The settlement had its own tourist attraction. Local drunks took the rare tourists who showed up, their enormous rucksacks sticking up over their heads and looking, from a distance, like children sitting on their shoulders, to a flooded mine. It was haunted. The settlement, built thirty years before, had been home to many miners and their families but one stroke of the pen had shut it down, boosting the list of dead settlements that were starting to outnumber living ones in the area. The mine's director had aged ten years when he found out that the mine was about to be flooded. His eyes, widened in horror, were as black and empty as two mine shafts. When the water was turned on, the director disappeared. He didn't come back the next day or a week later and, scratching her face, his wife rushed to the pit, sobbing and calling her husband's name.
For a bottle of vodka, the drunks would tell the tourists how at night the director would emerge from the mine, take people by the hand and drag them towards him. The tourists wrote in their notebooks that he once drowned a young boy after grabbing his leg. True, the wizened old crones ticked them off, yelling out that the boy had been dead drunk and had fallen down the mine himself but the tourists didn't believe them and looked superstitiously askance at the fearsome spot.
The village started to empty once the mine had closed but not everyone left. Some wanted to die where they had lived. Others had nowhere to go. All they could do was drink themselves to death, competing to see who would live longest.
«I'm not coming to your funeral!» one old man shouted out of the window, shaking his fist at a neighbour.
«And I'm not coming to yours!» came the retort.
They died on the same day, poisoned by industrial spirit procured from some passing soldiers so they were both true to their word.
The shops closed and once a week Antonov would send in a bus-load of out-of-date food that people bought initially but then began to swap for other things. When the things ran out, the bus stopped coming, leaving the residents on their own against the taiga.
The settlement's last resident was the director's wife. Every day she went to the mine and sat on a cold moss-covered stone running cherry-stone beads through her fingers. She would talk to her dead husband, reproaching him for leaving her alone so soon. Then she would sob and, on going closer, you could pick out swear words amidst the muttering. Weeping, the woman prayed for the suicide with whom she had hoped to spend her afterlife but on one occasion her husband appeared to her in a dream in the form of a devil and after saying three Our Fathers she set out on foot for the town, dragging a battered suitcase along the ground and looking over her shoulder as if she was afraid that her husband was in hot pursuit, pointing the end of his tail like a finger. In the church, she was gathered up by Antonov's wife who gave her a job as a servant and the settlement sank into a deathly hush that was now broken by Savage, shattering the silence with a shout:
«Is there anybody there?»
«Anybody there…» replied the echo, drowning in the flooded pit.
Savage went round the houses and, despite all he'd seen in his wanderings, he felt suddenly ill at ease. It seemed as though the settlement only looked empty, that its residents, whether dead or departed for the town, were sitting inside, watching Savage roam the streets from their windows and grinning wickedly as he went through their things. He imagined that no-one went anywhere after death. They stayed put, living where they used to live and, sooner or later, every flat became a communal one, packed like a piggy bank full of change, with its residents, the living and the dead.
Hunger, clenching his stomach into a fist, painted crazy pictures in Savage's head. He felt dizzy and imagined there were people around every corner. Trying to escape from his persistent delirium, he hastened to leave the settlement, looking over his shoulder as if he was afraid that unseen residents were wagging their fingers behind him, sniggering around the corners, like devils.
«Nobody needs anybody,» muttered Karimov, flicking through the telephone book and wondering why he needed an expensive, designer phone if there was no-one to ring. He had long ceased to see faces behind the names entered in a neat, even hand but only their bank accounts, crossing off the ones who had no money left.
His scheme was a simple one: to take the factory away from Pipe by buying up shares, turning his place of exile into his property and ridding himself of Pipe forever by severing the ties between them. He found an investor who smacked his lips in delight when he looked through the papers and the deal was done. Karimov himself rang round the shareholders, starting the conversation with meaningless small talk. The person he was speaking to felt as though Karimov's wheedling tones were sliding down his throat like a probe to examine him from the inside. Once he knew the listener would accept his terms and not reveal the scheme to anyone else too soon, Karimov named his price.
«Nobody needs anybody,» he thought, rubbing his hands as he agreed yet another contract.
One of his father's friends had been known as a good family man. He spent his weekends with his wife and children and once a week dropped in on a young mistress who had wound herself around him like ivy. He was fond of a drink and of riotous parties with friends bringing other friends and ear-splitting laughter. Once, as he passed the cemetery where the crosses leant companionably towards one another, he pictured his friends and relatives gathered at his funeral. His wife would sob as she hugged their children while his mistress, face hidden under a wide-brimmed black hat, crept stealthily up to the coffin and kissed his cold lips. He felt his eyes fill and looked away in embarrassment so that his driver didn't notice. At that point, he came up with the idea of staging his own death to fulfil a childhood dream of seeing how his loved ones would mourn him. He didn't go home that day. Instead, he hid in a hotel out of town and his minions presented his wife with the burnt-out wreckage of his car along with their condolences.
He hired a car and, sporting shades that hid half his face, he went from his office to his house and from the restaurant preparing the funeral feast to the morgue, observing his family. His wife spent a whole day going round the shops to pick out her widow's weeds and decided that black was definitely her colour. The children did what they always did and met up with friends. In the evening, the father watched them through the café window mixing martinis and whiskey and discussing the football. The funeral was as dull as the tenth repeat of a show in which every line was familiar. His friends and sidekicks delivered short speeches with one eye on the time, gazing mournfully at the closed coffin. His wife didn't cry and his children, shifting from foot to foot, fidgeted with their lavish bouquets while his mistress didn't show up at all. The mourners heaved a sigh of relief when the coffin was lowered into the grave, which cut the man hiding behind the trees to the quick. When his wife got home from the funeral feast, flushed from the wine, she found the husband she thought she had buried earlier in the day, hanged in the bathroom.
«Nobody needs anybody,» Karimov reiterated, recalling the would-be prankster's second funeral which was even duller than the first.
The phone rang.
«I've been hearing the bodies haven't even got time to grow cold up there in your Chicago of the Arctic Circle…»
Karimov cringed and thought that even the grinding of teeth sounded pleasanter than that voice. He imagined Pipe putting the electronic device to the hole in his throat and soundlessly moving his lips, his unlit pipe between his teeth, his useless tongue, flapping in his mouth like a fish.