The Zone Read Online Free PDF Page B

He pulled on some pants and a fatigue shirt. Grabbed a sheepskin jacket from the drying room. Then, lighting a cigarette by the sentry, he went out onto the porch.
    The night had come down heavily, right down to the ground. In the cold gloom, one could barely make out the road and the outlines of the forest that narrowed to the horizon.
    Alikhanov crossed the snowy parade ground. Beyond it, the kennel compound began. The hoarse barking of dogs on chains came from behind the fence.
    Boris cut across an abandoned railroad branch line and headed for the commissary. The store was closed, but the saleswoman, Tonechka, lived next door with her husband, an electrician. There was also a daughter, who came to visit only during holidays.
    Alikhanov walked towards the light of a window half-covered by snowdrifts.

    Then he knocked, and the door opened. From the drunken haze of the narrow room, the sounds of an old-fashioned tango could be heard. Squinting from the light, Alikhanov walked in. In the corner was a Christmas tree, leaning to one side and decorated with tangerines and food labels.
    “Drink!” said the electrician.
    He pushed a wine glass and a plate of wobbling aspic across the table to him.
    “Drink, marauder! Eat, you son of a bitch!”
    The electrician then put his head down on the oilcloth, obviously completely exhausted.
    “Much obliged,” Alikhanov said.
    Five minutes later, Tonechka handed him a bottle of wine wrapped in a poster from the local social club.
    He left. The door crashed behind his back. Instantly, his long, awkward shadow disappeared from the fence. And again darkness fell under his feet.
    He put the bottle in his pocket. The poster he crumpled up and threw away. He could hear it turning over and opening.
    When Boris got back to the wire fences of the kennel, the dogs again began snarling.
    The kennel grounds housed a lot of people. The dog-trainers lived in the first room, which was hung with diagrams, work rosters, lesson plans, a shortwave radio band decorated with a sketch of the Kremlin tower. Beside these, photographs of film stars from Soviet Screen had been tacked up. The film stars smiled, their lips slightly parted.
    Boris stopped on the threshold of the second room. There, on a pile of dog-trainers’ uniforms, lay a woman. Her violet dress was entirely buttoned up. For all that, the dress had been yanked up to her ribs, while her stockings had fallen around her knees. Her hair, recently bleached with peroxide, was dark at the roots. Alikhanov came closer, bent down.
    “Miss,” he said.
    A bottle of Pinot Gris stuck out of his pocket.
    “Ugh, just you go away,” the woman said, tossing uneasily in a half-sleep.

    “Right away, right away, everything will be all right,” Alikhanov whispered, “everything will be okay .”
    Boris covered the table lamp with a sheet of official instructions. He remembered that both instructors were away. One was spending the night in the barracks. The second had gone on skis to the railway crossing to visit a telephone-operator girl he knew.
    With trembling hands, he pulled out the red stopper and started to drink right from the bottle. Then turned suddenly – the wine was spilling down the front of his shirt. The woman was lying with her eyes open. Her face expressed extraordinary concentration. For a few seconds both were silent.
    “What’s that?” the woman asked. There were coquettish notes in her voice, garbled by drunken drowsiness.
    “Pinot Gris,” Alikhanov said.
    “Come again?” the woman said, startled.
    “Pinot Gris, rosé, strong,” he answered conscientiously, reading the label.
    “One of them here said, ‘I’ll bring some grub…’”
    “I don’t have anything with me,” Alikhanov said, flustered. “But I’ll find something. What may I call you?”
    “Whatever. My mama called me Lyalya.”
    The woman pulled down her dress. “My stockings are always getting unDONE. I DO them up and they keep getting unDONE… Hey,