Cold by John Sweeney

Author:John Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781503934221
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Published: 2016-07-01T06:00:00+00:00

NOVO-DZERZHINSKY, SOUTHERN RUSSIA

A goods train clank-clanked through Gennady’s brain. Sleepless, he lay prone on the bed of his overheated room, the curtains drawn, telling himself that he’d slept in better style in Jalalabad. There he goes again, he argued with his restless self, bringing up the good old, bad old days of Afghanistan. Why couldn’t he give it a rest? Why couldn’t he accept that he was no longer a warrior, merely a bad-tempered old librarian whose daughter had gone missing? His un-sleep was interrupted by a row down the hallway, a woman laughing, shouting ‘You’ve got such a small prick I need a magnifying glass’, a slap, hard, a scream, then the sound of someone vomiting.

Saving money for God knows what, he’d checked into one of the cheapest hotels in town, part brothel, part goods yard. The only virtue was that the hotel receptionist wasn’t in the least bit interested in checking the name he’d given – fake – against his ID card – real. Just a thousand roubles in cash in return for a key.

The vomiting from down the hallway eased and the train was gone, its whistle blowing from a mile off, maybe two, a long, mournful sound that pierced the quiet of the night.

Gennady remembered not sleeping at night when he was a boy, seven, eight years old. His mother had checked up on him, and brought him a glass of milk, and then they heard that sound, a train whistle, from far off and she started crying. Tough as nails, his mother was, but her whole body had quivered with grief.

‘Mum, what’s the matter? Please, Mummy, tell me,’ said Gennady, and eventually she had wiped away her tears with a musty-smelling old handkerchief and started to talk.

‘Back in 1933 I was little, as young as you are today, Gennady. The police came in the morning and assessed our farm. We had three cows, not one, and they said that meant we were kulaks, enemies of the state. They took my grandfather and grandmother, my father, my uncle Sasha and my aunt Maria, and all my seven cousins, including Evgeny, a sweet little boy with beautiful blond curly hair who I had a crush on, my first love.’

‘Why didn’t they take you?’ asked Gennady.

‘Because my mother had an uncle in the police, so he protected her and me, her only daughter. But his protection was only so strong, and eleven of my family, the heart of it, my papa too, were lined up, the police kicking them with their shiny boots and waving their guns. They shot all three cows. Then the town butcher, one of them, a big Soviet he was, came along in his cart and started hauling the carcasses onto it and my grandfather, who was a big man, he’d fought for the tsar against the Germans at Tannenberg in 1914, told the butcher he was a thief and a pig, and was going to hit him and then one of the police shot him dead.

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