I knew it; V. did not, clearly, but as he had been born and raised here I could see that he would be damned if he admitted it. It had been abandoned after the war, when the priests were rounded up and marched off, and then it had become some government administration building for a while, and then it was declared structurally unsound in the ’nineties and closed off. The city was supposed to rebuild it or prop it up or something, but there always seemed to be something else to do with the money. A practical, modestly adorned concrete building of three or four storeys, sagging dangerously in the middle.
I met K’s eyes and drew myself up. Who told you this? I said. What did they see?
An old woman I met, he said. Near the riverfront. She was doing laundry, and fell in, and I pulled her away from those tentacle-things that grow up between the rushes, and we talked. I didn’t tell her I was looking for missing children.
No? I said.
He said, No. I told her I was looking for places the sentinels and the statues came in and out of a lot. All day. All night. And she said, oh, like an anthill, the opening of an anthill. The old seminary.
Let’s go then, I said. Let’s look.
V. said, No, it’s too close to night. We’ll have to go tomorrow. All of us. Together.
Of course, said K.
Under some pretext, he wandered off, humming to himself; V. and I narrowed our eyes at him as he left.
He’s got a nice voice, said V. after a minute. You’d believe someone who told you things with a voice like that.
Oh, you noticed that too, I said. I noticed that he knows this city, but he doesn’t love it.
No? said V.
I waved an arm at the plaza around us, the thick old buildings tottering but still proud, the church with its breathlessly bent steeple, the bell hanging over the edge like a perched bird, the whole square barely recognizable now, as if it fell from a great height. The gray concrete, the colour of the gray sky, loomed over us like the clouds, angular, the edges soft with impact, chunks littering the ground snowlike at the base of every foundation. You don’t have to love a place just because you’ve lived here a long time, I said. I mean, look at you. You’ve lived here less time than me.
How do you know that? he said.
I’m much older than you, I said patiently.
Not much, he said. I bet.
How much do you bet?
A billion American dollars, he said blithely. No, don’t give me that look; I know where I can lay my hands on it. I could be the richest man in the country in half an hour. The continent.
It’s true, I said.
Money doesn’t mean much now. It didn’t even mean much when we had the proper markets still going. It was just food for food.
And I was thinking of Chornobyl, hundreds of kilometers away but in a sense very near, near enough to touch, as if its breath were on the back of my neck; They were there too, I knew. It was even a site of curiosity for Them if not gladness, it was a place They congregated, a place whose poison They might even enjoy; I felt certain, somehow, stabbingly sure, that they had broken the Sarcophagus, taken the Elephant’s Foot into the obscenities of Their mouths. I wondered what V. knew about it. Just what they taught in the history books. But he had been born years after that happened, and I had been born before. It was different.
It’s not different, he said, months before when I brought it up. Both people born before and after it happened carry the mark in their bones. Because the fallout got everywhere. It’s like a signature. No, a tattoo.
No, that’s not true, I said. It was only for people who were born before.
No, it’s everyone, he insisted. The only difference is degree.
I’m doubtful that that can be true, but what do I know about bones? At any rate, I can’t go to the library and take out a book about it, not right now. Maybe in the winter, if we’re still alive. Isn’t it funny that that was virtually the only thing the world knew about us, when they thought of us at all, and it took the Invasion for the entire world to start thinking about the same thing all at once. Solidarity at last, I thought, and I laughed drily by myself in the dark.
October 15
Happy birthday to me! If I’ve been reckoning the days right, I suppose. I think I am the only person in the city who still adheres to some kind of calendar and it’s probably not even accurate by this point.
We set off across the city this morning, just as we said, to investigate the seminary. Everything soft, silent, waiting. As if holding its breath. I scanned the ground as we walked, hoping to find… what? I don’t know. Something obvious and clear that no one could miss. A dropped shoe smaller than my palm. A superhero sticker.
And ahead of us—a shock, an expected shock, our stomachs telling us first that the ground was moving, and only then seeing it erupt, spitting cobbles into the houses near us, a humped thing slavering and gnashing at us, its tongue covered in our good black soil. I say this now, as if I had stood and coolly analyzed its appearance, but in fact we spun and ran so fast that we got no more than a glimpse. It was big, like a bull, but it was fast once it dug itself out of the street, and the street itself shivered under our running feet, and we fell to hands and knees and kept going.
Of course it was a trap. When we had staggered and sprinted and crawled about fifteen blocks the thing ceased its pursuit, and we had no strength except to crawl into a doorway and count our fingers and toes and teeth. You did this, I almost said to K. You brought us into this. And yourself, to make it look credible. But we were all so shattered and ragged that I resolved to do it in private, and then did not.
V. said, That’s a good sign. They wouldn’t have put that thing there if They had nothing to protect.
K. said nothing.
We met tonight, briefly, to discuss the trap, and the possibility of getting the children, if they are alive. I want people to be… well. No. Let us be clear. I want to coerce everyone into helping me. I don’t care if they do it out of guilt. But I myself will feel guilty if I guilt them into helping us.
P. is passionate, but has no plan. She stood on the coffee table in her ripped leggings and said, Listen. I was a student at the university. I was on campus on Invasion Day. My parents, my sisters, my brother, they are dead far from here—two thousand kilometers from here. This isn’t my city, this isn’t even my country. I will never go home again. But I’m willing to stay and fight because we cannot break the chain of what links the past to the future. If we die, who will tell the stories of those who survived the old conquerors?
And T1 said: Thousands of years of conquerors. Not just these, nor the last ones, nor the ones before that.
Silence fell while we thought of how we have all been overrun, how this land has always been under someone’s thumb, and I still wonder where P. is from and how many times her country was overrun. I cannot place her accent. At any rate we all know that the last time no one saw fit to invade anyone else’s land, we still, probably, swung from the trees. What people want, always, is to conquer. To take what belongs to the seemingly weak or the outnumbered or the outgunned… to take from the other. If you erase an entire generation and replace it with your own, the chain breaks, both ends swing free.
She came here to learn about the past, to carry it into the future. She loves that chain. She does not want it to break.
Me, I don’t know how I feel about it. But I suppose I will continue keeping this diary as long as I can. Hearing her, last night, I wondered who picked sides, if they had been undecided before; I wondered if it felt like it had when I did, abruptly, with a sensation like swooning or falling into an unfamiliar darkness.
It is we who must forge the links of that chain to get the children out. No one else will.