These Lifeless Things

You don’t know that, I said.

He shrugged; he was wrapping knives in a pillowcase and putting them in his sack. He said, They came here so suddenly. Maybe They’ll just leave as suddenly. Maybe Their intent was to… gather resources or something, like in the alien movies, and They’ll just leave.

As we pondered this incredibly trite statement I thought idly of how interesting it is that you can hear the capitalization in the name. Well, They are gods, are They not? You get the capital letter whether you earn it or not, if you are a god.

I want to know: How do we know They are gods?

But that is a limitation both of the divine and of our language when speaking of the divine. And no one said all the gods were good.

Anyway.

With our findings, I think I can feed the (appx.) eleven people left in our immediate neighbourhood; if A. is still hosting he’ll get the word out first thing in the morning. It’s good, it’s like a tiny census, and it’s harder to betray people when you know their face.

I have a tuna, bean, and olive salad (like a Niçoise?) planned, with flatbread (oh, how I wish we had pasta; but I haven’t seen a single egg in two years), and a kind of tomato sardine soup, with pickle garnish. I even found a little tin of caviar; everyone can have a spoonful. There will also be braised cabbage, we need the vitamins, but that’s not really a treat. Maybe if we had some salo.

In those first starving days, when we couldn’t get out to scavenge (‘shop,’ V. insists), I dreamed about meals far less elaborate than this; this would have seemed an impossible, fairytale feast. I thought about simple bread-and-butter, and plum jam from Baba’s ruthlessly temperature-controlled pantry, boiled new potatoes, varenyky, all the things we ate when the boys were little and we didn’t have much time to cook.

And then, after a while, I stopped thinking about food at all, preferring sleep; I could never get my fill, I wanted to sleep forever, but between the screams and the Them and the trees and the bombs, I would go—what was it, that first time?—maybe two weeks without sleep longer than an hour or so, day or night. God! Remember that. Don’t forget that.

Now, because everyone is dead, and the Army is gone, there is both food and sleep. But there is no escape. We may as well have our fairytale feast.

If They are taking children alive, what are They feeding them?

Stop, stop. Someone will know. Someone will have heard something.

June 27

Mmm. The long, slow breath of the few dinner guests that did not get out by sunset, and opted to spend the night. They lie like dogs, tangled in a warm heap in the other bedroom. V. has perched himself on top, a contorted lump in a quilt. How easily I could creep in there, and take his hand, and lead him back here. Don’t sleep there, I’d tell him. Sleep here.

I would die of embarrassment if he ever found this book.

But it’s nice to have something to… I almost wrote ‘live for.’ But I mean ‘enjoy oneself with,’ don’t I? I’m not staying alive for him, obviously. I am staying alive for me. But it isn’t much fun, this whole staying alive business. You need to have a secret or two in wartime. Even if it is a war of attrition.

It’s funny. We are a walled city, but the walls are five hundred years old, and crumbling. I fight with V. when he calls it a siege. To have a siege, I insist, you need to have walls. No, he says, you just need to have no way out; and anyway, we do too have walls.

Some walls. I can climb over them!

We watched, briefly, too frightened to laugh, as They tried to repair the low, crumbling walls when They first arrived, fumbling with the medieval stones like a drunk man with his keys. They seemed to have trouble making things stick together. I don’t think that’s why they’ve recruited human agents (or slaves or whathaveyou) but at any rate, the walls made no difference in the old days, and they make no difference now. When people are starved into submission, anything is a wall, because we are too weak to climb.

But he’s right that there’s a siege ring, and that since the Army abandoned us, it has quietly and completely closed. And he’s right that there’s no way out. The guards both day and night are not numerous, but they are fast, and they don’t like people near the river, or the lake, or the train tracks, or the highway or bridges. If they see people moving there, they chase and harry us, or simply gather in their packs and attack, as if teaching us a lesson. One I’ve learned; I stay put, thank you.

I think of another famous siege, and I remember the Harvest Victory (ha! some name). But we didn’t get that. We didn’t get any warning, not a week, not a day, not even a minute. Just one second there was sky and sunset, and the next there was… Them.

In the movies, we would have seen Them on radar moving towards us through darkest ocean, through deepest space. Here, it was as if They stepped in from the other room. And everything came to an end.

Why here? Is there something special about here, our small city with its factories and its fields and its shoddy museums? We’re nothing. We’re a blister on the plain, surrounded by fields. Why do we not see Them in the distance, striding towards the mountains in the east?

The Army left us, anyway; they escaped the siege before it became a siege, not singing their songs. We who stayed fielded a new one. V. admitted soon after we met that he was a draft-dodger in this small, desperate second army. I’d guessed as much.

I was ashamed, he said. I thought you’d think less of me.

I do, I said, but I understand.

What a cruel thing to say, I thought even then, and I should have apologised or not said it at all, but we could not lie to each other; already we had survived too much.

Most everybody said yes to the recruiting squads. The few people that said no, my boys told me, were still dragged along to the shoddy training centres, in school auditoriums and the big stadium downtown. And then they went to defend the city. And they never came back.

So I never asked why. V. knew he would not come back.

No one knew anything about the missing children, not A., not B., not T1 and T2, who (being old women) usually know everything.

Alive? said A., fretfully. His eyes in that dark, wrinkled face seemed to recede some infinite distance, thinking perhaps, as we all were, of children we had known. Even I, who barely dare to say the names of my children even in my head.

At the market, said B. briskly. Someone will know.

Do you think so? I don’t. But maybe when there’s another one. I keep thinking, There’s something I can do, there must be something. Why is everyone out there sleeping instead of combing the streets with me?

I ask this rhetorically. But. I’m so helpless and frustrated I’m shaking, I can’t write. Even with my full stomach. I’m shaking.

I think of the boys, saying goodb

No. Think of something else. Sleep.