Liza Alexandrova-Zorina - The Little Man

«Back to town! And be quick about it!» he shouted, striding along the shore and rounding up the soldiers. His heart was pounding like a time-bomb, primed to go off at any moment.

Meanwhile, Savage and Salmon flew through the forest, not looking back. They were both too weak to evade pursuit and made frequent halts, collapsing onto the wet grass to gather their strength.

The girl stroked Savely's matted hair telling him the gang was frightened of him. «They're more scared of you than of anyone else!»

The forest was getting darker and denser, damp rose from the swamps and their feet sank into the squelchy moss. Birds called balefully and the firs linked their wide branches as if joining hands. The branches scratched the fugitives' faces and hands and gripped their clothes, refusing to let them go.

Salmon had caught cold and thrashed around in a fever, coughing. Savage tried to carry her but found even Salmon's tiny, jaded body as immoveable as a boulder. On several occasions, he attempted to abandon her. «They'll pick her up,» he said, deceiving himself as the girl slept, curled up in a shelter hastily thrown together from fir branches. Hardly had he gone a couple of steps, however, than Salmon woke up and hurled herself after him with a cry.

«Who are you? Where did you come from?» Savage asked but Salmon just shrugged as if she didn't know herself.

«I haven't always been like this,» she said once, gazing into the mirror of the lake. «I was very beautiful once.»

Savage climbed a tall pine, sticky with resin. He made his way up its thick, strong branches as if it was a ladder propped against the side of a house. From up in the tree, he tried to make out their pursuers but no bonfire smoke rose above the treetops and he decided the hunters had fallen behind or gone home.

«We seem to have escaped,» he said as he climbed down.

«There's no escape from the gangsters,» said Salmon, shaking her head. «No-one's got away from them yet.»

Bilberries hung like droplets on the bushes. Crawling on all fours, the girl picked the berries with her lips and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Savage remembered the red-haired tramp he had abandoned at the burning tip. He had no idea whether she had survived or died, suffocated by the acrid smoke.

«I'm a murderer,» Savage whispered recalling how the woman clutched at his arm and he pushed her away to escape from the blaze.

Salmon understood what he said in her own way.

«Tell me how you killed Coffin,» she asked for the umpteenth time. She curled up in a ball as she listened, like a small child lulled to sleep by a children's story.

«I was coming home from work and Coffin and his mates were out on the veranda,» he began, stroking Salmon's head. «When I was going past, Coffin shouted something at me but I couldn't make it out. The others laughed and pointed at me. I went over and slapped him across the face.» Savage clenched his fist and showed how he had struck the gangster and the girl laughed and clapped.

«Then his second-in-command came out with a gun and I thought my time was up. But he came too close and I grabbed it by the barrel and pulled it out of his hands and shot Coffin!»

«You should've shot Saam too,» Salmon said every time, pressing her lips together. «You should've shot him!»

To Savage, it seemed as if they were circling the town as they wandered through the forest, the town drawing them to it like a giant magnet. He recognized stones and roots, imagined houses behind the trees, and they would take a different turn, getting more and more lost. Then, suddenly, emerging from the trees into a clearing, they came upon a reindeer herders' camp.

Several small houses, made of dark planks, nestled in the clearing, together with a couple of nomads' tents and a barn, towering above the ground on two long piles. Perfectly normal clothes, the kind sold in any shop in town, were hung out on lines to dry. Brightly coloured sweaters, jeans and tracksuit tops, spattered with English writing, made an odd contrast to the wooden houses and reindeer skins.

The men had left with the herd. Only an old Saami woman, wizened as a baked apple, had stayed at the camp, preparing food over a fire, and two Saam teenagers, humming as they crafted something from a reindeer pelt. Savage dashed towards the fire, snatching the food out of the old woman's hands. He greedily devoured the flatbread and dried fish and then, coming to his senses, thrust a chewed-up morsel into Salmon's toothless mouth. The old woman, pointing a gnarled finger, called out in her own language and a reindeer herder, his eyes narrow and his face as round as a plate, took an ornate reindeer-skin cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it round those of Salmon. The Saami showed no surprise at having guests, as if they had been expecting them for a long time.

Warily, Karimov gazed at his reflection until the dark window was slowly lowered. Looking at him was a yellowed old man with a broad, fleshy nose and colourless eyes. He was holding an electronic device to his throat and talking through it. His grating voice raised goose-bumps like the scrape of metal on glass.

«I decided to take a look at this place for myself…»

They talked through the car windows, the vehicles standing still in the middle of the road. A traffic jam developed but no-one honked their horns and the drivers lit up cigarettes and patiently waited for them to finish their conversation.

«It's just a town like any other, nothing special,» said Karimov with a shrug and a defiant look at the old man.

«You know me well,» said Pipe slowly, emphasising each word meaningfully. «But I know you better.»

Karimov pursed his lips.

«Do you think I want to know whether you've managed to get the factory off me or not?» The old man kept licking his dried lips as his gaze bored into Karimov. «I know that anyway. I want to check whether I'm so old some snot-nosed kid can get the better of me.»

With a gesture to the chauffeur, Piperaised the window.

Karimov nervously drummed his nails on his teeth, trying to predict what the old man had come up with but lost himself in his conjectures. Pipe didn't make idle threats and was known for having a great many enemies, none of whom were still alive. Tugging the hair at his temples that was as silver as a winter forest, Karimov pondered the fact that the pitiless old man was not about to show him any mercy.

«What's it all about?» Karimov had once asked, watching Pipe concentrate on filling his pouch with tobacco. «Don't you ever wonder?»

«There are only two questions in life that ought to bother you,» the old man laughed, «what to do and who's to blame.»

«And what should we do?»

«Make money!» Pipe guffawed, shedding tobacco «As for who's to blame? Anyone who hasn't got any!»

Remembering the self-satisfied laughter, Karimov winced as if he'd eaten a lemon and decided he needed to get Saam involved. He would find a quick and simple solution. Karimov imagined looking Pipe in his colourless eyes at the very last moment and saying with his hands round his throat, «So, what was it all about?» Karimov inhaled deeply and, releasing the smoke through his nostrils, asked the driver:

«What about you? What's your life about?»

The driver shrugged and turned the key in the ignition.

«That's something nobody knows and thank God for that,» he said.

Seeing a raised eyebrow in the mirror, the driver turned round to explain: «Maybe I was born to drive you around and you were born for me to drive. Just think, somebody was born just to die of a cold at two days' old after passing the cold on to all the other newborns in the hospital. If you knew why you were here, you wouldn't want to go on living.»

Karimov screwed up his face at this homespun philosophy, thinking, «However you live the end's the same.»