Not that it mattered nowadays. Hunger tended to obviate other needs
Her face was in keeping with her folk-song image: a rosebud mouth, silky black eyebrows under the sallow forehead, brown-nut eyes, now staring emptily at her killer.
She looked entirely human.
So he had killed a peasant girl. She was probably a collaborator, a servant of the Enemy. And yet it made him uneasy. He tried hard to avoid killing women and children unless it was absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, this mistake may have ultimately been to his advantage. He wanted to penetrate as far as possible into the nest before the commencement of his mission. Killing an Eater would bring the entire colony out in force. Killing a human probably would not.
He cast a wary glance at the farm. There was no movement there.
He sighed and looked at the girl again. If she had been from a poor family, she might have deserved life, after all.
“Forgive me, comrade,” he said and started down the slope.
Something looped around his ankle and yanked him off his feet. He was thrown onto the dusty path and dragged back, kicking and flailing, toward the dead girl.
He expected her to stand up like the Vourdalak of old-wives’ tales, but the body was as lifeless as before. The only part of her that was alive was her hair.
The braids slithered and coiled in the grass like the tentacles of a squid. One caught his ankle in a noose and was contracting, squeezing it in a vice until he felt the bone crack. Another stood up, a hairy serpent, and lashed him across the face with the force of a Cossack’s whip. He tasted blood from his broken lip.
He reached for his Mauser but the vertical braid snatched it from his hand and tossed it into the bushes. He was dragged almost on top of the girl whose flaccid inertness contrasted horribly with the frantic activity of her braids that danced and swished through the air, coming down upon him like a cat-o’-nine-tails, pummelling and blinding. He tried to catch one of them, but it was like trying to hold onto greased lightning. Dripping with rancid hair-oil, they slipped through his fingers.
The second braid managed to wind itself around his throat and started squeezing. His vision dimmed with blue spots. The other braid crawled up his body, pinning him down.
‘Shma…’ something mysteriously whispered in his head, an echo of the discarded past.
With a superhuman effort he managed to loosen the coils around his body and release one arm. Instead of tugging futilely at the hairy noose, he reached down to his worn belt and pulled out his knife. He stabbed the braid but the knife went harmlessly through the plaited strands of hair. The pressure on his windpipe increased until he was about to pass out.
He stabbed again, desperately, and this time the sharp edge of the knife caught the soiled white ribbon that held the braid together and ripped through it. And the pressure relaxed.
Coughing and sputtering, Yakov shook off the loosening coils and jumped to his feet. One braid puddled in the grass, a puffy mass of hair; the other still twitched and flailed. He raised his knife and slashed through the second ribbon. It was gristly and tough, not like fabric at all.
The dead body shuddered and came undone.
First the hands broke away and skittered daintily on their fingertips into the undergrowth. Legs humped away like giant inchworms. The pale belly-beast hissed at him from its hairy mouth, its single eye blinking furiously, but hopped into the bushes when he raised his knife again. The head, its human features disappearing into undifferentiated, swelling flesh, rolled and bounced down the slope like a ball. The only things left were the empty blood-stained clothes and the braids that had fallen apart into hunks of lifeless honey-blonde hair, probably the remnant of some Eater meal.
Massaging his bruised throat, Yakov considered his options. One glance toward the farm showed it as peaceful and deserted as before.
A trap?
But how could they entrap a prey that wanted to be trapped?
He took a long, deep breath and walked down the path towards the farm compound.
The smell of chicken bones in the pot, his mother, pale and scrawny and hugely pregnant, scurrying around to finish cooking before Shabbat… The sounds of a harsh jargon, forgotten but not forgiven, overlaid with the wailing of his baby brother…
He was eight when he was taken by the authorities to the military school, a community tax in the shape of a frightened child. He was sixteen when the war made him a soldier instead of a sacrifice. He was nineteen when the Revolution washed away the stain of his origin. He was twenty-five when the Eaters came. A handful of red-coloured dates that defined his life.
Strangely, though, he was not thinking of the night when he first confronted the Enemy, an unheard-of menace that he, the only survivor, stumbled through the night to report to the incredulous headquarters. They did not believe him; he was almost executed for fear-mongering. The firing squad was only halted when other reports started pouring in. But he was the first, and it put him under a special obligation to the Revolution. He had been a passive witness to the beginning of the assault; he would be an active agent in trying to bring about its end.
But his perverse memory refused to focus on the struggle and instead brought up a mélange of counter-revolutionary dross.
A woman lying in the congealing pool of blood, her belly slashed open by a bayonet…
He had seen the aftermath of a pogrom in his shtetl. He did not look too closely at the faces of the dead. But there was little chance he would recognise anybody. By this time he had lost touch with his family. He believed they had moved away but did not know where. He did not care. He had never forgiven them for handing him over. The fact that they had no choice only enhanced his contempt for their cowardice.
Fat mustachioed faces paling in fear when his squadron rode into town, their crude muzhik voices falling silent as he commanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice…
There were no Jews in the eyes of the Revolution. There were only comrades and enemies.
And now there were also Eaters.
He stood in the middle of the courtyard, listening. The farm was eerily silent. Had they eaten the livestock already? This would be terrible: the nascent commune he was organizing in the nearby village depended on the spoils of this operation for its survival. The winter was coming and the grain and meat requisitions had to be filled. They would be, but unless he found stores here, there would be few people alive in the spring to keep the commune going and to send more food to the hungry city.
Finally he heard the moo of a cow coming from the barn and breathed a sigh of relief.
Still, there was no sign of life in the house. Its door was ajar, opening into the darkness of the hallway like a parted mouth.
Slowly, he inched towards the door. There was a strange smell wafting from the hallway: a thin, sour reek that reminded him of the moonshine his peasants were brewing out of rotten straw and composted leaves. He would have to shoot Ivan to stop this shocking waste of resources.
He sidled through the doorway. The interior was very dim as the carved shutters in the main room were closed, admitting only a scatter of dusty rays. He glimpsed the shining ranks of icons in the corner and the white cloth on the table.
There was a loaf of bread in the middle of the cloth.
His mouth flooded with saliva, and he was distantly surprised that there was enough moisture left in his wasted body. The sour reek had disappeared, overpowered by the yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread, as unmistakable and enticing as the scent of a woman. He moved toward the table, tugged on the leash of hunger. He could almost see the thick crust with its pale freckles of flour and taste the brown tang of the rye…
He stopped. He had not come here to eat.
He came to be eaten.
Yakov lifted his hand to his mouth and bit deeply, drawing blood. The pain and the salty burn on his tongue centred him. He turned away from the table and walked out of the living room, back into the hallway where other rooms of
the house waited behind closed doors. The short distance he traversed from the table to the hallway felt like the longest walk of his life.
Abe gezunt!
His mother’s reedy voice, shrilling this incomprehensible phrase every time a new disaster fell upon the shtetl with the inevitability of bad weather. He had forgotten what it meant, had forgotten the language of his infancy altogether, deliberately expunged it from his memory. But sometimes falling asleep in the cold mud of the trenches, he would hear it again: as annoying and compelling as the buzz of a mosquito.
The military campaigns were also receding into the past. The civil war, with its familiar enemies, appeared in retrospect to have been a mere light rehearsal for the war with the Eaters. What were those haughty landlords, perfidious capitalists, and rapacious kulaks compared to the nauseating evil of the Enemy? Mere humans, easily comprehended and handily killed. It afforded him grim amusement to think about all the propaganda clichés he had once come up with to motivate his troops. The opposition were bloodsuckers, cannibals, shape-shifters, beasts in men’s clothing. Strange how these inflated metaphors were sober truths when applied to the Eaters!
Abe gezunt!
He shook his head, trying to get rid of the almost-audible voice. He had to focus on the task at hand. And the task was becoming more puzzling by the minute.
The farm was empty. He had searched the main house. It must have belonged to a kulak, a prosperous peasant whose fate had been sealed long before the Eaters appeared. Whether serving as their meal was preferable to starving in exile was something Yakov did not speculate upon.
The new masters had not made many changes in the house and this was puzzling too. Previously, in clearing out Eater nests, Yakov and his soldiers had encountered living nightmares: granaries filled with bloody gnawed heads, children’s limbs on chopping blocks, rats the size of a sheep dog. But this house was unnaturally clean – cleaner than most poor peasants’ hovels, truth be told – and silent. The beds were made with fresh linen, there was water in a wash-bucket, and the wooden floors were scrubbed. The large stove was empty and cold: in the human lands, the winter was coming, but here the summer was lingering still. It was not only the blooming cherries and yellow dandelions that defied human seasons: Yakov was beginning to sweat in the still, warm air of the hollow. He did not think to take off his leather jacket, however. It was the uniform of the Revolution, and he would not part with it until his service to the Revolution was done. Then he would be dead and he did not care how he was buried.
He then went out to the barns and stood, gawking, as the sleek, well-fed cows mooed in their stalls and clacking chickens scrabbled in the yard. The animals were clearly being taken care of, so the farm could not be abandoned. But perhaps the creature he had killed had in fact been its only inhabitant. This seemed impossible, considering the giant swarms that had attacked them in previous battles. But the more he thought about it, the more the idea appeared plausible.
The Eaters were natural entities. He had ruthlessly squashed the superstitious talk among his soldiers, some of whom, still infected with the religious bacillus, whispered tall tales of demons and fiends. In fact, he had to execute one particularly devout muzhik who was a corrupting influence both on his comrades and on the commune members. Yakov, immune to the peasants’ religion and oblivious of his own, had no doubt that the Eaters had come from another planet rather than from hell. He had read Alexander Bogdanov’s magnificent Red Star, in which the Revolution reached Mars, and was moved to tears; so much so that he procured a novel by a progressive Englishman in which Martians came to Earth. He had been disappointed by the Englishman’s war-mongering but in retrospect he had to concede that the writer had a point. The aliens came and they were neither socialist nor peaceful.
Inspired by the novels, he had started a surreptitious study of the Enemy. That was not encouraged by headquarters, who tended to remain silent about the exact nature of the Enemy or resort to recycled propaganda clichés. But the food situation being what it was, anything that could conceivably increase procurements had to be attempted. Ultimately, his supreme task was to keep the requisitions going and – of secondary importance – keep his commune alive. And knowing the true nature of the Eaters was instrumental to both ends.
He had come to the conclusion that their many different forms were not independent creatures but something like the parts of a single body capable of acting at a distance from the central core.
But perhaps not all Eaters were parts of a single organism. Perhaps separate swarms of them constituted individual entities, much like his unit sometimes felt like an extension of his own body. If that was true, such entities had to reproduce, to bear young, as was in the nature of life everywhere. The pseudo-girl he had killed was a colony of parts. He shuddered remembering her tentacle braids, her skittering hands, and her rolling head. But she was much more closely integrated than any Eater he had seen. Didn’t it follow that she was an immature version of a swarm, growing in the seclusion and plenty of the farm until she was big enough to disassemble into her component monsters and send them off to pillage and devastate the neighbouring communes? If so, the sleek appearance of the farm animals and the cared-for condition of the farm were no mystery.
He went back to the main house and sat at the table. His injuries were beginning to smart. He felt tired and strangely disappointed that his sacrifice was not needed. He had steeled himself for the mission for over a month, seeing that the commune was about to fail, telling himself that he could not allow his life’s work to have been in vain. He would have much preferred to stay in the city rather than mingle again with the peasants…
…who had killed his family?
He had no family any more and needed none. His cadres were his children. If he had to die for them, for the Revolution, so be it.
But now, it seemed, he did not need to die at all. He could walk back to the commune – a longish walk since his horse was gone – convene the committee, order them to organise a search party that would take over this farm and move the animals into the communal barns
…hope they won’t slaughter them to fill their bellies…
Collect whatever grain was there to fill the procurement quota for the city and hope that something was left over for the winter.
It reminded him how hungry he was. Surely there was no harm in eating a little now. He lifted the loaf from the table and twisted it to break off a chunk.
‘Don’t,’ said the loaf.
He dropped it, jumping to his feet. The loaf ended on the floor with the round side up. The crack he had made in the crust formed a long misshapen mouth that lengthened as it spoke.
‘You…’ he whispered stupidly.
He looked around. In the deepening dusk the room was filled with shadows that moved and whispered to each other. He wondered how blind he had been to think that the farm was empty.
The haloed saints on the icons leaned forward, staring at him intently. The pots on the shelves smacked their glazed lips. The white curtain flowed down to the floor in a waterfall of putrefying flesh. The ceiling joists blinked with a multitude of rivet eyes. A post rippled as it adjusted its stance.
The Eaters looked at him and he looked back.
‘Go ahead!’ he cried, his voice shriller than he intended. ‘Eat me! Bloodsuckers! Parasites! I am not afraid of you!’
And indeed he was not.
It had been a gradual realisation: from the paralysing fear that gripped even the most seasoned fighters as they confronted the alien menace; to the survivor’s guilt that his soldiers died all around him and he remained unscathed; to the growing conviction.
Eaters would not touch him. He was immune.
He did not know whether there were others like him and he did not care. He was only a spark in the cleansing flame of the Revolution and it was his duty to burn whatever thorns came his way. He had been sent to this starving, dim-witted countryside, to make the best of the coarse muzhiks who were under his comm
and, and he would do so. When he had realised that the commune was failing, that the procurement quotas were not going to be filled, he knew he had to do something drastic. If the requisitions were not met, he was a dead man walking in any case.
If, for whatever reason, the Eaters were afraid of him, he would turn it to his advantage. He remembered that in the progressive Englishman’s novel, the aliens succumbed to earthly microbes. Perhaps he was a carrier of some hitherto unknown disease that would infect and destroy the invaders. And if they refused the bait, if they ran away from him, well, then he would requisition the farm and carry on his Revolution-given task.
But this was not as he expected it to happen.
The entire farm was swarming with Eaters, perhaps the entire farm was Eaters, and they did not run away from him. The pseudo-girl had attacked him: the first time he was the target of alien aggression. He was not untouchable, after all.
But they were not attacking now. He felt himself to be in the crossfire of innumerable eyes but nothing moved.
‘Why me?’ he asked finally.
It was the post that answered, sprouting a notched mouth.
‘You were the first. You gave us form.’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We are the enemies you wanted.’
He remembered the night of their coming.
A fire blazing in the night, a smell of blood and unwashed feet. His own voice, hoarse but full of conviction:
‘Kulaks, rich peasants are your enemies, enemies of the people… Bloodsuckers, shape-shifters, cannibals. They devour your land, your crops, your family…’
The fire in the dark, the fire of belief in his rag-tag soldiers’ eyes. And then a mocking peasant voice:
‘Dirty Yid!’
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