Denouncer Read Online Free PDF

around—they kept to themselves. If they observed any religious practices, it was in the quiet and security of their own dwelling. Sasha would often visit them on his way home from school. The road passed their farm. They treated him as a surrogate son and called him their little David. During Passover, Sasha liked seeing their candle holders glowing with tapers and never ceased to stare at the mezuzahs on the outside doorposts, but best of all was the ivory chess set on which Naum taught Sasha to play. He would occasionally let the lad win, but they both knew that he could have swept Sasha any time that he wished.
    Infrequently, Sasha would stay for a meal, and then return home to tell his mother that Ida Zaslavsky made strange foods with odd names, like gefilte fish and knishes and kugel and cholent and babka and charoset and hamantaschen. Mrs. Parsky worried that Sasha was being poisoned. But he assured her that the Zaslavskys ate the same food. The Parskys never invited the “Yids” to dinner, and the latter never invited Sasha’s parents. Such was life in their village.
    If Naum had denounced Mr. Parsky . . . no, that was impossible. Yes, the two families had once quarreled over property lines, but any man who talked about the Talmud with Naum’s reverence could never betray his neighbor. Although the other farmers were rabidly anti-Semitic, Sasha’s parents, other than sometimes using the word “Yid” and repeating some jokes about Jewish economy, never repeated phrases like “the Christ killers.” To learn that Naum had been the denouncer would have elevated all the local prejudices to the status of truth. And since he couldn’t think poorly of the Zaslavskys, he adopted Winnie Verloc’s view in The Secret Agent that “life doesn’t stand much looking into.”
    When he thought of the papers under the plank board, what tormented him most was the fear that his examiners might ask him about the murders. Personal digressions were common during honors thesis exams. His mouth suddenly tasted of bile, and his forehead oozed sweat. He breathed deeply. His body seemed to be acting independently of his mind, signaling him, telling him to read the hidden papers and dispel all his fears. He went to the door and fastened the bolt; then he slowly dressed in preparation for the examination—and the unveiling. He removed from the small mahogany armoire a black suit, his only one. From a bottom drawer, he took a white shirt, a blue tie, and his lone pair of dress shoes, which a former tenant of the house had left behind and which fit him. Now suitably attired in a funereal manner, he used the same knife as before to raise the plank board, extricating a wallet, a brown morocco notebook, and some incidental papers. Spreading them on his bed, he pulled up a chair and studied the contents. The first man he had killed, the one with the wallet, was Alexander Harkov, almost thirty-three years old. His birthday would have taken place in two weeks. A lock of hair in his wallet must have come from some former or current girlfriend. It exhibited a ringlet. Sasha ignored the few rubles. The notebook, actually a diary, belonged to the other man, Petr Selivanov, twenty-nine. Although he had found it in the glove compartment of the truck, Sasha concluded that the frayed and broken corners resulted from its having been carried in the owner’s pants and not in his jacket or shirt pocket. With shaking hands, Sasha ventured into Petr Selivanov’s private life.
    Inside the front cover were birth dates. A photograph of his wife and daughter showed a pretty woman whose dark, Jezebel eyes exuded excitement, and a child with a bright face and pigtails. The pages were covered with rather elaborate sloping handwriting. Although short, the notebook was telling. One could see in an instant that the author had received a good education. On the wave of words, Sasha read:
    12 May
    Galina has given me this small brown morocco notebook. We have