Denouncer Read Online Free PDF Page A

to hide.
    Under a floorboard of his room lay the papers—unread—that he had found on the policemen and in the truck. Although he had initially saved them out of a morbid curiosity to know something about whom he had killed, he found it too painful to disturb the dead. After leaving his family, he had boarded a train and sat staring out the window. A railroad vendor had asked if he wanted tea, but even though the samovar whistled and he felt an insatiable thirst, he lacked the energy to reply. An old woman sitting across from him asked if he felt unwell. Her words came to him as if through water. On having heard the one soldier scream back through history, he had defensively rearranged his mind to muffle all sound.
    He now stared at the ominous plank board covering the papers. In his dreams he could hear the board squeak, as if someone was suspiciously examining it. Other times he tried to dispel the phantasm of dream to interpret the Morse code that the board seemed to be sending, a farrago of dots and dashes. The longer he had left the papers untouched, the harder he’d found it to read them. But the night before, he had dreamed that his university examiners knew the contents and asked him why he hadn’t studied or burned them. His indecision, they said, called into question his readiness for his honors exam, an exhausting exercise to be held the next day.
    Once awake, he scolded himself for his timidity. Perhaps the papers contained information about his parents having been “unmasked” as kulaks and the name of the denouncer. But that discovery was what he feared most: learning the name of the person who had betrayed them. The villagers were like family. They took meals together and, side by side, walked to church. In times of sickness and want, they aided each other. What if he learned, for example, that the Judas was the Chumachenkos, who shared a thresher and a plow horse with his family, and whose son, Sergei, pitched horseshoes with him; or the Sharatovs, who had helped build the Parsky barn; or the Bulgakovs, who famously invited the neighbors’ children to sit around a fire on a summer night and listen to fairy tales and ghost stories; or the one-legged Gregori, who showed the children his souvenirs from the Great War and regaled them with his exploits on the German front; or the Krichefskis, who raised chickens and, until their younger son died of polio, never failed to give the poor a stewing hen; or the Ezhovs? Having played with the Ezhov children, three boys and two girls, he regarded them as his own brothers and sisters. One August day, he had even kissed Natasha Ezhova on the cheek, in the apple orchard. At the time, she had said that Sasha was now promised to her and made him kiss the crucifix that she removed from around her neck.
    Down the road lived the Nazarovs. On warm August nights, the two families would take their meals in the Parsky garden, at a long table covered with a white linen tablecloth. Although the dishes were cracked and the silverware common, the food would have suited a boyar: pheasant and partridge, carp and herring, mushroom soup, hot bread fresh from the oven, boiling water for chai thanks to the samovar that the Nazarov family carted by horse to the Parsky house. Pavel Nazarov had generously offered his samovar when Mr. Parsky complained that his was too small for ten people and needed repair. In the long summer light, the children would play tag and catch fireflies and read poetry while the parents sipped a cordial and reminisced about traveling operas and ballets that used to come to the theaters of the great estates and perform for the locals. Sasha wondered whether his parents actually saw such performances or lived them vicariously through the memories of their parents.
    The Zaslavsky family, Ida and Naum, lived to the south of the Parsky farm. They had no children. After years of medical advice, Ida was told she was barren. A Jewish family—the only one for miles