These Lifeless Things

The old women say this is like the old days, and I nod, because I too read the history books, and they tell me: No, no Eva. This is not like the books. This is what the books cannot truly tell you. The invasion of privacy, the rush of the warm air into the icy night.

They are looking for rebellion and sedition, and in other places, other times, the mere act of looking used to create it; but it cannot do so here. They stamp it out, and then if even the wind stirs the remains, They stamp again. You’ve seen what They did to that first revolution, and I think, yes, I did see, I wish I could forget. We’re no good at this revolution thing now, I think. Ours was erased, actually obliterated, so that not even teeth remained.

What they needed was a cadre of old women, which are still in no short supply in this place; in fact after M. disappeared I began to notice how some people simply soldiered on. The world of old women had not ended; only ours had. They had lived under one dictator and then another and another, and when the system collapsed and strangers came to their houses to tell them they were free, their answers were “Hah!” Universal disdain. Now, strangers come to their houses to ask them if they would like a few cans of sardines, and their answer is “Hah!”

I think of the first days, eating next to that old woman, how she had honed her own knife to a razor’s edge and taken apart someone’s leg as smoothly and quickly as if she’d been doing it all her life, like deboning a chicken, so that for a moment we others around the fire glanced at one another: Had she been doing it all her life? Good Lord, the police never find most serial killers, do they.

But she had something we didn’t: transferable skills. The rest of us lost ours in the unconquered years.

The city shifts, rumbles at night. We leap out of sleep in fits and starts, whimpering like babies startled awake. Sometimes, when we do so, K. is not there. I tell myself: It means nothing. It’s better than thinking that it means everything. That it’s proof of something. I haven’t told the others; I’m not sure they’ve noticed.

A. tells me, nervously, that he’s heard that They’ve taken one of the old war bunkers near the river as Their new headquarters. That you can see Them sometimes, shapeless and tall as mountains, flickering in and out of it, leaving behind Their stench and the soil writhing with Their leavings. The bunker was some kind of tourist attraction (for the dozen tourists we used to get every summer) but still structurally functional, still solid, still good. Three-foot walls of solid rebar concrete. You’d have to drop a bomb square on it to make a dent. We joke about this city and its flimsy new buildings, but a lot of the older stuff is like that—swoops and blocks of concrete, whole riverbeds of moulded aggregate. You never appreciate the stuff while you’re baking in a bus station made of it, and yet it never rots, warps, weeps like wood; it doesn’t flake or chip like brick; a thrown stone won’t shatter it like glass, but bounce back. We bitch about it, journalists come here and photograph it to mock in coffee-table books, but dammit, it’s useful. You can tell from all the hits this city’s taken. What falls. What stands.

If you were gathering children from a dead city’s dead parents, would you put them behind concrete? Or something else?

October 8

Our people never threw out much, we hoarded and buried for later, proud of our full pantries, we knew the word ‘cache’ and laughed when the magpies and squirrels did it. Is that what They are doing with the children? Are They storing them for… for something I cannot think of? Or are They waiting till they grow up and become suitable for use as agents?

The not knowing hurts me, a long unending throb. It is still all I can think of and I am making myself sick with it.

One good thing today: V. brought food for dinner at the old flat, not a full community dinner, though there would have been enough: just me, P., K., A., B., and T1 and T2, whom I have noticed are absolutely impossible to kill, and also impossible to get behind; we have a game now, which I am sure they participate in as fully as V. and I, where we try to get behind them, but they always have their backs to a wall.

The food, anyway. A plateful of bleeding, dark red meat. P. and I looked at each other. We looked at K., who showed no surprise. T1 and T2 snickered.

Oh, come on, said T2, and dug her skinny elbow into V.’s side. I thought we agreed we would stop doing that.

It’s not what you think! V. said.

Yes, it’s one thing to eat the already dead, said T1 serenely, and another to get, you know. Fresh provisions. Shame on you, young man.

It’s not that! V. huffed. It’s venison!

We all laughed. And I really mean that. Laughed and laughed as if he had told one of those long obscene jokes. And cooked the meat on spits in the fireplace like cavemen, and burned our fingers while we gorged ourselves, absolutely gorged, till our stomachs were distended. With nothing on it, not even salt, it tasted like… the meal you might be given in Heaven, you swoop in on your cloud and they hand you your wings and a plate of steak and potatoes, charred and rare like this, it tasted like pepper and rosemary, brown butter, fried garlic, it tasted like dreams. When the only true seasoning, looked at in the cruel light of daylight, was cooked blood from a fresh corpse.

(Update later: it was a deer! V. stubbornly showed me the hooves and the startled head, still dripping. They wandered into the park, he said. Three of them. A tree snatched at them and they bolted right into me, and I stabbed one of them. Then I had to chase it down. Thought it would taste gamey. I laughed, As if any of us would notice whether it did, you ridiculous creature. He had a smear of blood under his eye. Funny, I said, pointing at it, it suits you, Nimrod the noble hunter, and he said, Then I’ll keep it there. We agreed not to eat the brain, even though it was probably full of valuable minerals and vitamins and suchlike. Mad Deer Disease, I said.)