I reached the banks by 22:45. I sat on a dry patch of land to keep myself from pacing. Here there was absolutely no light. Even the factories across the river were dark. The only sound was of the water slapping against the cement barriers.
Then, very faintly, I heard something. It sounded like a whisper, or like wind. And then I saw something: a faint blob of yellowish light that seemed to float over the river like a bird. Soon it grew bigger, and more distinct, and I saw that it was a small wooden boat, the kind I knew from pictures that people used to row across the Pond back when it had been an actual pond.
I stood, and the boat drew to the shore. There were two people inside it, both dressed completely in black, one of them holding a lantern, which he lowered as they approached land. Even their eyes were covered in thin pieces of black gauze, and I struggled to see them in the poor light.
“Cobra?” one of them asked.
“Mongoose,” I replied, and the man who had spoken reached out his hand and helped me into the boat, which rocked beneath me, and I thought I might fall over.
“You’ll stay down here,” he said, and helped me crouch into the space between him and the other oarsman, and once I had made myself as small as possible, they covered me with a tarp. “Don’t make a sound,” he said, and I nodded, even though he wouldn’t have been able to see me do so. And then the boat began to move, and the only noise was the sound of the oars slicing through the water, and the men’s breathing, in and out.
After David had told me he wouldn’t be meeting me at the banks, I had asked him how I would know that the people coming to get me were the right people. “You’ll know,” he’d said. “There’s no one else at the banks at that time. Or ever, really.” But I had said I needed to know for certain.
Two weeks after my husband and I were married, there had been a raid in our building. It was the first raid I had experienced without Grandfather, and I was so terrified that I hadn’t been able to stop moaning, moaning and batting at the air and rocking. My husband hadn’t known what to do, and when he tried to reach for my hands, I slapped him away.
That night, I had a dream that I was at home after work, making dinner, and heard the sound of keys turning in the lock. But when the door opened, it was not my husband but a group of policemen, shouting and ordering me to get on the floor, their dogs lunging at me and barking. I woke up, calling for Grandfather, and my husband had gotten me a glass of water and then had sat next to me until I had fallen asleep again.
The next evening, I was making dinner when I heard the noise of keys in the locks, and although of course it was only my husband, in the moment I was so frightened that I dropped the entire pan of potatoes on the floor. After he had helped me clean them up, and as we were eating dinner, my husband said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we have a pair of code words, something we can say when we’re entering the apartment, so we’ll each know it’s the other? I’ll say my word, and you’ll say yours, and then we’ll both know that we are who we say we are?”
I thought about it. “What words will we use?” I asked.
“Well,” my husband said, after thinking. “Why don’t you be—let’s see—a cobra?” I must have looked surprised, or offended, because he smiled at me. “Cobras are very fierce,” he said. “Small, but quick, and deadly if they catch you.”
“And what will you be?” I asked.
“Let’s see,” he said, and I watched him think. My husband liked zoology, he liked animals. The day we met, there had been a report on the radio that Magellanic penguins had been declared officially extinct, and my husband had expressed sorrow over that, had said that they were resilient animals, more resilient than people thought, and more human than people knew as well. When they were sick, he said, they toddled away from their flock so they could die alone, with none of their kin to watch them.
“I’ll be a mongoose,” he said at last. “A mongoose can actually kill a cobra, if it wants to—but they very rarely do.” He smiled again. “It’s too much work. So they just respect each other. But we’ll be a cobra and a mongoose that do more than just respect each other: We’ll be a cobra and a mongoose that unite to keep each other safe from all the other animals in the jungle.”
“Cobra and Mongoose,” I repeated, after a pause, and he nodded.
“A little more dangerous than Charlie and Edward,” he said, and smiled again, and I saw that he was teasing, but teasing in a nice way.
“Yes,” I said.
I had told David that story on one of our earliest walks, back when he was still a tech at the Farm, and my husband was still alive. And so, as we stood at my door before he left, he said, “What about using code words—like Cobra and Mongoose? That’s how you’ll know the people coming to meet you are who they should be.”
“Yes,” I agreed. It was a good idea.
Now I stayed crouched in position beneath the middle plank seat. The boat bobbed and rocked, and yet it kept moving, the sounds of the oars stroking through the water steady and swift. Then, rumbling through the bottom of the boat, I heard the sound of a motor, and as I listened, it grew louder and louder.
“Oh shit,” I heard one of the men curse.
“Is that one of ours?” the other asked.
“Too far to tell,” said the first, and swore again.
“What the fuck is that craft doing out here?”
“Fuck if I know,” said the first man. He swore once more. “Well, there’s no way out. We just have to take our chances, and hope it’s one of ours.” He nudged me with his foot, not hard. “Miss: Be very quiet and keep very still. If it’s not one of our people—”
But then I could no longer hear him, because the sound of the motor was now too loud. I realized that I had never asked David what I should do if I was caught, and that he had never told me. Was he so certain everything would unfold as he had described? Or was this in fact the plan, and was I being delivered to people who would hurt me, who would take me somewhere and do things to me? Surely David, who knew so much and had foreseen so much, would have told me what I was to do if something went wrong? Surely I wasn’t so helpless that I wouldn’t have thought to ask him? I began to cry, quietly, folding a piece of the tarp into my mouth. Had I been wrong to trust David? Or had I been right, and had something happened to him? Had he been arrested, or shot, or disappeared? What would I do if I was caught? Officially, I was nobody: I didn’t even have my papers with me. Of course, they could do whatever they wanted to me even if I had my papers, but without them, it would be that much easier. I wished I had Grandfather’s ring in my hand, so I could squeeze it and pretend I was safe. I wished I was at home, and my husband was alive, and I hadn’t seen or experienced any of the things I had in the past three days. I wished I had never met David; I wished he were with me now.
But then I realized: No matter what happened, this was the end of my life. Perhaps it was the actual end. Perhaps it was just the end of the one I had known. But either way, my life mattered less to me, because the person to whom it had mattered most was gone.