“What…?” he began.
I jerked myself free, throwing the chair backwards. As it toppled over, I managed to get to my feet. Dementyev swung round but he was too late to stop me lashing out with my fist. I knocked the glasses off his face. He fell back against the desk but then recovered and seized hold of me again. I needed a weapon and there was only one that I could see. I reached out and grabbed the arm of the skeleton, wrenching it free from the shoulder. The hand and the wrist dangled down but I hung onto the upper bone – the humerus – and used it as a club, smashing it against Dementyev’s head again and again until, with a howl, he fell back. I twisted away. Dementyev had crumpled over the desk. There was blood streaming down his face.
“It’s too late…” he stammered. “You won’t get away.”
I snatched back the jewellery and tumbled out of the office. There was nobody outside. Surely someone must have heard what had happened? I didn’t want to know. I ran to the lift. It was already on the way up and it took me a few seconds to work out that the police were almost certainly inside, travelling towards me. And I might have been caught standing there, waiting for them! I continued down the corridor and found a fire exit – leading to twenty-four flights of stairs. I didn’t stop until I reached the bottom and it was only then that I realized I was still carrying the skeleton’s arm. I found a dustbin, picked up some loose papers and dropped the arm in.
As I walked down the steps at the front door, I saw three police cars parked there with their lights flashing. I pretended to be immersed in the papers I had taken. If there were any policemen outside, I would look like one more of the countless students coming in and out.
But nobody stopped me. I hurried back to the station with just one thought in my head. I was alone in Moscow with no money.
ТВЕРСКАЯ – TVERSKAYA
I went back to Kazansky Station.
In a way, it was a mad decision. The police knew I was in Moscow and they would certainly be watching all the major stations – just as they had in Rosna and Kirsk. But I wasn’t leaving. The truth was that in the whole of Russia, I had nowhere to go and no one to look after me. I couldn’t go back to Estrov, obviously, and although I remembered my mother once telling me that she had relations in a city called Kazan, I had no idea where it was or how to get there.
No, it was much better to stay in Moscow, but first of all I would need to change my appearance. That was easy enough. I stripped off my Pioneer uniform and dumped it in a bin. Then I got my hair cut short. Although the bulk of my money had gone, I had managed to find eighteen kopecks scattered through my pockets and I used nine of them at a barber’s shop, a dank little place in a backstreet with old hair strewn over the floor. As I stepped out again, feeling the unfamiliar cool of the breeze on my head and the back of my neck, a police car rushed past – but I wasn’t worried. Even today, I am aware of how little you need to change to lose yourself in a city. A haircut, different clothes, perhaps a pair of sunglasses… it is enough.
I still had enough kopecks for the return journey and as I sat once again in the Metro, I tried to work out some sort of plan. The most immediate problem was accommodation. Where would I sleep when night came? If I stayed out on the street, I would be at my most vulnerable. And then there was the question of food. Without money, I couldn’t eat. Of course, I could steal but the one thing I most dreaded was falling back into the hands of the police. If they recognized me, I was finished. And even if they didn’t, I had heard enough stories about the prison camps all over Russia, built specially for children. Did I want to end up with the rest of my hair shaved off, stuck behind barbed wire in the middle of nowhere? There were thousands of Russian boys whose lives were exactly that.
This time I barely even noticed the stations, no matter how superbly they were decorated. I was utterly miserable. My parents had believed in Misha Dementyev and they had sent me to him, even though it had cost them their lives. But the moment I had walked into his office, he had thought only of saving his own skin. It seemed to me that there was nobody in the world I could trust. Even Dima, the boy I had met when I got off the train, had only been interested in robbing me.
But perhaps Dima was the answer.
The more I thought about it, the more I decided he might not be all bad. Certainly, when we had met, he had been pleasant enough, smiling and friendly, even if he was simply setting me up for his friends. But maybe I was partly to blame for what had happened, coming off the train and flashing my money around all the different stalls. Dima was living on the street. He had to survive. I’d made myself an obvious target and he’d done what he had to.
At the same time, I remembered what he’d said to me. It’s good to have a friend. We all need friends. Could it be possible that he actually meant it? He was, after all, only a few years older than me and we were both in the same situation. Part of me knew that I was fooling myself. Dima was probably miles away by now, laughing at me for being such a fool. But at the end of the day, he was the only person in the city I actually knew. If I could find him again, perhaps I could persuade him to help me.
And there was something else. I still had my mother’s jewels.
Half an hour later, I climbed up to street level and found myself back where I had begun. The women were still there at their food stalls but they almost seemed to be taunting me. Before, they had been welcoming. Now, all their pies and ice creams were beyond my reach. I found a bench and sat down, watching the crowds around me. Stations are strange places. When you pass through them, travelling somewhere, you barely notice them. They simply help you on your way. But stand outside with nowhere to go and they make you feel worthless. You should not be here, they shout at you. If you are not a passenger, you do not belong here.
To start with, I did nothing at all. I just sat there, staring at the traffic, letting people stream past me on all sides. The children I had seen were still dotted around and I wondered what they would do with themselves when night fell. That could only be a few hours away. The light was barely changing, the sun trapped behind unbroken cloud, but there were already commuters arriving at the station, on their way home. There was no sign of Dima. In the end, I went over to a couple of boys, the ten-year-olds that I had seen before.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Two pairs of very sly and malevolent eyes turned on me. One of the children had snot running out of his nose. Both of them looked worn out, unhealthy.
“I’m looking for someone I was talking to earlier,” I went on. “He was wearing a black leather jacket. His name is Dima.”
The boys glanced at each other. “You got any money?” one of them asked.
“No.”
“Then get lost!” Those weren’t his actual words. This little boy, whose voice hadn’t even broken, used the filthiest language I’d ever heard. I saw that he had terrible teeth with gaps where half of them had fallen out. His friend hissed at me like an animal and at that moment the two of them weren’t children at all. They were like horrible old men, not even human. I was glad to leave them on their own.
I tried to ask some of the other street kids the same question but as I approached them, they moved away. It was as if they all knew that I was from out of town, that I wasn’t one of them, and for that reason they would have nothing to do with me. And now the light really was beginning to disappear. I was starting to feel the threat of nightfall and knew that I couldn’t stay here for much longer. I would have to find a doorway – or perhaps I could sleep in one of the subways beneath the streets. I had four kopecks left in my pocket. Barely enough for a cup of hot tea.