«But do you remember how Karimov tried to find Savage? He wanted to blame everything on the dead man!»
«He probably polished him off as well! What sort of life is it when people are being killed for nothing?»
Hands behind their backs, two old men were strolling down the avenue, discussing the latest news. One limped on his right leg and the other on his left and Lapin slowed down to listen to their chatter as if he might learn something useful from them.
«Was Saam in it with him?»
«You can't understand these gangsters. They think one thing, say another and then do something else…»
Lapin thought back to the time when the town emptied of people when there was a price on Savage's head and its residents took up guns and garden rakes and galloped off on a manhunt. It reminded him of the days when the town had no lighting and turned into a massive gangsters' den and every flat produced murderers, thieves and profiteers who would trade a candle for gold. Robbers smashed down doors to break into flats and, brandishing kitchen knives that cut the darkness to pieces, they went off with everything of value.
There was no room in Lapin's office for the fat files that recorded the details of crimes perpetrated by decent citizens. Ultimately, an emergency meeting of the mayor, the prosecutor and chief of police, decided to destroy the evidence of those days, crossing it out of the town's history so that everyone who had been arrested, except the murderers who had settled scores with their relatives, were allowed to go home.
«And how are we any better than the gangsters?» Lapin exclaimed loudly. The old men looked round, startled.
«We haven't stolen anything or killed anyone!» they replied in annoyance, looking him up and down.
«When the lights were out and the doors were smashed like bits of cardboard, I didn't bother locking my flat but I did sleep under the bed so that I didn't get killed for an old TV and a tape recorder,» Lapin began and the old men prepared to listen. «I didn't even wake up when I had visitors at night. I only discovered there was something missing a couple of days later.»
«So what?» an old man interrupted impatiently. «The day before yesterday the fence was stolen from my wife's grave!»
«But then I saw my tape recorder when I went to see some friends. They swore they'd bought it cheap on the black market. Maybe they did but who can find out now?»
The old men waved him away and carried on, limping and spitting out the bitter saliva of the old.
«And the second-hand shop which at one time could hardly make ends meet expanded so much they had to lease another building!» Lapin yelled after them, thinking that he was like an old man no-one listened.
He had been suffering from headaches for several days, the tablets weren't helping and he was haunted by a recurring dream. In it, there was an open book in front of him that was written in Russian but when he leant over it he realized he couldn't read a word as if all the letters had suddenly become strange and incomprehensible. Waking in a cold sweat, Lapin would grab the first newspaper that came to hand or a crumpled draft report and only calm down when he'd read it. The next night, however, he had the dream again.
«Name?» the Chief popped out of a garden like a jack-in-the-box and grabbed his arm.
«Lapin, Comrade Colonel,» the investigator said, drawing himself up, and the Chief subsided, burying his face in his shoulder.
The crazy thought occurred to Lapin that if he shot the Chief, it would put an end to the hapless cripple's sufferings and be the best thing he'd done in his life. Watching the Chief blowing bubbles, he thought back to the angry man who had scoured the town, shaking his fist at the gangsters: «I'll put the lot of you behind bars. I'll get you!» Fear had silenced the little boys when they saw the chief of police and he self-consciously raised an eyebrow as he went by as if trying to appear even more menacing.
«Comrade Colonel, why is that you think you're digging up a treasure and it turns out you're digging your own grave?»
«Grave… Coffin…» said the Chief, and Lapin thought he saw a flash of awareness cross his mad countenance.
«Why is that, Comrade Colonel?» Lapin said again but the Chief didn't answer and they went on standing by the garden for some time, arm in arm, as if communicating wordlessly with one another.
The Saami assigned a young lad with short, quick legs to accompany Savage. The herders lined up in the clearing and came up one by one to shake Savage's hand or, hugging him, to give him three kisses, Russian-style, taking his cheeks in their cracked hands. The Saami woman stuffed a bundle of food into his bosom and whispered charms into his ear to ward off evil. «I was so beautiful once» were the words he heard in the old shaman's mumblings, and the lake that showed white through the trees was laughing like a toothless mouth.
Savage took the same road he had once fled along with Salmon when they were hiding from the hunters. He thought that life offered many roads but we choose only one and travel along it back and forth, never deviating. He could already think about the town without horror or revulsion and, as he mentally went back over his past life, he could feel his heart tingle with yearning. His escort said nothing, recognizing Savage's need to be alone and to probe his inmost self in order to find the Savely Savage who had fled into the taiga several months earlier.
The youngster ran through the forest as if he knew every corner of it, guided by unseen paths and signposts. As he made his way through the alder groves, the boy held the branches up carefully to let Savage pass as if he was afraid of hurting the trees and when he picked mushrooms he bowed to the earth in thanks for feeding him. Savage thought of the people who had hearts like shoe soles and minds eaten away by spiteful thoughts like a wormy apple, and again he wanted to stay with the Saami whose thoughts were simple and hearts kind.
Many years ago, Savage had gone to St Petersburg. Like a brightly decorated shop window, the TV lured him in with offers of another life that seemed more interesting and more intriguing than the sleazy everydays in the horrid little town he knew like the back of his hand. His wife and daughter were squabbling in the next room while Savage imagined travelling to the northern capital and plunging into its mysterious life. He imagined women with thin, mean lips, reading the poets of the Silver Age, a long cigarette holder clasped in their teeth, and men with manicured hands who thought that life was a confrontation with yourself in which some people forge their own path while others split in two like walnut halves and in living out one destiny, lose the other they might have had. Savage himself sensed that his own life, like the moon, had a dark side he would never see.
He brought the old suitcase he'd inherited from his father down from the attic, threw in his stuff and sat down all alone for a moment to compose himself for the journey. He slapped his knee: «Time to go!» His wife, lips pursed, scowled after him from the window.
The train arrived early in the morning. A full moon bobbed amid blackening clouds and sleepy passengers hurried along the platform, bumping into one another with their suitcases. There was a smell of diesel and the homeless. Eyes watered from the acrid smoke and Savage, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, bumped into a grinning taxi driver.
«The metro station's closed for repairs,» he told Savage. «Look, everyone's waiting.» He gestured towards the people crowding round the entrance.
«Surely, it won't be long before it opens,» said Savely missing the point.
The taxi driver shook his head.
«Not till late in the evening. If you don't want to wait, get in the car.»
Plonking himself down on the back seat, Savage noticed that the doors into the station had opened and the crowd was swallowed up by the subway. Savely would have liked the driver to stop but he had already started the engine.