Moscow but Dreaming

by Ekaterina Sedia

  Svetlana smiles, imagining herself confronting a gang of cannibals with words. “Men are still men. They’re still dangerous.”

  “But if they’re human, they won’t try to eat you.” Svetlana shrugs, not convinced. With hunger like that, why wouldn’t they try to eat anything alive and made of meat?

  4.

  In her mind, Svetlana never recognized her relationship with Ilya as courtship. It was only when Yasha and Vanya, re-energized by playing at Valya’s quiet, cavernous apartment, as barren of floorboards as any other, and by her grandmother’s stories and slivers of bread she fed them throughout (children ate from her hands, opening their mouths wide and stretching their thin necks, like baby birds) started teasing. “Bride and groom,” they started in a whisper and then, growing bolder, in a singsong, when Ilya and Svetlana walked side by side behind them, heading home to mother. “Bride and groom.”

  Svetlana blushed and looked at her boots, the slicks of ice, the river swelling up leaden and white up ahead, and at the boy’s shaven heads, blue under their hats—anywhere but Ilya’s steady gaze and his hale earth smell.

  Ilya murmured under his breath, as embarrassed as she felt. She couldn’t quite make out the words, but thought that he said “Heart” or “My heart,” and her stomach felt warm and tight.

  When they reached her house, she looked up at him, into his sparkling eyes. “You can come in, if you wish.”

  She told the boys to be quiet or she’d box their ears if they breathed a word to mother, probably asleep in her room. The boys tittered, and she twisted Yasha’s ear harder than she meant—that quieted them right down. Ilya waited patiently as she herded the boys to kiss their sleeping mother (her breath so shallow) and then to their own room.

  She was not on the air-raid duty that night, and she motioned for Ilya to follow her into her room; he instead remained standing as if stuck to the spot, until she whispered fiercely, “What are you waiting for? Come on.”

  She didn’t light the candle and undressed in the dark. She could feel Ilya’s solid presence, smell him as she unbraided her hair. She slipped under the covers and soon he followed, the mattress shifting under his weight, his body dense like iron. They lay side by side, their arms barely touching, until Svetlana fell asleep.

  In the morning, he was gone.

  5.

  In the morning, she also discovered that her mother was up unusually early—a fat lardy candle burned in the communal kitchen, and mother, wrapped into two shawls over her nightgown, coat, and boots, her bare venous legs ghostly white in the dusk, sighed and pulled the folding kitchen table to the center. Svetlana’s heart sank.

  “The neighbor’s dead,” mother said. “Something awful happened.”

  Svetlana raised an eyebrow—dead was normal. “Awful?”

  “The door was ajar this morning,” mother said. “Someone must’ve broken in. Yasha heard her whimpering and woke me, but when I got there, she already bled out. People are turning savage.”

  On numb feet, Svetlana hurried down the hall, to the usually closed Lyuda’s door. Thoughts buzzed in her head, without taking shape but content with general notions—cannibals, someone killed her, wonder if Ilya’s all right.

  The woman lay in her bed, and one could think her sleeping if it wasn’t for the wide gash in her neck, an extra mouth, blooming in a red obscene flower across her neck. The mattress was soaked with dark blood, but they could probably still sell it, or give it to someone who needs a bed, even if blood-soaked.

  The edges of the wound were torn and raw, and there were definitive toothmarks. Svetlana tried to imagine a serrated knife that would leave a cut like that, but the mind rejected the possibility. She folded a doily from the bed table into a dense white rectangle, and stuffed it into the wound, and watched the doily turn slowly pink.

  6.

  It is important for a city in crisis, no matter how terrible, to maintain elements of normalcy, something people can anchor their sanity to. This is why there’s still theater and musical concerts, and this is why when Ilya invites her to see a play, Svetlana accepts. She insists that the boys should come too, and Ilya buys them tickets to see Les Miserables—Gavroche is being played by a middle-aged woman, but otherwise the play is fine, and the boys seem to enjoy themselves. Both have been subdued lately and laugh little. They don’t even tease when Ilya comes home with them again.

  This time, Svetlana is asleep—a sick heavy nightmare sleep— before her head even touches the pillow.

  And as I tell you this, I know that you’re wondering the same thing that I and my brother, although still too young at nine, wondered about: why didn’t she have any suspicions? I have my own theory. I do think that some facts are merely too terrible to consider. Love complicates everything further.

  She has nightmares about Ilya leaning over her, his chest pressing on top of hers like a tombstone, stilling her heart, stealing her breath, “My heart,” he says. “I hold you in my hands. For the sake of your brothers…”

  Mother is dead next morning.

  7.

  Svetlana decided now that she was the head of the household, the boys would have to go. She bundled up Yasha and Vanya—or rather, Vanya, my brother, and me, and gave us all the food she managed to scavenge in these past days. She gave us our clothes, wrapped in blankets, and we stood in the hallway like two tiny transients. “They will be taking more children out this morning,” she told us as we walked side by side with her. “Or maybe the next. You must go though, while the ice is still strong. We’ll go by Valya’s house, see if Olga Petrovna would send her out too.” All the while, her gaze cast about, looking for Ilya, but he failed to show up that day. Who can tell why.

  None of us mentioned the dead kindergarten teacher and our mother, lying side by side on the kitchen table, with their windpipes torn out and gnawed raw.

  Olga Petrovna, superstitious as she was (Svetlana said to the children that it was because she was from a village, not city-born like us), crossed herself. “When you take them to be buried,” she said, “don’t take them out of the door—go through a wall or a window. And don’t carry the bodies along the roads.”

  Svetlana sighed. “We live on the third floor, we can’t just toss them out of the window. And it’s silly anyway.”

  “Not when an upyr takes a life. Do you want your mother to become one of the cursed? Do you want the devil to take her?”

  “There’s no such thing as upyr,” Svetlana said, and paced back and forth across the cold corridor while the children waited, huddled, by the entryway. “Or devil, for that matter.”

  “Who gnawed them then?”

  “Cannibals broke in.”

  “And left the bodies?”

  “Someone startled them.” Svetlana froze to the spot. “I think it was my friend who did—he…”

  Olga Petrovna didn’t need to hear the rest. “Dear child!” she cried. “Daughter! You brought a stranger home? Do you even know what he is?”

  “Just a young man,” Svetlana said. “A handsome fellow. In any case, I only came to ask if Valya would like to come with us. I want to send the boys out, by the Road of Life. I know there are bombs, but at least they have a chance of getting out.”

  Olga Petrovna nodded slowly. “Better than them dying here, of hunger or worse.” She gave Svetlana a piercing look. “Listen to me, daughter, and if there’s anything you’d do, do this one thing: find out where your handsome fellow goes when you’re not with him.”

  “How’d I do that?”

  “By cunning.” Olga Petrovna hobbled into the darkened cave of her living room, and returned momentarily with a ball of uneven black yarn. “Next time you see him, you tie that string to the hem of his coat. And then you follow along. I’ll go get Valya ready now.”

  Svetlana took the children to the rallying point, where they waited for hours in a long, silent throng of children, old people, a few pregnant women. It was almost dark when the crowd started to move and the engines revved up ahe
ad. Svetlana hugged the boys and cried over them and made them promise to be good and to write and, after the war is over, to find her. Just as she kissed the boys tearfully goodbye, a woman—short, squat, in military boots and a man’s jacket—walked up to her.

  “We’re taking the smallest ones today,” and motioned at Yasha (me). “Bring him back next week—they promise more trucks then. Today we have no space for him now, just the little ones.”

  “Please,” Svetlana clutched her hands to her chest. “He’s just one boy.”

  The woman nodded. “And there’s no place for him. Do you know how many we turned away today? We’re taking the small ones though.” Her large mittened hands swallowed Vanya’s and Valya’s, and the three of them were gone.

  Svetlana and Yasha returned home.

  The girls from the neighborhood—the same ones that were on air-raid duty with Svetlana—helped her dress the two dead women and to cover up the gashes on their throats. They took them on a sled and carted them to the site of the nearest common grave, near Nekropol. The earth was too hard to dig, and they left them with the rest of the bodies awaiting burial, alone in the dark.

  Only two of them in the large communal apartment now, and barely any wood. They sat together under the covers, their breath white mist, shimmering in the darkness like anti-materialist ghosts. They sleep with their arms around each other, secretly grateful for a warm body to hold.

  8.

  Many children died while evacuating. Many survived, and were placed into orphanages around the country. Most went to school at their new places of residence, and lied about where they were from and what their fathers died of (a living father was a rare treasure, and yet a potential embarrassment—he better be a war hero.) Most of the fathers died in the war, best if it happened in Germany or in the Stalingrad battle. Having a father who died in the siege is a liability, and this is why most of the siege kids lie—having a father who starved to death is only a step above a father who was executed for being the enemy of the people. On the playground, every father is a war hero. Some kids are lucky enough to have fathers and brothers who are war heroes, and they never fail to mention the fact. I hope that Vanya learned the correct lies quickly.

  9.

  The next morning, Svetlana tells Yasha to sleep and not to open the door to anyone, and leaves for the factory. She is not sure if it’s her shift or if the factory is even open, but she goes anyway. She is relieved and terrified to discover Ilya waiting just outside.

  “Where are your brothers?” he asks.

  “Gone. Evacuated, the boys and Valya.” (She is hoping that Yasha is not looking out of the window, like he often does— seeing her coming and going. She is too afraid to look herself and betray him.) “I have to be at the factory.”

  “I’ll walk you,” he says.

  She wraps her arm under his, gingerly, and they walk arm in arm, step in step, in silence. The sun is out and the river sparkles, and all the while her fingers are working, working, to wind the ragged black thread Olga Petrovna gave her through the buttonhole of his sleeve.

  He doesn’t seem to notice as they walk, or even as he kisses her goodbye, his mouth moist and cold, lips liver-colored, pressed against hers for one suffocating moment, and then he is gone— walking away toward the embankment, the left bank. He never even noticed that the factory gates were closed.

  She waits for the black thread to unravel and lets it slack as he disappears from view. Then, she follows him. They walk again, step in step, separated by a length of black woolen thread. It hangs like silk of a monstrous spiderweb, like a curving meridian line—she imagines it as a thick jagged crack in white ice, running across lake Ladoga, separating her from the evacuated and the saved, a thick woolen thread, fuzzy and itchy, that connects her to him without ever touching. Cleaved, in both senses of the word, along the embankment.

  He leaves the embankment near the Admiralty, and goes west. West and west and west, crossing streets and bridges, and Svetlana is so busy keeping the thread in her hand not too taut, not too slack, that she doesn’t even notice the names of streets and rivers—Moika, Fontanka, all the same.

  She doesn’t know this place, and the thread is no longer pulling or unraveling. She is looking at a low metal fence. “What is this?” she asks herself, but a passerby mistakes her bewilderment for curiosity.

  “Volkovskoe Lutheran Cemetery,” he says, and wraps his wind-chapped face in the wide collar of his thickly padded canvas coat. “Only they’re not burying anyone—the ground’s frozen solid.”

  “I know,” Svetlana whispers, and follows the thread, along the fence, through the ornate grate. Her feet are numb and her fingers tingle as if it’s a live wire, not a woolen thread she’s holding. She follows it, unyielding and fateful like the needle of the compass, until the thread snakes across already frozen clumps of dirt, strewn about as if thrown by hooves and paws, and disappears under a tombstone, empty of any names save for a lone star in its left upper corner.

  10.

  Svetlana did not remember her way back home. Even the hunger retreated, giving place to profound, impossible resignation. It was the second time that year that her world tumbled upside down, and everything that she knew was right was proven to be otherwise: first, it was her secret, unexamined belief that she would be all right that came to an abrupt end in August; now it was… she refused to name it even in her mind, no matter how the imagined Olga Petrovna tried to claw through her thoughts, through the erected mental wall of distracting thoughts and resonant determination to not think about that, you mustn’t think about that, you mustn’t think that word, you mustn’t.

  “Call it by its name,” Olga Petrovna insisted, her face clear in Svetlana’s mind despite her decisively squinted shut eyes. “It will destroy him.”

  No, not destroy. Make him human.

  “And then what?” Svetlana wondered aloud. No one ever seemed to know the answer, it seemed—once you made those creatures human, you killed them, the wisdom went. Otherwise, you couldn’t touch them. But could you let them live?

  “I’m hungry,” Yasha said the moment she got home. “Can I go where Vanya went? They say there’s food there.”

  “Soon,” she promised. “Come now, we’ll sleep and the time will go by faster. Before you know it, you’ll be in some village in Ukraine, and it’ll be warm, and they will have fresh milk in clay jars, and plums and apples and cherries you can pick off the tree.”

  “And bread and butter,” Yasha sighed.

  11.

  Human arms are a thin thing, especially the arms of a girl starved half to death—such a trifling thing, such an easy barrier to bypass. It didn’t matter how much Svetlana hugged Yasha to her in her sleep—just to keep him, until next day, next week, when maybe they would have a place for a larger boy who would soon be large enough for labor, for digging graves in frozen cemeteries and for hauling buckets of sand onto the roofs.

  She woke up because the heavy suffocating presence on her chest and the emptiness of her arms, the sticky trace of something cold on her fingers, and a loud, wet chewing. Soup and dumplings, she thought in her fogged-up mind, bread and butter and treacle, before she heard cartilage and a long whistle of a windpipe suddenly too wide for breath.

  It was so dark that even with her eyes wide she couldn’t see—but she shut them again, and covered her face with her sticky hands, and screamed, “Upyr, upyr, leave him be!” as loud as she could. In the dark, she flailed, looking for something to hold onto, but there was only darkness seeping between her fingers.

  12.

  It takes one a while to get used to talking about oneself in third person. I am Yasha, and yet not entirely. I sleep in the Volkovskoe Lutheran Cemetery, even though we’re not Lutherans or even German. I wish Ilya was here with me, to explain things, to tell me why I was always so cold and why my own sister wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t call me by my name.

  That night, he didn’t eat me up like he did my mother—he left just enough
of a soul glimmer that I woke up under the pile of frozen bodies and clawed my way to the surface. Even though people were hollow-eyed and starving, many wanted to take in an orphan, so I survived without him.

  I only learned what happened to him a few days later, when there was an air raid. What that old bat, Olga Petrovna, said about upyr becoming human for a while was true. What she didn’t know was that once human, the upyr would seek death—he would go to the roof of some apartment building and wait for the German bombs among the giggling, gossiping girls and the buckets of sand. He would die a hero’s death, he would cover an incendiary bomb with his own body and save everyone, and the newspaper would write about him. People would know his name.

  And so I wait by my sister’s door and beg her, I beg her for the word and a shot from my father’s pistol, so that Vanya could finally have a hero for a brother.

  Other Books By Ekaterina Sedia

  Novels

  The Secret History of Moscow

  The Alchemy of Stone

  The House of Discarded Dreams

  Heart of Iron

  Anthologies

  Paper Cities

  Running with the Pack Bewere the Night

  Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top Bloody Fabulous

  Wilful Impropiety

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  “A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas” © 2008 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in The Endicott Studio Journal of Mythic Arts, August 2008.

  “Citizen Komarova Finds Love” © 2009 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Exotic Gothic 3 (ed. Danel Olson), Ash-Tree Press, 2009.

  “Tin Cans” © 2010 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Haunted Legends (eds. Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas), Tor, 2010.

  “One, Two, Three” © 2009 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Hatter Bones (ed. Jeremy Needle), Evil Nerd Empire, 2009.

  “You Dream” © 2010 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Dark Faith (eds. Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon), Apex Publications, 2010.