«Are you out of your mind?» he shrieked, afraid. «You'll set the place on fire!»
«Oh, you're such a wimp,» snapped his wife. «You really are.»
The residents found it impossible to stay inside their flats when they didn't know how to keep themselves busy and they wandered the streets like sleepwalkers, slipping on the icy, snow-covered pavements that weren't being cleared. There was a crowd outside the municipal hospital, faces bleeding and noses broken. Some people were picked up on the street and carried in or brought in on stretchers.
«Fellow citizens! The situation is under control. Keep calm!» In the square, the mayor's voice boomed from a loudspeaker that was plugged into a storage battery. «There is no need to panic!»
During the day when there were a couple of hours of sunlight, everyone came tumbling out of their homes. Midday in the polar region was like evening. In the lilac twilight, snowdrifts looked like cotton wool and stars shone dully through slate-grey clouds. When they looked at one another, neighbours found they had changed beyond all recognition: their faces were swollen and sleepy; their eyes blocked and teary. People walked with their arms outstretched automatically, testing the air to avoid bumping into a post that had suddenly sprung up out of the darkness.
Savage roamed around town, trying to find something useful to do. He wanted to help and hoped he would come across an old man stuck in the snow or a woman who couldn't find her way home but, as he wandered around, he blundered into fences and cut his knees when he fell on the icy road and didn't meet anyone he might have helped. From a snatch of conversation, tossed over the shoulder of a passerby, he found out that the hospital needed volunteers. Wearing his red armband, he longed to help the patients who had gathered at the hospital entrance where fires were burning, shedding light on the street and the lower floors. Instead, he was assigned to corpse duty, dragging away the bodies that were being dumped out of the back door and straight into the snow. He would put a corpse onto a sheet and slowly drag it through the snow to the morgue where the doors stood open in welcome.
In the first few days, Coffin's gang broke into several banks where the alarms and security guards weren't working. As a result, soldiers were dispatched from the military unit to protect the main facilities and posted outside the big shops and local government buildings. It didn't take the gang very long, however, to realize that the outage at the power station hadn't just turned the ordinary lives of the residents inside out. It had done the same to the residents themselves.
The mayor's voice resounded through the town: «The situation is under control. Repair work is under way at the power station!»
People lit bonfires inside their flats causing fires. The whole town was enveloped in thin smoke and a smell of burning hung in the air. The police couldn't cope with the number of calls to deal with robberies and murders involving ordinary citizens, who suddenly realized they could get away with it. Savage's neighbour strangled his wife then dragged her out into the street and left her there. This murder, like many others committed during those days, would have gone unsolved had the man not been so tormented by his conscience that he went and confessed.
Police Chief Trebenko could tell that the town was getting out of control and that he couldn't pacify the newly savage inhabitants. It had become dangerous to go outside and the police barricaded themselves into the station, frightened by rumours that the townspeople were planning to take it by storm. To play it safe, they released all their prisoners except those waiting to be sent to labour camps but when they found themselves in the dark streets they asked to be let back in.
Trebenko went to the gang for help.
«My boys can't cope,» he said, with a helpless gesture, hovering ill at ease in the entry way.
The generator snarled like a dog on a chain and a dim light winked with an air of cunning, threatening to go out one minute only to flare up brightly again the next. Predatory shadows flickered across the walls. A rusty sink kept count of the seconds like a metronome and Coffin, an old checked blanket round his shoulders, warmed his feet on Shorty who was curled up on the floor.
«They're getting into it,» he smirked, exchanging a look with his sidekicks. «By the time the lights come back on, this will be a prison camp not a town.»
Armed for the task, Coffin's gang took to the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the police officers, dispersing bystanders and terrorizing anyone who tried to take advantage of the general misfortune to line their own pockets. Instead of the soft, soothing voice of the mayor, the gang leader's hoarse and baleful tones could be now heard from the loudspeaker in the central square.
«Right, well, basically…» Coffin began, clearing his throat. «Break it up. Go home. Stay indoors, quiet as mice: not a sign, not a sound. We catch anyone outside…» there was a pregnant pause, «and, well, you all know what will happen… That's all I wanted to say.»
And that was the end of the unrest. A couple of days later, when extra troops had already arrived in town, the power station had been repaired and the lights came back on inside and out, dazzling eyes that had become accustomed to the darkness. The town had been without light for two weeks but it spent a lot longer licking its wounds. Ransacked shops, burnt out houses and broken fences were repaired all over town, the dead were laid to rest and newly emerged criminals, who until recently had been law-abiding citizens, were hunted down.
Colonel Trebenko came from the Ukrainian town of Donetsk. They say a Ukrainian without cunning is like a bun without currents. Trebenko wouldn't lift a finger unless there was something in it for him. He would wink complacently at his reflection in the mirror but blushed to see his old photos. The young lieutenant dispatched to a small northern town a quarter of a century before had the steady gaze of a prosecutor and Trebenko couldn't look him in the eye.
«A person's not a needle. We'll find him,» he said. Trebenko liked crime films and would repeat phrases from them so you could tell which serial he was watching. There was no let up from the gangsters though. The previous chief of police had tried to resist them but came to no good. Trebenko's stomach ached at the thought of what had happened to his predecessor.
«If you don't, we'll skin you alive!»
«Why do you need him?» Trebenko raised his voice.
«Not ‘you', us,» said Saam with a grin, thinking back to the accident at the power station. «If he's not punished, the next thing we know, they'll all be taking up pitchforks!»
That conversation with Saam stayed in Trebenko's head. He parked the car in the garage and took a bottle from the cupboard, which he kept hidden from his wife behind a petrol can. He poured himself a glass and drank it down, so unaffected it might have been water. There had been a call from headquarters that morning. «Can't you cope?» the general had asked, needling him. «Have you brought in the volunteers? There's always something happening in your blasted town!» Trebenko had stood to attention as if the general could see him but when he replaced the receiver he spat out: «And we all know where the stars on your shoulders came from.»
A gun and hunting trophies hung on the garage wall. There was a deerskin too, shaped like a map of the Soviet Union, pinned with beer bottle corks to mark the village Trebenko was born in, Moscow where he'd set up his children and the godforsaken place he lived in himself. «This is a big case so I can't go but as soon as it's over, that's it. I'm taking my pension and going home!» he would say after the third glass while his wife just sighed, biting her bloodless lips. Trebenko dreamt of building a two-storey house with a turret and carved shutters. He would draw the layout of the rooms on the back of a police report for his wife, telling her which room was the bedroom and which one was the lounge. But when his wife brought a dusty suitcase down from the attic, Trebenko would sulk and claim that urgent cases were keeping him at the station until midnight and his wife would carefully fold up the report and the sketch, hide it in the table drawer and put her suitcase away. «I'm stuck,» he would say helplessly, hiding his eyes. He dreamed that Ukraine, warm, passionate, sable-browed Ukraine, was calling him home but the North, like a shaman hag, wouldn't let him go now that she'd got her talons into him.