Liza Alexandrova-Zorina: The Little Man

When Severina pointed to something that had caught her fancy, he pulled it down and threw it over his shoulder. The market women watched him go mentally calculating their losses while the ones who saw him coming from a distance hastily hid the expensive items away.

Coffin's gang met at an old wooden house left behind by the early settlers. Encircled by a high fence, it towered over the brick houses around it the way angry grown-ups stand over a naughty child.

«But she's underage!» exclaimed Shorty, stroking his stumps, when Saam brought Severina along.

«I've adopted her,» snapped Saam.

Everyone looked at Coffin.

«Orphan girls are accommodating,» he grinned, looking the girl up and down. «Let her stay.»

Saam took her everywhere with him like a doll. Sitting in the car, Severina would count the gunshots on her fingers, trying to work out how many had hit their targets. The first time she saw a dead body, she wasn't afraid. They were trying to cram a lanky corpse into the boot but it wouldn't fit so the gangsters tossed it onto the back seat. The head, its hair caked in blood, was on Saam's lap while Severina held its feet and examined its polished boots.

She moved into Saam's tiny flat and when she was on her own she would run from room to room delighted that she wouldn't be seeing the institutional walls of the home any more. Trying out the role of lady of the house, Severina spent whole days cleaning floors, washing clothes and decorating the rooms with flowers and knick-knacks.

«A woman's a woman,» snorted Coffin, noticing the polka-dot tablecloth and violets on the window-sill. «She could be 13, she could be 50 but she's only got one thing on her mind. You watch, she'll be giving you little Saamkins…»

«Fine by me,» said the gangster, shrugging his shoulders.

Severina only went to the children's home for the nanny's funeral. The nanny had downed an entire bottle, then suffocated the babies, sobbing all the while.

«You poor, unfortunate things. What have you got to live for? You'd be better off dead,» she wept, her hands around their tiny necks. Then, with a farewell kiss to each of the dead babies, she jumped out of the window, arms outstretched as if she expected to go straight up to heaven from the home.

The whole town buried the dead babies. As the procession went from the morgue to the cemetery, people stopped at the side of the road to see them off on their final journey. But the nanny's funeral was hushed up. The coffin was placed in the corridor of the children's home and the children crowded round, sniffling, to gaze in silence at her tear-stained face, fixed in a grimace of pain. They remembered the nanny rocking each of them in her arms, her gruff voice singing a lullaby, and thought that no-one had loved them more than this awful woman. Severina went over to the body, kissed her on both cheeks and fell on her breast in floods of tears and the denizens of the children's home wailed in chorus as they took up her lament. As evening drew nearer, the older children took the coffin to the cemetery and lowered it into the grave just as the nanny used to put them in their cots. Hastily, they covered it with earth and planted an iron marker without a name or photograph.

After what had happened, the room was boarded up and a priest was called to bless the home. «In the name of the Fa-a-ther and of the S-o-n,» he intoned, swinging a smoking censer from side to side, while the children, picking the peeling paint off the walls, thought of their own fathers, who, like God, they had never seen.

Savely Savage woke up and turned to glance at the alarm clock. Instead of the bedside table, however, there was the rusted shell of a car, with crumpled cigarette packets lying around and bottles that reflected thousands of suns. In all his many years at work, Savage had never once been late and, driving away the vestiges of sleep, he thought about his unfinished drawings and a report he had to submit as if he could still put the finishing touches to his work.

In the north, winter doesn't end even in summer. It was a frosty morning. The ice crunched in the puddles and his breath was steaming. A hairless dog, tail between its legs, plodded along the road while up in the trees black crows resembled elderly gossips with dark shawls thrown around their shoulders. Shivering with cold, Savage walked past the closed garages, pulling at the heavy locks. Men used to congregate here once, drinking vodka and arguing noisily about nothing. He had often wandered in this area of single-storey buildings, picking up the echo of these squabbles and gone home drunk as if he'd downed a bottle himself. Strolling around, he secretly hoped he would be asked to join in, would be offered a drink and some homemade snacks, but on the one occasion he was invited to join two other drinkers, he chickened out and quickened his pace, without answering. These days, the garage get-togethers had been displaced by the TV and people spent their evenings with its programs as they had with their friends. Savage himself couldn't imagine his life without its yells, debates, laughter and tears, without the news, the slogans and the adverts, the dull reports, the songs, groans and gabbling that filled his room, giving its walls world-wide dimensions and reducing his ego to a mere pixel. Now though, his ears were full of silence like cotton wool that seemed as if it might burst his eardrums.

Savage had been on the move for several hours now, not knowing what he was looking for, afraid of every sound, wondering whether to go home or to the police, and what to do next. Without reaching any decision, he went off into the taiga, afraid the garage owners might spot him. Savage tried to imagine his daughter weeping in self-pity, his colleagues whispering and the cleaner scouring the blood off the veranda. For a moment, he felt a pleasant warmth in his breast: the whole town was talking about him today. He remembered the drug dealer who sold pot to teenagers, the girls Coffin picked out for the Councillor, his own plastered daughter. «A little man in a little town. A little man in a little town,» he muttered, sucking the words like lollypops as if finding new meaning in them.

When he was young every day ended before it began, an endless series of years stretched on and there seemed to be an eternity ahead. With age, however, the days had become dull and heavy and Savage had the impression that every page torn from the calendar counted off a year rather than a day, making life fly by like scenes from a train window that he could never make out properly. Now, he appeared to have got out at the station to touch them with his own hands. There was still dirty snow in the forest, patches of white in the gullies, and Savage rubbed it on his face by way of a wash. As he wandered he pondered his fate. Would he go to prison? Would the gangsters take their revenge? He had a feeling that he could go back to town as if nothing had happened. Coffin would be dozing on the veranda, the gangsters would be drinking kvass and his daughter would be getting into Antonov's car over and over again…

Afraid of getting lost, Savage kept his eye on the television tower which stuck out like a splinter. Every time he lost sight of it, he broke out in a sweat. By evening, he was dizzy with hunger. He chewed bitter unripe berries that burnt his mouth and drank water by wringing out the damp moss like a sponge. Towards nightfall he went back into town.

The windows glowed yellow in the thick twilight, breaking up the pavements with patches of light. The streetlights gleamed dully. Savage wanted to bang on all the windows one by one to ask for shelter. Standing on tiptoe, he peeped into ground-floor flats, picturing the inhabitants sitting at the table or watching television and couldn't understand why he had deprived himself of such normal, everyday delights.