Moscow but Dreaming (30 page)

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.

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

“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.

“Zombie Lenin” © 2007 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Fantasy (ed. Sean Wallace), Prime Books, 2007.

“Ebb and Flow” © 2009 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Japanese Dreams (ed. Sean Wallace), Lethe Press, 2009. 

“There is a Monster Under Helen’s Bed” © 2008 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Clockwork Phoenix (ed. Mike Allen), Norilana Books, 2008.

“Yakov and the Crows” © 2006 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Book of Dark Wisdom, December 2006.

“Hector Meets the King” © 2007 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in New Writings in the Fantastic (ed. John Grant), Pendragon Press, 2007.

“Chapaev and the Coconut Girl” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia. Original to this volume.

“The Bank of Burkina Faso” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia. Original to this volume.

“Kikimora” © 2005 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Jabberwocky, July 2005.

“Munashe and the Spirits” © 2006 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in GrendelSong, September 2006.

“By the Liter” © 2008 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2008.

“A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets” © 2007 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Text: UR—The New Book of Masks (ed. Forrest Aguirre), Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2007.

“The Taste of Wheat” © 2007 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Clarkesworld, August 2007.

“Cherrystone and Shards of Ice” © 2009 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, April 2009.

“Seas of the World” © 2007 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Sybil’s Garage, May 2007.

“End of White” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Shotguns v. Cthulhu, Stone Skin Press, 2012.

“A Handsome Fellow” © 2012 by Ekaterina Sedia. Originally published in Asimov’s, October/November 2012.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of Paper Cities, Running with the Pack, Bewere the Night, and Wilful Impropriety. 

Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.