Russian Roulette Read Online Free Page A

would I want to leave? This is my home.”
    “Estrov is a dump.”
    “No, it’s not.” I looked at the river, the fast-flowing water chasing over the rocks, the surrounding woodland, the muddy track that led through the center of the village. In the distance, I could see the steeple of St. Nicholas. The village had no priest. The church was closed. But its shadow stretched out almost to our front door and I had always thought of it as part of my childhood. Maybe Leo was right. There wasn’t very much to the place, but even so, it was my home. “I’m happy here,” I said, and at that moment I believed it. “It’s not such a bad place.”
    I remember saying those words. I can still smell the smoke coming from a bonfire somewhere on the other side of the village. I can hear the water rippling. I see Leo, twirling a piece of grass between his fingers. Our bicycles are lying one on top of the other. There are a few puffs of cloud in the sky, floating lazily past. A fish suddenly breaks the surface of the river and I see its scales glimmer silver in the sunlight. It is a warm afternoon at the start of September. And in twenty-four hours everything will have changed. Estrov will no longer exist.
    When I got home, my mother was already making dinner. Food was a constant subject of conversation in our village because there was so little of it and everyone grew their own. We were lucky. As well as a vegetable patch, we had a dozen chickens that were all good layers, so (unless the neighbors crept in and stole them) we always had plenty of eggs. She was making a stew with potatoes, turnips, and canned tomatoes that had turned up the week before in the shop and had sold out instantly. It was exactly the same meal as we’d had the night before. She would serve it with slabs of black bread and, of course, small tumblers of vodka. I had been drinking vodka since I was nine years old.
    My mother was a slender woman with bright blue eyes and hair that must have once been as blond as mine but was already gray, even though she was only in her thirties. She wore it tied back so that I could see the curve of her neck. She was always pleased to see me and she always took my side. There was that time, for example, when Leo and I were almost arrested for letting off bombs outside the police station. We had got up at first light and dug holes in the ground, which we’d filled up with the gunpowder stripped from about five hundred matches. Then we’d snuck behind the wall of the churchyard and watched. It was two hours before the first police car drove over our booby trap and set it off. There was a bang. The front tire was shredded and the car lost control and drove through a bush. The two of us nearly died laughing, but I wasn’t so amused when I got home and found Yelchin, the police chief, in my front room. He asked me where I’d been, and when I said I’d been running an errand for my mother, she took my side, even though she knew I was lying. Later on she scolded me, but I know that she was secretly amused.
    In our household, my mother and my grandmother did most of the talking. My father was a very thoughtful man who looked exactly like the scientist that he was, with graying hair, a serious sort of face, and glasses. He lived in Estrov but his heart was still in Moscow. He kept all his old books around him, and when letters came from the city, he would disappear to read them and at dinner he would be kilometers away. Why did I never ask more questions about him? I ask myself that now, but I suppose nobody ever does. When you are young, you accept your parents for what they are and you believe the stories they tell you.
    Conversation at dinner was often difficult because my parents didn’t like to discuss their work at the factory and there was only so much I could tell them about my day at school. As for my grandmother, she had somehow got stuck in the past, twenty years ago, and much of what she said didn’t connect with