He was interrupted by the waitress who opened the crumpled paper she had been using as a fan.
«It says Karimov was a bit, you know,» she said and twirled a finger by her temple «And he killed because he got a taste for it! The prison shrink asked him if he thought of himself as a serial killer,» she continued, running a finger along the crumpled paper and reading the article out loud. «And Karimov had some sort of fit, laughing fit to burst until they took him back to his cell.» She folded the paper up again and looked at the fat man in triumph.
«And he set up the shooting at the lake as a distraction,» said a man hunched over behind the counter. «What I can't understand is whether Krotov died by accident or whether Karimov knew he had a bad heart and deliberately turned the heat up in the steam room.»
«Yes but Savage. What about him?» someone yelled.
«Sod Savage!» the fat man said with a yawn watching the froth on his beer settle. «Maybe he starved to death or maybe Karimov got to him…»
Lapin slammed his empty glass down on the table and went out, blinking in the sun. It was dazzling after the darkness of the bar. He picked up a dirty, sticky newspaper that lay next to an overflowing dustbin and read the article about Karimov, whom the reporters had dubbed a serial killer. The drink clouded his brain and the letters jumped around like fleas so that he had to read every line twice to understand it. «When he looked around, Saam, the head of the group, saw that he was surrounded by dead men. Everyone he had been close to and on whom he could rely had been killed by Karimov. So Saam was afraid he would be next. It was then that he went to Investigator Lapin and told him what really happened on the fateful evening that turned the town upside down. The killer has not got away with it.»
The car sped along the broken, bumpy road, bouncing over the potholes. Pipe only remembered what he wanted to remember and forgot everything he wanted to forget and so, when he passed the road sign with a broad line crossing out the name of the town, he crossed the town out of his memory too, forgetting even its name.
«The killer has not got away with it,» Pipe read in conclusion before rolling up the paper and hiding it in his pocket. «People like fairy stories and believe in them more than they believe in themselves.»
«Be ye as little children,» said the driver with a smirk.
«It's a shame I'm not a writer,» the old man sighed, looking at the red of the autumn forest, dark as dried blood, and contemplating the serial killer story he had just read.
The driver raised his eyebrows in surprise and turned the music down.
«I'd write a detective story, seasoned with murders like meat with pepper, and then,» Pipe thought for a while, «and then I'd actually do everything I'd written about, following my own book like a recipe. Everything grows dull, my friend, everything needs novelty whether it's food, women, or killing…» His mechanical voice through the device placed at his throat was like a radio broadcast.
The driver kept his eyes firmly on the road, unable to bring himself to ask his boss about his foster son.
«When I die, he'll forget about me the very next day,» said Pipe as if reading the driver's thoughts. «Now, though, he'll remember me for the rest of his life. He'll wake up in his bunk and his first thought will be about me. He'll look in the mirror and see me. Every single second he'll be thinking about me. To his dying day…»
When Karimov found out from the warders that his foster father had left, he became limp as a rag doll. He signed the confession and stretched out on the bench, staring at the ceiling. «Nobody needs anybody,» Karimov muttered and he felt as though he lay wrapped in his mother's faded frock which he had never ever seen.
Summer in the north is short as a woman's best years. The air smelled of rotten leaves. The young trees had already lost their leaves and stood naked, shivering with cold. Berries scattered like torn strings of beads and Salmon gathered them up in her skirt while Savage cleaned skins with the Saami and dried meat, cutting it into thin strips and suspending it over the fire.
It seemed to Savage as though there were more hours in the day. While previously dawn peeped out of nightfall like an underskirt from under a dress and the days ended even before they began, now the days were as long as an echo in the taiga, coming back like a boomerang, only to take flight through the forest once again. Savage started smoking, making his own smelly roll-ups. He scraped off bark and planed off fine strips that he pulverized between two stones, then rolled into sheets to dry in the sun. And so he kept himself busy during the long, drawn-out days as thick as Saami soup.
Wrapped in reindeer skins, Savage smoked a roll-up, warming himself by the fire, and mentally reviewed his life. He felt as though he hadn't lived before. As if his skin had been peeled away and he was now naked, aware of the slightest breath of wind, the cautious steps of a wild animal keeping away from the Saami camp, and Salmon, shivering as snuggled into him.
«If I could have my time over again, I'd live life completely differently,» her toothless mouth mumbled as she drifted through reminiscences of her own, in which she was a beautiful young girl with eyes blue as berries. «And why do we only live once? After all, you write things out in rough first, deleting things, crossing them out and redoing what you don't like. Then you write it all out nicely. But we only live once, without any rehearsal. We leave blots like birthmarks and it's only when we look back that we realize we lived in the wrong place, in the wrong way, with the wrong people… And we die without even being born!»
These were Savage's own thoughts chewed over in solitude for years like a cold supper and when he looked at Salmon, it struck him that life, like the Saamis' traditional songs, had no beginning, no end and no rhyme. It was pure feeling, drawing us along like a guide dog on a lead.
«There's no way you can change anything.» He shook his head. «Our life is spelled out from the cradle. We don't choose our parents, the town we're born in, the colour of our eyes, our friends, our wives, our children or our ailments… You can't escape your fate like you can't leave your own body. The play can be stopped mid-word with a noose around your neck but who knows, perhaps that too is the only possible ending, the one that was predestined.»
Salmon remembered the nanny who suffocated babies with pillows, chanting, «You poor, unfortunate things,» and she pictured her, hair loose, striding out of the window and into the night.
«We are poor, unfortunate things,» the girl repeated, burying her face in Savage's shoulder.
The herders talked the way they sewed their Saami shirts, piercing the conversation with their tongues like needles through cloth. They decorated the shirts with beads and coloured ribbons and their conversations with songs and sayings that made their faces tickle as if stroked by a blade of grass. Savely joined the Saami in their circle and they talked to him, smiling, even though he didn't know their language, but he nodded in response or threw out his arms as if he understood what they were saying.
«Happen it did or happen it didn't, be it a fairy story or a tall tale, but heed it well, girlie, if you've nothing better to do,» said the old woman in a sing-song voice, a smile in her slanting eyes. «I can't remember who told me this tale, Old Father Reindeer or a passer-by or whether I made it up myself…»
Salmon was cleaning fish with a knife and the old Saami woman, spattered with flour, was rolling the fish in flatbread to bake over the fire.
«Once upon a time there were three sisters. They went into the forest and turned into bears and all summer long they stayed away from people. Then, when winter came, they settled into a lair.»