Vlada, Vladusya. Help me.
Daryna Goshchynska turns around, presses the eject button, pulls out the tape with the copy of the interview, throws it into her tote, and yanks the zipper closed. She puts her raincoat on, turns the lights off, and throws the door open.
“Yuurrrkooo!” her throaty, trilling call resounds in the empty hallway over the clicking of her heels—almost like a dove cooing.
Room 3. Adrian’s Dreams
Lviv, November 1943
The man with a briefcase under his arm runs hard down the sidewalk, past the locked doors and padlocked shutters on the windows of ground-floor apartments; his footfalls, even on smooth unshod soles, thunder in the emptiness of the early morning, loud enough, it seems, to rouse the entire neighborhood; the cobblestones are wet and slippery under the film of the night’s lingering frost. A voice inside his head calls, “Watch out!”—the same voice that’s always warned him of imminent danger, that gives plain and concise orders: step off the path and hide under a bridge—moments before a Studebaker full of Krauts drives across it; or “Don’t go there!” two blocks away from the safe house—where, as it turned out later, in place of their liaison agents, Gestapo had been waiting for him since the night before. Some in the Security Service felt compelled to wonder if this was too much luck, if, by chance, he was actually the one to “spill” that safe house, having avoided the trap so handily, but to hell with them and their suspicions; everyone knows he’d come out dry, alive, and unscathed from much hotter waters, almost as though he was possessed, and perhaps he is, by this voice that whispers its spell over him, demanding that he obey, that he respond instantly, in his muscles, in his body, like a wild animal, not wasting a single instant on thinking. This is why the second he hears “Watch out!” he opens his briefcase and puts the still-warm Walther pistol inside it. The muzzle is still smoking after the shot, the smell of gunpowder and burned metal all but comforting, welcome in his nostrils; his hand still feels the springy imprint of the recoil that had pushed it up and back moments ago. Grabbing the briefcase by the handle with his other hand, he proceeds at a regular pace, a sparse, focused gait of someone on his way to the day’s business—a clerk hurrying to his office—precisely a moment before the milky-gray fog at the corner of Bliaharska expels the black shapes of the military patrol, glistening in their leather coats like wet tree trunks.
Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen. Adrian Ortynsky, aka the Beast (the alias he had taken for good reason) got lucky again. To walk past them without arousing their suspicion is nothing, piece of cake, done it a million times—the thing is to relax, not to clench up into an anxious knot, but to cease being a solid body altogether and proceed as though it were all a dream from which he could wake at any second, whenever he so chose. The November morning chill biting at his skin under layers of clothes; the particular grip of his hand on the briefcase handle so that he could drop it, should the need arise, simply by relaxing his fingers; the dark cupola of the Dominican Cathedral in the fog-distorted distance at the end of the street, floating weightless high above the ground; the frost-laced damp cobblestones—Katzenkopfstein, the dream readily offers in German—and the synchronous pounding of marching boots on them (iron-shod boots, made to last, made for stomping the will of the Übermensch into whoever is under them, for intimidation, not for flight), the pounding that comes closer, overtakes him—and passes, thank you, sweet Lord Jesus, passes without hesitation.
In that moment of passing—as the patrol leaves the man and his persisting luck behind as indifferently as if he’d willed himself to dissolve, right in front of their eyes, into shaggy strands of milky-white fog—a very important shift occurs in his own consciousness: the bullet he just fired into the chest of the Polish Gebiet Polizei’s Commandant when he stepped out of his office into Serbska Street (Kroatenstrasse, as they call it), and his flight along Serbska and Ruska Streets after that (to the young gunmen he schooled he always said the Germans were bears, and one must run from them the only way one can outrun a bear in the mountains—on a crooked path, diagonally uphill; the Magyars, they were wolves and only knew the language of fear; and the Poles, well, the Poles were rabid dogs; he knew that for certain, had known it ever since that childhood day when the Uhlans galloped into their village, dragged his father out of the parish, pulled his vestments over his head, and chased him around with whips, while one of them rode on his back, all of them yelling, “Long live Marshal Piłsudski!”—the Poles were rabid dogs and were to be killed like dogs, with a single shot), and everything that happened a mere minute before he slid as a single mass into the past like a load of dirt slipping off a shovel into a hole. It became just another completed mission, another assassination on Beast’s record, while the man himself strolls freely onward with his briefcase, away from it, toward his new, clear, and certain destination: the streetcar stop, his final rendezvous point with the courier girls who would relieve him of the murder weapon.
He glances at his watch—it would be impolite to make them wait—and hastens his step, through the modest park, past the wet tree trunks, their rutted bark like weathered weeping faces, on to Pidvalna, and every hair that stands on its end on his arms quivers as the seconds tick off.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK…
This has always come easy to him: parceling out his time, slivering himself up into its fragments. Shedding the just-lived like flakes of dry skin, pulling all his senses up by the root from the past moment and replanting them completely intact into the present. It could be said he really didn’t have a past in the sense that other men had, the ones who moaned and talked in their sleep. If it were up to him, he’d send them packing home: a man who calls out to the living and the dead in his sleep can no longer fight. Bullets find him in the next fight, and sometimes even without a fight, they just find him, as if made for the single express purpose of finding and pinning someone’s living past. But he is Beast and knows how to live in the fleeting moment alone. And he has luck.
Now he does not fear the echo of his own steps on the park’s paved path.
TICK… TICK… TICK… TICK… And what wonderful fog lingers this morning! (He is lucky with that, too.)
In the fog, or at night, or even without a single glimmer of light at all (especially since the Soviet air raids began and only a few ghostly bluish camouflage lamps smolder on the railway station’s canopy), he knows his city by touch, in his blood, like a lover’s body: wherever he may stumble blindly, wherever he throws his arm out for balance, the city offers itself to him, yields softly, opens a familiar alley, a warm odorous ditch, a moist crease between buildings. Zhydivska… Bliaharska… Pidvalna—it’s his lips, his skin, the slippery lining of his innards that rub and burrow and part the lightly breathing folds of stony flesh; it’s his city and it will never betray him; it’ll guide him through itself like a loving and knowing wife, his faithful one; it’ll spread itself open and take him in; if need be, it’ll hide him completely—inside, in the swampy, sinewy darkness of its underground passages.
He does not remember how long it’s been since he was with a real woman, even in a dream from which a man wakes with the sticky semen on his thighs—but in his city whose every cobblestone (every Katzenkofstein, pox on their German whoring mothers) he remembers not just with the soles of his feet but has learned, once and forever, with every muscle and tendon in his previous, long-gone life as a child, a schoolboy, a loafer, and a fop; here, he stays erect day and night, as it sometimes happens in the happiest of marriages—and the city keeps and protects him as no woman could. At times, the German presence in the city infects his own body: the black-and-white blemished eagles and crooked-arm crosses on buildings (Kroatenstrasse, ha!) feel like scabby calluses on a beloved body, a sensation first engendered by the Soviets in ’39, by their shabby, kitchen-smelling soldiers in stiff boots, their savage “Davai, davai, move on!” their ubiquitous patches of red (just like the German color later) fabric stretched over buildings with their slogans and pictures of their leaders, the entire wood-suitcased Asiatic horde of them that within a few weeks picked every store clean to the bones like an invasion of giant red ants and hatched instead, in the heart of the downtown, in front of the Opera house, a swollen welt of a flea market where the local crowd could be entertained in broad daylight by the sight of their women latched on to each other’s hair in a ferocious fight over a pair of satin stockings.