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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 onto the pages. It was a very quiet morning. Even the
chickens seemed to have abandoned their usual clucking and I was
aware of only the ticks of the watch on my left wrist. It was a Pobeda
with black numerals on a white face and fifteen jewels that had been
made just after the Second World War and that had once belonged to my
grandfather. I never took it off and over the years it had become part of
me. I glanced at it and noticed the time: five minutes past twelve. 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
of the open window. A few people were walking across the fields but
otherwise there was nothing to see. I returned to the book. How could I
have so quickly forgotten my parents’ conversation from the night
before?
I read another thirty pages. I suppose 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 of 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 leapt 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 around on the front lawn of our house, pecking at the grass.
There was a dog barking somewhere. Everything was ridiculously
normal. But then I heard footsteps and looked up. Mr Vladimov, our
neighbour, was running down from his front door, wiping his hands on a
cloth.
“Mr Vladimov!” I called out to him. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” he wheezed back. He had probably been working on
his tractor. He was covered in oil. “They’ve all gone to see. I’m going
with them.”
“What do you mean … all of them?”
“The whole village! There’s been some sort of accident!”
Before I could ask any more, he had disappeared down the muddy
track.
He had no sooner gone than the alarm went off. It was extraordinary,
deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. It couldn’t have been
more urgent if war had broken out. And as the noise of it resounded in
my head, I realized that it had to be coming from the factory, more than
a mile away! How could it be so loud? Even the fire alarm at school had
been nothing like this. It was a high-pitched siren that seemed to spread
out from a single point until it was everywhere – behind the forest, over
the hills, in the sky – and yet at the same time it was right next to me, in
front of my house. I knew now that there had been another accident. I
had heard it, of course, the explosion. But that had been half an hour
ago. Why had they been so slow to raise the alarm?
The siren stopped. And in the sudden silence, the countryside, the
village where I had spent my entire life, seemed to have become
photographs of themselves and it was as if I was on the outside looking
in. There was nobody around me. The dog had stopped barking. The
chickens had scattered.
I heard the sound of an engine. A car came hurtling towards me,
bumping over the track. The first thing I registered was that it was a
black Lada. Then I took in the bullet holes all over the bodywork and the
fact that the front windscreen was shattered. But it was only when it
stopped that I saw the shocking truth.
My father was in the front seat. My mother was behind the wheel.
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