The Speak House

THE SPEAK HOUSE

THE STREETS WERE empty the next morning as they trudged through the shivery frostbite of the crystal air toward the Speak-House. Svetlana was so cold that even her thoughts seemed frozen in her head. She clung to one certainty—she needed to talk to the people in charge and tell them what she had seen. Hopefully, then her parents would be restored to her, and everything would be as it used to be.

But what about Andrei? He marched by her side, his face set in a frown. He was her witness. If her story of the eyeless was doubted, he could lend his support. Would he be believed? Wouldn’t he be suspected of being in the service of the Enemy? How could she know for sure that he was not? Okay, he could not be an Enemy himself; something deep inside her insisted on his humanity, but what if he was a foreign infiltrator of some kind?

When they had woken up in the office, she had been unable to move, her limbs seized with the paralysis of chill. The fire had gone out in the night and the windows were painted with rime. When Andrei pulled on his boots, the newspapers he used to pad them crackled like frozen autumn leaves. He tossed them aside. Svetlana picked one up. A large headline blared at her: “Victory in Operation Kutuzov!” Another one: “How many Hitlerites did you Kill?” Still another: “Under the Leadership of Comrade Stalin . . . ” She could not understand it. It was in her own language and yet made no sense. She was about to confront Andrei when he picked up the newspapers and shoved them into the stove where he had managed to light another fire. At the time she had been grateful for the feeble gust of warmth; now she questioned whether he had done it to prevent her from asking questions.

Svetlana bit her lip. Her rational mind insisted she should be suspicious of this man with his strange weapons and stranger words. At the same time, she trusted him as much as she trusted herself, but she did not know why. Paradoxically, this increased her self-doubt. Could one be of the Enemy without knowing it? Schoolbooks said nothing about such anomalies.

They had not eaten for twenty-four hours. Andrei asked about canteens. They had one in each neighborhood, of course, but Svetlana was determined not to listen to her stomach as the urgency of her parents’ situation drove her to the Speak-House.

“They’ll feed us,” she said.

On the other hand, what if they were too busy with the eyeless to listen to her?

As they walked, she saw that normalcy was grudgingly reasserting itself. A straggling line of workers passed by, their faces drooping but not disfigured by black patches. They looked at Svetlana suspiciously and she had to resist the impulse to tell them she was not playing hooky from school.

A Patrol barreled down the street without paying them any attention.

They passed a canteen. The door swung open and they were enveloped in a cloud of steam smelling of cabbage pies and buckwheat porridge. Svetlana’s mouth filled with saliva. She would have resisted the temptation, she told herself, but Andrei stepped in and she followed.

Inside, a plump woman in a stained apron was stirring a large pot on the counter. Several people sat on the benches at the trestle tables, but the morning rush was over. Some glanced at Svetlana and Andrei with dull curiosity. Everybody seemed tired and out of sorts this morning.

Belatedly, Svetlana realized that she had left her ration card in the apartment, but Andrei confidently pulled out a worn wallet with documents and showed it to the plump woman. Svetlana caught a glimpse of the logo that included a strange curved symbol alongside a familiar red star.

“Sergeant Andrei Kurchenko of the 50th Army, 17th Rifle Division,” he said smartly. “Here for some R&R.”

The woman did not even look at the paperwork. Her face was the color of putty, fat cheeks sagging.

“We don’t accept those here,” she said. “Only the new cards issued by the House.”

Andrei’s face flushed dangerously:

“I’m killing fritzes on your behalf, mother,” he bellowed. “Defending the home front! And you are telling me I can’t have a bowl of soup?”

Svetlana stepped forward to defuse the situation.

“He is a soldier,” she said. “Fighting the Enemy. We are on our way to the House! But we are hungry. I . . . I lost my card . . . we had a commotion yesterday . . . ”

She trailed off, unsure how to describe yesterday’s nightmare. The woman turned away.

“Get a new card,” she said indifferently, “and come back.”

“What new card?” Svetlana cried in frustration. “What are you talking about?”

She turned to the people on the benches.

“Comrades,” she appealed to them. “Maybe you don’t know me but my parents are workers in the munition factory. This man has just come back from defending our borders. He is a soldier! How can you deny food to a soldier?”

The choking sensation in her throat warned her she would burst out in tears and she stopped, unwilling to be seen as a hysterical little girl. One of the men on the benches got up. He looked like a human basset hound with hanging jowls and puppy-sad eyes.

“Come on, Tamara,” he addressed the fat woman, “give them some chow. On my card.”

Tamara shook her head.

“You know I can’t do it,” she said in the same monotonous voice. “I’ll be arrested, and you’ll be too. The Patrols are out in the streets with orders to check everybody’s papers. Let them go to the House and get new ration cards, and then they can come back here.”

The basset-hound man shrugged helplessly, as if to say, “I tried.”

Svetlana turned to him. “Thank you, Comrade,” she said politely. “Can you please show me your new ration card, so we’ll know what to ask for?”

The basset-hound man pulled it out from the pocket of his oil-stained overcoat. At first sight, it looked no different from the cards Svetlana and her family used to have—the man’s name, number and blurry picture, surmounted by the symbols of the Motherland: the electric torch, the loudspeaker, and the red star.

Except the star was no longer red.

Instead of the familiar five-pointed symbol, the upper right corner of his laminated card bore a sooty design that looked like a tiny sea-star with spiky arms. It was slightly bulging, standing off the laminated cardboard, and as Svetlana looked, it seemed to twitch.

She quickly thrust the card back at the man and pulled Andrei out of the canteen.

***

They stood in front of the Speak-House, feeling as tiny as a couple of mice lost in a granary. The House dwarfed them as it dwarfed every visitor. It was a ten-story concrete behemoth, as wide as a city block, with rows of tiny square windows. Its central section was crowned by a fat tower with an electric star on top. Its beaten-bronze doors, decorated with a stylized design of beaming torches held by muscular hands, were easily as tall as a two-story building. Normally there would be two Patrolmen standing ceremonial guard by the doors. Today there was none.

Svetlana swallowed and stole a glance at Andrei who stared at the House, his face unreadable. She had only been inside once with a school tour. The grandeur of the building made her problems feel shameful and insignificant.

Mama was there. Dad was there—sick, perhaps, but he was her Dad nevertheless. And the solution to the eyeless epidemic was there. She marched forward, shivering in her crusty layers of castoffs, and touched the door handle.

The giant loudspeaker mounted above the door suddenly cleared its metallic throat.

“Comrades!” the loudspeaker announced in a pleasant masculine voice. “Stand by for an important announcement from the Council of Light.”

The loudspeaker was the reason for the House’s name. Svetlana knew that what was being said here and now was simultaneously broadcast in every school, factory, plant, and canteen in the city. Her schoolmates would be standing in assembly now, drinking in every word. She would give everything to be there again, surrounded by her friends, to return to the untroubled days when a lost notebook was the greatest of her worries.

Then she remembered Tattie’s blind face and the red flower on her chest and realized nothing was going to be the same again.

“Comrades!” the voice continued. “A new conspiracy of the Enemy has been unmasked by our heroic Patrol of Patrols. Those inhuman monsters managed to pollute with their stinking touch the sacred symbol of our struggle: the red star. POP has discovered that the red stars on your ration cards and other official documents have become a source of contagion, afflicting our innocent citizens and robbing them of their eyesight. Please come to the Speak-House as soon as possible to turn in your old documents and receive new ones. Our brave Patrolmen and women will pass through the city and remove and replace signs and slogans affected by the Enemy’s despicable wiles. We shall overcome this setback, as we have overcome all the others. Under the guidance of the Voice and with our eyes firmly set on Light, we shall triumph over the Enemy!”

A wave of canned applause and cheering washed over Svetlana and Andrei. She pushed the door, which moved easily, and they stepped into the House’s giant foyer.

The foyer was flooded with bright electric light. After the winter dimness outside, Svetlana was blinded. Blinking away tears, she looked around.

The blaze was generated by the electric sconces affixed to the marble columns that marched around the foyer. There were banners and slogans, rippling sheets of rainbow-colored fabric hanging from the domed ceiling far above their heads. There were several enormous pedestal-mounted loudspeakers. After a moment, she realized that though the foyer was quite big, it was not actually as huge as it had first appeared. The illusion of size was produced by the fact that the back wall was a mirror, doubling the bright space and reflecting their hesitant, ragged figures on the threshold.

There was a small desk, as incongruous as a toy. Sitting behind it was a stout, uniformed woman with permed gray hair, busily sorting through a stack of ration cards.

“Dear Comrade,” Svetlana approached her. “Could you please direct us to a representative of Patrol of Patrols? We have an urgent matter to discuss.”

The woman looked up at Svetlana who gasped and backed off. The woman’s eyes were in their proper places in her lined face but instead of pupils and irises, black spiderish stars twitched in the discolored whites.

The woman cleared her throat.

“Your cards,” she rasped. “Give them to me. Need to be exchanged.”

Svetlana was paralyzed with shock, but Andrei quickly grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

“This place is infested,” he whispered. “Traitors. Let’s go.”

“Cards,” The woman repeated shrilly.

A group of uniformed Patrolmen appeared on top of the wide marble stairs leading to the upper floors where Council offices and POP headquarters were located. They looked familiar and reassuring in their long leather overcoats and peaked star-decorated helmets, but a second glance confirmed Svetlana’s worst fears: their eyes squirmed with black spiders and the stars on their helmets were spiky and black instead of red.

“Halt!” their leader yelled as Svetlana and Andrei retreated toward the entrance doors. The Patrolmen pulled out their electric torches, and their beams, dazzling even in the brightness of the foyer, converged on the two. Svetlana automatically stopped. Electricity killed the Enemy, but everybody knew that it was harmless and even beneficial to true citizens. Perhaps now they would see that she was no Enemy spawn, that her father had been the victim of a terrible mistake . . .

Instead of caressing her with a touch of Light, the beams stabbed her like red-hot knives. Her layered clothes started smoking and a welt formed on her cheek where a beam glanced off.

“Run,” Andrei yelled.

Svetlana stood frozen, unable to overcome her disbelief that this was happening. Those were Patrols of Light who had protected her since she was a babe in her mother’s arms. Running away from them was like running away from herself.

The beams whipped at Andrei and his greatcoat caught fire. He shook it off and tossed it at the Patrolmen.

“Run! These are fritzes, fascists!”

The Patrolmen moved down the stairs and the black stars on their caps writhed as if alive. A thunderous crack deafened Svetlana and she saw one of the Patrolmen fall. Andrei gripped her arm, almost wrenching it out of the socket, and dragged her back into the street. Wrapped up in a cocoon of shock—even her father’s arrest had not been as traumatic as discovering the rot of treason in the Speak-House—Svetlana mutely followed him through the swirling snow that had started falling while they had been inside. She felt as if she were floating. Andrei was swearing as monotonously as a stuck gramophone, but Svetlana could not understand what he was saying. Her parents had been very strict about protecting her from the bad language spoken by shirkers, lazybones, and other anti-social elements.

“Where to?” Andrei hissed in her ear.

This did rouse her. She suddenly realized that he was the only thing left to her—this stranger whom she had met less than two days ago. She was not afraid of dying but losing him was intolerable.

She looked around and pulled him into the grated entryway of a courtyard. The oatmeal-colored veils of snow billowed out as indistinct figures rushed past them down the street. The snowfall obligingly erased their footprints.

There were no children playing in the courtyard as there would be on a regular day. The skeletal swings and the lopsided slide were covered with white snow-sheets as if in preparation for a move. This could be because the school was still in—or for a more sinister reason. Svetlana owned no timepiece, of course. Only Council officials did, but normally there was no need as loudspeakers blurted out news on the hour and there were large public clocks on all main intersections. But she had not heard any loudspeakers for quite some time and had forgotten to look at the clocks. Would she trust them in any case? In a world gone mad, what if time itself had been corrupted?

She no longer felt cold and she knew how dangerous that was. The whispering caress of the snowfall could lull them into death.

Taking Andrei by the hand, she led him through a succession of courtyards, linked to each other by dank passages smelling of urine and mice. Kids were told not to use those, but most did anyway. Gossip about girls snatched up by krovososy only added to the piquancy of disobedience. Svetlana wondered dully why she had ever thought that danger was exciting.

Andrei was still gripping his strange weapon that he called the Nagant but eventually holstered it when it became clear they were not being pursued.

“Running out of ammunition,” he muttered.

They came out of the labyrinth of courtyards close to Svetlana’s house. Through the thickening veils of gently falling snow, she could see that the street was empty.

Fearfully, she searched for Tattie’s body in the drifts but there was no sign a girl had been killed here.

Andrei took off his cap and put it on Svetlana’s head. Only then did she register that she must have lost her scarf somewhere and that wet clumps of snow were accumulating on top of her head, soaking her braid, and dripping cold moisture down her unprotected neck. The cap, too big for her, only added to her discomfort by sliding off and blocking her vision.

But this was what Mama or Dad would have done. Tears streamed down Svetlana’s face, but she no longer sobbed aloud—the world was quiet, white, and deadly, and in the snow-hush even the sound of crying could be their death sentence.

Andrei tugged her braid:

“There, there, little sister,” he whispered. “I won’t leave you, I promise.”