the quiet of the night. The spirits of the woods who had watched over him guiding him through the thickets, stood behind him. This was his land—his strong-as-death love pulsed like invisible light in the dark. Those who had come to stomp it down with their boots had no such strength. Could do nothing to him.

He felt the angry glee enter him. The berserk heat that comes in battle and—if you have luck—on a mission, fills your body with dreamlike ease, with the tease and tickle of danger that arouses and intoxicates more irresistibly the more boldly you deny that danger, until it retreats, tamed, because you showed yourself to be stronger. Ahead he could see the white field—no, not white but already speckled, welcoming him with black wet inlets of thaw; his mind—a white knight in icy armor—observed from outside his body, watch in hand, and the watch ticked loudly, calculating the minutes measured before his turn, and somewhere in space, or perhaps inside himself, an invisible hand wound up a barrel organ for a bawdy kolomyjka tune, tighter, tighter, don’t crack the spring—no, that’s a twig cracking underfoot, like a girl who’s done waiting. “To the mountains go white sheep, up higher and higher, I slept with a partisan and I ain’t yet crying….” He grinned, noisily drawing in a full chest of sharp forest air, stretching his lungs like an accordion’s bellows in anticipation of a dance, cruel like a wolf hunt. Only it wasn’t him anymore—it was a demobilized Soviet Army captain, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin, dispatched, with magnificent documents and a Nagant revolver engraved with his name, by the grain supply department to finalize grain collection in the district. Alright, motherfucker, let’s go! said Anton Ivanovych. And crossed himself.

Let the games begin.

Adrian’s Lost Dream

Why am I creeping, half-bent, along this wattle fence with no end in sight?—the weaving glistens wet, as though varnished, and drops of water leave earthbound trails on it here and there, like tears on the wrinkles of an ancient face seen up close—a thaw, it’s dawning, patches of flimsy threadbare snow like moth-eaten wool grow lighter on the black ridge as my foot finds them, spellbound, obedient, to avoid stepping on the white—

—that’s a rule we have, sweetie, like in hopscotch: “Don’t step over!” Jump on each square, miss none, to get to the main nave of the heavenly sky—here I am, Lord!—but watch out, don’t step on a single line, because each line is a line of fire, and he who steps over is out of the game—boom, dead!

And then can’t reach the heavenly sky.

Has to start all over again from the beginning. Again and again—until he comes all the way.

I am ready. Ready to do it all over again if they kill me now.

You still have time. And you have all eternity before the heavenly sky. Because the Lord gathers all who’d been killed in one place where the living cannot go—turns their shoulders to the sky and their faces to the earth from which they’d been torn too soon—and from that secret place of our Lord they watch over you: they war when you go to war, make sure you don’t stray from the path, and send you letters you don’t know how to read…

So they’re watching me right at this moment? Igor, Nestor, Lodzio, Roman, Ash, Myron, Lisovyi, Ratai, Legend, all the boys who left me here alone—I can sense their silence as it fills the air, it hangs above the ground as though a whole platoon is studying me through their optical aims from an invisible cover, and when I raise my arm to fire my weapon they all hold their breath as well, so that my arm steadies, and when my voice warns me an inch before death—is that they, too?

They, they… but you already knew it. Ask something you don’t know—you have time for one more question.

Okay then. I’ve never said this to anyone. I would like to fall in Kyiv, like Lodzio. On the apostolic hills where my nation began. Where the Dnieper’s blue and the churches’ gold are our ancient colors before the heavenly host. Where the glory of our princes and hetmans roared—and from where our forefathers marched to the peal of St. Sophia’s bells to defend it. I never came that far—and I so yearned to go there, to see it all with my own eyes, that’s why I chose Kyi as my alias—

Your blood will be in Kyiv. You don’t need to know more.

Who are you that you say this to me?

Black furrows plowed, plowed, hey, hey…. Black furrows plowed, seeded and plowed, and the bullets sprout, sprout, hey, hey…

I know you: You are Grandma Lina! Oh, Grandma, I am so happy it’s you—only where are you, why can’t I see you?

I’m no grandma, man. I am the land.

The land? Yes, I see it—black dirt, not furrows—just mud, you leave tracks on it, too, so I must watch my step, step so the snow won’t creak underfoot, rouse neither men nor dogs, leave no trace on softening, rich soil. I see my breath knit through the air before me; I cover my mouth and nose with a wool scarf, and it’s instantly wet inside it; now tears brim in my eyes, my ears are full of wind, my eyes and nostrils full of moisture, the thaw, the thaw, everything runs, everything drips, champs, slips, screams—what?

It is the land bubbling, soaked with blood—heavy, swollen with blood like the walls of a woman’s womb: fecund, brewing, gurgling bog; she can’t take any more blood; she oozes it like black beestings—she is asking to rest; she is asking for winter…

Like a woman who bleeds in vain and bears no children? Yes, I see—it’s the time before winter, the darkest of seasons, and the land although wet, has no smell; it is going numb, entering sleep…

The winter that’s coming shall be long, so long it will seem eternal. Only the women won’t cease giving birth. Remember that.

I don’t know who you are, but listen—I cannot remember things I do not need! I have a mission, and I must come back alive, and no one will write down for me what I am soon to hear. I will have to archive it all in my head, down to the last comma, the dots above the i’s…

What you are soon to hear you will no longer need. And what you might need you will not hear.

What’s that supposed to mean?

You’ll understand when the time comes. And now the wattle fence will end, and you’ll hit your knee on a stake.

Bugger! There it is, a stake alright. How did I miss it?

This will be a sign for you. So you would remember when you wake up on the other side of this long winter.

So I am asleep?

No, soldier. You are already gone. Look—

The earth! Sweet beloved God, have mercy on us—the earth is falling from above. Is it the bunker or the world that’s collapsing? So much of it, Lord, I can’t get out from under it; it is heavy; it stifles me, covers me. I can’t see the light! It is dark… dark…

Sleep, soldier. They’ll call for you when the time comes.

Written on a pack of cigarettes on Adrian Vatamanyuk’s bedside table:

Two policemen in winter shearling coats passed him by without a second look. For a minute, he was overcome by the sense of being invisible—as though he’d been transported, in flesh, through a well suddenly opened in time, into a different November morning, where another, German, patrol passed just like that, not seeing him, as if through thin air, and the feeling made the world around him shift and begin to slip, a door taken off its hinges. This didn’t last long, two heartbeats at most, but he flushed: it’d been too long, darn it, he’d forgotten how to walk in the city.

The city, however, had not changed—those who now ruled it by day knew only the work of ruin. In the cities they took—just as in homes abandoned by owners on a moment’s notice, with embroidered tablecloths on the tables and family silver in the drawers—they repaired, fixed, or tidied nothing; they didn’t love the cities they took and didn’t understand that any place, be it a city, a home, or a bunker needed someone’s hands and heart to live. All they knew was how to wield their threatening presence to paralyze anyone who had hands and heart to put to this task, and wherever they made camp they brought with them, like rot, a cheerless air of unsettledness, discomfort, and poverty.

The heap of rubbish where the Germans had blown up the synagogue hadn’t been cleared—only sagged a bit since he was here last summer: people must’ve been stealing the excellent Austrian brick from it, pilfering it piece by piece. In the window of the pharmacy on the corner, a bust of Stalin had appeared: a sign that the local pharmacist who had supplied the underground with medicine was gone, arrested. Closer to the center, there was more Stalin: a portrait on the former German administration building, a portrait on a school—and everywhere the eye tripped on red streamers and lengths of red fabric with white lettering, strung across streets for their holiday tomorrow: “Long Live the Great Socialist October Revolution!”

The most notable change was the construction of a jail—the only project the new power had begun: through the gates, opened to let in a five-ton truck loaded with bricks, he hooked, out of the corner of his eye, and reeled into his memory a sliced-off view of the yard, and deep in it, under the dirty pink wall, the color of Soviet ladies’ undergarments (the Poles at least had better taste and didn’t adorn either women or jails in such a nasty color!), lined up in rows, like piglets at market, were reddish sacks of precious cement. Uncovered, he noted with spite: everything with them louts is like that—just dropped in the middle of the yard, under rain and snow, can’t keep things straight even around their prison! Not for naught it is said—if it’s everyone’s, it’s gone. Like what happened around Drohobych to the cattle left behind when they’d shipped everyone off to Siberia. Six thousand head, with nowhere to keep them and nothing to feed them, because the silage they’d also left under the rain all rotted—they rounded them up in the district center and slaughtered them, as if enacting some ancient nomad funeral rite in which the animals shared the fate of their owners….

But they are nomads—the voice inside his head reminded. Of course, who else—Batu Khan’s horde come to ravage our cities and villages, exactly like it happened a thousand years ago, only this time it’s reached far beyond the Carpathians, across the Vistula and Oder… Flagellum Dei, Scourge of God. The man walking toward him on the other side of the street, dressed in a civilian gray Mackintosh and a hat with a navy band, seemed somehow familiar to him; he turned his face to the wall and crouched to tie an ostensibly untied shoelace, turning—to no avail—that vaguely familiar face over and over in his memory, as if straining to push through a locked door that refused to budge. He could feel with his shoulders that the man on the opposite sidewalk also slowed down, and he regretted his slipshod disguise, resented Anton Ivanovych Zlobin for not wearing at least a mustache like all Soviet military men, even retired ones (it would appear that the shaving of one’s face and the perfuming of oneself with chypre constituted their entire repertoire of personal hygiene, since, according to our girls who worked in their military hospital, they didn’t have much use for toilet paper, as the scraps of newspaper that hung on a nail in the water closet there remained undisturbed for days on end). As he assessed the distance to the closest doorway into which he could dash, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a dark spot on the sidewalk, but then his Voice gave the order “Go!”—and when he turned his back to the wall again, the man in the gray Mackintosh was no longer there. Instead, a single crow stood on the sidewalk, covered like a brand new gun with a moist oily gloss, and leered at him saucily, askance—as if she had something to say to him.

Pish! He almost spat as he would have in the forest (the Soviets, though, spat in the streets openly, right where they walked, and equipped their official offices with a fixture never seen in the Austrian or Polish days—special bowls for spit, like at a dentist’s!). This was the second time he saw this crow—no, couldn’t be, this had to have been a different one—the bird had greeted him at the edge of the city, on one of those boggy little lanes lined with thoroughly country-like homes behind wattle fences. His attention, strained to its limit, fixed every little detail—yet he still couldn’t identify the man in the gray Mackintosh: had they really met before (Where?) or was it merely an illusion, a coincidental similarity of facial features that raised alarm in him?

This was why the city was dangerous—it was a bottomless and unpredictable reservoir of the past. The woods—they were the opposite. The woods had a short memory; the woods, like the partisans, lived in the streaming moment; every storm that blasted through erased the contours of the land you knew by touch just a day before, blocked your path with a fallen tree, a slipped slope; a twig you broke as a sign was torn off by deer or bears; cuts you made on tree trunks scabbed up like blisters on your own skin, and went black, blending into the landscape; heavily trodden campsites were soon overrun by shoots of new grass, studded with a generous sprinkling of buttercup and anemones; blood you spilled seeped into the ground without a trace. Adrian would be hard-pressed to find the bunker where he’d spent the previous winter although he dug it, as conspiracy rules prescribed, himself, with his own two hands; perhaps only the peasants who’d grown up grazing their cattle in those woods and knew the area’s topography like their own homes in the night—just as he, Adrian, could take apart and put back together a Mauser in three and half minutes without light—could etch into their memories, without fault and for all eternity, a spot at the edge of the village where someone made a money cache or buried archives in milk cans. Except no one ever divulged such information to peasants, and those who did know how many steps to take north by the azimuth from the dried-up hornbeam tree or the third rocky outcrop from the right often perished before they could pass the secret on to another confidante. How many of them were already there, slowly rotting underground, our abandoned secrets?

The city was a different beast—inside its walls, the city closely guarded the entire mass of time lived in it by its people, stashed it, generation after generation like a tree growing new whorls. Here your past could pounce at you from behind a corner at any moment, like an ambush no reconnaissance could ever warn you about. It could explode in your face like a time-delay bomb—with an old Gymnasium professor of yours, miraculously not exterminated by the Germans or the Soviets, or with a former friend from the German Fachkursen, later recruited by the NKVD, or simply with someone who had once been a witness to an old fragment of your life, which was, at the moment, of absolutely no use to you and thus subject to being expunged from your memory—but not from the city’s. Because this was the city’s job—to remember: without purpose, meaning, or need, but wholly, with its every stone—just as to flow is the job of rivers, and to grow is the job of grass. And if you take the city’s memory away—if you deport the people who’d lived in it for generations and populate it, instead, with relocated squatters, the city withers and shrivels, but as long as its ancient walls—its stone memory—stand, it will not die.

Adrian walked down the street and felt the city oozing the past from every pore, sap from a pine tree. It trapped him like a fly with his little feet sinking into sticky amber goo—he felt as if he were walking on the bottom of a lake, against the resistance of many atmospheres. It may have been because at the moment he wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as he could. His time, tied to the time of the one who was fading like a dying candle and who waited for his friend Kyi to whom he could pass on the secrets he’d guarded until his last breath, was running out. But friend Kyi could not run. The city hung on him, weighed him down with stone on all sides; it clung to him with the tar of dozens of eyes he could see, and hundreds more he couldn’t. Lord, how much easier things were in the forest.

I’ve done become a woodsman, he thought with a city dweller’s instinctive pride in this accomplishment and with a growing anxiety about how much of it was apparent to others (so far, he checked, there was no tail). And right away, the next idea caught up with the previous one, clicked against it, like balls on a pool table: so, they’ve really driven us from our cities, from our memory’s terrain—into the underground of history, the twilight zone….

“Documents!”

“Please.”

A captain and a lieutenant, well-fed and also in good shearling coats; another fifty meters behind them, a woman with a market basket approached. The rest of the way was open; the space he left between them as he handed over his documents—piece by piece, not all at once—would be enough for a freely swung cross-in, edge of hand against Adam’s apple above the collar, the two of them at once; he punched equally strong from either side.

“Looks like he’s on a road assignment, tovarish Kapitan…”

“Last name?” verifying the papers actually belonged to him. “Zlobin, Anton-Vannych.”

At the sound of his undeniably Russian pronunciation—a local could never fake that!—both finally, as if on command, relaxed, brightened up.

“Where are you from?” the captain asked with unexpectedly human curiosity; Adrian saw in close-up, as if through a Zeiss telescope, his pale eyelashes and thin, watery skin grained with freckles, breathed his smell—shag, leather shoulder belt, chypre…

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

“Lvovzagotzerno, tovarish Kapitan.”

“That’s not what I mean! Where’d you fight?”

“First Ukrainian front,” he said, icing with hatred, feeling the pistol against his side under his overcoat, and in his stomach—the tightening knot of anticipation, because at any moment, any moment now the alien past could rush at him, and he wouldn’t know what to do with it: he was confident in his Russian only with short, chopped-up sentences, even though the original Anton Zlobin, known by the alias Lisovyi in the Insurgent Army, always praised his pronunciation.

“And I was at the First Byelorussian!” the captain said, thrilled for no particular reason. “Did we cross paths in Berlin, by chance? It’s just your phiz looks so familiar.”

“I was done fighting at Sandomierz.”

The woman with the basket passed them and, not looking back, hurried along as if someone were after her.

“Got laid up in hospitals for a while after that.”

“Well, it’s no picnic here either,” the captain said by way of boasting—or maybe complaining. “The banderas are keeping things hot alright.” He clearly wanted to add something else, but stopped and waved Adrian off with the carefree, comfortable gesture of a person not afraid of leaving himself open to a throat jab. He offered Adrian’s documents back as if to say, sorry, brother, just doing my job, and in a flash of sudden insight that is the sole provenance of ancient, well-tempered hatred—the kind that doesn’t fog your mind with black madness but hardens, year after year, into a heavy amalgam that melds you with the one you hate like two lovers to death—Adrian realized that the captain also longed for the old warfare. For his First Byelorussian front, the brotherhood of battle that he must have experienced there, and that the reason he tarried with needless yap was that he felt much better then and there, than now and here. And now he would remember him, Anton Ivanovych Zlobin wounded at the First Ukrainian front; now Adrian would have one more person who knows him in this city. Rot your bones to pieces, tovarish Kapitan.

He kept walking, and about ten meters before the intersection he needed, that same crow materialized on the sidewalk before him. Turned her head every which way and stepped from one foot to another like a whore in high heels. He didn’t give a doggone about signs and such nonsense, but this was a bit too much.

“Shoo!”

The crow bounced once, heavy and awkward, like a woman at term, then again, and lifted into the air, wings rustling, and then landed, a few steps ahead, atop a cracked mascaron head above a doorway. Adrian thought he saw the mascaron wink at him. Was it just a tall tale or can crows really live to three hundred years old? And this same one could have flown above the battle at Berestechko? The ominous bird stared down at him as if it knew something. Where had he seen this unmoving gaze before? Like a snake’s, the Queen of Snakes…

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

As he turned the corner, he spotted the gray Mackintosh at the other end of the street again (Could it be the same one?) and made a sharp turn into the first available gateway, and stood still, waiting. A woman dressed in a whole pack of silver foxes walked by with a small boy—“How many times do I have to tell you—No!” scorched her high, screeching, self-assured voice. Must be a commissar’s wife. Claws clicking on the cobblestones, a dog ran by—there’s a creature that doesn’t need to be afraid anymore…. Minutes dropped, loud as drumbeats; somewhere in the building a radio came on. The gray Mackintosh still did not show. If he was a tail, he was an incredibly sloppy, amateur one.

Come on already, for God’s sake!

Here it is finally, Kirov Street. Kirov! All streets now renamed after some Bolshevik commissars, new scabs on old walls…. From here, it’s the sixth door on the right. One, two…

“Watch out!” boomed in his head.

The morning street looked empty, lying in wait. And, like in the children’s game of cold-warm-hot, his alarm grew with every step. He could actually hear it, the sound of alarm pushing from inside at his temples. Something was wrong, and the something was right ahead of him. Dear Lord, please let him be alive, please let me come in time, Lord Almighty, please keep him living…. A small old man with a cane shuffled out of the third door and began to close it behind him with a protracted, teeth-grating screech. Four, five… he saw every doorstep at once, polished to a silky gloss by thousands of feet, saw every crack in the sidewalk, the moist gleam of the cobblestones, the sugary trim of snow along the curb, and the dark specks in it, burbling with thaw-water, and the tear-streaked, cracked (Why doesn’t anyone fix it?) clay gutter at the building’s door. And—three curtained windows on the fourth floor: safe to proceed.

Here are the doors, the sixth doorway, a lion’s head with a ring in its maw, a gold maslin handle. Heavy. His mouth instantly dry. Lord, please let me not be late. Fourth floor, apartment eight.

Stairwell—dusk, pale light from the pseudo-gothic window facing the yard. If need arises, he can flee that way. Silence uneasy, ominous. But no, a door slams overhead. That’s lower, on the third floor. Someone coming down the stairs, the planks groan and creak: a man.

Adrian hastened his step to have his back to the window when he meets the man—he’d already advertised himself plenty, no need to parade his face before the neighbor as well…. From above, a pair of boots descends, then navy uniform breeches—a policeman! A major. Well, that’ll beat your grandmother! Jeepers. Steady now, don’t look away, keep straight at him, open, bold, schlagfertig…

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

But the policeman, much heavier and slower, also plows straight at him, silently like a somnambulist, his entire body blocking the way, like a boulder; he snuffles with the previous night’s vodka heaves and poor digestion; he blocks Adrian’s path as if he wants to embrace him—and looming, with all his shoulder straps, stripes, stars, and belts, exhales unexpectedly quickly, quietly, hoarsely into Adrian’s face.

“Number eight?” he asks.

Adrian is silent.

“Leave, it’s a kapkán. They arrested everyone last night.”

“Thank you,” Adrian manages to peel off through his dry lips, then jumps astraddle the rail and slides down in a blink. He’s out in the street, in the deafening, blazing day, faster, faster—but not too fast, he can’t run, watch out!—puts distance between himself and the sixth door, Kirov Street, all the while waiting, with his back tuned to every sound, for someone to yell “Halt!” after him like a shot of the starting pistol. But nothing happens, it’s all quiet behind him; there’s no chase, no stomping boots; two more blocks and he’ll turn onto a more crowded street that runs to the market; he’ll mix with the passersby. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us….

Why wasn’t there a curtain pulled back in the middle window—the agreed-upon signal in case of failure? They didn’t have time? Someone prevented them? Or, worse, the worst—were they betrayed? Kapkán—the word stuck in his mind and lay there like a rock in the middle of a stream, cracked into its two syllables, two blows with a Tatar cudgel, kap-kán—but man, do you have luck! Thank You, Almighty Lord—three and a half floors below the trap, two minutes before the fatal knock on the door, three-one-three, “Do you have Brits to sell?” He’d have dropped like a ham hock into stew. God bless that major—whatever’d come over him? With girls, it’s been known to happen—sometimes moskali saved them by warning them like this, but a man? Must get a message to our people at the police, let them find out what kind of a major they got themselves here…. “They arrested everyone last night”—whom, how many? Was the one he’d come to see among them? Had he had the time to shoot himself, or was he taken alive? Waited for friend Kyi, but got another kind of visitor altogether, the uninvited kind—if only the courier had come the day before, a day, just a day earlier!

Adrian all but moaned through his teeth, his old wound aching in his chest: as if it were he who was being dragged, unconscious, and tossed like a sack into the “black raven,” as they called police vans… “You, black raven, why’d you circle ov-er the hum-ble heaad of mine” went the doleful ballad, drawn out like your own guts slowly pulled by a well crank, when friend Lisovyi sang it around their campfire, the former Red Army captain, Andriy Zlobin, who perished in the Carpathians and to whom Adrian owed his papers (they only changed Andriy to Anton, but that was nothing in comparison to what it would’ve taken them to manufacture good legal papers otherwise). And now it came, the “black raven”—not for nothing did the stupid black bird haunt him But no, you bastards, the day has not yet come when you could take Kyi alive! But who, who was it? He didn’t know even their aliases. A wounded man, dying—that’s all the courier communicated. And what if they’d taken him alive?—they’ll nurse him, to be sure, patch him up in their hospital and then torture him until he tells them what he was supposed to tell Adrian…. And right from under his nose, rot it!—the MGB snatched away the secret that couldn’t be confided to a single other person on the territory, the secret he’d walked eighteen kilometers (and now had to walk as many back!) to hear, and now could only pray to God that they wouldn’t get to it, that it would perish, vanish forever, go into the ground together with whoever was its keeper…

“Beg pardon!” he blurted in Russian when he shoved past another man. Closer to the market there were more people; he couldn’t keep the same pace without drawing attention to himself, and he spotted behind him—this time beyond any doubt because it was much closer—the gray Mackintosh and the navy-banded hat…. Whoa, brother, you’re a slob to shame all slobs, who tails like that? His mouth was still dry, but his heart had returned to his chest, and his reason worked coolly and clearly as though placed outside of his body. Under different circumstances, he’d have had good fun losing that tail, would make a sport of vanishing without a trace, but now he felt unavenged wrath choking him, high in his throat where it had risen, by the law of communicating vessels. As soon as the first, dark wave of fear ebbed—he was still in that state where the body, like a well-oiled machine, acts of its own accord as it does in dreams, in love, and in moments of mortal danger—and before he knew what he was doing and could rein himself in, in blatant denial of all logic of safety that demanded he remove himself, now, at once, far from the city, he was making a show of turning onto another street, almost tripping into the arms—Beg pardon!—of another fur-wrapped missus who instantly ogled him with a purely feminine hunger—some other time, lady; I’ve no cash on me today!—a quiet and usually empty street where he knew a very good doorway, with narrow latticework like in a confessional—and he was feeling an urge to confess to someone, a powerful urge indeed! He didn’t care if it was broad daylight, as long as the dolt didn’t lose him again.

He was right: after just a few moments, he could hear hurried steps clattering from the same direction he’d come from—clickety-clack, check it out, the comrades make a fine racket when they walk, and we, when “the red broom” swept its hardest, were compelled to parade through the woods barefoot so a mouse wouldn’t stir—clattering close and then stopping, hesitating, not far from the darkened doorway. Has he lost sight of his object or what? You poor bastard, who sent you off like this, a calf into the woods? Alright, come on, here, brother, a little closer, don’t be scared, step another step, davai-davai, as your handlers like to say as they give you a helpful prod with the gun barrel….

The other man, as if hearing Adrian’s call, obeyed and moved ahead—that’s it, good boy!—and when the gray Mackintosh, uncertainly spinning his head about in search of a trap door through which his object may have disappeared, aligned with the doorway, Adrian sprang in a single noiseless lunge out the door, and the rest took a matter of seconds: a short confusion, a sob from a terrified human throat, like a muffled caw, cut short before it could disturb the quiet of the city morning, and in the dark pend, shielded from the street with the narrow cast-iron grating, Adrian pressed the newcomer close to himself, feeling the man instantly freeze against the gun poked into the small of his back, and spoke to him over his shoulder, lips almost brushing the man’s frigid cheek.

“Do not move. Who are you?”

“I… khhhh… I…”

What a buzzard! Every time he found himself among civilians, Adrian had to remind himself how retarded they were in comparison to the guerillas—like gramophone records set to play on slower speed.

“I… khhh… I am a teacher, sir… from P.”

The deuce take it! An amateur snitch was the last thing he needed.

“Then why are you here, in the city? Why did you follow me?”

“I came to the school district office, for a meeting…. Our principal left middle of the year… I recognized you. I’d seen you at a wedding in our village last spring.”

This same face—only without the hat, with large, flaggy ears—now surfaced, clear and bright, in his memory, ensconced on the other side of the wedding table: the man had a fine singing voice, a tenor, resonant as a well, “Hey pity, pity, loved the girl since was little….” Adrian slackened his grip a bit, but did not let go; to an outside observer, this must have looked like an embrace, two men hugging each other in a pend in the middle of the day. Must be drunk.

“Did you intend to renew our acquaintance in this manner, professor?”

“I thought… your photo is up there… by the police… I saw it this morning… I thought you might not know…”

A photo? By the police? “Help find this bandit”?

“Your phiz looks so familiar,” said the captain who checked his documents. That would be why. He felt like laughing out loud: apparently, he’s on the wanted list (What price did they put on his head?), and he’s strolling through the city, not a care in the world, right under the noses of an entire garrison, the day before the Great October Socialist Revolution, when the Bolsheviks are especially vigilant—and not a feather ruffled, not a hair raised? The invincible, elusive Adrian Ortynsky—as if cloaked by Our Lady with a magical cloud that makes his enemies look right past him.

And instantly he was covered with sweat: that was too much luck for one day! It must have been the smell of chypre that made the Soviets not see him when they looked at him, and not one of them had sensed him a stranger. Except maybe the major in the stairwell—he had to have recognized him; he saw his face up close, beyond doubt….

TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

He had to flee—he had drained the well of his luck to the bottom and the dregs were turning to vapor as fast as his Soviet cologne: he could already sense his own smell emanating from him like heat from a stove—the heavy, sylvan, animal smell of an unwashed body.

“Thank you very much, professor.” He stepped back, pushing his pistol under his overcoat. He believed the man now: no agent would be foolish enough to tug after him—just report him to the nearest patrol and end of story. “Please accept my apologies for being so uncivil to you.”

“No harm done; no worries…. This worked out well, actually; I was, pardon me, perspiring, following you—I couldn’t figure out how to come close enough so that no one would notice.” As any civilian would, after the shock of encountering a gun, the man, although he kept his voice down to a whisper, turned instantly and uncontrollably chatty. “And yesterday I had such fright, God forbid!—we set out for the city, on a wagon, through the forest, and there’d just been a fight right there, and the moskali stopped us, and put two wounded into the wagon, our folks, from the woods, a man and a woman….”

A fight? Near P.? That’s Woodsman’s territory, with the infirmary.

“When was that?”

“Late, it was dark by the time we reached the city.”

“You wouldn’t know the hour, would you?”

“No, not exactly… I don’t have a watch; moskali took mine two years since already, and I haven’t earned enough for a new one yet.”

“Anything you can tell me about those two?”

“Both young… probably married… the man died on the way. That made them very angry; they cussed like God forbid…. The one who was their boss yelled, “We need him alive!” And the woman was still alive when we pulled up to where their cars were… pregnant, about seven months. She moaned so, poor soul; I just kept praying that she wouldn’t go into labor on the way…. She’s dark, swarthy like a Jewess…”

The day went dark before Adrian’s eyes—as if, with a heavy hop and a rustle of wings through his mind, a black bird took flight from the edge of his sight. No, no, it was impossible; it wasn’t true; it could not be…

“Can you remember anything else?”

Something in his voice must have changed, because the teacher blinked at him in a kind of awe—the first time he looked straight at Adrian, at the man who, a minute earlier, had thrust a gun between his ribs. Apologies, professor. It could have been worse, much worse. More than once at night, unable to see clearly, we’ve shot our own…. But, for the love of Christ, please, anything else, professor? Give me just another detail. A handkerchief, a shred of her underwear. So I would know, so I would know for sure. The man—that must have been Orko. Lord, please make it so it isn’t true…. Seven months pregnant—and it’s November now… somehow he lost his ability to count and started folding his fingers one by one, inside his pocket, like when he was little and Mother taught him how to tell from his knuckles which month is long and which is short: May, June, July, August…

“I can’t remember,” rustled the teacher timidly. “I didn’t look very closely, I was scared…”

He was scared—and still he followed me through the city to warn me; he trembled; he hid—but followed…. Adrian felt a lump in his throat. He wanted to shake the man’s hand, but didn’t dare, was held back by the years-old underground habit—never offer a hand.

“How did you know she was seven months?”

“Be darned if I know! Could’ve been eight. Just the way she looked—my wife gave birth not too long ago.”

“Congratulations,” Adrian said automatically—and then understood the meaning of what the man said: he had a child. “A boy?” he asked, not sure exactly why—as if he couldn’t leave just yet, as if something held him in front of this man, a last hope or a promise, some delayed message. “Or a girl?”

“A boy!” The teacher’s face glowed in the dark. “Little rascal, three kilos and a half! That’s already the second one God gave us, the older turned two on the Feast of the Intercession.”

“God bless your family,” Adrian said. Like he was caroling for the man. Like this was Christmas, the greatest of all feasts, when above cities and villages and snowbound bunkers an invisible light pulsed through the night and underground, like in Roman catacombs, kolyada, the Noel, boomed, a great buried bell lighting the faces of all who had come together with the glow of the good news: the Son of God is born! He, too, received the good news today—he, too, was to have a son born, and exactly on Christmas: November, December, January, nine months exactly, mysterious are your ways indeed, Lord—while we war and perish, somewhere in the darkness of women’s bodies new lives swarm, grow, hasten to light, into the world, to the unceasing, bloody birth feast, the Christmas of our nation that carries on and on without end in sight….

Villagers began singing a new carol: “Did you people hear sad news again—into chains they bound our dear Ukraine….” King Herod’s servants walked through the snow like Brueghel’s hunters, looking for newborns—somewhere, a crusted rag the color of rust in the cradle of an emptied Lemko home was a six-day-old baby shot at close range, and young men with submachine guns who had caroled at this very home not too long before—Lord bless all those who are in this home!—Thank you, boys, blessings on you, too!—ran outside and vomited into the snow—joy to the world, joy to the land. Down, down the carolers’ hands runs the red wine, brims in goddards, spills from bullet-ridden, bayoneted skulls, but the women—they must be mad; they pay it no mind; they cling to us like roots that trap our feet, begging for love so they may bear children in pain; and God is on their side, because who, really, would remember and count the murdered newborns of Bethlehem when the whole world rejoices with the new joy, and the living from everywhere come bearing gifts for the one child that lives?

And that is good, that’s the way it’s supposed to be—let him live, let him grow big and strong—someone will grow, someone will hide in mangers, in thickets, in caves, in a forgotten village at the edge of the woods while Herod’s hunters walk and walk through the snow, single file, falling upon homes in the night, tearing the living from their warm beds—two hours to pack, two loaves of bread for each soul, and only the clothes on your back. Officer, sir, can I please change the baby?—davai-davai, hurry up, go!—and the wagon with two not-quite-shot lives, the woman and the child in her womb—Lord, is it really my child?—bumps over forest ruts and potholes to where the prison opens its gates for them—and the prison grows, swells, gains the strength to contain the rebel blood inside it, and tomorrow the sun rises again like a pregnant woman’s belly over the skyline, as if the whole earth writhed in pain but could not bring forth its Savior, and a voice is heard in Rama, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning—Rachel weeps for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not…

He had more questions to ask—the man had to have noticed something else!—but he remembered himself: there was noise in the yard behind them, someone had left the building and was walking toward the gateway. A young, dancing walk. The walk of a person who hadn’t yet given birth to anyone. Whose body still believes in its own immortality.

“O-olya!” a woman’s voice sang out, as if through a silk veil, slicing the quiet from above.

“Stay behind,” Adrian whispered. “Ask for directions, like you’re lost. And, God forbid, do not follow me—you can’t be seen with me.”

“May God bless you,” he added or maybe just meant to add. If there was an answer, he did not hear it.

Ahead of him lay eighteen kilometers in which anyone could recognize him. The hunters walked in the snow, well-fed whippers in new shearling coats and snug leather shoulder-belts, surveying the field through field glasses—and the dogs lunged at the end of their leashes, baying, choking, barking their lungs out, and scuffed the ground madly with their back legs, kicking up fountains of black mud into the sky. The beast did not err; the beast had guessed it all as soon as he stuck his nose out of the bunker at dawn: the warm wind from the south carried on it the smell of a raid, a hunt—and he was the one being hunted.

Do you see it?

I see it.

He is coming.

Yes.

Don’t be afraid.

I am not.

It’s just a dream. We’re dreaming the same dream.

Is it really possible? For two people to dream the same dream?

It is. My grandma and grandpa had it happen to them once, in Karaganda. It’s actually quite simple: I’m dreaming you, and you’re dreaming me.

It is, isn’t it? So strange—how simple things can be in a dream; it seems it couldn’t be any other way.

That’s because in dreams things are the way they really are. And in daytime—the way they appear to us.

Then I really love you. Now, in this dream, it’s so obvious it doesn’t require any further proof or evidence. I can’t see you in this dreamscape; you’re somewhere aside, close by, like a part of me—I can only feel there’s another, separate life beside me, and I love it. And I know it’s you. It is you, isn’t it? You? Is it you? ADRIAN?

“Adrian? Where’d you go? Why did you turn on the light?”

“Go back to sleep… I just have to write this down, or I’ll forget…”

“Write what down? The covers are all bunched up—how’d that happen? What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Four.”

“Did you feel me love you? While we were asleep? In our dream? And you just had to wake up.”

“There was something else there. Let me think.”

“Come here, we’ll think together.”

“Damn it!”

“What?”

“My knee… I just touched it… it’s like bruised or something. What did I do? Last night it was fine.”

“Did you hit the bedside table? You’ve been jumping up and down all night. Let me see.”

“How bizarre. How very bizarre.”

“No, no bruise… Does it hurt when I do this?”

“No, not really.”

“What about here?”

“It’s like it’s inside somewhere, really deep. Muffled. Really weird.”

“Well, go back to sleep then. You scared me and I lost my dream again. All I remember is that I loved you very much for some reason. Why would that be?”

“That’s good. You just go on loving me. Love me all the time.”

“And what do you think I’ve been doing?”

“Man, I am in luck.”

“We’re both in luck.”

“Uhu. Madly.”

“Oh… Aidy… Aidy, I love you. No, please don’t stop… oh, God… oh, you, you’re my… my… my…—my love… my beloved…”

“Here, let me wipe your tears. Put your head on my shoulder… like that. Just like that.”

“That’s even better than in my dream.”

“It’s what comes after.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what it is… because when I’m with you, I always see something. New pictures every time—like a movie…”

“You’re my picture. The best in the world.”

“I only wish you could see what I see… I wish I could show you. That would be some kind of a movie!”

“So what was it this time?”

“A flash. Just a flash, but incredibly bright. Like a searchlight straight into your eyes after coming out of a dark cellar. And a blast… a mix of terror and thrill, like flying out of your body. I wonder if it’s like that when you die…”

“The way you moaned… it scared me a little.”

“It really seemed a lot like dying.”

“You know, you just helped me understand something.”

“Something about your infinite sets again?”

“No, about that dream of mine… I realized why there’s no fear of death in it, in any of those dreams… even though they’re all, in a way, about death. Strange, isn’t?”

“You little fool…”

“Baby, what is it now? Why are you crying again?”

“Because I love you. I love you so much I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Shhh… don’t cry. Here, do you want me to hold you and rock you?”

“Jeez!”

“There… I’d rather have you laugh.”

“Go ahead, tell me. What about the fear of death?”

“Nothing, that’s the thing, it’s not there. I don’t think he was afraid of death at all, that man. I think he was always ready for it. And that’s what made all the pictures in his head so sharply focused, intensely physical. It’s the same as in ecstasy, you know? When you said the thing about leaving your body, it made me think of this.”

“Oh God. No, it can’t be…”

“What?”

“No, nothing… just a guess. I think I know who that man was.”

“For real?”

“More or less… you wouldn’t recognize him, would you? In a picture?”

“No more than myself without a mirror.”

“Well, then it’s moot. No use thinking about it.”

“About what?”

“That flash. Nothing, forget it. How’s your knee?”

“Quiet now. Not a peep. You’ve healed me.”

“Aidy?”

“Mm-hm?”

“Do you think it’s really us? Or are we dreaming ourselves?”

“I don’t know, Lolly.”

“Sometimes I get this feeling… promise you won’t laugh at me?”

“I promise.”

“I get the feeling that we got someone else’s love. Someone’s once unfulfilled love—you know, like the imperfect tense in grammar.”

“Well, then it was meant to be.”

“No, listen… once when I was little, really little, when we still lived in Tatarka, this one girl moved out from our apartment building. The whole building got blighted; they moved us out not long after that, too, but this family was the first to go, and the whole building helped them. The truck came and parked in front of the gateway; people carried furniture out of the apartment—the same armchairs we used to pounce on together—I can see them now in that girl’s living room…. Outside, under the sky, they looked like pulled-out teeth. They let me hold the lampshade they’d had above their dinner table, with a wire frame, you know, bright yellow with little tassels.”

“I know—vintage fifties.”

“Uhu, everything they had was old… taken out of place, it stopped being a lampshade—I could pull it over my head, and it’d be a hooped skirt, like a princess’s…. And there was this one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about… we made a secret a couple days before, that girl and I. We were very proud of it, too. And so I stood there and all I could think was, now she is moving out and what’s going to happen to our secret? You see, she’d forgotten all about it. She’d moved on to other things. Maybe if we’d had a chance and snuck away, just the two of us, to dig up that secret and pledge our undying friendship over it, everything would’ve been different. More melodramatic. Or, if she had bequeathed that secret to someone else, given me permission to show it to someone else after she left, to another girl… but nothing like that happened—our secret just died; it was so clear. It died because she forgot about it. The same thing happened to it as happened to the armchairs and the lampshade—it lost its defining purpose. It was still in the same spot as the day before, and perfectly undisturbed, but it was no longer a secret—just a little pile of buried rubbish. Are you listening?”

“Uhu.”

“And I remember this very un-childlike gloom came over me. A child—she feels the same things as the adults, you know, just doesn’t have the words for them. It was like I saw all at once all those secrets we’d made and then abandoned and never checked on again—how they all were somewhere underground. All our sealed friendships, tears, pledges… our little lives under glass like exhibits in Mom’s museum. A giant museum of abandoned secrets. And people walked right over it; they didn’t even know it was there, right under their feet.”

“The museum of abandoned secrets—that’s nice. I like it.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve been making much sense….”

“No, I understand. You are trying to say that you and I are together because we accidentally dug up someone else’s love. Like one of those secrets that got left behind.”

“Yeah… something like that.”

“But don’t you think it’s also possible that whoever made it may have, as you put it, bequeathed it to us?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think that man was in love with Gela. And she did something wrong. She made some terrible mistake that messed up everything. And it still hasn’t been fixed.”

“Now, that’s just your imagination…”

“No, it’s a hunch. A woman’s hunch, trust me on this one. It’s always us, the brilliant and the beautiful, who make the kind of royal mess no plain little mouse of a girl could ever dream of. It’s true. You know why? The risk is higher: plain little mice don’t get nearly as many chances to imagine they can control someone else’s fate.”

“Never really liked those plain little mice…”

“That’s the problem right there! You all want the brilliant and the beautiful. Do you think that makes our lives easier?”

“Oh, you poor, long-suffering, brilliant thing…”

“Finally, about time someone felt sorry for me. At least I’m alive—for now.”

“And warm too. Damn it!”

“What?”

“My knee!… Got it! Lolly, I remember! I was crawling along a wattle fence somewhere on the outskirts of town, and ahead, in the city, lay a betrayal. I was supposed to kill the traitor, Lolly! That’s what I went to do; that’s why I was called! And I didn’t even learn his name! I learned nothing!”

“This was all in your dream?”

“And I bumped my knee—against that fence!”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nothing to kid about, girl! The pain made me remember…. And you, by the way, were there too—you spoke to me.”

“Me? And what did I say?”

“Wait, it might not have been you after all… Granny Lina, maybe? In any case, it was a woman’s voice; I’m sure of that. A woman that’s very close, very dear to me. It couldn’t have been Mom, could it? Shit, I can’t remember…. All I see is this soggy plowed field right in front of me.”

“And you don’t remember what she said, the woman?”

“Wait, I wrote it down as soon as I woke up! It should be here somewhere…. Here, got it! On my cigarettes.”

“Let me see. Jeez, that’s some chicken scratch.”

“I wrote in the dark! ‘You won’t need.’”

“What does that mean?”

“How should I know? It’s all gone now. ‘You won’t need’—no kidding, that’s like a joke or something…. ‘Blood will stay in Kyiv.’ Don’t remember that either. ‘Women…’ what about them?”

“Give it to me.”

“A prophesy of the Oracle of frigging Delphi: The words are all there but make no sense whatsoever! Like you said about that secret of yours: a pile of buried rubbish…”

“‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’”

“How’s that again?”

“‘Women won’t cease giving birth.’ That’s what you wrote down.”

“Sure. Is that supposed to be like E=mc²?”

“That’s not as stupid as it seems.”

“What does that have to do… you’ve got to understand, that dream was a warning—a warning that for some reason was left unheeded. Who was that traitor I had to kill? And someone was supposed to die because of him—the dream is still leaving marks to make someone, anyone remember that!”

“Listen. We’ve got to stop this. We’re both going nuts. It’s like Macbeth with the witches—he also kept trying to decipher their prophetic message, and look what happened to him. It’s not like we’re going to find out anyway. I’m done, sweetie. I quit. Turn off the lights, it’ll be light outside soon….”

“Lolly?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you asleep?”

“I is.”

“Alright then. Good night.”

What happened still didn’t make sense to anyone.

Stodólya disappeared.

As simple as that. He’d left the bunker before dawn, soon after Adrian had left, to go to the village to get some food and just disappeared. Hadn’t come back.

Hard as Adrian tried to look elsewhere, Geltsia’s eyes found him wherever he turned—ghastly, completely black around the huge pupils, corners swelling with blood. He had seen eyes like that once—on a hare he’d shot, and they had gone glassy afterward, turned dead. Those eyes of Geltsia’s grated on him, demanded an extra effort of him while his thoughts raced in every direction at once like mice in a barn. Geltsia hampered him; he wished she weren’t there.

The thing that didn’t make any sense was that they still had food—not much, and only groats, which you couldn’t just eat by themselves, but Geltsia managed to boil grits even in these makeshift circumstances, and they could’ve lasted another day or two! And they still had a bit of anti-scurvy herbal tea—no sugar to go with it, but so what, he would’ve loved a cup of that tea right now, forget the sugar, as long as it were hot, but it was a chore—so he had to make do with the cold grits when he came back, and now his weighted-down stomach made noises like someone was moving a room’s worth of furniture in it; this, too, was irritating. Darn it, even if they had to go hungry for a little bit, what’s the fuss? To not eat is to not shit—can wait for a bit (as they cheered themselves up when Geltsia was out of earshot): wouldn’t be the first time their stomachs saw their spines; you’d chew on bark and leaves in the woods sometimes just to make your mouth, hot as a dry skillet, fill with spit again, to fool your body into humming with sweet warmth—rebels are old pals with hunger. Whatever possessed Stodólya to take off in such a rush to get food, not even waiting for Adrian’s return?

Wrong, wrong, something here was wrong and he could feel it, and the boys could feel it, too, and this unspoken torment mixed with anxiety wormed into their souls like an itch drawn out over a fire—like when lice, feeling the heat, crawl out from under your skin, and it’s better to endure the honest scorch to your fingers held over the blades of flame than to bear the crawling that bores into your brain.

And Stodólya, of all people! The one who was draconian about maintaining conspiracy, the one who had the authority to court-martial others for the smallest infraction—and who knows how many he had convicted already. It wasn’t all enemy blood he had on his hands. His motto was, “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Now it occurred to Adrian that whenever Stodólya said that he did so with a sort of condescending scorn, like he was challenging them—like he was warning them, up front, not to trust him, and he found it entertaining that no one braved asking him, up front: So, do you mean we shouldn’t trust you either, friend Stodólya? An ancient paradox, from the Gymnasium logic class: the Cretan said all Cretans are liars, so did the Cretan tell the truth? The paradox cannot be solved: according to Gödel, every system of axioms contains a statement that cannot be proven within that system. But when you find yourself inside the system, the realization of it sends your shaken world helter-skelter and all things leave their usual places like in the nightmare where you’re crossing a frozen river and suddenly the ice begins to crack under your feet, opening a black abyss.

If you start seeing a traitor in everyone, even in the comrade who’d carried you out from under fire on his own back (Was that really what happened? Or was it only an elaborate ruse, orchestrated on purpose like those NKVD barrel ambushes with staged fire to fool the victim into believing that our boys had fought him off from the Reds, so that the grateful soul would tell them everything they couldn’t pry out under torture? How can you know what really happened if there are no witnesses, except Stodólya, of that fatal May march left alive, and you yourself were unconscious?), if you don’t trust anyone, and see the enemy’s traps everywhere, then how do you not lose your mind, how do you even go on living?

Could Stodólya have lost his mind? Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore, nerves failed him, he’d gone mad—and no one in the group noticed? No one stopped him?

Bolsheviks went mad like that, and not infrequently. They had people shoot themselves; leaders throw themselves out the windows. Adrian had long ceased being shocked by that: ever since he saw, in combat once, how when some of the Reds turned and ran, their major, small and narrow-shouldered, a gnome with grotesque wings of shoulder straps, chased after them and shouted, “Halt, motherfucker!” while firing at the running men’s backs, and did fell a few before Raven, first to shake off their common torpor (because none of the rebels had ever beheld a marvel like that—an officer shooting his own men in the back—before), mowed the gnome down with a short burst from his machine gun. Adrian remembered well their common impulse of sympathy for their living enemies—up till then he’d only felt sorry for their dead, when they found them lying in the forest uncollected, in foreign uniforms, with glassy eyes staring at the sky (“Why did you come here?” he chided them, mentally), and it occurred to him that the garrison’s atrocities and their constant, self-obliterating drinking, their monstrous explosions of irrational rage (somewhere they skewered to death a man who’d come into the forest for firewood, somewhere else they opened fire on children sledding from a hill and killed one) must have come from more than their sense of impunity alone (“We can do anything!” barked one of those drunken Ivans when villagers came to complain to “Officer, sir” that “you can’t do that”). It must have come from the fact that in a land boiling with partisan warfare these people had been turned into tiny, inanimate screws—and they had broken under the strain just like screws: the nightmare ice cracked and split under their feet all the time, and behind them shuffled some major of theirs, in big shoulder straps, ready to shoot anyone in the back at any minute. And the major, in turn, had his own superior behind him, and that one his; and this went all the way up to Stalin: everyone was afraid of everyone and no one trusted anyone. And this was the fundamental formula that they carried with them wherever they went like a mass lunacy—to make it so no one could trust anyone. So no one would love anyone—because trust is only possible among those who love one another. That’s what they wanted from us; this would be their victory.

And now, on top of everything else, he felt angry because he sensed in himself and the boys the same noxious virus—the corrosive poison of silent suspicion. He didn’t allow himself to think the worst, but the thought was already inside him, inside them all—injected into their blood like that “vaccine” given to people arrested in K., after which the GB, for no apparent reason, let them all go home, and, within a month, all seventy who’d been vaccinated succumbed to a mysterious illness. A man’s utmost humiliation: to feel that you, without ever noticing, gave in and now act exactly the way the enemy wants you to act, against your own will. And everything that used to give you strength—friendship, brotherhood, love—begins to fall apart from inside, eaten away by doubt. You begin to do the enemy’s work for him: you break up the ice under your own feet, throwing your pickax in time to the beat of your heart.

Or, maybe, Stodólya simply didn’t risk walking back through the woods with knapsacks once it got light, and stayed to wait for nightfall somewhere?

Where could that be? Not in the village, surely?

And why not? The warden could have hidden him. There was still hope; they just had to wait for the night. Anything could have happened.

Adrian knew that while he had been gone, in the city, the others had already talked to death all the likely versions of what happened—and that his return gave them new energy, enough for another round. Really, all kinds of things happened at war. Under different circumstances, meaning if Stodólya had been there, he would have told them about the policeman he’d met in the city, three and a half floors below the appointed door. “Leave, it’s a kapkán….” And now he won’t. Not ever. Even if Stodólya, God willing, does come back, alive and well—he still won’t tell them. Only in his report, to his anchor in General Staff. Don’t believe anyone, and no one will betray you.

No, that’s not what the anchor had told him, a long time ago, in Lviv, back under the Germans, during that dark time when our people fell utterly without explanation—when Gestapo shot down OUN members right in the streets, picking them out from among passersby as certainly as if the Germans carried their photos in their pockets, until it turned out they did, in fact, have photos, and more—that back in November of 1939, in Kraków, at a joint conference of Gestapo and NKVD, the Soviets had turned over to the Krauts the lists of political cases they’d inherited from the Poles, so everyone who’d joined the Organization under the Polish rule was obliged to disappear, go underground: “Remember,” his anchor had said then, “even if I betray, you never will.” And he remembered—because at those words, goose bumps sped up his spine. He remembered it for the rest of his days: he was the sentinel who didn’t dare leave his post even if he were there alone.

He wasn’t alone—yet.

Levko and Raven’s faces, concerned and alert in the shape-shifting flicker of the gas burner (Geltsia went to brew some tea after all—it was the only reasonable thing that could still be done to maintain the illusion of unshattered order), moved him to an unfamiliar, painful tenderness—as if these boys, a mere seven or eight years younger than he, were his sons. If God had given him a son, he’d wish for one thing and one thing only—that his child grow up to be like them. They’d been taught from a young age that work and prayer are life’s foundation, but what they’d really learned was to tell good from evil. And that’s the only important thing, the most important thing that a father must give his child—God takes care of the rest.

Adrian felt he was growing lightheaded and his eyes were beginning to tear up—probably because there was so little air to breathe in the bunker. And Geltsia’s presence impeded him—he couldn’t look into her bloodstained, wounded-hare eyes; they pierced right through him. As if in accusation, as if to say, in plain language: you never liked him—are you happy now?

Happy he was not. Honest to God, was not. Wanted one thing—to know the truth. Either this or that. Either dry solid ground under his feet—or ice water closing over his head, but either one or the other, finally. Anything but this nightmarish cracking of ice where things should be solid. To wake up, finally, from his seven-month dream through which he’d been marching blindly with his eyes open. Marching because he loved this woman. She looked at him with all but hatred now, and he still loved her.

No, the boys said, there’d been no shooting—if there’d been a fight, they would’ve heard it, noise carried far. There was, thus, hope that Stodólya was still alive.

Still, they had to get themselves out of this bunker. Adrian was sure of that. The bunker smelled like a grave to him. Had from the beginning.

Hence, they’d drink their tea and would have to spend the night in the woods.

Geltsia looked at him out of her terrible blackened eyes as if she didn’t understand what he was saying. Mater Dolorosa, flashed through his mind, irritably. She did not like sleeping on the snow; she once admitted to him that for her it was the most unpleasant aspect of the partisan life. For a woman, it really must be uncomfortable—when everyone sleeps under the same waterproof cape, fitted against each other like spoons in a drawer, turn all together, and a half-awake chap is liable to grab hold of some body part that doesn’t belong to him—but at the moment he worried a lot more about how they would keep themselves warm during the night. There’d been too little snow for them to pile onto the cape as insulation, and things could get tough if the night dipped far below freezing. Geltsia would have to lie in the middle, and they would keep her warm; they’d protect her, they’d guard her from the cold. And what if Stodólya did get caught by the raid?

The water still refused to boil. Let me breathe on it, Levko offered, and Raven chuckled something supportive—they were showing themselves they could still joke. Or perhaps the still-young energy in them, like in young animals, took over; well, that was not half bad. Not half bad. We’ve got another fight or two in us yet, boys. We’ll keep things hot for them as that captain said. He stared at the lifeless little pot—come on, boil already!—and a different vision rose before his clouded eyes: a stubby oblong metal box sat on the burner, and 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 surgical metal pincers, readied for an operation. That operation didn’t happen either.

What?, he startled: Geltsia called his name. Instantly, he was scared—really scared, to a cold squeeze inside his chest—What is it, am I asleep?—and all his fatigue disappeared, at once, as if surgically removed. He was focused again, ready for action—only his heart beat faster than normal. The doubt, that’s what had worn him down, burdened him, taken away his strength—that accursed doubt. He needed a moment, a moment….

Geltsia wanted him to come outside with her. Signaled it with her eyes.

And this, too, had already been; his body remembered it: going out of a bunker into the night after a different woman, his heart pounding, and him not knowing himself, knowing nothing except the nearness of her presence, stepping toward the moonlight—only then it was spring, and now pale spots of snow lay under the firs, and in the graphite sky to which both instinctively turned their faces once they’d climbed out, gulping the open air and space with all their senses, the naked branches of hornbeams hung black against a murky, chalk-dusted moon. It was quiet—the wind had died down, and only the free warm-run’s muffled babble rose from the bottom of the ravine. Adrian had time to realize that of all of them Geltsia left the bunker most often; he’d noticed it yesterday—it must be that time of the month for her, and the bunker, without a latrine, was not meant for long stays. And that was when he heard her voice, the voice that instantly shook him clear and sober of his revelry in the night’s open air—it spoke as if from under stone.

“I’m to blame. It’s my fault.”

In the firs’ dense shadow he could barely make out the stain of her face. Were she to take another step back he wouldn’t be able to see her at all. And this, too, it seemed, had once been—where? When? She suffered and he could do nothing to help her.

“He went for me… the food was for me. He wanted to find me some milk.”

Milk? What did milk have to do with anything? It was as if she were speaking a foreign language that refused to coalesce into meaning in his ears. He thought he heard a twig break somewhere in the thickets—or did he?

“I should have talked him out of it. I told him it would pass… the malady. It’s the early weakness; it always passes.”

He still didn’t understand—he only knew she wasn’t there, with him, in that moment, wasn’t with them all, and that’s why she irritated him, like a voice cutting against the choir’s harmony—she was separate from them, locked in this obtuse hull of hers. Her anxiety had a different color, different density. So she is ill?

“It’s not an illness,” Geltsia responded to his unspoken thought—gently brushed aside the man’s crude clutch extended toward her in the dark; a new note appeared in her voice—soothing, self-assured, maternal almost—her voice glowed again, albeit not as brightly. “It happens often… in the fourth month.”

It happened. The blow fell onto him softly, like a lump of snow from a spruce. In the Hutsul highlands he once saw a master slaughter a lamb, after talking to it for a long time, all but whispering into the animal’s ear until the little thing obediently lowered its head as if agreeing to accept its end. He saw himself as that lamb now.

So, that’s how it is, he thought obtusely. So that’s why. As if he slammed, at full speed, into a dead wall, but the momentum kept his legs moving: so that’s how it is. That’s the thing. But then again—he felt strangely relieved, as if someone put red-hot iron through a wound inside him and let the pus out: Stodólya went to find some milk. Left, without explaining himself to anyone, because his wife was pregnant and needed nourishment. Well, he probably would have gone too, if it were him. Would’ve crawled on his hands and knees, even right now. Would’ve kept crawling as long as he had air in his chest.

She interpreted his silence in her own manner.

“I can bear it, Adrian.”

That Adrian resounded inside him like a twist of steel in an open wound. She could’ve addressed him by his alias right then, could’ve given him at least that one drop of mercy. But she couldn’t think about him: he was here, right before her, alive, unharmed, and free, and he was not her child’s father.

“I won’t be any trouble. And when my time comes in the spring, I’ll go have the baby up in the mountains. It’s all been arranged; I have an address.”

She was apologizing; she saw herself as the only one to fault for what had happened. And at the same time, she emanated such unbending fortitude that Adrian’s breath caught in his throat: it was as though she’d grown taller in the dark. He did not know this woman, had no inkling of her strength. “They can’t do anything to us!” flashed in his mind with wild, rabid joy, a blast of awe like one inspired by a mighty storm—a sudden, almost superhuman pride for our women: no one can ever do anything to a nation like this. We’ll overcome it all, all! He stood at attention instinctively, as if he were about to salute her. Geltsia, Lord. The same delicate violet of a girl, tiny feet in soft lace-up boots, the petals of her tracks scattered over the snow—he’d once stood at her door, stood there all night long, having forgotten himself with happiness. Geltsia, Geltsia, my only one, why are you not mine?

And instantly everything inside him collapsed, leaving a sickening vacuum. He remembered where and when he lost her—remembered the dream that had haunted him all these years, ever since the Polish prison: the two of them dancing in a darkened ballroom, somewhere in Prosvita or the People’s House, and at some moment Geltsia vanishes—detaches from his arms and dissolves into the darkness. Just as she would, if she took a step back now, be lost in the gloom of the forest. In his dream, he ran madly all over the great hall looking for her and could never find her; the hall grew bigger and bigger like a dark drill field without end, filling, along the walls, with the dead who kept coming—those who had departed, as the song went, for a different, bloody dance—to break Moscow’s shackles off Ukrainian hands. And he, too, joined the bloody dance—he died in the infirmary; he hung on a cross, and the centurion struck him between the ribs with his spear where the bullet had entered, and Geltsia was the merciful sister. No, she was Magdalene in an overcoat lined with living raw purple, like ripped-off skin, with its hem folded back, and no matter how hard he called for her, she did not hear him and did not look toward him, and the centurion promised him with a malicious chuckle that he’d see her again, moy-ye, see her good and right! And the merciful sister was a different woman, Rachel. And he loved her, too.

“Dark, swarthy like a Jewess. Pregnant, about seven months….” And Geltsia now—four? It suddenly struck him: this meant that when they had that picture taken, she already had the new life living inside her! It coalesced into a pool of light before his eyes, in the space where he sensed, more than saw, her fragile figure between the fir branches, that picture, illuminated like a Byzantine icon by her semi-apparent smile: the smile women smile when they carry a secret invisible to others under their hearts.

He was overcome with a queer urge to place his hand on her stomach—and instantly, the next thought was: How nice would it be if it weren’t Geltsia’s but Rachel’s stomach—then he’d know for certain? But he didn’t have a chance to finish that thought, didn’t get to comprehend what it was that he would’ve liked to know for certain, because from the darkest bowels of his soul rose, menacing and unstoppable, like a pregnant woman’s urge to vomit, the thing he’d been kicking around in his mind this whole time, on the whole eighteen-kilometer return trek from the city, moving his feet without getting anywhere, trying in vain to stomp out the poison of suspicion already injected into his blood: the picture! His photograph displayed at the police station, his phiz that the teacher from P. recognized, having seen him but once half a year before—that picture must have been recent, which meant it could only have been that same one, from their group photograph. The one in which he “had mourn”—a shadow on his face like soot, the whites of his eyes bright as sin: nothing like his regular self, a highway Gypsy. No one could ever recognize him if they hadn’t seen him before—the shadow fell from nowhere like a Gypsy curse and disguised him. The GB had nowhere else to find an image of Kyi; that was the only one taken of him in the last three years—the one Stodólya had made of them all last summer.

How did they get it?

And who revealed the location of Stodólya’s bunker in October? The courier girl didn’t do it. That’s why the GB nailed her tongue to a board. And he knew how they did it: they’d bring in one of their doctors during an interrogation, and he’d pretend to offer medical attention to whomever they’re torturing—he’d feel the pulse, take the temperature, even wipe the victim’s face and put salve on the wounds. And then he’d ask the thoroughly reassured prisoner to stick his—or her—tongue out and say “A-ah!” And the others, as soon as the tongue was out, would jump in and put it in a clamp. Then they can torment their victim to death if they want without having to worry about hearing her scream, or curse, or die with the last “Glory to Ukraine!” You can do whatever you want to a person with their tongue in a clamp.

No, not quite. Can do whatever with the body, but not with the person. That girl did not tell them anything.

But who did? What compromised Stodólya’s bunker?

Put your hand on my forehead, he asked her silently—She, with Stodólya’s child in her womb. Cool me, clean me, set me free. Let this poison out of my soul; tell me something else I don’t know. Tell me how he kisses, how you part your knees for him, and how he enters you as your husband, and what you feel when he does; tell me the words he says to you—I will bear it all, as long as it is true. Tell me so I don’t have to suspect you, too. In his memory flashed, with a burn of pain, their happiest hours in the underground, when they sang all together. Their singing and their communal prayer—those were hours of otherwise inexpressible unity, so resplendent and inspired were the faces of friends, such fires burned in their eyes. Stodólya never sang. He wasn’t musical.

Somewhere close, but outside himself, he could hear the chronometer ticking: his consciousness, distanced from his pain, sober, cruel, and implacable, like a knight in icy armor timed him, counted his minutes. TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…

“Let’s go back,” he said, surprised by the sound of his own voice, the way it came out of his throat. “It’s time to leave this bunker.”

He thought he felt her shrink, draw back. As if he’d hit her (she’d told them about the time, during a raid on the village where she was staying, dressed as a peasant, when a captain had hit her on the face and, before she could realize what she was doing, she instinctively struck him back—her mistress then threw herself at the captain’s feet in panic, assuring him that her niece was “born stupid” and they believed her: for them, it was the only possible explanation for why an unarmed person would respond to being hit by hitting back). Alright, he thought, it’s your turn to strike. Hit me, stomp me, don’t spare me, hate me if it’ll make you feel better—it doesn’t matter anymore; someday, if we survive, I’ll set things straight with you, but now we have to save ourselves. Black hunters were walking through the snow, black dogs were running, pulling the men along behind them, their leashes so taut they sang—he could feel their choking breath at the back of his neck. The anxiety that had been smoldering inside his body like fever now gathered itself, acquired a shape and a contour, pointed outside like an antenna trained on the village—and Geltsia, like a child too preoccupied with her little owie, was deaf to it all; really, women can be quite obtuse sometimes.

He forced himself to speak again. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it around the boys.”

“I understand. And now we should go back to them.”

“Do you not believe me, Adrian?”

He felt like laughing out loud. Only a woman could ask something like that. He could have repeated her disappeared husband’s commandment: “Do not trust anyone, and no one will betray you.” Could have said he trusted that she was, in fact, pregnant. Why not? Could tell even judging by how often she had to go outside. He’d read his share of medical texts; he knew the symptoms. Although no, he couldn’t say that, could never have said that to any woman. And that wasn’t what she was asking about anyway.

So, instead of all that, he blurted, “And who am I supposed to believe?”

It sounded unexpectedly rude, like a teenager’s outburst. Exactly like a teenager from a ragtag neighborhood, and it made him blush—at least she couldn’t see that in the dark!—and then he heard her respond with a muffled sigh, a bitten-down sob of relief, like the touch of a breeze that brought him her smell through the firs—the blonde smell of her hair that he remembered so well from the days when they were like Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable on a ballroom floor: long unwashed and uncurled, pulled into a greasy knot at the back of her head. It only smelled stronger, more piercing—of cut wildflowers, of hay before a storm—of Her. And he made a quick wish then: if the other one does not come back, be mine! Be mine, until I fall, until my last breath, until the last bullet that waits for me.

And she, revived by his sincerity, seemed to awake and spoke with new urgency—to make her point, beat it to a pulp. “Mykhailo is an extraordinary person, Adrian! None of you really know him…”

Mykhailo. Stodólya, Mykhailo to her.

“He once said he can do everything that the Bolsheviks can, except better, and that’s why he always outplays them. He won’t let himself be caught, you’ll see!”

She’s always been like that, Adrian thought, ever since the Youth Assembly—always pushed through to the end, to reach whatever goal she’d set for herself. And he stood there like a dolt and let her go on talking.

“All any of us knows is how to die for Ukraine; that’s the only thing we’re good for. And he belongs to the breed of people who will build it up one day, after we win it.”

“That could be,” he said. But what he thought was that’s how it actually is. And it’s always been like that, since the dawn of creation: those who love their land above all are the first to die for it in battle. And if they have luck—not the plain soldier-variety luck that he still had, knock on wood, but the gambler’s luck of a historical player that puts him in the right place at the right time so that their blood follows whatever suit leads in the worldwide political game, played far above and beyond their heads—then their blood brings to power those who love power itself and know how to hold on to it. And Stodólya was one of those people; that was true. And the Bolsheviks were, too. If they ever need an independent Ukraine in order to hold on to their power, they will build it just as zealously as we now fight for it in the underground. When Stalin needed to pry Ukraine from the insurgents’ influence in ’44, when the whole country was united behind them, he allowed Ukrainian ministries of defense and foreign relations to be created. And when the Supreme Liberation Council demanded from the Allies that we have a government in exile, Stalin also outmaneuvered us by making Ukraine the founding member of the United Nations Organization. And even though it was all just for show, formal attributes of a country that does not, in fact, exist, one day we’ll make use of it all… Kyiv wasn’t built overnight.

And he also thought: in these circumstances, living from one day to the next, he wouldn’t have dared have a child with her. And Stodólya did. So he did not live day to day—he kept a longer count. And that, too, somehow underscored the truth of what she said.

Meanwhile, she’d gathered speed, she flew now like a bicycle down a hill, unable to stop, possessed by her lust to win him over to her side by whatever means necessary, to make it so he would share her faith in the man whose seed she carried in her womb.

“The Bolsheviks won’t kill him; they want him for themselves! They had offered to take him into their intelligence school, and after—to send him to Yugoslavia as an agent. They didn’t even want any information about us from him—only for him to work for them. And he outwitted them then, too: rubbed his palms so he could show a fever and get into the infirmary, and then managed to organize his escape from there.”

“Did he?” he said. “I didn’t know this.”

The bicycle just hit a rock at full tilt, but she never noticed the rattle, din, and clang of her words crashing: so Stodólya had been arrested? (He really didn’t know anything about the man!) If so—he had to have passed a security check with the highest levels of the Service; they must’ve turned him inside out there. But still, for some reason, this thought did not comfort him: all the separate little splinters he pulled out one by one—the disappearance, the photograph, the loss of Stodólya’s bunker, his past arrest—were coming together of their own accord, were aligning themselves into a geometric progression, and connections appeared between them where none had been evident before. Every new circumstance landed with a more alarming screech because it took on the combined weight of whatever had come before it, and this new sequence of elements skewed the whole picture further and further away from the image Geltsia had in her mind. I have to write a report to the Supreme Command, he realized. Just write it all out, as it is. And with this, part of the burden shifted off his shoulders; he felt better—it’s always easier when someone else has to make the decisions, someone other than you. He stirred impatiently, felt a wet scrape of a fir branch on his cheek, its myriad minute claws—he was in his proper place again; he knew what he had to do.

“Anything else, Miss Gela?”

“Don’t say ‘miss’ to me, Adrian. Please.”

“I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Because it sounds like you don’t take me seriously.”

And this is just the beginning, he thought. It’ll only be worse later—if they get a later.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “And now please, go ahead, I’ll cover the tracks.”

“Let me do that.”

“Some bullet-head you are!”

“There,” she laughed—a sprinkle of light in the darkness, “that’s better! Much better than ‘miss.’ I just wanted to make weewee down by the stream.”

“I’ll wait for you,” he said, moved by this sudden intimacy, such as they’d never shared before. He remembered an illustration in some thick anatomical volume: a semicircular dome full of innards, the riveting and simultaneously repugnant female belly and uterus inside, an oval aquarium with a bigheaded mollusk, pressing the bladder from above…. He tried to imagine what that would feel like, that pressure, shuddering as if he’d felt a wet toad in his pants, and for the first time realized that her condition meant something completely different to her than it did to him—that all this time her body knew something he would never know, even if he’d memorized all the books in the world. This something existed outside their struggle’s logic, in utter disregard of it, as if it had come from a different planet. And that’s the way it’ll always be, he thought in awe, listening to her descend heavily (she did sound heavy, the rhythm of her step had changed), like a she-bear, down the rocky slope, taking time to choose where to plant her feet (and the one who was in her seventh month already—how did she move?)—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.

Everything went quiet for a little while, and then he distinguished, over the measured babbling of the warm-run (his hearing strained, pushed like a radio receiver to the very edge of its range) the sound of louder, self-propelled, and somehow very jolly purl, and this sound suddenly clenched his throat in a wave of intolerable, melting, animal tenderness. In the same instant, as a dark accompaniment, the bass hum of free current with the violin solo, he became aware, to his horror, of muscles contracting below his stomach—his body awoke and remembered the other one, the one he lost, hammered in his temples, screamed with its every cell to will back the insatiable luxury of that one spring night, the intimate, selfsame yielding of moist flesh like earth that brims with the juices of life, the fiery contour in the dark—as though these seven months had never been—he couldn’t hold on to separate faces, they came together in his mind and melded: the barely visible stain of Geltsia in the dark between fir branches; the white face, like a round of sheep cheese, of Rachel thrown back to the moon, upper lip bitten down. He was blind; he simply wanted to embrace the Woman, a pregnant woman with a taut round belly. To squeeze his head between her milk-laden breasts, to breathe in her smell.

Sobs shook him hard, once, like wind over a dried tree—dry sobs, tearless like a soundless scream. Like the mute roar of a beast with its tongue nailed down.

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—she was coming back. He could hear her heavy breathing: she was short of breath. He felt happy to have her coming back and to have her miss his moment of weakness. (He watched yellowish circles swim in place of the fiery contour, as if someone had thumbed him on the eyes.)

“It’s beautiful in the forest right now, don’t you think?” she exhaled into the back of his head in a single spasm, like she’d also just cried. And instantly sensed the change that had come over him—a woman must sense these things, as a doe senses a deer buck, from afar. As long as she doesn’t decide to touch me right now, he thought. Anything but that soothing touch of her hand. As long as she doesn’t, I’ll bear it. He faltered a bit as he stepped aside to let her pass and remained standing like that, feet wide apart, his hand instinctively planted on his gun, as if prepared to defend himself.

“And did you know,” she suddenly laughed very softly, and it was almost like a touch, only not the kind he feared, “that my Lina is also a mama? Three years already!”

“Who?” he asked, confused.

“Lina, my sister!”

Her sister? Oh, yes, she has a sister…

“She married a very nice young man, one of ours, a student at the Polytechnic. And they already have a little son, named Ambroziy—in honor of our dad.”

“Aha,” he said. “Congratulations,” thinking, who was it that I already said this to today? Quite a day I’ve had—full of other people’s children. Lina? That little girl in a sailor suit that used to run around with her dog? She had that comical way of blushing whenever he brought pastries for her, as a present. He held back a big fir branch, so that Geltsia wouldn’t have to bend too low. As they walked, her quiet twitter continued to envelop him like the stream’s babbling: she’d visited her family recently, in October, when she was in Lviv on a mission. They still live in the same house on Krupyarska; the house now belongs to the Soviets, and they’d been moved to the ground-floor room. They all went crazy when she rapped on the window that night—they hadn’t seen each other for three years! And the boy is very handsome, looks like Lina—she’d taken a good look at him while he slept.

“We talked about you, too. Lina was very happy when I told her you were alive. You were her first love, did you know that?”

“No,” he said, “I did not know that.”

Life was full of things he didn’t know. But it did not matter anymore, he did not change his mind, she didn’t convince him. They had to get out of the bunker. The clock was ticking.

“She was head over heels in love with you. In Gymnasium, she had a picture of Clark Gable pinned above her desk—with his mustache covered up, to make him look more like you. I think she was probably a little jealous of me.”

Oh no, he thought, I won’t fall for this. Does she mean to soften me up with this? A covered-up mustache—what notions women have sometimes! They’ve always fallen head over heels for him, that’s the son of a bitch he is: women have always fallen for him hard and fast, lined up wherever he went and threw flowers (or more than that, some threw themselves) at his feet—all except one.

His soul no longer perceived the meaning of what she was saying (she’s gone lost her wits for Mykhailo; it’s like she’s lost her bearing without him and doesn’t understand anything!). He only thought, at the pace of a ticking clock, of sparks of tiny bubbles rising through wobbly water, boiling the dark outline of fear: she’s playing me; she’s playing me however she pleases, like a piano, and I am letting her. I am responsible for a woman who has more power over me than I do over her, and this is bad, it is no good at all, friend lieutenant. A tremor he couldn’t control started small inside his exhausted body—like a fire in a house. He focused on the prospect of hot tea, hoping it had finally boiled.

“Adrian.”

She stopped—like music that’s been turned off. They stood opposite each other, a step away from the stump that masked the lid to the bunker, and in the darkness he could feel the crown of her head level with his lips. Here was a woman made to his measure—the one such woman in the world.

“I wanted to tell you. There may not be a chance later. I am very grateful to you. And not just for listening to me right now. For everything.”

He was silent, a lamb under the cudgel.

“You are like family to me. Like the brother I never had. And always wanted, for as long as I can remember.”

“Thank you,” said friend lieutenant, alias Kyi. “Go ahead, Dzvinya.”

You’ll never betray me?

I will never betray you.

Don’t leave me.

I will never leave you.

I don’t have anyone closer than you.

Me neither. I don’t have anyone at all, just you.

And the other man?

There never was another. Forget it. It wasn’t me.

Are you sure? How do you know you won’t change your mind? That if he comes back and calls you, you won’t lose your head again and run to him?

I know because I don’t like the woman I was with him. I don’t like her. What motivated me then, what pushed me into his arms—it wasn’t mine. Wasn’t his either. I saw a completely different man when I looked at him—a man created by my want from the hard losses, unaddressed complexes, and collective desires of my people. I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. Because it’s always been foreigners and their lackeys who determined the fate of many in our country. A Ukrainian security agent, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, a Ukrainian banker—people of power—this has always been an unattainable dream: an embodied dream of our ancient collective rightlessness of “its own” native force that would protect and defend. I thought him strong. But he was only cruel.

To you? To you, too?

Let’s not talk about this. Don’t.

Okay, we won’t.

It was all like a dark pall. But I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be.

My poor girl.

What can I say? Taking cruelty for strength is the most common mistake of youth. Youth only knows life by the intensity of its own feelings—a continuous explosive fortissimo with a foot on the pedal. Youth knows nothing of that supreme sensitivity, the true sensitivity of the strong that denies cruelty; youth has no inkling of the force with which a barely audible pianissimo can strike under your heart. Women make this discovery with the first butterfly quickening of a child in their wombs.

And what about men then—do you think them dumber?

You love war. And war is not conducive to refined sensibilities, it keeps pressing on their pedals, intensifies them. It’s that same fortissimo, all the time—until you go deaf.

You are unfair.

I am a woman. I want to feel the butterfly stir and see God’s presence in it. God is constantly present to us in small things—in a shape of a leaf, in the thin lace of new ice along a shore. In the miracle of miniscule nails on an infant’s fingers. War makes one deaf and blind to all that.

You are being unfair. War is also a way of seeing God manifest. Perhaps the most direct way. And the most terrible, as it should be—it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Omens in the sky, comets, messages spelled in fire, voices of spirits, descending angels, renewal of churches that will collapse under bombs tomorrow—every war has its own metaphysical history. And none have yielded as many martyrs as this one. And we are mere tools in it, rocks in God’s sling.

Adrian. Tell me, will this war ever end?

The war never ends, my girl. It is always the same—only the weapons change.

Is it you telling me this? Or that other one, the dead man?

Are any of us alive?

No! Don’t say that. I don’t want it. And these are not your words at all!

Don’t forget—it’s a dream. We’re dreaming this, and words can flit into this dream from wherever they please—like dust into your eyes.

I know where these words come from. I remember the painting that went with them, After the Blast—one of Vlada’s, who is now dead, too. Weren’t these her words—about a strong man her imagination created out of fear of losing? What is she doing here? Why is Vlada in this dream?

It’ll end soon. You have to bear it for just a little longer. We have to squeeze just a little farther through that narrow, dark shaft—we’ve got a bad bunker, with a straight entrance, and the entrance should always be angled, you should build it zigzag, so that when they throw in a grenade, no one inside gets hurt.

I don’t see the shaft. I see myself step into water, into a stream. I am washing my legs and dirt runs down my skin.

Maybe the dream has split at some point into separate branches, and now you’re seeing something I’m not? But water—that’s good. It’s good that the dirt is washing away.

Such clear, black streaks on bare thighs…

That’s everything extraneous coming off. The soul’s being cleansed, remains itself.

I love you. And I will never betray you.

You know, I was so jealous! For quite a while, I just never admitted it to you. Those lobsters you ate with him were stuck in my throat.

It’s washed away, all washed away like it’s never been… I see a little girl smiling, laughing, a blonde little girl, two years old or so—and somehow I know she’s mine… I’ll have a girl?

A girl! Of course, it has to be a girl, how did I not see that? A girl, of course, a little Geltsia with tiny blonde braids…

And where is the boy?

Which boy?

The one who’ll protect her. Every girl is meant to have a boy like that—a husband, a brother, someone else…. Why do I not see where he is? Has the war taken him, too?

What if he’s already been born? He’s among the living and that’s why you cannot see him?

And there’s no one alive in this dream?

Only you and me, Lolly. This is our dream. And we cannot change it…

“Banderas, surrender! Come out!”

Shouted, in Russian, into the vent. Above, dogs bayed, boots stomped—many boots, the commotion made the dirt fall from the ceiling, the sound growing like a shell’s whine through the air: higher, higher until it falls, explodes, buries them.

“Come out, Kyi! We know you’re there!”

The four looked at each other. The flashlight lit Levko’s face as the color drained from his cheeks and it turned sallow. Like Geltsia’s. And Raven’s.

“This is it,” the voice said inside Adrian’s head—with heretofore unknown calm. And instantly a bubble of long-awaited relief burst inside him: finally! And then his whole being rebelled against it: no! He licked his lips—the lips were also someone else’s, separate.

Who? he mouthed without a sound, but everyone heard because they were all asking the same thing in that instant: Who brought the raid?

Or did he bring it himself? Did the dogs pick up his trail, all the way from the city?

“Come out, bitch, or we’ll smoke you out!”

Oh, so they have gas. They’ve got it all—gas, dogs, all the force in the world. His throat caught in a spasm of hatred, like a burst of machine-gun fire he mentally sent up the vent. For a moment, he couldn’t see, a dark veil over his eyes. He gestured; Raven understood him first: the papers! Hurriedly, they began to empty their knapsacks, shred photographs; Raven struck a match, the fire blazed, sent flares dancing across faces, shadows along the walls. Adrian thought he saw Geltsia’s teeth chatter. He didn’t feel the heat either; wouldn’t have felt it if he put his hand into the fire. He did, however, feel, with his whole body, the cold of his pistol, suddenly heavy—the pistol was doing the thinking for him, choosing its aim: temple or under the chin? He stepped under the vent and shouted, head up, “Go smoke your mama out the barn! Where’s the one who brought you here?”

“What’d you want him for?”

“Get him here; I want to talk!”

Up above there was muttering, low, indistinct over the dogs’ racket, in several voices, light moved in the crack of the vent. They’ll negotiate, he realized; they want me alive. Personal commendations, promotions, decorations, vacations—they are drooling now, like those dogs, they won’t want such prize getting away from them. Talk, buy time for the archives to burn. And then fight it: grenades through the shaft and go. There’s always some chance, he’s been in worse straits. No, he thought, not like this. Lord have mercy on our souls, but Geltsia must remain; she must live. Rachel—that’s my sin, let me atone for it now. Let one of them survive. I am now like Orko in the fight yesterday—a guard to a pregnant woman. If it was really Orko—but it’s all the same, whoever it was: he was now all of them—all who had perished, blown themselves up in bunkers, burned themselves in haylofts, fallen to bullets, coloring the snow red under them and grasping the grenade’s pin in their fingers’ last twitch—the endless dark ballroom where he danced, his danse funèbre gathered itself, like a fist, into this underground hideout and thousands of the fallen thundered, marching in his blood. Your blessing, Lord.

Something moved close to the vent. Now, he thought. He seemed to feel the breath coming from above, and the breath mixed with his own, like two people sleeping under one cape. Suddenly, his body shook with a long, fierce tremor, more intense, almost, than love’s, and sticky sweat covered his forehead. He had never been so appalled before.

“Friend commander—”

It was Stodólya.

Geltsia gasped behind him, a thin short noise, a baby-bat squeak. Above, the barking was cut short, turned to whimper—someone must have kicked the dog, so he’d keep quiet. The boot, give him the boot, always the boot.

“Let her out,” said the one who had been Stodólya; no one had ever heard him speak in this voice before, it slithered over Adrian. “Let Dzvinya out, friend commander, let Dzvinya come out.”

A noise made Adrian turn around. Dzvinya, who had squatted to throw documents into the fire, had fallen backwards, hit her head on an SMG propped against the wall, and now lay across the bunker’s floor, the fire lapping at her boots. This is hell, he thought, watching the boys drag her aside; I’m in hell. This is what it looked like in the picture of Judgment Day in the old wooden church where his father used to serve Mass: tongues of fire wagged, sparks sliced through faces, and devils in reddish-gray haloes bared their hungry fangs at you from below. Hell is feeling appalled forever, without reprieve. He didn’t know this before. Before, he was happy.

Smoke made his eyes water.

“Better you come down here,” he shouted, fighting back the cough. “Your wife has just fainted, she needs your assistance. If your masters will let you, of course.”

“This is not what you think, friend. I swear—”

“You’ve already broken one pledge you’d sworn. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Let me talk to her!”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you. Ask the ones you’ve sold us to.”

“She’s guilty of nothing!”

“All the worse for you, then,” he spoke almost mechanically, as though knocking out the standard insurgent verdict on a typewriter: “We order you to remove yourselves from such-and-such village within forty-eight hours, and similarly from all Ukrainian lands. There is no place for people like you on Ukrainian land. We warn you that failure to carry out these orders will…”

Stodólya used to be the one who carried out such verdicts; now he, Adrian, had taken his place. “You’ll just have to live with that. The judgment of Ukrainian people will find you.”

I’ll do it myself, he promised himself mentally—I’ll give you a load of lead when we start the fight, and with such cold satisfaction, it’ll be like squeezing a boil. And that’s when he realized how he would do it—instantly, as if he saw it in a flash of a photographer’s magnesium.

“Smoke! There’s smoke, comrade captain, they’re burning something down there!”

“Kyi, don’t be stupid, turn yourself in. Your pal here—he’s smarter than you!”

He knew how he would do it; he felt an amazing clarity in his mind and body. You’re yet to see how the banderas surrender. You wanna see it—I’ll show you. Something white to hold in his hand—a newspaper? The boys leaned Geltsia against a wall; her head fell to one side. As long as those above don’t stuff the vents shut, so the fire doesn’t go out… Levko kept slapping her on the cheeks; it would be better to leave her alone, let her not wake.

“The Soviet government is doing you bandits a favor, and you’re turning up your noses at it?”

He pushed a few more photo shreds into the fire with the toe of his boot: a merry-eyed girl’s face with her smile torn off, a pair of peasant hands folded in a lap. Somewhere in there burned the picture of the five of them together. He’d tossed it in after shredding it. Ashes alone must remain. Ashes alone, everything must burn to dust. Not a name, not a sign, nothing after us. Only our blood for you, Ukraine. A new, unfamiliar excitement alit in him, growing brighter and hotter as the fire that swallowed their archives. Someone was coughing; he wiped his eyes and saw a smudge of soot on his hand: It was his own hand but he could not comprehend it.

“Should we burn the newspapers, too, friend commander?”

“Leave them. Let them read.”

“Come out nicely, Kyi, or are you done living?”

“And who would you be to order me around like your pig herd?” he shouted, listening to the movement above ground. Just as he thought, they were taking positions on the ground behind the trees, away from the entrance in case grenades came flying out of the bunker; Stodólya showed them where the entrance was. “Or are you all pig herds yourselves? Then go fetch me Colonel Voronin, I’ll talk to him!”

“Yeah, sure! No colonel for you—I, Captain Boozerov, am in charge of this operation!”

He thought, there, my death introduced itself. From a thousand possible anonymous faces it had chosen this one. And I wished so much for this to happen in Kyiv—and I never got to see the city. That’s a shame. That was one thing he regretted, a single thing, and the regret was already too small to touch anything inside him. Lord, help me. This is the last time I’ll ever ask You.

He heard a bolt click: Levko sent the bullet into the stock. And stood up, for some reason—the low ceiling kept him half-bent and he stood like that, pistol in hand, as if holding the entire earth on his shoulders and swaying a bit under its weight.

“Friend commander… friends…”

“Hold on, Levko,” Adrian said. “While we’re still armed, it’s no good rushing into the next world without taking a few Bolshevik souls with us. Captain Boozerov’s already in a hurry, can’t you hear it?”

“Kyi, surrender! I’m giving you five minutes to think!”

“Grenades?” Raven asked hoarsely, ravenously.

Adrian looked at Geltsia. She was awake. She sat, unmoving, and shone her eyes at him straight through the darkness. For a moment, all sounds disappeared and the only thing he heard was blood ringing in his ears. A high, dangerous whine.

“Forgive me, Adrian.”

She knew, he realized. Knew that he loved her. She is here, with me. Hand in hand. My love, my happiness. Wonder lurched inside him, tore free, and burned high and even like a torch.

“May the good Lord forgive you,” he answered in Father Ortynsky’s voice. “And you forgive me, Gela. And you forgive me, boys, for however I sinned before you, Raven… and you, Levko…”

“Lord forgive…”

“I forgive you, forgive me, friends…”

“And you forgive me…”

“May the good Lord…”

Awkwardly, like strangers, they kissed each other: each was already alone with his or her fading life and the touch of another’s body struggled to reach their awareness—a stubby cheek, a hot cheek, a cold one, a wet one…. That’s Geltsia’s, he realized: she is crying, her tears returned. Tears ran down her cheeks in grooves or moist glitter, and he suddenly regretted not having had the chance to shave one last time—felt like he was leaving a camp untidied.

“I said five minutes, Kyi! Did you hear me?”

He heard fear in that shout. Now’s the time, he thought. Like in that fairytale where the shrew kept asking the girl to dance and she tarried and tarried, until the roosters called. Only the roosters won’t call for us, and help won’t come. His clock was about to stop; the hand counting seconds almost ran its last circle. The thing for which he’d been preparing himself all these years was rising before him as a humongous, menacing wall, more magnificent and menacing than anything he had known before. Even the feeling he had when stood in formation in 1943 with four Insurgent Army companies, just sworn in, and sang “Ukraine’s not yet perished,” could not match this. Nothing could. And no matter how much you prepare yourself for this, you can’t ever be ready.

“Dzvinya, you stay,” he spoke. “Stay here. Come out later… when it’s all over. That would be best.”

She opened her mouth spasmodically, as if about to yawn. And instantly the sharp pity he felt for her—for leaving her alone, tearing her away, as though he were ripping out of her, full of love, his aching flesh—caught him and entered him like a knife under his ribs—and he shuddered, scorched by the boundless, infinite mass of life that was hidden inside him.

“They already know everything you know—from him,” she said as if to justify herself. “It won’t do any more harm if you turn yourselves in.”

Only then did he see the pistol in her hand.

“Shoot me, Adrian. I beg you.”

“No!” he said.

“For the love of God, do it. I’m afraid my hand will err.”

“You must live.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Gela,” he said.

She jerked her chin sideways, in torment, as if not having the strength to complete the gesture of refusal. “I don’t want to… carry his blood,” she whispered the last words.

He didn’t know what to say to that. He was not a woman. The life force that was in her differed from the one he felt, the one that urged him into his last battle. He could only repeat, “You must live. You can bear it, Gela. You’re strong.”

“I don’t want to surrender to them. I have grenades, too, two of them, in fact.” At once and without words they all remembered how they gave her an RGD grenade for her name day in September, and she must’ve remembered it, too, because she sobbed, or perhaps chuckled nervously. “Goodness, I clear forgot—I’ve got Christmas presents prepared for you all!” And next she was tossing some bundles into the gathering darkness from her knapsack—mittens? socks?—something white fluttered and fell like a wing. Scooping up heat from the cinders, she caught it, shook it out. “This one’s for you, friend commander, will you wear it? Lina, my sister, asked me to give it to you. I was saving it for Christmas.”

It was a shirt—a blazing white shirt with dense embroidery, lush as a row of marigolds, down the front. The kind girls embroidered for their betrothed—and the sight of it made the three men’s breath catch in their throats. The shirt glowed in the dark as though alive; it wanted to be worn into marriage, not into death. And suddenly Adrian knew why it was there.

“Geltsia, bless your heart!” he said, no longer surprised by anything. Everything was the way it had to be; life, aimed at its end like a bullet sent down the stock, ran smoothly along its course as though guided by a supreme will, and everything fit into its proper slot. And the little girl in the sailor suit, who had, without knowing it, embroidered his last weapon, was also there and looked at him with love. He would use the shirt to come out.

He explained his plan: he would announce they were giving themselves up. He’d come out first, under a white flag—this one, he took the shirt into his hands, but it had no smell: he could no longer perceive smells, could only sense the smoke. He’d use the shirt to hide a grenade—they won’t see it until they close around him. Then, with three blasts at once, they’d be able to destroy at least a dozen enemies. More if they were lucky.

And Stodólya with them, he thought but didn’t say out loud. That was his last mission, his alone, not to be delegated to anyone else: he had to kill the traitor. He dared not die without it; he wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye in the other world. And Geltsia had to stay here, in the bunker; Geltsia had to live. Someone had to raise our children.

“Friend commander.” It was she again, only her voice had changed unrecognizably, became low, as with a cold. “Allow me to go with you.”

But he wasn’t listening—a giant dark wall was rising before him, bigger than anything he had ever scaled before, and he said to the one who wasn’t letting him go, who was tethering him to life, “No,” and stepped up to the vent.

“Wait!” Her hair had come loose; she looked deranged. “Listen to me! They’ve come for you, friend Kyi, but he has come for me!”

The men looked at her as if they’d seen her for the first time.

“He’ll survive,” she said; hysterical notes rang in her voice. “He’ll slip out, he’s wily. You won’t be able to do anything to him. The Area Council of Security Service Command is in two weeks, and he’ll go there—with new troops. And that’ll be the end. Lord,” she almost cried, “don’t you understand that you won’t kill him? You won’t fool him with your show, and he’ll escape; he’d escape even if you had a bomb here instead of your grenade and took half a garrison with you! I have to come out. And first, just like he wants! That’s the only way he’d believe you—if I’m standing next to you!”

Silence. Through the ringing in his ears Adrian thought he heard thin children’s voices singing in chorus, far away, a carol.

“She’s right,” Levko said quietly.

Three kings came from an East-ern la-and, put pre-cious gifts into the Vir-gin’s ha-ands…

She was right, Stodólya had come for her. Stodólya also knew he, Adrian, loved her, and counted on it—that he wouldn’t let her die. She was right; she knew him best. She was right, that was the only way—to come out together; to perish together.

I didn’t want this, thought Adrian Ortynsky as he collapsed with inaudible din, shattered into pieces, into myriad slivers of his own life, all visible at once and up close like lit windows at night through a field glasses, like a snowstorm splintered into myriad snowflakes—he didn’t want this. But his will was no longer there—Not what I will but what you will. Get up, let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand. The choir of angels reverberated, the ringing in his ears grew—somewhere far ahead, on the other side of the impossibly dark wall they were to scale, rang St. Sophia’s bells, the bells of Heavenly Ukraine for which they were setting out. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Yes, he thought. Yes. She was right.

He nodded. Very slowly—everything around him instantly became very slow so that no trifle escaped his attention, not one snowflake that swirled before his eyes—he could see them all; he could hold everything at once somehow: the ribbed ebony handle of Raven’s SMG, the convex gleam of buttons on their jackets, the crimson remnants of the fire like an ashen bruise over a wound, and the rounded snouts of grenades, sitting dark, alive in their hands. Six grenades between the four of them. Not bad at all.

“Agreed,” he said.

And then he felt it stir in the bunker—the breeze of tension that always comes before battle.

Geltsia made the sign of the cross over him, and he also saw the gesture distinctly, like a snowflake under a magnifying glass: his mother made the cross over him like that, when he left home for the last time. He wanted to smile to his bride in death—this was, in a way, their wedding, and the chorus of tiny voices that made the invisible glass sphere of his life crack with a slow ringing sang the wedding hymn for them—but he could no longer smile. Instead, with a senseless, bear-like lurch he suddenly pulled them all by the shoulders together as though he were about to dance the arkán with them here in this tomb—the ancient dance, the warriors’ dance in which a single, many-headed body spins in a locked circle, and feet stomp the ground with a single force, faster and faster, and the chain gathers speed, arms on shoulders, shoulder to shoulder, the eternal male dance of their people that’s been holding the circle together on this land with an inhuman effort, ever since the days of the Horde, holds the circle that others keep breaking with blood and torment, and it takes more torment and blood to renew it, to find the strength and stomp your ground. It’s mine! I won’t give it!—here’s our circle, we are together at last, my girl, this is it, this is our wedding dance; it was once interrupted, but everything’s now set right. We are together again; we’ve found our music; we’ve only the finale to play—play it cleanly, without a single fault, because it can’t ever be played again…

The last twitch of the hand counting seconds—and the clock stopped.

“We surrender!” Kyi called out from underground. “You win!”

He still heard the noise of movement above—when they skittered, ran up there, barking orders—but he was already thinking with his body alone, wrapping his grenade with the wedding shirt: She will walk two steps ahead; I will pull the safety pin out of the grenade. Those above shouted for them to come out with arms in the air, and he pictured their fear—gray, as if a pack of excited rats swirled around the bunker, not entirely sure of its prey, and the rats had to be soothed, so he spoke—or rather someone else spoke from him while he listened—“There’s a woman here who requires medical assistance…”—and these words were as right, mindless, and singularly precise as his movements, and were received by the others as a command. Because he, Kyi, had taken command over them in this moment. He roused them onto their feet, already happier, already weaker; their minds’ focus shifted from the imminent order “Fire!” to a new hole in their shoulder-straps: Ha, we win, the pussy talked them into it!

This was something they understood, something that accorded with what sent them out trudging through snow and muck in other people’s lands and putting to the torch the cities and villages they’d come to hate: some pussy, a fat ration, and everyone afraid of you—they already believed their luck, they were straining their necks and rubbing their hands together, these simple organisms, lower vertebrates that know only the most primitive instincts and destroy anything they can’t understand. Although created in God’s image, they never did become people, and he felt no hatred for them—hatred had already left him like all other emotions that used to constitute his being—but among them was the man whose heart he felt inside his own like proud flesh, like a second, black heart that continued to beat in this hour, and he had to cut it off, tear it out by the root, excise it. Through the lifted lid flooded the white blaze of military searchlights, blinding them with steam and cold, trained on the bunker and the black female shape rose in his sight, endlessly slowly, in stopped time dammed like a lake with the invisible dark wall before them, and stepped into the light—the cold, devilish light meant not to brighten but to blind—with her arms up in the air, to give him a few extra seconds to regain his scorched-out sight.

His hand squeezed its death grip on the grenade.

What illumination. What quiet.

He was looking from above, from aside, from the night sky—and saw himself: his body stepped out of the bunker holding the white bundle in his hand raised high above his head—and a noise came from nowhere, from the firs as if the forest sighed its farewell, and the cloth wing opened above him in the searchlights like a beating sail as tens of eyes boiled to it.

The world stopped breathing, the Earth held its spin.

He saw the muzzles of machine guns aimed at him from the dark and the figures behind them—below, by the stream, to the sides, among the trees—saw the face of the shepherd dog barking his head off, straining his leash, and Geltsia’s profile two steps before him, and the trajectory of her gaze clear as on a ballistic graph—a hyperbola reaching down and behind the firs from where the light beat on them and where a cape stood stiff like a monument, and shapes clustered together. There!—and saw the stillness that came over the scene and lasted for a single endless moment melded into the pause of creation—when only he and Geltsia moved among all the figures frozen in the forest with the lightness of somnambulists on the edge of a roof, turned inward to listen to a musical rhythm audible to them alone—this was enough for him to gain his advantage, exactly as he wanted.

“Him! That’s him!”

They no longer paid any attention to the woman.

“Throw down your weapon!”

He dropped his submachine gun.

And that’s when they ran to him. Came into motion just as slowly, incomparably more slowly than his consciousness, transported outside his body, commanded—like a pile of black fallen leaves whirling into his eyes. The back of his head felt the burn of hot breath and the dog collar’s clang, the hand that was holding the sheaf of light separated from the cape, and the light was coming closer, splitting, along the way, into several distinct figures, and the face that pounded inside him as his second heart—the living, real face with the hooked ax of a nose pulling it forward, the wolfish face with close-set holes for eyes—swam into focus, blocking the light before him: it was coming straight at him, contorted with a wild spasm of terror and joy, and it took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t coming at him; no, it was coming at her—at the woman who stood beside him, who, in the rhythm of their inaudible wedding dance, already took her decisive step back before the storm of black fallen leaves.

“Glory to Ukraine!” he said to Stodólya. And relaxed his fingers curled around the grenade’s handle. The world, deafened, clicked drily, and a white veil flit as it fell—his wedding shirt’s wing.

“Grenade! He’s got a grena—!”

“Motherfu—”

“Oh God!”

“Down!”

He did not hear the explosion. Or the two that followed, almost in sync. He only saw the flash, the terrible flash, dazzling beyond what a human brain can endure—as if a thousand suns exploded at once, and the Earth flew up in a single sky-high black wave. He had time to lean forward after his hand offered his enemies the released grenade like a heavy ripe fruit on its open palm. His muscles filled out with the weight of their burden—but everything ahead was already cut off by the blast, and it was only his body that moved for that split second that a body already vacated can propel itself forward before it collapses obeying the force of gravity, while the film, overexposed by the flash, continues to rustle its blank frames inside his skull.

“Gela,” he wanted to call.

But he was no more.