The Gentle Axe Paperback Read Online Free Page A

hostile, mocking, contemptuous. And yet some of the men who pointed her out for ridicule were among those who came to the basement of the milliner’s shop, at a different hour, for a different purpose.
    She turned her back on the Haymarket, to face north, toward Yekaterininsky Canal, or the Ditch, as it was known. She crossed Kokushkin Bridge over the frozen canal back into Stolyarny Lane. There was the building that housed the police station ahead of her, and she remembered again his impossible eyelashes. His eyes, she now remembered, were the color of ice, but whether that color was black or silver, she could not say. She was tempted to go back inside just to find out. And while she was at it, she would demand the money after all.
    Then without her thinking about it, the rest of him suddenly came back to her. Fat—that was it. He was a fat little man, with a proud paunch out front. But every part of him, almost, seemed to have something swollen about it, from his big, close-cropped head to his plump hands. How strange and improbable those eyes had seemed in all this. How calm and unexpected and alert, but above all how kindly.
    Perhaps she would go back inside. And tell him everything. But then again, what was there to tell?
    She kept on walking as far as Srednyaya Meshchanskaya Street. So she was going home after all, and with nothing to show for the night.
    She could not face going back for her galoshes.
     
    T HE SNOW IN the yard was stained with blood. A pig had been slaughtered there that morning. A peasant couple butchered the carcass in the open. They paused in their task to watch her across the yard. The two of them lifted their cleavers in warning, as if they suspected her of being intent on stealing their meat. Their expressions remained blank.
    Lilya entered a narrow passageway at the rear of the courtyard. Its darkness shielded her from their scrutiny. She reached out one hand to grope her way along the wall, but with the first step she took, her foot kicked over an unseen obstacle, setting off an almost musical reverberation. A metal pail lay on its side, a dark stain hastening from it. Before she knew it, the peasant couple were at her shoulder, screaming abuse.
    “That was our blood, you careless bitch!”
    “You’ll pay for it, whore!”
    As she fled their stabbing fingers and careless blades, she felt a gob of hawked mucus strike her cheek. She could still hear their shouts as the door to the back stairs closed behind her.
    The stench of cabbage soup and urine hung in the stairway. Even so, this felt like a refuge. The gloom welcomed and concealed her. The temperature, though chill, was a degree warmer than outside.
    Lilya hauled herself up the stairs with both hands together on the grimy rail, her feet slapping on the worn-down wooden steps.
    She heard the door she had just come through clatter in its frame, then hurried footsteps hammering. Somehow she managed to pick up her own pace. She did not look back.
    But she was still four flights away from her landing and the footsteps were gaining on her. Then, unexpectedly, they stopped and a door below slammed.
    She turned a corner and pushed her way through hanging laundry. It seemed to cling to her face, dragging her back and down. Doors stood open on this landing. Sullen, consumptive faces looked out, waiting for something but not her.
    She trudged on, light-headed, her legs uncertain and aching. In a niche on the next half-landing she fancied she saw a figure hanging back, a dark shape in dark shadows. Were those eyes that flashed in the gloom, or white sparks firing in her brain? Dog-tired she was, so tired that it was not inconceivable that her nightmares had come ahead to meet her.
    It felt as though the steps were moving beneath her feet now, swaying and sinking, their height increasing, so that it required the courage of a mountaineer to scale each one. And now they had no substance. Her feet sank into them. They were like the marshes the city had