The Eyes of Lira Kazan Read Online Free Page B

eyes!”
    And the old blind man, still holding Lara’s hand, gave a little triumphant laugh, as though it were the jealousy of other men that had deprived him of everything.
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    Lira finally escaped and went up one floor. She knew her friend’s apartment well, with the overloaded cupboard that threatened to crash over in the hall, the bedroom completely filled by the bed, the sitting room whose walls were covered with black-and-white photos taken by her elder brother, who had died in a car crash a few years ago, the cat who shed his fur everywhere, the collection of old American films. She had spent a few nights there at the time of her separation, sleeping on the sofa until she found an apartment. That was three years ago.
    She had been the one to leave. She had taken advantage of her daughter’s departure for Paris to go too. She had nothing against Dmitry, but for some time she had preferred being in the apartment without him, and she found herself staying later and later at the office. It was a sign that she no longer loved him and needed someone or something else. Behind her were almost twenty years of marriage, during which she had had two brief affairs when on assignments. They had not led to anything and Dmitry had never suspected anything, thinking her too serious, too passionate about her work and absorbed by her subject for that sort of thing. And there had sometimes been other meetings, other friendships that had dissolved without being forgotten
for all that. The job, for her, had always meant travel and departure; in the beginning, like so many others, she had imagined herself becoming a great reporter. She loved a scrap and thought she could liven up the dozy editorial offices. It took her some time to realize how inert a newspaper can be, and to learn to manoeuvre her way around sensitive areas and cowardly attitudes. She found herself writing columns instead of crossing frontiers; she covered news items, the politics and the economy of her own vast country, as well as her region and home city. Lira had finally realized that she was living in one of the epicentres of the world. And then, with one assignment north of St Petersburg and less than an hour spent at the site of a huge housing project, her life was turned upside down.
    The workers there had downed tools when the management had announced the closure of the canteen and the end of subsidized meals. Such an explosion of anger was a sufficiently rare event in this country to make it worth going up there to have a look. Lira decided not to go through the manager’s office to get to the site, she just followed the lorry-tyre tracks that led to the workers themselves. There she talked quietly to them about the empty canteens, all the while observing their torn work clothes and their rusty tools. She had only been there for twenty minutes when one of the management security men, alerted to her presence, grabbed her by the arm and threw her out, shouting “Journalists forbidden!” adding “Bitch” in the way those types did when a woman was not in her proper place. But Lira had seen enough.
    It wasn’t hard to find out who was backing this two-billion-dollar project. It was Sergei Louchsky, a man close to the top, with billions of dollars of capital, the owner of eighty companies; he controlled petrol, telecom and car companies, as well as several regions in the Russian Federation and a fiefdom in the Northern Caucasus – a nauseating stink of criminality permeated all his businesses. All this
was enough to excite Lira – she divided mankind into two parts, the “ sputniks ” and the others. Courageous people on the one hand, and then all the rest.
    â€œTread carefully,” her editor, Igor, had said, knowing as he said it how she would react.
    â€œI know, we must all love the Kremlin, and keep telling them not to worry, we belong to them!”
    â€œWell, I didn’t quite say