Liza Alexandrova-Zorina - The Little Man

The businessman's neighbours were no cowards either. The whole block gathered outside his door, with hammers, axes, pliers and spades and, for several days, they battered at his iron door until it smashed. When they opened it, they found themselves looking down the double barrels of the shotgun.

«Now, now. Give that here!» cried the woman from the bakery fearlessly seizing the gun.

The neighbours grabbed the businessman by the hair, hands, feet and clothes and dragged him down the stairs. As his bones counted out the steps, he regretted ever moving into the top floor.

«Open up! We're bringing him out! Open up!» the residents yelled out of the windows and, spitting into their palms, the gang set about dismantling the barricades.

The hapless businessman was pushed into a car and driven away to an undisclosed location. His flat stood empty for many years, the crumpled door a reminder of he days of confinement, but then a new resident moved in and upholstered the door with leather, maintaining that he had purchased the flat from that same businessman whom he had allegedly seen safe and sound at the notary's office.

When Saam showed up at the children's home, the little boys would crowd round him, making a racket and fighting in a bid for his attention.

«I've taken up wrestling. I can beat anyone. I'm just what you need!»

«I climbed into a flat through a tiny window while my dad was the lookout. I can still get through any window!»

«Saam, let me be in your gang!»

The children put part of their loot in a common pot to learn about the pecking order and the gang would help those who had been caught. The local children's officer, a tall butch woman, with police major's rank and a dark moustache above her thread-thin lip, released the little thieves, throwing the reports into a bin she would kick under the table with the toe of her boot. The woman had eyes like dried-up puddles. They seemed always on the verge of tears but she never actually wept.

«Little thugs,» said the sergeant who brought the small robbers in from the market. He looked discontentedly askance at the major.

«What, you think they should be sent to a prison colony?» she said, dispatching yet another crumpled police report into the bin. «They've no future as it is and they'd make mincemeat out of them there. They'd come out brutal and full of hate…»

Listening to her, however, the sergeant smiled a crooked smile knowing that she was more afraid of the brats than they were of her and that her teary eyes looked the other way in return for gifts from Saam.

The gang put the smartest kids into a juvenile detachment. On an abandoned building site, avoided by tramps and dogs alike, they were trained to fight, use air-guns and hide from pursuers. Then, when they left the children's home, they became fully-fledged members of the gang. They called Saam «Dad» and were ready for anything for the sake of that word and how it felt to say it.

«This is a little town. It cramps your style,» Saam would say, looking at the boys as he leant on a slab of concrete. «With our lads, we could move mountains.»

«Better to be a Big Man in a little town than a sucker in the capital,» his comrade snickered.

Rain hammered the window panes, running down in streams that distorted the houses, streetlights and pedestrians, rushing along under umbrellas. It was noisy inside the Three Lemons, glasses tinkling as women laughed and conversations bubbling up and boiling over like milk on a hot plate.

«Take away the gang and there would be mayhem!» said Antonov, loosening the neck of his shirt and shrugging his shoulders. «You just try and hold them back,» he said, nodding at the tables nearby.

«Why do I have to be involved with a killer and a bandit?» Krotov wondered tearfully.

Antonov sucked on a piece of lemon to go with his shot of vodka while Krotov screwed up his face as if he had a bitter taste in his mouth. They were so alike they could have been one another's mirror images and, for anyone looking at them, it was like seeing double.

«I'm no idiot either but I've been involved with them for twenty years now. You'd love to keep your hands nice and clean while Trebenko and I did all the dirty work.»

Offended, Krotov stared at his plate.

«You're a businessman whereas I'm a civil servant. I'm not working for myself, after all.» He spat the words out along with his olive stones. «While you were off having fun, I was doing the thinking for everyone.»

Antonov threw back his head and roared with laughter as he remembered the accident at the power plant when cables had burst like old veins, houses were staring out of empty sockets, and satellite dishes protruded like ears that had been deafened by the silence. Clutching a bulging suitcase to his chest Krotov had fled in his official car from the electricity-deprived town which looked like a black foundation pit from the top of the hill.

That year, winter was so cold the houses froze right through and people slept in sweaters and hats, the blankets pulled up over their heads. It was a long time since the decrepit electricity grid had been repaired and initially the cables, eaten away by the cold, stopped working in various parts of town, leaving first one set of buildings then another without lighting. Then there was an outage at the main power station and the whole town sank into impenetrable gloom.

Sirens wailed like hungry dogs, alarms screeched, women shouted and then the town fell silent and everything was quiet. In the distance, the factory was all lit up, powered by a back-up substation. Residents scurried along the dark streets like moles, holding their arms out and bumping into one another. Cars raced around town for a few days, their headlights dazzling. Then the petrol station closed and the cars shuddered to a halt in the streets where they turned into giant snowdrifts. Some people hastily gathered their things together and managed to leave town. Krotov, the mayor, was one of them. He fled to Moscow. He had recorded dozens of different speeches and slogans for all eventualities so that every day his voice could be heard from the loudspeaker in the square, reassuring the citizens by the very fact that the mayor was sharing their common misfortune.

Only the factory's main production units carried on working. Schools and hospitals closed. Shops initially used generators and hastily sold the food in their defrosting refrigerators. Residents stocked up on food, not knowing how long they would have to manage without electricity. The cost of candles skyrocketed. They went for fabulous sums of money and whispers did the rounds that suggested the hardware shops and the church stall were making the biggest killings of all. Televisions didn't work. There were no newspapers and information about the failed power station travelled by word of mouth, acquiring more and more details and sowing panic among the residents.

Savage didn't know what to do with himself as he sat in his dark room. He looked out of the window as if he were watching television, trying to imagine what was going on in the black windows of neighbouring blocks of flats. What were other people doing? Dreaming, talking, pottering about at a loose end, making love? A useless lamp dangled from the ceiling like a hanged man but the telephone worked and Mrs Savage spent days chatting to her friends, her legs swung over the back of a chair. Savage had no-one to ring, however. All he could do was listen to his wife's conversations as she bitched about her colleagues as if nothing had happened and discussed recipes to make with the food they had stocked up or talked about the bank robberies that had taken place in the town.

An inquisitive moon was glued to the window pane at night. Savage tried to read by its meagre light, taking forgotten books down from the top shelf, which had once seemed mysterious but were now as dull and simple as copybooks. Savage decided to read them back to front but instead of making nonsense of the plot it gave it new meaning. Turned inside out like gloves, heroes became antiheroes, executioners became victims and wives, husbands and children wicked angels biting their wings in rage and all the books that had previously differed so greatly in plot and ideas became impossible to tell apart. Read from back to front, each book told how man is born in darkness, lives in shadow and departs into the night.