Liza Alexandrova-Zorina: The Little Man

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Even Savely's surname was a joke: Savage, yeah right! He had a stammer, stumbled over his words and took refuge from conversations in solitude. When people around him laughed, he'd sulk and when they wept, he'd sneer. He always got out of bed on the wrong side and came upon people when he was least wanted, so that by forty, life had really started to grate. He was born in a little town and had grown up there too. From his window, he could see the school where the only thing he'd learnt was that while it's the hard-working students who solve problems, it's the failing students who set them and change the rules to suit themselves so that they always have the answer ready. Savage went unnoticed as a pebble on the road. But when the gangster Mogilev nicknamed Coffin was shot dead in broad daylight, Savely came to the notice of the whole town.

It was several hours' drive to the nearest village while the Finnish border was only a stone's throw away, so the town lived a life of its own, cut off from the rest of the country like a hunk of bread from a loaf. The gangsters ruled by terror, prowling the streets, collars turned up, a trail of ransacked wallets and destinies behind them. Several gangs shared the various districts, but it was a small town and there wasn't enough room. Coffin had the last word. He crossed himself with fingers clenched into a fig and could multiply any number by zero. The crumpled faces of his henchmen made you think of clenched fists. He had blood on his hands, right up his arms in fact. He had blown up his rivals when they were relaxing in a restaurant and thereby put an end to their protracted showdown. Only one survived. The blast ripped his legs off and the crock that was left they called Shorty. He walked on his stumps rather than crutches, supported by hands that were callused and scarred, and served as a reminder of what happened to anyone who crossed Coffin. He kept Shorty on as a mascot in the belief that he would bring him luck. And he did until the day Coffin was shot down right in front of everybody. Shorty, looking at the body, felt a gnawing pain in his stumps.

Savely's single life continued even after he got married. Life with his wife and daughter was like sharing a communal apartment. They took no more notice of him than they did of the pattern on the wallpaper. His wife's tongue was knife-edge sharp, she smeared Savely with taunts like buttering bread, and his teenage daughter aped her mother's manners so that Savely was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, unable to understand how he had become so estranged from his own daughter. In her disinterested gaze, like a needle to his heart, he read, «So he's alive, fine, but it would be no great loss if he wasn't!» He tried to spend longer and longer at work and when he was at home hid away in a corner like a cockroach. The «life is fun» attitude of the TV made fun of him. «Someone's got to be the loser,» he thought with a shrug.

The town was so small that a whisper at one end could be heard at the other. Savely's wife changed lovers like she changed clothes and she believed that marriage aged people while love made them younger. She wasn't ashamed to appear in public on the arm of her date and, envying them from afar, Savely would cross the street or look down if he bumped into them and his wife's lover, plastering a grin on his face, would pretend they didn't know each other. At night, twisting and turning in bed, Savely would often picture his wife in bed with another man but he felt neither jealousy nor insult, only envy. He was so lonely he could have howled at the moon like a wolf and talked to his own shadow.

At work, Savage huddled in a corner behind a cupboard. It separated him from his colleagues and sheltered him from the sidelong glances he so dreaded, although, in fact, no-one paid him much attention. Someone had stuck a broken chair in his corner and a fat clay pot with a dried-out palm and Savely would squeeze past the clutter he couldn't quite bring himself to throw out.

Had it not been for his visible bald patch and the horseshoe curve of his shoulders, you could have taken Savely Savage for a teenager. He was skinny and, like all dreamers, he dragged his feet like a child. The office grind had sucked all the goodness out of the years and now he was irritated when anything new disturbed his usual routine. He'd fume when the roads were resurfaced or the street names changed or when his slippers weren't where he'd left them. He met the same people every day and only noticed them when they disappeared. He lived his life as if he was watching a boring film.

The town clung to a mining factory like a baby to its mother. The smoking chimneys could be seen from every part of town. In conversation, people would say «there» and everyone knew they meant the factory. They could nod vaguely in any direction and everyone would still know they meant the factory even if they'd nodded in a totally different direction.

Karimov, the factory manager, looked like an Italian Mafioso. He had black curly hair and a hawk nose and his appearance didn't fit into the local landscape where it resembled a glossy photo pasted over a pastel drawing. Karimov had been sent two years ago from Moscow, which from here seemed so distant it might as well have been abroad, and he lived out of his suitcases in a hotel, as if constantly awaiting a transfer. Karimov helped the local children's home and that's why people forgave him his look of disgust and the cold half-smile that never left his face and could induce a shiver even on a hot day. He was a door-step baby himself with the sticky eyes of every abandoned child. His mother had wrapped her baby in a faded dress and left him on the steps of the home. The baby lay there all night. He didn't cry, just fixed his angry eyes on the locked door. In the morning, he was picked up by a passer-by who took the bundle home and opened it up on the table, the baby splayed out like a frog. The man had no children and decided that the god he didn't believe in had sent him a son.

You could set your watch by Mayor Krotov. Rushing to work in the morning, Savely would see him outside the local municipal office and in the evening the burly mayor would tumble out of it like a potato falling from a torn sack. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he would get into his car that would tip sideways. Rumour had it that the mayor had built a medieval castle with towers somewhere out in the forest, hidden away from the townsfolk. No-one had seen this castle, however, and encrusted with rumour, it grew to the size of a town. Krotov avoided meeting Coffin who did his best to avoid him too. They communicated through the chief of police, Trebenko, who travelled between the gangsters and the civil servants like a ferry between two shores. They had tacitly split the town in two. Each part had its own laws and regulations that didn't operate in the other.

Everything is in plain sight in a small town so no-one bothered to hide. The one place of entertainment, the Three Lemons bar, brought the town's big cheeses and its lowlifes together under one roof.