Karimov received a letter from his father before he was sent off to prison camp. He went around his cell, caressing the walls as if he wanted to remember every bump and scratch of the peeling paint but he didn't open the envelope. He held it up against the light, palpated it and sniffed it as if he could tell what it said from the smell of its postal odyssey and the printer's ink. He thought that a person is a letter by an unknown writer, sent out to a random address. The lucky ones are opened and read but most come to rest in rusting post boxes full of papers and adverts and never discover their intended recipient.
Karimov went over his life, trying to understand why his soul had been behind bars before his body and imagining himself as a prisoner in an Arctic Circle that would grip his throat like a dog collar, preventing any escape.
The warder was sorry Karimov was being taken away. He enjoyed listening to his tales about life in the capital and women who smelt of spicy scent, about expensive resorts and financial speculations. Karimov told stories of lives spent as small change and his tales filled the warder up like a money box. More than anything else, the warder loved it when Karimov talked about the murders and recounted the deaths of Trebenko and Coffin, who the warder feared and hated even though they were dead.
He lectured Karimov, saying, «You should have been cannier. Do you know how many people get killed here? This many,» and he drew his hand along his neck. «And no-one gets sent down. It's a little town. Everyone knows who did it but they can't prove it.»
Karimov smirked and carried on packing his bag.
«And now you'll be locked up for the rest of your life,» insisted the warder. «To your dying day!»
«Prison is whatever's all around us,» said Karimov, gesturing at his cell. «We are all imprisoned by circumstances, habits, weaknesses, by our heritage and our biography, ultimately by our body which dictates how we live our lives. As for the flat where the years go by, its locks are stronger than the bolts on my cell and its walls are thicker.» Karimov looked again at the grey sky and said: «And isn't this town a straitjacket in the end? You live as if you're behind barbed wire here and the whole country is as unattainable for you as freedom is for prisoners, as if you were all serving sentences…»
Shaking his finger, the warder cracked a broad smile that showed the gaps in his teeth:
«No,» he drawled. You're the one banged up and I'm the one who's free. «I go where I like and live how I like.»
And slamming the window closed with all his strength, he limped off down the corridor, chuckling.
The cheerless sky hung over the hills like a deflated big top. There was a grimy locomotive at the platform, a solitary carriage hitched to it, no different in appearance to a goods wagon. The prisoners were driven into cells, separated from the corridor by bars, and Karimov stretched out on the bottom bunk, staring at a blank wall. His cellmate dangled off the top bunk to look at him, drumming a military march with his fingers. He grimaced evilly, his face spongy as a lump of dough.
«Hello, sir,» he smirked. «I recognized you right away…»
Looking at him, Karimov tried to remember where he could have seen him.
«You don't remember,» the man said, licking his lips. «People like me are like stones under your feet. If we get in your way, you chuck us out. If we don't, you won't even notice we're there.»
Half-standing Karimov turned towards the guard but he was coolly going through the list of prisoners, ignoring what they were saying.
«I was a caretaker at the factory. The stuff I carried off wasn't much really. You had a driver. I walked every day. And now here we are in the same carriage. But I've only got two years and from what I hear you're there for life…»
For the whole journey, he hung off his bunk, gazing at Karimov and cracking his knuckles.
«For life!» the man said again with an evil laugh.
Karimov took out his father's unopened letter and tore it open. Smoothing out the sheet of paper which had been folded in half, he read a single sentence written in Pipe's uneven hand:
«Life is a trial in which just one case is heard: the case of fate against the individual.»
The doorman was frightened of every visitor, he wrapped himself in his tattered sheepskin coat, his pockets clinked with medicine bottles and he was hard of hearing so that he never heard what was going on in the hostel. Savage went up the stairs, reading the graffiti on the walls. He jumped back at the scrunch of a syringe under foot as if he'd stepped on a scorpion.
«Even in the hostel, I got room No. 13,» Severina had lamented, cursing the absurdities of her life. The town had three hostels. At the first, Savage was shown in by a tipsy young woman who was breastfeeding a wizened baby. Savely had a lump in his throat. He staggered back and took the stairs like a slide.
A domestic squabble could be heard from room No. 13 at the workers' hostel. It reminded Savage so much of his arguments with his wife it seemed he need only push open the door to see himself and his wife, covered in the red blotches from her yelling.
The third hostel was in wasteland that had once had a football pitch but was now a rubbish dump for packing cases, broken furniture and plastic bags stuffed with garbage from God knows where. Empty windows gaped in an upper storey, left grimy by a fire. Tramps gathered there in winter and the watchmen kept away from them, afraid of being knifed. One night, one of the tramps fell out of a window. No-one tried to find him and he lay under a snow drift until the snow started to melt and someone spotted a hand sticking out of the drift.
The corridor smelled of burnt frying pans and cheap eau-de-cologne. Numbers had been daubed on the doors in floor paint. Inside, the TV burbled away like a demented old man. The floorboards creaked like aching joints and Savage took every step gingerly as if afraid of falling through the floor.
There was a mess of crumpled receipts and cigarette butts outside Salmon's door.
«She hasn't been around for a long time,» said an old woman with a long, hooked nose, who put her head out of the next room and looked Savage up and down. «She could be dead.» She closed the door without waiting for an answer.
Savage picked the flimsy lock with a knife and slipped inside like a thief. The room was furnished with a narrow bed, a humming fridge and a couple of chairs with clothes hung over their backs. Savage found a lump of mouldy cheese and a swollen carton of kefir in the fridge. A partially completed crossword lay on the bed. He took a framed photo off the wall, lay on the bed and looked for a long time at the girl who was so pretty she looked lovely even in a distorting mirror.
A lieutenant-colonel went to Savage's work. He walked so heavily it seemed as though he found every step difficult. Looking over Savage's papers, he peered at his drawings and recounted Karimov's trial while Savely's colleagues clustered round wondering how he was able to say one thing while reading another.
Coming to a halt, the lieutenant-colonel said:
«Give the guy some support. He was wandering around the forest for three months. He's been through a lot. God forbid that anyone…»
«They told us he'd shot a gangster,» whispered a secretary standing in the doorway.
«Have you worked with him for long?»
«We've sat next to him for about 15 years,» one colleague answered, adjusting his glasses with a nervous gesture.
«And what do you say? Could he have shot anyone?»
Adjusting his glasses again, the man laughed.
The next day Savage himself appeared. As he walked down the long corridor, he was accompanied by stares that prodded him from behind. He felt as though he had walked down that corridor the previous day, the day before that and a month before that, and in the evenings had struggled to put his arms in the sleeves of his coat as he ran down the stairs, his steps counting out the final seconds of the working day. During that time, it had been someone else, not him, who had lived in the forest, sheltering from rain as light as mist in a hut made of twigs.