Remembering how Salmon had feared the shadows on the wall when she lay dying, Savage heard the death rattle that tore at her chest in Saam's heavy breathing. «I was so beautiful once,» her voice whispered. Staring at the gangster's rough hands that he had laid upon her, Savage felt his terror giving way to devastating hatred.
Saam shuddered as if he had read what Savage was thinking in the colourless eyes that had turned cold and angry. Like an animal ready to pounce, he slowly reached towards his pocket that held a knife, but Savage spotted the movement and shrank back in his seat, his hands raised.
Facing in opposite directions, they leant against the windows, watching the passers-by. The dark windows made it look as though it was dusk outside and Savely chanced a glance at his watch.
«Put it all behind you,» said Saam without looking round. «Go back to how you used to live as if none of it ever happened.»
«Put it all down to my imagination? Think of it all as a dream?»
«If nobody remembers something that happened, it means it was a dream.»
Savage held out his scratched hands like dry, broken twigs.
«Scars heal,» said Saam dismissively. «And those to the heart heal more quickly. But do you know what corpses smell of?»
«What?» asked Savage turning to face him and encountering his mocking look.
«Human filth. The worse someone was, the more he stinks after death…»
Savage remembered Salmon's shrunken corpse that smelled of reindeer milk, mouldy pelts and the children's home. «What's that supposed to mean?» Savage asked, struggling to remain polite.
«That people die the way they lived.»
Savage wanted to talk about Salmon but hesitated.
«And how should you live?»
«With no regrets for the past and no thought for tomorrow. The main thing is to remember that life has no meaning and that that is its main meaning.»
His maxims made Savage's head hurt.
«You have a daughter,» said Saam with a conspiratorial wink, concealing a threat in his smile like the knife in his coat. «Think about her, nothing else…»
Savage's mouth felt full of prickles: Vasilisa had drunk her youth away by the glassful. Her glazed eyes had pierced her father like needles and he had felt his daughter drifting away like a chunk of ice-floe borne away by the current.
«I think he's a bit, you know,» said the driver, twirling his finger at his temple as he watched Savage go.
He remember running from the children's home to the abandoned playground. Savage's little girl had been digging in the sandpit and he, a sweet hidden in his cheek, had nestled into Savage's shoulder wishing the moment to last as long as possible. He had boasted to the children in the home that his father had shown up and had put up with their beatings as he waited for him to collect him.
Lenya flushed and the old hurts hung like leeches on his heart.
«Perhaps we better get rid of him before it's too late?» he asked, pupils narrowed.
«I don't want the old man for an enemy,» Saam said, pulling a face as he thought about Pipe. «Let's wait till he dies and then…» He made a gun with his fingers and aimed it at Savage's back.
Savely's memories clung to one another and became confused. He suddenly saw the red-headed women getting into Antonov's car, Salmon choking on the smoke at the burning tip, and the Saami lowering his daughter into a rough pine coffin, her shrivelled body laced as if in cobwebs by prominent blue veins.
«If life's an empty dream, death is a dirty trick!» said a passer-by and Savage plodded after him like a stray dog.
He was all ears as he walked, waiting for the man to throw him his well-chewed thoughts like crumbs to a dog.
«Death is madness because life is stupidity. Each person has their cross to bear and that cross is himself.»
All of a sudden Savage realized that he was following his own shadow and talking to himself.
He wandered home, waving his arms and muttering to himself and passers-by shied away from him, frightened by his mad, contorted face. Rain trickled down inside his collar. His boots mashed the slush and Savage dissolved in his recollections like sugar in water. He felt as if he was pursued by ghosts that grabbed onto his coat.
At home Savage carried on talking to himself and, looking into his eyes, his wife read in them something that turned her lips down in a half moon and made her heart shrivel up like a baked apple.
In the morning, a psychiatrist arrived with a nervous giggle as he straightened his shirt cuffs.
«The p-p-past is all m-m-mixed up with my imagination and I can't tell what really happened and what I only imagined and I think I'm going mad.»
The doctor listened to Savage and made out a prescription which he left on the bedside table.
«B-b-but what's m-m-most terrifying,» said Savage grabbing his hand, «is when the d-d-darkness p-p-passes and I r-r-remember what really did happen.»
«There's no cure for memories. All we can do is give you medication to get rid of the thoughts…» He rose to go.
«Will it be easier if I do forget it all?»
«It could be even worse,» the doctor said, shrugging his shoulders. Mrs Savage tugged on his sleeve.
«Is he ill?» she asked in the corridor.
«Definitely,» the doctor nodded.
«What ails him?»
«Himself.»
Savage kept the tablets close to his heart like a baby and felt the hallucinations subsiding and giving way to an unbearable, oppressive indifference that bent him to the ground as if he'd become a hunchback. Previously Salmon had come to him at night as he alternated between dreams and memories. Sometimes she was young as she was in the photo. Sometimes she was disfigured by disease. She whispered as she shivered in her fever: «I was so beautiful once…» and her trembling transferred itself to Savage who also shivered beneath his blanket. Every night they ran through the impenetrable taiga and took refuge in the Saami encampment and the kind herders warmed their frozen souls like the heat of the fire. Every night the shaman woman lowered an empty coffin into the ground and in it, according to their beliefs, they buried her soul. To Savage it seemed as though he'd left his soul in the coffin as well and that without it he was like a stone covered in moss. He dreamed of holding Salmon close and kissing her withered cheeks and in the morning he would stare at the ceiling trying to remember whether it had really happened. Since he'd started taking the tablets, however, the girl had stopped coming. Savage missed her and took her photo out from under his pillow.
Savely was loosing his mind scared by the shadows overhead threatening to attack him. He stared at the madman twirling his finger by his temple until he realized he was looking in the mirror. It felt as though he wasn't in control of his own body, that someone else was, and that he smiled and moved his limbs at someone else's behest. The minute that person stopped being in charge, however, Savage would collapse on the floor, unable to take a single step.
«No regrets for the past and no thought for tomorrow,» he said, repeating Saam's words. «No regrets and no thought. No regrets…» The walls of his room held him in a vice. The ceiling bore down like a tombstone. Savage poured out his tablets, weighed them in his hand and put the handful into his mouth, washing them down with water. He stretched out on the bed and lay for a long time, listening to himself. His heart was pounding crazily and the blood raced through his veins like a new resident examining his home. A weight was pressing on his chest like Antonov's body when they fought on the stairs. His blanket was soaked with sweat and the trembling of his body transmitted itself to the walls which started to jump before his eyes. They sought to collapse, as if he was lying in the old box the tramps had slept in at the tip. Savage waited to lose consciousness and sink into the blackness, oblivion and silence of the everlasting Polar night.