Anthony Horowitz - Russian Roulette

“Estrov is a dump.”

“No, it’s not.” I looked at the river, the fast-flowing water chasing over the rocks, the surrounding woodland, the muddy track that led through the centre of the village. In the distance, I could see the steeple of St Nicholas. The village had no priest. The church was closed; but its shadow stretched out almost to our front door and I had always thought of it as part of my childhood. Maybe Leo was right. There wasn’t very much to the place, but even so, it was my home. “I’m happy here,” I said and at that moment I believed it. “It’s not such a bad place.”

I remember saying those words. I can still smell the smoke coming from a bonfire somewhere on the other side of the village. I can hear the water rippling. I see Leo, twirling a piece of grass between his fingers. Our bicycles are lying, one on top of the other. There are a few puffs of cloud in the sky, floating lazily past. A fish suddenly breaks the surface of the river and I see its scales glimmer silver in the sunlight. It is a warm afternoon at the start of October. And in twenty-four hours everything will have changed. Estrov will no longer exist.

When I got home, my mother was already making the dinner. Food was a constant subject of conversation in our village because there was so little of it and everyone grew their own. We were lucky. As well as a vegetable patch, we had a dozen chickens, which were all good layers so (unless the neighbours crept in and stole them) we always had plenty of eggs. She was making a stew with potatoes, turnips and tinned tomatoes that had turned up the week before in the shop and that had sold out instantly. It was exactly the same meal as we’d had the night before. She would serve it with slabs of black bread and, of course, small tumblers of vodka. I had been drinking vodka since I was nine years old.

My mother was a slender woman with bright blue eyes and hair which must have once been as blond as mine but which was already grey, even though she was only in her thirties. She wore it tied back so that I could see the curve of her neck. She was always pleased to see me and she always took my side. There was that time, for example, when Leo and I were almost arrested for letting off bombs outside the police station. We had got up at first light and dug holes in the ground which we’d filled up with drawing pins and the gunpowder stripped from about five hundred matches. Then we’d sneaked behind the wall of the churchyard and watched. It was two hours before the first police car drove over our booby trap and set it off. There was a bang. The front tyre was shredded and the car lost control and drove through a bush. The two of us nearly died laughing, but I wasn’t so happy when I got home and found Yelchin, the police chief, in my front room. He asked me where I’d been and when I said I’d been running an errand for my mother, she backed me up, even though she knew I was lying. Later on, she scolded me but I know that she was secretly amused.

In our household, my mother and my grandmother did most of the talking. My father was a very thoughtful man who looked exactly like the scientist that he was, with greying hair, a serious sort of face and glasses. He lived in Estrov but his heart was still in Moscow. He kept all his old books around him and when letters came from the city, he would disappear to read them and at dinner he would be miles away. Why did I never question him more? I ask myself that now but I suppose nobody ever does. When you are young, you accept your parents for what they are and you believe the stories they tell you.

Conversation at dinner was often difficult because my parents didn’t like to discuss their work at the factory and there was only so much I could tell them about my day at school. As for my grandmother, she had somehow got stuck in the past, twenty years ago, and much of what she said didn’t connect with reality at all. But that night was different. Apparently there had been an accident, a fire at the factory… nothing serious. My father was worried and for once he spoke his mind.

“It’s these new investors,” he said. “All they think about is money. They want to increase production and to hell with safety measures. Today it was just the generator plant. But suppose it had been one of the laboratories?”

“You should talk to them,” my mother said.

“They won’t listen to me. They’re pulling the strings from Moscow and they’ve got no idea.” He threw back his vodka and swallowed it in one gulp. “That’s the new Russia for you, Eva. We all get wiped out and as long as they get their cheque, they don’t give a damn.”

This all struck me as insane. There couldn’t be any real danger, not here in Estrov. How could the production of fertilizers and pesticides do anyone any harm?

My mother seemed to agree. “You worry too much,” she said.

“We should never have gone along with this. We should never have been part of it.” My father refilled his glass. He didn’t drink as much as a lot of the people in the village but, like them, he used vodka to draw down the shutters between him and the rest of the world. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. We’ve been here long enough.”

“The swans are back,” my grandmother said. “They’re so beautiful at this time of the year.”

There were no swans in the village. As far as I knew, there never had been.

“Are we really going to leave?” I asked. “Can we go and live in Moscow?”

My mother reached out and put her hand on mine. “Maybe one day, Yasha. And you can go to university, just like your father. But you have to work hard…”

The next day was a Sunday and I had no school. On the other hand, the factory never closed and both my parents had drawn the weekend shift, working until four and leaving me to clean the house and take my grandmother her lunch. Leo looked in after breakfast but we both had a lot of homework, so we agreed to meet down at the river at six and perhaps kick a ball around with some other boys. Just before midday I was lying on my bed, trying to plough my way through a chapter of Crime and Punishment , which was this huge Russian masterpiece we were all supposed to read. As Leo had said to me, none of us knew what our crime was, but reading the book was certainly a punishment. The story had begun with a murder but since then nothing had happened and there were about six hundred pages to go.

Anyway, I was lying there with my head close to the window, allowing the sun to slant in onto the pages. It was a very quiet morning. Even the chickens seemed to have abandoned their usual clucking and I was aware of only the ticks of the watch on my left wrist. It was a Pobeda with black numerals on a white face and fifteen jewels that had been made just after the Second World War and that had once belonged to my grandfather. I never took it off and over the years it had become part of me. I glanced at it and noticed the time: five minutes past twelve. And that was when I heard the explosion. Actually, I wasn’t even sure it was an explosion. It sounded more like a paper bag being crumpled somewhere out of sight. I climbed off the bed and went and looked out of the open window. A few people were walking across the fields but otherwise there was nothing to see. I returned to the book. How could I have so quickly forgotten my parents’ conversation from the night before?

I read another thirty pages. I suppose half an hour must have passed. And then I heard another sound – soft and far away but unmistakable all the same. It was gunfire, the sound of an automatic weapon being emptied. That was impossible. People went hunting in the woods sometimes, but not with machine guns, and there had never been any army exercises in the area. I looked out of the window a second time and saw smoke rising into the air on the other side of the hills to the south of Estrov. That was when I knew that none of this was my imagination. Something had happened. The smoke was coming from the factory.