The Eyeless

THE EYELESS

WHEN SHE CAME TO, sluggishly and reluctantly, she found herself lying on the family’s shabby sofa. Andrei was sitting by her side. A sparse dawn bled through the window.

“Mama,” she whispered.

“She went after them,” he said. “I told her not to . . . It’s not a good idea. But she would not listen.”

Svetlana stared at him. His face looked dusty. She noticed, distantly, a half-healed scar on his cheek.

“They took my Dad, too,” he was saying under his breath. “A month before the war started. They said he was a cosm . . . cosmop?”

“Kosmop,” she said. “It’s a kind of vermin.”

“This is what they said. I can’t even pronounce it.”

“My father is innocent,” Svetlana said dully. “It was not . . . it wasn’t him. Somebody made a mistake. I need to go and talk to them. Now!”

She tried to get up but fell back onto the sofa again. Her head was spinning, blue spots rotating in her field of vision.

“Hey, hey,” Andrei pushed her back.

“You need to eat, little sister,” he said. “I’ll boil water, make tea. You just rest.”

Svetlana lay back and closed her eyes. In the kitchen, Andrei was banging pots and pans, looking for loose tea.

“In the tin,” she yelled.

He came back into the living room, holding a battered tin, shaking his head in admiration.

“Real stuff,” he said. “Real Chinese tea. Haven’t smelled it since I was a kid.”

“What’s ‘Chinese’?” Svetlana asked. She was not really interested but needed a diversion. Anything to make her forget that her father . . . No! She squeezed her eyes shut, willing it all to go away, willing to wake up and find herself back in yesterday when the world had made sense.

“Where does this come from?” he asked, lifting the tin decorated with a discolored picture of women in red skirts gathering tea.

“The South. Swamp Country. We used to trade with them before they went bad. Now, I’m not sure.”

Andrei shook his head. A vertical frown cut his forehead, as if he was figuring something out.

“Dead,” he said, speaking to himself. “A bullet through the head . . . Quick death. So quick I did not notice . . . So that fat priest was right! There is something after death.”

“You are not dead,” Svetlana said impatiently. “Come on, don’t you think I would know a mertvetz, a former person, from a living man? We did an autopsy on one in class and I got an A. My teacher said that I should go on to the POP Institute after I finish school because I’m so good at sniffing out the Enemy, but I told her I wanted to be a nurse.”

A wave of grief and disbelief, as palpable as a slap in the face, drove the words back into her mouth. So good that she could not see that her own father was . . . No!

Svetlana collapsed on the sofa, wailing. The sound of her voice was shockingly loud in the hushed apartment and she raised it even more, forcing the air through her scratchy throat, as if the sheer volume of her inarticulate cry could force the universe to respond to her, to make everything right. But the universe was silent.

When her sobs died down, she saw Andrei put a steaming mug of strong black tea and a plate with a heel of rye bread smeared with a thick layer of butter on the table before her. She was too nauseous to eat, but she was touched by his efforts. Her father never prepared food; it was a woman’s job. Mama took care of cooking when she came home from her factory shift. Svetlana helped occasionally but Mama was reluctant to let her into the kitchen, wanting her daughter to focus on her studies.

She drank obediently, wincing at the cloying sweetness—it tasted like he had dumped several tablespoons of sugar into the tea. Andrei sipped from her father’s chipped mug.

“All right,” he said, “so if I am not dead, where am I?”

“Loadstone Rock.”

“Is it your city’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds familiar,” Andrei muttered, “but how the hell did I get here? Anyway, that’s a factory town, right?”

“Of course.”

“What are you making here?”

“Weapons,” Svetlana said proudly. “Weapons of light. To fight the Enemy. To build the future.”

Andrei was staring wistfully at the bread and she realized he had not made any snack for himself. She pushed the plate toward him.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Little girls have to eat.”

“I’m not little!” she fired back, her face reddening. “I’m fourteen. Three candles already.”

“What does that mean?”

“You start with one candle when you are seven. Two when you are ten. Three—from thirteen to seventeen. And if you are really good, really dedicated to the fight, you join the Light Patrols after that. Girls, too.”

Andrei nodded. The tension in his face was draining away as if he was beginning to make peace with the holes in his memory. Svetlana was glad. She had already decided that he could not be of the Enemy: he was too kind, too solid, too reassuring. In the world that was so crazily off-kilter, he seemed to be the one real thing remaining.

But perhaps he had been affected by the Enemy? This must be it. Damagers! Yes. Svetlana suddenly remembered one of the definitions in her lost notebook. The teacher had been talking about a new kind of the Enemy that had been spotted in the factory precinct. Called vrediteli or damagers, these were fat colonies of pallid worms that had the ability to imitate, albeit imperfectly, a human being. Stuffed into a business suit, their swarming heads covered by a wide-brimmed hat, they could pass for a manager or a supervisor as long as one did not look too closely. When they approached a vulnerable piece of machinery, they would fall apart and crawl all over the precious gear, sliming the bright metal, clogging the moving parts, and bringing production to a standstill. As opposed to most Enemy kinds that infiltrated the city from the Wastelands outside, damagers seemed to breed in the heart of Loadstone Rock, which made them all the more dangerous. There was some talk of their being able to cast a kind of glamour over the workers that made them sluggish and confused. What if Andrei had been exposed to something like this? The Patrol had not touched him; he was human, after all.

Then she remembered who the Patrol had actually taken away, and denial and incomprehension crashed over her once again.

Andrei was busy rearranging his beat-up backpack. He had taken out the curved black thing that he had used yesterday to kill the Fist and was lovingly polishing it with a piece of cloth. Its black oily sheen drew Svetlana’s eyes. She had never seen anything like that but somehow it seemed like a counterpart to the electric torches of the Light Patrols: dark where theirs were radiant, but equally deadly against the Enemy. She reached out, gingerly touched the warm metal.

“Careful,” Andrei’s tone was sharp, but then he smiled apologetically. “No, sorry! Girls can shoot, too, I know. I heard of a sniper named Lyudmila at Stalingrad; she had more notches than most guys.”

“Notches?”

“For dead fritzes.”

Svetlana did not understand but somehow his admission that she could do whatever it was that he had done with this strange object spurred her into action. She swung her legs over the edge of the sofa and stood up.

“Come on.” Andrei put his hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back. “Where are you going?”

“Speak-House.”

“Is this where they took your Dad?”

She was unable to say “yes”, her face flaming with shame. Speak-House used to mean protection and reassurance. Now she would have to go there as a disgraced supplicant, tainted by association with the Enemy.

“Don’t go,” Andrei said. “It’s useless. My mother and sister, they used to stand in line for hours. They never saw him. They brought food and gave it to the guards who ate it. And we starved.”

“I must,” Svetlana insisted. “There was a mistake. There must have been.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You saw.”

She looked away.

“Mama is there,” she said after a pause. “I have to bring her home.”

Andrei was about to say something else when footsteps were heard outside and the front door rattled.

Svetlana rushed to the door and collided with something that felt like a steel bar. It took her a moment to realize it was Andrei’s outstretched arm, corded with sinews and covered by the rough fabric that smelled of makhorka tobacco. His other arm whipped up, and his hand clapped against her mouth. She was as helpless to move as a mouse in a trap.

“Shhh.”

A rain of blows fell onto the door. Svetlana’s family lived in a two-room apartment on the ground floor of a four-story building. The front door opened straight into the living room. There was a short communal hall outside, and the building had a sturdy entrance door, but it was never locked, so whoever was outside could have walked in straight from the street. The only door in the entire building that was always kept bolted and locked was the one leading to the stairwell.

“Quiet,” Andrei whispered again.

Svetlana redoubled her struggle. Her suspicions came flooding back. Perhaps it was Mama coming back and the soldier was trying to keep her away.

No, Mama would have a key, and a Patrol would just break through.

Another wave of blows. They were urgent but curiously uncoordinated, as if a whole bunch of people were hammering on the door simultaneously, oblivious of each other. Not a Patrol, then.

“Don’t answer,” Andrei hissed in her ear.

“Enemies.”

The idea that the Enemy would knock was ridiculous beyond words, but Svetlana had no time to respond. The door shuddered and popped off its hinges. The group of people crowding the entrance hall was smeared into a gray mass by the pale winter light. They heaved like a field of weeds, eager to burst through, but with so many trying to do it at the same time, they got in each other’s way.

Andrei swore and let go of Svetlana as he fumbled for his fire-stick. She stood still, trying to assimilate what she was seeing.

***

This was no Enemy raid. The people who had just broken into her apartment were perfectly familiar. Even in the tangle of shadows that swarmed over them, she recognized the faces of their neighbors.

Uncle Dima, Dad’s coworker who had often lingered in their kitchen over a stein of kvas until it was too late to go back home and he had to snore the night away on the floor in a nest of old blankets, much to the indignation of his wife, Aunt Xenia.

Aunt Sonya, the school’s imperious cleaner.

A thin woman with a face like a hatchet that Svetlana had seen in the bakery, arguing with the salesman over a squashed jam bun.

Misha, her good-for-nothing schoolmate.

And . . . and Tattie, her best friend, her small fists clenched above her head as she surged into the room, colliding with the sharp angle of the dining table. The collision sent her sprawling, and the rest of them, rushing after her, tripped and tumbled into a pile of flailing limbs. It was so clownish that Svetlana could have laughed, believing it was all a weird communal performance put on for her entertainment. Except that she finally saw what caused these people to flounder, stumble, and fall like newborn kittens.

Kittens were blind because their eyes were covered by a film. The eyes of the people in the room were covered by spiky black splotches that spread over their faces like ink-stains on a piece of blotting paper.

Tattie crawled from under the heap of the adults and surged toward Svetlana who whimpered and backed away. Her friend’s dark plaits bounced down her back, one of them unraveling as the blue ribbon that held it together came loose. The ribbon was familiar, and so was Tattie’s white-aproned school uniform, creased as if she had slept in it. But with those horrible blots covering her upper face, she looked as alien as an Enemy. They seethed and squirmed as if they were alive: spiderish sea stars drinking away human eyes.

Andrei stepped forward, raising his Nagant.

“Back off,” he yelled. “Freeze or I shoot!”

“Stop!” Svetlana cried, shaking off her paralysis. She had seen what the thing could do. No matter what had happened to her friends and neighbors, she did not want them blown to pieces. But it was too late.

Tattie’s outstretched hands brushed Andrei’s military tunic and hooked into the fabric. He pushed her away. Meanwhile, the hatchet-faced woman zoomed in on the sounds of struggle and blundered toward them, her splayed fingers tasting air like a colony of worms. The rest of them did not bother to get up. They just crawled toward the soldier.

The shot was deafening in the confined room. Tattie spun around like a top, her white apron blossoming with a red flower. She crashed to the floor and lay still.

It had no effect on the rest of the blind people who kept advancing. Uncle Dima creeped over the girl’s body as if it were as insignificant as a speed bump. But the splotches on her face reacted by detaching themselves. Two sooty, spiky, star-shaped patches slipped off smoothly and disappeared into the massing shadows on the floor, leaving behind two deep black holes where Tatttie’s hazel eyes had been.

Andrei kicked Uncle Dima’s ribs, aiming his army-booted foot so unerringly that the crawling man was almost lifted off the ground and crashed into the hatchet-faced woman. The rest paused, disoriented. They seemed raw and unused to their blindness.

Andrei scooped Svetlana up in his arms, jumped over the squirming barricade of bodies, and ran to the door. A hand closed over his ankle, and he stomped on it. At the entrance, he dropped Svetlana and beat at his trouser leg where a black patch tried to attach itself. He tore it off and trampled it into slime.

They rushed through the hall and exited into the pale light of winter morning, the white sky as brittle as glass. Svetlana’s breath steamed and her lungs seized with a brutal jab of cold. She only had her house dress on, her padded coat, cap and mittens remaining in the apartment.

But the cold was the least of her worries when she saw what was happening outside. Their street was swarming with people.

On a regular day, men and women would be walking to the factories, singing and laughing, exchanging jokes, eager to resume their work. Children would march through the streets in orderly columns on their way to school, waving flags of Light or, on special occasions, burning torches. A Patrol would show up occasionally and people would jostle and crowd to come closer to the stern-faced young men and women in their dusty overcoats and star-crowned helmets to yell their appreciation of their fight, and to press into their hands home-baked goodies and, in summer, flowers. Older people who stayed home to take care of babies too young for the crèche would also step out when the weather was good, to breeze in the atmosphere of good cheer and common will that pervaded the city of Loadstone Rock.

What was happening now looked like a nightmare version of such a regular day.

The people were a chaotic mass flooding the street like a military parade gone awry. They pushed and shoved. They shouted, but instead of uplifting slogans, what issued from their mouths was a stream of broken syllables, all the more terrifying because it occasionally coalesced into a meaningful denunciation of the Enemy. Their faces were blinkered with squirming black sea-stars, some tiny like an eye-patch, some so big that they covered everything but the screaming mouth. They were blind but they moved forward with the tenacity of migrating caterpillars.

Andrei whirled around but the flood of eyeless people was coming from both ends of the street. He looked up to where the apartment blocks jutted into the colorless sky.

“Up,” he yelled in Svetlana’s ear and pulled her back into the entryway of her building where the always-locked door to the stairwell loomed threateningly in the dusk.

He pushed the door, but it did not budge. The first eyeless scouts were now squeezing into the hall, colliding with, and momentarily hampered by, those who were crawling out of Svetlana’s apartment. Andrei pulled out his Nagant but holstered it back. A shot would only reveal their location.

Shaking off her paralysis, Svetlana darted toward the stairwell door and groped under the filthy rug on the floor, through the accumulation of debris and dead cockroaches. Her fingers closed upon the chunky key.

She fumbled with the lock while Andrei kicked away the grasping hands. The eyeless were as strong as they had been before whatever had befallen them had wrought the horrible transformation. They were getting better at coordination, as if the shock was wearing off. Before the overwhelming human wave could drown them, the door swung open and Andrei and Svetlana dove in, slamming and locking it behind their backs.