A village of summer dachas could be seen beyond the trees. The houses were scattered like children's bricks, some of them set apart, others clustered closely together. There were picnics here at weekends. Children raced around shrieking during the day and bonfires were lit in the evenings. When one yard struck up a song, the neighbours would join in while stray dogs took up the melody, carrying it along the streets where it continued to be heard for a good long time. Only rarely could the white and purple flowers of potato plants be seen in the yards. The cold ground had no time to warm up in summer before it was autumn so only the most stubborn and reckless gardeners bothered with allotments.
A few years ago, Mrs Savage had made him buy a plot of land for growing vegetables.
«There are potatoes in the shops,» said Savage, trying to get out of it but his wife had hung on with bulldog tenacity.
«You know how much they cost. We could all go on holiday on the money we'd save.»
Savage succumbed to the temptation of a family holiday and bought a few buckets of potatoes and a sack of fertilizer. He spent all summer on the land, digging, weeding and watering. In the autumn he harvested exactly the same number as he'd planted and was happy.
«The season's nearly over. Shall we go for the tail end of summer?» he said, reminding his wife about the holiday and holding out the money he'd set aside from his wages.
His wife and daughter crammed their suitcases with clothes and went off on holiday. He saw them to the door, feeling like a beaten dog. Once on his own, Savage cooked jacket potatoes and ate them, skin and all. He dunked the potatoes in salt and reflected that life was better taken with too much salt than with too little.
Now, looking at those savour-less days, he was astonished that in a matter of minutes he had swept his entire life off the table and begun again not from the beginning or even from the end but from a line in someone else's tune, which he had taken up like a drinking song at a wake.
The village was quiet. The dacha owners had gone home, smoke-blackened barbecues and bent shovels abandoned in the yards. The sleepy caretaker, who kept an eye on the dachas, protecting them from tramps and thieves, was strolling along the fences. A ladder leant against one of the houses. Only part of the roof was covered in plywood. Savage waited for the caretaker to turn down another street then slipped through the hole in the half-repaired roof. It looked like a respectable sort of a house and Savely decided it was bound to be stocked with food. Inside, it smelt of rotten wood. The old furniture had been covered in patterned tablecloths and old toys put away in a wooden box so that just for an instant Savage imagined he was back in his own childhood. He searched the cellar, pulling out a sack of gone-to-seed potatoes and dusty jars of mushrooms. There was a dry crust on a shelf and Savage ate it, slugging water from a pot-bellied carafe. When he had gathered up his supplies, he fell on the bed and, rocking into the springs, he counted the number of days he had slept on bare earth.
Previously the week had divided into two. Long drawn-out weekdays had given way to unbearable weekends. Now they were all mixed up and no day was like another. Savage called the days it rained and he had to hide under branches getting soaked Mondays and if he'd managed to find something to eat, it was Sunday.
His cheeks grew wispy stubble, his face darkened and his skin was so stretched there didn't seem to be enough of it. Sometimes, Savage was overcome with despair. It made his hands shake and his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. He would cry, sniffling to start with, like a child with hurt feelings, then getting louder and louder until he was sobbing out loud. Afterwards, exhausted, he would fall on the damp swamp-smelling moss and lie there, gazing up at the cold sky and trying to read his fate in the patterns of the clouds. Like a rabid wolf, circling a settlement, Savage could neither go back to town nor run away.
The residents of the town had stern, suspicious faces and cold smiles — looking into their eyes was like freezing in a snowdrift. They walked well-trodden paths, concealing their frost-bitten fates under fur coats and now that they had adjusted to the gangsters running the show they had long forgotten ever having lived differently.
The nine-storey block of flats stuck out among the five-storey blocks like a raised finger. Its residents tended to look down on everyone else, making them easy to recognize anywhere in town. A shop-owner's noisy family moved into one of the flats. He had three children, a shrill mother-in-law and a widowed sister who looked after the children. The businessman was pigheaded and grasping so that fresh bread was never put on the table until the children had finished the last stale bun and his book-keeping was darker than the Polar night. But the gang weren't the tax service and they weren't taken in by forged records. Coffin demanded a round sum from the businessman that the latter couldn't bear to part with. Arson set light to his shops, the electricity failed because of sudden power cuts and auditors made frequent inspections. Coffin was stubborn but the businessman was a match for him. His losses ate away at his savings but he was prepared to sell off all he had rather than see anything go to the gang.
Realizing that the day of reckoning was nigh, he sent his family out of town and sold his shops to Antonov for a pittance. He hid the money in bank accounts and barricaded himself into the flat with a double-barrelled shotgun. No-one broke down the door, however. Nothing happened at all and the next day the businessman started to panic. He looked out of the window and saw Coffin's men surrounding the building. The way in had been boarded up. Hovering in the courtyard, residents who couldn't go home asked the gang to let them in or, as a last resort, to let their families out but Coffin shook his head. Anyone who tried to climb out of the ground floor windows was driven back inside with sticks. Soon, the businessman's doorbell started ringing. His neighbours asked him to come out and speak to the gang but, pressed to the spy hole, he remained stubbornly silent. They were running out of food. The residents organized a morning market, swapping their surplus for things in short supply. So, the hoarder on the ground floor who kept sacks of potatoes on the balcony swapped them for tea and soap and a bakery worker exchanged flour for lard and washing powder. Fed up of waiting, the gang cut the electricity and water supply in the building, and the people shut up inside became utterly dejected. Since the plumbing wasn't working people had to use the entrance hall as a toilet and had to hold their noses when they went outside their flats. The businessman, ear pressed to the door, could hear angry footsteps but didn't answer any knocks. He no longer knew what he had hoped to achieve by locking himself in his flat and now he became totally confused and couldn't work out what to do. His rage only made him more stubborn, however, and, when he looked out of the window at the gang who were lying in wait for him, he laughed darkly and gave them the finger.
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.