Russian Roulette Read Online Free

backward furiously, which was the only way to stop. Everyone had exactly the same model of bicycle and they were all death traps with no suspension, no lights, and no brakes. We had nowhere to go, but in a way that was the fun of it. We used our imagination to create a world of wolves and vampires, ghosts and Cossack warriors—and we chased each other right through the middle of them. When we finally got back to the village, we would swim in the river even though there were parasites in the water that could make you sick, and we always went to the bathhouse together, thrashing each other with birch leaves in the steam room, which was meant to be good for your skin.
    Leo’s parents worked in the same factory as mine, although my father, who had once studied at Moscow University, was the more senior of the two. The factory employed about two hundred people who were collected by buses from Estrov, Rosna, and lots of other places. I have to say, the place was a source of constant puzzlement to me. Why was it tucked away in the middle of nowhere? Why had I never seen it? There was a barbed wire fence surrounding it and armed militia standing at the gate, and that didn’t make sense either. All it produced was pesticides and other chemicals used by farmers. But when I asked my parents about it, they always changed the subject. Leo’s father was the transportation manager, in charge of the buses. My father was a research chemist. My mother worked in the main office doing paperwork. That was about as much as I knew.
    At the end of a summer afternoon, Leo and I would often sit close to the river and we would talk about our future. The truth was that just about everyone wanted to leave Estrov. There was nothing to do and half the people who lived there were perpetually drunk. I’m not making it up. During the winter months, they weren’t allowed to open the village shop before ten o’clock in the morning or people would rush in as soon as it was light to buy their vodka, and during the months of December and January it wasn’t unusual to see some of the local farmers flat on their back, half covered with snow and probably half dead too after downing a whole bottle. We were all being left behind in a fast-changing world. Why my parents had ever chosen to come here was another mystery.
    Leo didn’t care if he ended up working in the factory like everyone else, but I had other ambitions. For reasons that I couldn’t explain, I’d always thought that I was different from everyone else. Maybe it was the fact that my father had once been a professor in a big university and that he had himself experienced life outside the village. But when I was watching those planes disappear into the distance, I always thought they were trying to tell me something. I could be on one of them. There was a whole life outside Estrov that I might one day explore.
    Although I had never told anyone else except Leo, I dreamed of becoming a helicopter pilot—maybe in the army, but if not, in air-sea rescue. I had seen a program about it on television and for some reason it had caught hold of my imagination. I devoured everything I could about helicopters. I borrowed books from the school library. I cut out articles in magazines. By the time I was thirteen, I knew the name of almost every moving part of a helicopter. I knew how it used all the different forces and controls working in opposition to each other to fly. The only thing I had never done was actually sit in one.
    “Do you think you’ll ever leave?” Leo asked me one evening, the two of us sprawled out in the long grass, sharing a cigarette. “Go and live in a city with your own apartment and a car?”
    “How am I supposed to do that?”
    “You’re clever. You can go to Moscow. Learn how to become a pilot.”
    I shook my head. Leo was my best friend. Whatever I might secretly think, I would never talk about the two of us being apart. “I don’t think my parents would let me. Anyway, why