The End is Coming

Chapter Eight

General Ishmael Varakov sat on a park bench, halfway across the spit of land extending out into the lake toward the astronomy museum. The wind was stiff and cold off the lake there. Beside him, Catherine sat. His secretary, the girl who wore her uniform skirts too long—a shy girl. A shy girl who had told him that she loved him when he had attempted to send her back to spend the last few days with her mother and her brother in the home he would never again visit beside the Black Sea. She had refused to go—he had let her stay.

He looked down at his left hand now—for some reason he yet didn’t understand, his left hand clutched her right hand. She was young enough to be his daughter—or perhaps granddaughter. She would not call him anything besides “com-rade general”—and she whispered those words now.

“Yes, child,” he nodded.

“We will all die?”

“Yes, child—all of us. A week, perhaps—if that—” And thunder rumbled from the sky, a flash of chain lightning snaking low through gray clouds over the white-capped waters of Lake Michigan. But the lightning subsided, passed. “Very soon,” he whispered to her, “very soon, Catherine—the lightning will not go away.”

“I will miss it—if you can miss it, comrade gen-eral—being alive, I think.”

He looked at her face—the rims of her eyes were moist. “You cry, child?”

She nodded yes.

“That you die, child? We will all die.”

She shook her head no.

“Then why is it that you cry, child?”

“That I had to be told I would die—comrade general—before—before I—” and she looked away from him, Varakov feeling her hand in his, her nails digging into his flesh. It was life—sensa-tion was life now, and he did not tell her to stop.