Free Brainfire by Campbell Armstrong

couldn’t keep it straight, couldn’t concentrate. Dear God, dear God, how much more could she give them?
    Your family is well, I assure you, he was saying. No harm will come to them, I can promise you that.
    She fought to keep her eyes open. What was he saying? What did he mean—no harm? Were they in some kind of danger? She wanted to sit upright, couldn’t, kept feeling herself slip, the room darkening around her, the flowers dying by the bedside. What is he telling me about my family?
    Comrade Koprow himself has guaranteed their safety, he was telling her. His word counts for a great deal. Believe me. No harm will come to them.
    Silence. But not silence. She could hear faint sounds, nothing she could recognize, just faint indeterminate sounds traveling across dreadful distances to her. My family. My family, she thought. No harm will come to them.
    Further cooperation, that’s all.
    No. No.
    A small matter, nothing more.
    She was caught in the drifts, she was floating—but it was through warm water now, it was easy, easy, a pleasant feeling.
    We’ll talk later, he said. When you’re feeling strong.
    Did she hear him go from the room? Something? Had he said, Here, this letter just arrived from your son in Tel Aviv? Read it when you feel more strong? Or was this another aspect of how the dream went? She didn’t know. Had he laid an airmail envelope on the bedside table? Aaron. She tried to open her eyes to see. Further cooperation. A small matter. No harm will come to your family, you may be sure. The children, the grandchildren she had never seen, would run to her. And she would lose herself in the sweetness of it, she would surrender herself to loving, to what loving meant.
    And now she was thinking of Stanislav, of the moment of his birth, feeling a storm within herself, a burning heat between her thighs and a sense that giving birth to this child might cause her to break apart, to splinter. And she was remembering Aaron, how proud Aaron had been; perfumes—broken pine cones, the feline scent of crushed juniper: Aaron walking in the woods with the small boy, hands held, that special link of love, that private thing between father and son that a mother could only watch from the outside. But there was joy, it was joy she remembered, it was joy she wanted all over again.
    Aaron. Oh, God, not Aaron. A witch? Are you some kind of freak? Is that what I’m married to ? Forget, forget, you are too old now to remember black things, too old to bring back the picture, the terrible terrible picture. But there it was and she saw it, there it was, locked behind her closed eyelids, penetrating even the sweet moment of dreaming love and joy, the picture—the barn behind the house. Aaron? Aaron? Where are you? The barn. No. But you shouldn’t go in there where it’s dark and smells of rotted hay and the excrement of horses you shouldn’t go inside the barn because the picture lay there and you didn’t need to see him you didn’t need to see Aaron you didn’t need to remember how Aaron had hung—up in the air—just hanging and limp and his body motionless and the shadow of a rope.… A witch? A freak ? You saw the open eyes, the open lips, the dead limpness of the body as it hung from rope, how the rope had been tethered to some high dark beam, a chair kicked away; a man hanging there. Nonono.
    A small matter. Was that what the man had said?
    A small matter. There was no price you could fix to the value of love.
    4.
    It was falsely rumored of Comrade Koprow that he had single-handedly destroyed a German armored column during its advance on Kalinin—a rumor he did nothing to discourage but much to promote; courage, after all, was as much a weapon as terror. Now, close to midnight, he sat in the office of Maksymovich. They were allies of old, twins of the Revolution; between them they enjoyed the notion that they kept ancient fires burning. That neither