I said, mildly, Well, we’ve had thousands of years of people ‘cracking down’ on us for doing things like being located inconveniently. Or objecting to the seizing of our rail line. Or our people. Or fighting back. Or eating. Or breathing. I mean, they say Kyiv changed hands fourteen times in eighteen months, back in the day.
He watched me in silence, leaning on his hoe. Who was listening? Who was there?
I said, Look, we know the routine; it’s been a thousand years. Some asshole with a moustache barges in, he barely has time to turn around, you get some other asshole with a moustache. And they’ve all been putting up statues of themselves that we have to pull down and re-cast later. The least you can say about our newest conquerors is that the things growing on their faces cannot be positively identified as hair.
He laughed; I laughed. Separately, one after the other. Inside, I felt something roiling, a witch’s cauldron of black iron filled to the brim with things struggling to break the surface, thick bubbles popping; I felt sick, I felt certain.
But as the afternoon passed the feeling faded and now I am left, at the end of the day, with K. and V. sleeping in the living room and me thinking: Did I remember right, did I remember the conversation right? Maybe that’s not what he said. Maybe I’m exaggerating.
More than usual tonight I feel that I am being watched, in this windowless room.
APPEASEMENT, OF COURSE—the policy with which I’ve lived most of my short and academically-focused life—never worked; I suppose Eva wondered whether it had, anywhere. The truth was it never did, but that didn’t stop places from trying it. Compliance, as she notes, wasn’t the goal of the Invaders; but it was clear that people were disappearing, even their corpses were disappearing, and so there were numerous people who thought, “Well, we have one currency left,” and offered up their survivors as payment. But they almost all died right along with their friends. The few witnesses scrambled away with a combination of luck and the carelessness of the un-appeased, already knowing that their narratives would be hard to believe by the scholars of the future.
It wasn’t that we believed it or disbelieved it, really; it was that we ate it up too quickly to be objective. Pain is interesting, I was told when I started my studies. People don’t want to read about happiness. They want to read about pain. That’s what’ll get you published.
I search for the seminary, but I suppose it’s been destroyed, crumbled over the years. Maybe she will give me another clue. Even though now I’m afraid of what I might find there.
November 10
How did the fight start? I said, I’ll go alone. Maybe we’re setting off the traps because we go in a group.
No, I’ll come with you, he said. You don’t need to prove how brave you are.
I opened my mouth and shut it, stunned. No, I am a coward, I wanted to tell him. Valentin! Don’t you know that? Don’t you know me by now?
Till the world ended I thought I was average, I thought I had an average level of… everything. Two children, one husband, just enough school, just enough intelligence, just enough height and boobs and heft and courage. I took home a pay packet that, combined with M.’s, precisely let us keep house, go on vacation once a year, and buy the latest shiny flat phones to annoy each other with.
But when the day came, when the day came… there we were, the average four of us utterly unwarned for the tearing open of air and light. Terrified, we thought to flee to the countryside, but we let our terror paralyze us a little too long, and then we had to stay. And then the boys drafted into the defense… I remember embracing N., already so skinny, a growing boy forced by semistarvation to stop growing, his familiar body under my hands like a pillowcase full of twigs.
They will go fight in the countryside outside the walls, we thought. We already knew that was where Their reach did not often go, since everyone is so spread out—our country has a big side. We thought the boys would be safer out there, not subject to the raids, the vanishings, the interrogations, the bombs, the ugly new statues that walked at night and left only greasy patches of blood and fat by dawn. Then we thought: if we stay in the city, the boys will find us again. Out there, only They will find us.
And we stayed, drawing fire. I think now of the birds that feign a broken wing to lure predators away from the nest and I wonder which of us, in city or country, might be that bird. I don’t even know if they are still alive. The last message I got was over a year ago, when people could still sneak in and out of the city to a limited extent.
I worry that the boys said something that will tip Them off, or Their agents, that they have found a way to draw bulls-eyes on their backs. I worry that they will try to reach me. I worry that they won’t. I worry that there is a word for children without parents, but none for a parent who has lost both her children.
Well. Put that way, what have I, cowardly lion, to lose? More than V. Less than the others. I don’t know.
And yet, I keep thinking of that darkness, it must be dark in there, They would not keep the children in a place with light; in fact, I don’t even think They see light at all.
I think: They come from a place where the light is not like this. Or doesn’t exist. They don’t care.
The children in the darkness, I can’t bear it. I think of N. and I. and I think… the light on their faces that last day, their light, terrified, laughing faces as they left me, the blue of their eyes just like M’s. At least they left together. Oh, God!
We have to go.
We cannot stay.
November 16
Confirmed. Really, we needed more bodies, more eyes, but we got there in the end, by pitiful subterfuge that would not have fooled a doddering mall security guard. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before. We just… set roughly an entire street on fire, and let the sentinels come out, screaming in surprise, and in the confusion we ran the other way.
The old seminary has its own cemetery, crawling with fist-sized monsters, their bodies bright and insulting on the ancient stones. I bared my teeth looking at it, I felt hatred crawl over my own body, I wanted to rush in there and sweep them away, slap them, like roaches or centipedes. They are ruining the inscriptions. But anyway: the grass there impossibly, sinisterly green, still, despite the coming winter, just as V. said.
I put P. on watch. I don’t know how I feel about her, but I trust her instincts; she’s the wariest person I’ve ever met, she has been watching for enemies since long before the Invasion. V. and I crept down, listening, trying locked doors, tapping on the stone and brick. Expecting, still, to find nothing. Streets away, we heard the roar of the fire, and things thinly screaming; I had to close my eyes and press my entire face to the building before I heard anything.
When the voice emerged from the hole, V. cried aloud; I almost did too. We stooped, pressed our ears to the grille. We could pry this off, he whispered. I told him to shut up.
A thin voice from the stinking darkness. The hole, covered with a wire grille on our side, thick, screwed into the cement.
Hello? Is that… who are you?
I told the child our names. The things, I said. The monsters, the… Them. They’ve been stealing you, taking you down here?
Yes. We’ve been here for… I don’t know. Maybe a year? It’s gotten cold twice. I’m Olga, the child said. There are twenty-seven of us. It’s my job to keep count because I’m the oldest.
V. and I both looked down there, but we couldn’t see anything; I assumed that the grille was set up too high, and they had nothing to stand on. Behind us, a faint, warbling chirp from P., on the roof of the adjacent building. A long, cold wind. Leaves spattering us from the un-turned trees. All our greatest fears come true, and only one hope: that the children were alive.