Russian Roulette Read Online Free Page B

reality at all. But that night was different. Apparently there had been a fire at the factory . . . nothing serious. But my father was worried and for once he spoke his mind.
    “It’s these new investors,” he said. “All they think about is money. They want to increase production and to hell with safety measures. Today it was just the generator plant. But suppose it had been one of the laboratories?”
    “You should talk to them,” my mother said.
    “They won’t listen to me. They’re pulling the strings from Moscow and they’ve got no idea.” He threw back his vodka and swallowed it in one gulp. “That’s the new Russia for you, Eva. We all get wiped out and as long as they get their check, they don’t give a damn.”
    This all struck me as very strange. How could the production of fertilizers and pesticides be so dangerous?
    My mother seemed to agree. “You worry too much,” she said.
    “We should never have gone along with this. We should never have been part of it.” My father refilled his glass. He didn’t drink as much as a lot of the people in the village, but like them, he used vodka to draw down the shutters between him and the rest of the world. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. We’ve been here long enough.”
    “The swans are back,” my grandmother said. “They’re so beautiful at this time of the year.”
    There were no swans in the village. As far as I knew, there never had been.
    “Are we really going to leave?” I asked. “Can we go and live in Moscow?”
    My mother reached out and put her hand on mine. “Maybe one day, Yasha. And you can go to university, just like your father. But you have to work hard . . .”
    • • •
    The next day was a Sunday and I had no school. On the other hand, the factory never closed and both my parents had drawn the weekend shift, working until four and leaving me to clean the house and take my grandmother her lunch. Leo looked in after breakfast, but we both had a ton of homework, so we agreed to meet down at the river at six and perhaps kick a ball around with some other boys. Just before midday I was lying on my bed, trying to plow my way through a chapter of
Crime and Punishment,
which was this huge Russian masterpiece we were all supposed to read. As Leo had said to me, none of us knew what our crime was, but reading the book was certainly a punishment. The story had begun with a murder, but since then nothing had happened and there were about six hundred pages to go.
    Anyway, I was lying there with my head close to the window, allowing the sun to slant in on the pages. The time now was five minutes past twelve. I was wearing my watch, a Pobeda with black numerals on a white face and fifteen jewels, which had been made just after the Second World War and had once belonged to my grandfather. And that was when I heard the explosion. Actually, I wasn’t even sure it was an explosion. It sounded more like a paper bag being crumpled somewhere out of sight. I climbed off the bed and went and looked out the open window. There was absolutely nothing to see. I returned to the book. How could I have so quickly forgotten my parents’ conversation of the night before?
    I read another thirty pages. I suppose another half an hour must have passed. And then I heard another sound—soft and far away but unmistakable all the same. It was gunfire, the sound of an automatic weapon being emptied. That was impossible. People went hunting in the woods sometimes, but not with machine guns, and there had never been any army exercises in the area. I looked out the window a second time and saw smoke rising into the air on the other side of the hills to the south of Estrov. That was when I knew that none of this was my imagination. Something had happened. The smoke was coming from the factory.
    I leaped off the bed, dropping the book, and ran down the stairs and out of the house. The village was completely deserted. Our chickens were strutting