“You smell funny,” the girl says, spinning around and pinning the man with her stare.
“Can’t be helped,” he says, smiling shyly still. “You can’t help it if your teeth are crooked, can you?”
The girl frowns, clamps her lips shut, and stays quiet until they arrive to a three-storied brick building. “It’s just me and grandma now,” she says. “Would you like to come in?”
“Some other time,” Svetlana says. “I have to take care of my brothers, but maybe I’ll bring them by one day, so you can play together.”
“Tomorrow?” Light grey eyes up, expectant. Impatient, but how could one not be? It would be foolish to plan ahead for more than a day.
“Tomorrow,” Svetlana says.
“I’m Valya,” the girl calls out of the cavernous mouth of the entry way, disappearing from view.
“Svetlana,” Svetlana calls back.
“Ilya,” the man next to her echoes.
Things one needs to extinguish incendiary bombs: buckets of sand, blankets, mittens, several giggling girls. They drag the heavy buckets with effort, heaving them with all the might of their thin shoulders, the shoulder blades and the collarbones straining like twigs under the weight of encasing ice. Their legs wobble in the boot shafts too big for them, like pestles in mortars. And still they laugh and gossip, and stare at the sky.
It’s blackout, and from the roof one can see nothing but blackness. I imagine it sometimes, through Svetlana’s eyes, straining in this absolute void. Human eyes are made to see, and panic sets in when they can’t, and still they strain, trying to reach through the infinite distance of blackness into some pinprick of light. It is so dark here, like under ground. I imagine it would be like this, there.
Ilya shows up, unbidden and silent, and the girls titter more and then silence, after they notice how he follows Svetlana, how he’s always helping her with her bucket even though she tells him not to. How both of them avoid accidentally touching their hands together.
He shows up every night they keep watch on the roof ever since. Svetlana doesn’t know how he knows—he just appears and sits by her when they rest, or helps with the buckets. They have enough sand up there to extinguish a hellfire, Svetlana thinks, if there was such a thing—but she’s a materialist, and knows that there isn’t.
He also comes by in the mornings when she goes out to wait in a breadline or to work at the factory, or to take the boys to visit Valya, the girl they walked home on the day of their first meeting. He never goes in with them though, but waits outside, through the cold, through the wind.
Valya’s grandmother, Olga Petrovna, is old enough to die soon even without the hunger. She often cries that she’s not strong enough to refuse her portion entirely, even though she only eats half and gives the rest to her granddaughter, and to Svetlana’s brothers when they happen along. Sometimes she gives Svetlana jewelry to take to the black market. “Get some bread. Don’t bring it here though,” she says, “or we’ll eat it all up. Take it to the hospital across the river. They need it.”
Svetlana does as she is told, and Ilya follows, asking for nothing but mute solidarity. He refuses food when offered, but doesn’t seem to suffer as much as Olga Petrovna does.
Olga Petrovna has stories and theories. She tells Svetlana that there’s food in the city, only Zhdanov and other party officials keep it to themselves; she says that there’s grain in Vavilov’s Institute, the Genofond scientists keep all kinds of wheat and rice and every grain known to man. She also doesn’t think cannibals are really cannibals. “You’re young,” she tells Svetlana. “You don’t even know who upyri are.”
“I know,” Svetlana whispers, eyes downcast. The very word, Upyr, makes her skin crawl, materialism notwithstanding. There was never a Russian child not scared half to death by the stories of those dead who rose from their graves and ate the living.
“You just remember,” Olga Petrovna says, “if they ever come for you, all you have to do is to call them for what they are. ‘Upyr,’ you must say, and he’ll turn into a man—for a little bit, at least.”
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?
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.
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.