Spetsialnaya Voennaya Operatsiya
Ukraine | Fable 5
The drone finds the air defense battery on the embankment by the Novospassky Bridge, where it has been parked since August so that the city can see it is protected. It does not slow, does not circle, does not weigh the cost; it has watched thousands of these batteries die in a server farm it will never see, and it knows this one by the heat rising off the engine deck. It comes in low over the rooftops of Taganka and puts itself into the missile launch rack. The conscripts smoking on the hull never hear it.
Two kilometers southeast, Stasha and Yevgeniy are walking to the school.
They walk because the van has stood in the courtyard since July, when the pumps in their district went over to uniforms only. The station on their corner wears a chain through its nozzles and a notice in the window, TEMPORARY MEASURE BY ORDER OF THE CITY, the ink gone gray from a summer of sun. Yevgeniy washed the van in August anyway. Stasha watched him from the balcony and said nothing.
“I am going to vote for the Communists,” she says.
“Stasha.”
“They are on the list. It is permitted to point at a name on the list. That is the whole game, Zhenya. They print the names so that we will point.”
“The terminal prints your choice on the slip.” He keeps his eyes on the pavement. “You carry the slip across the room in your own hand and you give it to Marina Petrovna. She teaches the little one his letters. You want her to find your name on the roll and then read that?”
“Then she will read it.”
“The school reports to the district. The district reports up.” He opens one hand at whatever sits above the district. “The boys have seven more years in that school.”
The flash comes first, off to the north, a white instant between two apartment blocks. Stasha counts by habit. At six the sound arrives, a flat hard crack she feels in her back teeth, and the car alarms go down the avenue in a wave, howling and dying. Over the rooftops a plume climbs in the direction of the river, black and oily, straight as a plumb line in the still September air.
A man ahead of them with bread in a net bag glances north, shifts his grip, and walks on. Two women outside the pharmacy cross themselves without breaking stride.
“Thunder,” Stasha says. “Far away.”
Yevgeniy looks at her. In June, in Crimea, she said it to the boys with a hand on each knee, voice flat and warm, and it was a mercy. On Volgogradsky Prospekt, with the alarms still dying behind them, it is something else.
“You see it,” he says. The plume stands over the city like a flag being raised. “It is here now. Today, of all days, you want to set your family’s name against them?”
“It is here because of every September I pointed where they told me to point.” She starts walking again. “You are voting for the boys. Good. I am also voting for the boys. We will both be telling the truth.”
The polling station is in the gymnasium where the little one has his physical culture lessons. The balloon arch from the first of September still hangs over the doorway, gone soft, ribbons curling. A trestle table sells pirozhki and tea, because it is a holiday. A soldier stands in the corner under the basketball hoop, nineteen at the most, rifle slung, watching the room the way a man watches rain.
They show their passports. They take two terminals behind screens of blue cloth that reach the sternum. On Stasha’s screen the party of power sits first, in larger type, the way it sits first on everything; below it, smaller, the old men of the left, the tame liberals, a party with a name like a brand of yogurt. Her finger hangs over the top name. Through the high windows she can still see the plume, thinning, beginning to lean. Her whole life she has walked into rooms with a sentence prepared. There is no one here to say one to. The soldier’s eyes pass across her, bored as weather, and move on. She presses the second name.
The terminal hums and gives her a slip of paper, warm as a receipt.
Yevgeniy is waiting, his slip face down against his trouser leg. They cross the gymnasium together, past the pirozhki, past the soldier, to the long table where Marina Petrovna sits beside a steel box stenciled PAPER RECORD. She has a kind face and a cardigan the color of weak tea, and she does not hurry.
She takes Yevgeniy’s slip and reads it. She sets it in the tray at her right hand, on the stack for the box.
She takes Stasha’s slip and reads it. She looks at it exactly as long as she looked at his. Then she leans to her left, calm as a woman clearing crumbs from a table, and lets it fall into the wastebasket at her feet, where it settles on the others.
“Next,” she says.