You could have cut the silence with a knife. Savage looked at his daughter's bitten lips and recalled the crimson lipstick she'd worn that night and how he'd wanted to rub it off with his sleeve. Unable to bear his silence, Vasilisa jumped up, knocking the stool over.
«I've got to go,» she said and, without looking at her father, she rushed out of the kitchen, leaving him alone and at a loss.
Mrs Savage often thought about a divorce but a school friend with as many divorces as marriages to her name dissuaded her, shaking her head:
«Every new one's worse than the last!»
Her friend couldn't bear officialdom and to avoid having to change her identity papers she kept the name of her first husband even after their divorce. She wore it like a wig. Her ex-husbands all seemed the same to her and when she met them in the street she got their names mixed up and they had to remind her which number husband they were.
«Love takes the years off, marriage piles them on,» agreed Mrs Savage, wiping away a trickle of mascara.
She changed her lovers the way she changed her clothes and thought of her husband as a well-worn housecoat. Her initial terror wore off and once again she reigned supreme in their relationship like a wrestler standing over a prostrate opponent.
«Your colleagues want to know when you'll be back at work,» she said, dropping it into the conversation in such unctuous tones that Savage broke out in a clammy sweat.
He thought back to his desk, piled with drawings, the pot-bellied computer he just couldn't get used to so that he continued drawing by hand out of habit, and the limping coat stand that tipped sideways whenever he passed which made his colleagues sigh meaningfully, their gaze going through him like thread through the eye of a needle. After college, Savage had dreamed of soaring like a bird but instead had plodded off to work like a cur, tail between its legs and teeth chattering.
«Have they really not given me the sack?» he marvelled. «For all the time I've had off?»
«They've given you unpaid leave,» his wife answered, her eyes glittering. «But you mustn't take advantage.»
Mrs Savage attempted to revive family meals. She spent all day at the stove, spread the table with a freshly ironed cloth and put out the best china.
Conversation at the table failed to flow and the silence swelled like clouds full of rain, threatening to break into thunder and lightning. Savage simply couldn't get used to a fork, put the crumbs off the table into his mouth and virtually licked his plate clean, but his wife's eyes glittered, trapping him in his chair like a moth on a pin. Vasilisa was taut as a string. She didn't touch her food while Mrs Savage rolled little balls of bread and struggled to start the conversation.
«The f-f-fate of man is the s-s-sum of circumst-t-tance,» muttered an embarrassed Savage addressing his daughter. «We are p-p-powerless over it…»
«Come again?» frowned Vasilisa.
«Well, t-t-take C-c-christ,» said Savage, nodding at the Orthodox calendar on the wall. «If th-th-things had b-b-been different, he c-c-could have been Judas…»
«How?» His daughter couldn't follow him.
«Well, if s-s-something h-h-ad h-h — happened…»
«Like what?» asked Vasilisa. So Savage gave up, biting his tongue.
«Was it tough, being in the forest?» his wife asked to change the subject.
Inwardly Savage cried: «Better than at home.» Aloud he muttered: «It was.»
With a clatter of her fork, Vasilisa left the table without a word and Savely crumpled like a deflated ball. Mrs Savage hastily poured out the tea and cleared the plates away. Watching the wreaths of steam above their cups, Savely thought back to the bonfire the Saami had lit in the clearing. Dusk was falling but they left the lights off so that it soon went dark in the kitchen but Savage and his wife sat on in the darkness for another hour without saying a word.
A pink-cheeked police officer turned up on the doorstep unannounced. Staring at his scarred face Savage took him for a gangster in disguise and went white with terror. One of the scars split his top lip in half so that when the policeman wasn't speaking, it looked as if he had a harelip.
«Scars look good on a man,» he said when he spotted Savage's look.
Savely glanced doubtfully at the cuts on his own hands which until recently had been as smooth and white as a lady's.
«Soon be good as new!» the policeman chuckled. Savage found this deeply irritating.
Sprawled in a chair, the visitor took out some papers and licked his finger to flick through them. Savage drew back the curtain and took a quick look at the patrol car that had been keeping watch outside for days.
«I just need to clarify something,» the officer said, chewing his pencil. «About the night Coffin needed a coffin of his own…» He giggled at the pun.
Savage winced and nodded.
«Where were you standing when Karimov fired?»
«I was next to Antonov's car, talking to my daughter…» He paused after every word as if seeing how it felt. «A car pulled up and Karimov got out.»
There was a shriek of brakes from outside and Savage stopped talking, nervously loosening the neck of his jumper. The policeman looked up, frowning in surprise. Savely swallowed and continued repeating his statement word for word, as if reading it from a piece of paper. His visitor crossed his legs and turned a page in his notebook and Savage could see that there wasn't a word in it. The whole page was covered in noughts and crosses. A chill ran through him and, shivering with the sudden cold, he threw a blanket round his shoulders.
«Thanks for your time,» said the policeman and left, putting the notebook away in his pocket.
Savage saw him out then tried to work out why he'd come. Closing the door behind him, he looked through the spy hole to make sure he'd gone. The visitor went down a couple of stairs then came back, creeping up on tiptoe and listening with his ear to the door. To Savage it seemed as if his ear was a stethoscope that could hear his heart beating wildly and he held his breath, afraid to release it and give himself away. Adjusting his cap, the police officer whistled and dashed off down the stairs.
Back in his room, Savage checked that nothing was missing. Then he took a broom and swept away the mud from his boots and the stupid jokes scattered by the suspect policeman.
Savage closed his eyes and went over the evening Coffin was shot, reliving it minute by minute as he remembered it before turning it inside out and rearranging it back to front. He only became more confused. He kept getting stuck right at the second the shot was heard and the weapon jerked as if in its death throes and fell from his hands. It seemed as though he'd never pulled the trigger or, if he had, that he'd pointed the gun upwards and that then there was a second shot and a third or perhaps he hadn't fired at all or the gun fired a blank and fell from his grasp without killing a soul. And where was Karimov at that moment? Was he even there? Savage felt as if his doubts were starting to eat away at him, like rust corroding his recollections and confusing them with imaginings and overheard conversations.
Going through his old clothes which were now several sizes too big and hung on him like sacks, Savage thought back to the cold nights in the taiga when brushwood had kept him warm and he'd rigged up a hut from dry branches and rotten, mouldering trees. He felt cold all the time as if he'd been so frozen out in the forest that he still couldn't thaw out and, pulling on several sweaters, he sat under a camel-wool blanket, listening to his teeth chatter.
His daughter stayed out at night and his wife came home late, concealing the caked-on kisses beneath her blouse. Just as before, she took no more notice of her husband than of the furniture. She seemed to have put the last few months of her life out of her mind like the torn-off pages of a calendar being flicked into the bin.