Russian Roulette Read Online Free PDF Page A

around on the front lawn of our house, pecking at the grass. There was a dog barking somewhere. Everything was ridiculously normal. But then I heard footsteps and looked up. Mr. Vladimov, our neighbor, was running down from his front door, wiping his hands on a cloth.
    “Mr. Vladimov!” I called out to him. “What’s happened?”
    “I don’t know,” he wheezed back. He had probably been working on his tractor. He was covered in oil. “They’ve all gone to see. I’m going with them.”
    “What do you mean . . . all of them?”
    “The whole village! There’s been some sort of accident!”
    Before I could ask any more, he had disappeared down the muddy track.
    He had no sooner gone than the alarm went off. It was extraordinary, deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. It couldn’t have been more urgent if war had broken out. And as the noise of it resounded in my head, I realized that it had to be coming from the factory, more than a kilometer and a half away! How could it be so loud? Even the fire alarm at school had been nothing like this. It was a high-pitched siren that seemed to spread out from a single point until it was everywhere—behind the forest, over the hills, in the sky—and yet at the same time it was right next to me, in front of my house. I knew now that there had been another accident. I had heard it, of course, the explosion. But that had been half an hour ago. Why had they been so slow raising the alarm?
    The siren stopped. And in the sudden silence, the countryside, the village where I had spent my entire life, seemed to have become photographs of themselves and it was as if I was on the outside looking in. There was nobody around me. The dog had stopped barking. Even the chickens had scattered.
    I heard the sound of an engine. A car came hurtling toward me, bumping over the track. The first thing I registered was that it was a black Lada. Then I took in the bullet holes all over the bodywork and the fact that the front windshield was shattered. But it was only when it stopped that I saw the shocking truth.
    My father was in the front seat. My mother was behind the wheel.

2

    I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW MY mother could drive. We hardly ever saw any cars in Estrov because nobody could afford to buy one, and anyway, there wasn’t anywhere to go. The black Lada probably belonged to one of the senior managers.
    Not that I was thinking about these things just then. The front door opened and my mother got out. Straightaway, I saw the fear in her eyes. She raised a hand in my direction, urging me to stay where I was, then ran around to the other side and helped my father out. He was wearing a loose white coat that flapped around his normal clothes, and I saw—with a sense of horror that was like a pool of black water sucking me in—that he had been hurt. The fabric was covered with his blood. His left arm hung limp. He was clutching his chest with his right hand. His face looked thin and pale and his eyes were empty, clouded by pain. My mother had her arm around him, helping him to walk. She at least had not been hurt, but she still looked like someone who had escaped from a war zone. There were streaks running down her face. Her hair was wild. No boy should ever see his parents in this way. It is not natural. Everything I had always believed and taken for granted was instantly smashed.
    The two of them reached me. My father had no more strength and sank to the ground, resting his back against our garden fence. And all the time I had said nothing. There were a million questions I wanted to ask, but the words simply would not reach my lips. Time seemed to have fragmented. The first explosion, the smoke and the gunfire, going downstairs, seeing the car . . . they were like four separate incidents that could have taken place years apart. I needed them to explain it for me. Somehow, perhaps, they could make it all make sense.
    “Yasha!” My father was the first to speak and it didn’t sound