The Way We Were Hunters, page 10
Then no one had food. There were no special stores anymore, and Lena regretted not eating when they had bread. When someone was hungry, all they dreamed about was food.
The city burned, Mama died, and brother too. She regretted not loving them when they were alive. Then she was a grown woman arguing with a man who didn’t love her. He was a liar. A lot of them were. Papa too, because he’d said he’d be back.
There were no more normal factories, no work. No one made shoes or taught the piano anymore. She didn’t enlist because she was courageous but because she was starving. Everyone knew the war was ending by then, and she’d hoped to make a career in the army because she had nothing else. She’d never finished school or learned anything. That was her truth. She wasn’t a patriot but a selfish person trying to get by. She wanted to receive service benefits, find a respectable husband—perhaps one who was a civil engineer—get an apartment, a bed with a mattress, pretty dresses, women’s shoes, and…
Something was mooing like a cow giving birth. Lena groaned because her head hurt. She tasted blood, the metallic tang. The world came into focus, slowly, and she saw rocks floating. Loose gravel, metal scraps, bits of grass, everything was going toward the sky. She turned, saw her knife levitating, and reached for it.
Ulyana lay next to her. Blonde pigtails and blue dress, she looked like a little girl when her eyes weren’t evil. She didn’t blink. The girl had a bullet hole in her forehead, a third eye, a red one that was crying.
Lena grabbed her knife, her fingers closing around the hilt. In trying to get up, she recalled Vadim slamming her into the truck. Then the lights had gone out. The impact may have scrambled her brain. She couldn’t get up and tilted her face back instead and looked at the earth upside down. Then it made sense why everything was… falling.
The mooing, that was Vadim. His eyes were black and his face red. All types of veins were raging on his neck and temple, but it appeared he couldn’t get up either—Misha was on him. His knee in between the redhead’s shoulder blades, he was twisting Vadim’s neck beyond where it shouldn’t go, wouldn’t go. The redhead clawed into the ground, kicking. Then he screamed and his neck snapped. Everything that had been floating dropped as though the Savior had disconnected a great magnet in the sky.
Lena closed her eyes when Misha got up. Did playing dead ever work?
She heard footsteps then she was being carried and put into a truck. The door closed and the engine started. She pretended to be asleep, then fell asleep. She felt the knife drop from her grip, but she was too tired. It’d been three days after all.
A fire burned, the wood crackling. A pot hung over it and it was boiling. The first clear night in days, the constellations shone bright. The red hue of the flames fell on Misha’s face, and he looked down, rolling a cigarette.
His coat was on Lena, but he had on his weapons belt, so she waited. She heard him for a while, walking about, rattling things, zipping this, rustling that. Owls hooted and a wolf cried, and it was a while before he stopped making noises and she waited even longer, then opened her eyes. He’d fallen asleep sitting up. Soldiers did that.
The logs had burned out into embers and glowed. Lena held her breath as she got up and crept toward the truck. It was Vadim’s truck, and the bodies of Nemzhar, Alysa, and Oksana were in the back. Alysa looked as though she was sleeping, and Oksana’s head was facing right again. He’d corrected that, she supposed. Much of Nemzhar’s face was missing and that couldn’t be fixed.
Lena looked back at Misha before she opened the door. He was still asleep, exhausted as though he was a real person.
The key was left in the ignition. She twisted it and the engine came on. He didn’t wake up, didn’t even stir, veterans slept through even mortar shells. Besides, he’d been up for days too.
She drove off.
It took her two days to drive back alone. She’d radioed ahead that she was coming without going into the specifics, and when she arrived at 47, the cook had prepared kasha for two dozen men. She sat alone in the mess hall well after midnight, staring at the rows of untouched bowls along the long table.
The captain, senior and junior lieutenants all gone, Boris was now in charge, the big man giving orders… at least till they got a new captain. He questioned Lena many times, calling her into his office, but in her final report she wrote the captain as killed in action. Claiming he’d been a fallen would taint all his previous achievements, and there was no need to strip him of it.
Lena found Leonid’s dog tag tucked in her pant pocket when she was doing laundry and gave it to Valya, who buried it in the graveyard behind the bunker where the silver birches had begun to show yellow leaves. Fall soon, then winter, and spring, and time would move on except for those whose names were etched on the tombstones.
With trouble sleeping at night, Lena would hear mooing sounds sometimes when there were no cows around. She spent a few nights at Oleg’s cottage by the warm stove, and Boris excused her from duty for the time being for ‘mental exhaustion’.
‘You’re a woman. There’s no shame in being gentle hearted,’ had been his exact words, but the commissar had never seen the inside of 17. He wouldn’t sleep either if he had and he wasn’t a woman.
Lena put in a request to be discharged for medical reasons and was denied because she wasn’t injured. So, back to laundress duty a week after she returned.
The river was half a mile from the bunker. Lena had a spot where she washed things. Come winter it would be frozen and she would be able to walk across it, but today it was flooded, and water swirled murky red and angry brown. She squatted in the river with her rubber boots, washing her shirt for the third time because the blood just wouldn’t come out. Who did laundry in the rain at the crack of dawn? Those who couldn’t sleep and had nothing more useful to do.
The sky was dark, and the river was loud, rain falling all around. It would be breakfast soon and Oleg would come looking for her. He was kind and bent on caring for her.
He would shake his head and say, ‘Give it time, Lenachka, it will be better,’ but she didn’t know if that was true. It was never better that her family was dead and plenty of time had passed since…
She threw her shirt in the river, kicked it, then fell into the water and was just sitting there, her head barely above the rushing current, wondering if it wasn’t better just to lie down in it, when she saw him. He looked like he’d walked the four hundred and some miles back.
Lightning flashed silver overhead and it thundered. The rain was loud, drumming the river. She got out of the water, went to an old oak and sheltered under it. Misha was drenched, didn’t have his coat on him because she’d taken off with it, and set his knapsack down. He combed his black hair back with his fingers because they were dripping water down his face.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Lena said. “Boris is in charge now and he’ll shoot you on sight if he figures you’re one of them.”
“Where else do I go? I have nowhere else to go.”
“I don’t know, but you can’t be here.”
“What did you tell them?” he asked, gazing down at his muddied boots.
“You don’t expect me to lie for you.”
“Where do I go? I have nothing else.”
“That’s for you to figure out,” she said. “I told them you died. You go do whatever you want, but I can’t let you pretend to be a captain here knowing what you are.” She wanted to pick up a rock and throw it at him, as she might do to a stray dog trying to follow her home. This world had no pity. She had no pity, not even for her comrades never mind a fallen.
“Lena, I have done nothing wrong.” His hands were in his pant pockets. She didn’t know if he had any weapons, but she guessed it wouldn’t matter much. If he’d wanted to kill her, he would have.
“Besides all the lying, you mean?” she asked. “Why not go to Internal Affairs? They have things like you over there.”
He was silent for a while, then just said, “Okay.” More silence as the rain grew deafening. “Can you bring me my father’s photograph and a bit of food? And I’ll leave. I won’t bother you again.”
“You don’t want your medals?” she asked.
“What am I going to do with that?” he said.
She shrugged, turned, and walked away.
She stopped by the kitchen to get a loaf of bread, wrapped it in a cloth, went to Misha’s office, noticed someone (Boris) had jimmied open the drawer with morphine, and she was taking the pilot’s photograph out of the heavy frame because every ounce mattered when one was hiking when the commissar came in.
“There you are, Comrade Lena, just in time too. Follow me to the interview room,” he said.
“I’ve already given you my statement, Comrade Commissar.”
“Well, give it one more time. Internal Affairs is here, and they want to speak with you.”
Fuck.
Lena set the photograph down. She’d be back for it, she supposed. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long because she didn’t want Misha to grow impatient and come here. Then she would have to decide if she would lie for him. She knew she didn’t want to, but she didn’t know if she was going to.
thirteen
Ghost of the Past
The interview room with bare cement walls and a single light bulb hanging on a naked cord over a metal table and two opposing chairs naturally had no windows, being underground, and no clock, but Ardarion recalled Lena’s eyes kept flicking to the wall as though looking for the time.
They’d been speaking all day and it was nearly evening, she just didn’t realize it. The same way she didn’t realize he was already in her head. She saw the collar around his neck still, but that was part of his talent. In truth, the bluesteel was on his lap. There were numerous kinds of telepathic talents, a true spectrum, and Ardarion painted with all the colors.
The fabric of their makeup being cut from the same cloth, generally speaking, telepaths had difficulty with other fallen including telekinetics, but a plain mind was an open book to him—except for the pristine. Incredibly rare, but a pristine mind was immune to telepathic persuasion. Lena could have shut him out at any time, she just didn’t know how.
The general secretary was pristine, and some of his generals also, but a laundress in the middle of nowhere, now that was impressive.
Ardarion sipped his fourth cup of tea, feeling with some urgency the need to relieve himself, and asked, after he set the cup down, “What about Captain Mikhail Arkhimov’s whereabouts? Are there any, shall we say, updates?”
“He’s dead. I already told you. We’ve been over this. May I leave now?” she asked, quite agitated.
Even as early as then, she lied for him. Had Ardarion compelled, that was a telepathic command, her to take him to the captain, she would have shut him out, he had no doubt. But he’d been in her mind all this time, well enough to know the captain’s intimate preferences, and he no longer needed her to comply.
He’d find the oak tree and arrest Mikhail on his own. He knew where it was, Lena had already told him without realizing it. She wanted to go to him, was worried about him, and had been thinking about it the whole interview.
People told many lies, more often to themselves than to others, and Ardarion could see through them all. A curse more than a blessing, he would say, for sometimes a lie was so blissful that he wished he could believe it.
Three decades later now, Ardarion, an old fool alone in his third-floor apartment, reminiscing his youth, opened the drawer of his desk and took out a photograph of Lena. He glided his wrinkled bony fingers over her young face. Time, that robber, had taken all from him, but unaffected by it all his memory of her remained beautiful.
He leaned back into his chair and sighed, closing his eyes to the dying light. Thirty years ago, on the day he met Lena Zaitseva, he’d concluded his interview, asked Commissar Boris to keep her busy for a couple of hours with a mundane task, went straight to where Mikhail Arkhimov had been waiting for her, and arrested him. It was quite a serious offense to be a fall-borne and not have registered with the state. In the captain’s case, he was accused of sabotage, espionage, treason, and conspiracy following the decimation of Bunker 17, HKU-120, and HKU-118. He should have gotten the death sentence, but they needed bodies at the labor camp and he was given life in one.
To his credit, Mikhail hadn’t resisted arrest then, and Ardarion remembered the former captain standing tall during his hearing and sentencing. No one had come for him, as was often the case for soldiers. He was stripped of all his decorations and party membership and sent to a mine in the north to work till he died. It wouldn’t have been a long sentence. No one died in the labor camps of old age.
Ardarion imagined Lena had gone to the oak tree long after they were gone and waited for him there till nightfall. He was sorry he’d hurt her, and his old heart envied Mikhail, always had. But that was a story for another day, he supposed, it was late. He stowed Lena’s photograph in the place he kept it, and pushed off from his desk, stretching, and releasing the crick from his joints that had been seated all day.
He closed his notebook, but he wasn’t done. He’d return to it tomorrow, should there be one.
The woman who worked for him had left his meal outside his office door. He took it to the kitchen, ate alone, played music on the gramophone, danced with the ghost of his youth, drank a half glass of vodka, and went to bed.
Part Two
fourteen
The Years
The hospital walls were light blue, and the window frames were painted white. The hallways, the rooms, and even the white coats of the doctors all smelled of disinfectant. Ardarion sat on a small stool as the doctor studied his X-ray with a frown. It was sunny outside, and the window was open. The doctor had a row of plants on his windowsill.
Not good news, Ardarion guessed by how long the doctor studied the X-ray, holding it in the light, then putting it up on a board with a light, then finally sitting down behind his desk, frowning at it. So, he waited. He’d been waiting in hospitals for the past five years now. He had a brain tumor that interfered with his telepathy. Five years ago, he would have rather died than lose his usefulness, so he’d opted for the surgery to remove it. It had been successful in that he was still alive, but unsuccessful in that he was no longer a telepath, and the tumor had returned, over and over. He took medications that made him sick to hold it at bay but it was a losing battle, a slow retreat to inevitable defeat. Everyone was dying but he was marching to his end a bit faster.
“What is the prognosis, Doctor?” Ardarion asked. He didn’t need a bluesteel now, the surgery had done it permanently. After he lost his ability, he was asked to retire from Internal Affairs. No one visited him now and he lived on his pension. The republic had a way of spitting one out once one lost his usefulness.
The tumor had grown, said the good doctor. Soon, it would interfere with Ardarion’s ability to speak, think, walk, and keep the piss in his bladder. How long was ‘soon’? Four months, maybe. He’d changed many doctors over the years, but the chief physician who signed off on his diagnosis and treatment remained the same. Nikita M. I, the signature said, though Ardarion had never met the man. He was the dean of medicine, he supposed, just some stooge bureaucrat who never saw the ill.
He collected his prescription, made his next appointment, and was given a number to call to get on the waiting list for a care facility.
Ardarion took the bus home and got off a couple of stops short to walk, to get the blood flowing. He lived near the People’s Square where Young Pioneers were practicing marching formations for the upcoming Victory Parade. It would be quite the military show, he supposed, it always was. Two absolutely devasting wars back to back, the nation deserved to celebrate her victory. Rosyan people prevailed over the drakon and the fallen, that was the story they were always selling. A good one, too. People liked to hear about heroism, never about old pricks who’d given the Motherland his youth and got nothing in return but a number to call to get on the waiting list.
Children of Eve—Ardarion wouldn’t say they were the sole reason thousands of fall-borne were put to death without trial, without having done anything wrong, but they’d certainly started it all. The three-decade-long witch hunt was coming to an end, though, he supposed. A fallen hadn’t been born since the second war and the annihilation of the young nest, and the last of the Eve, an old fool like Ardarion himself, was on the run. Command had better dogs now, younger ones, and there was a fellow he was yet to meet whom they called the Hound (funny because that was what they used to call him when he was young) who had been digging Eve out by the root.
The god like portrait of the young general secretary hung from the People’s Palace with all the glory of the Rosyan Republic. Ardarion saluted the marshal. The political police were watching, as they always were.
Ardarion bought rye bread from the store and went home.
Having looked after his failing health for the day, he then poured himself a drink, lit a cigarette, and returned to his desk where he’d left the story of Lena unfinished.
When he had first reported to Command about the return of the drakon and the Children of Eve gathering forces, recruiting the fallen for something large, they’d asked him to ‘correct’ his finding because it had been demoralizing and unpatriotic. But two years later, it had become a reality with the attack on Command and Control claiming the lives of many officers and the general secretary, the former one, barely escaping with his life.
Rebellion stirred in the fringes of the republic, shadows whispering in basements after hours. The drakon were returning, they’d claimed, and they’d been right. The Great War, that had been just a single nest, and the second one stirred now, unfound meteors slumbering under Rosyan soil, and keeping with them hibernating drakon.
