He didn't read books. He preferred newspapers. Other people's inventions made Karimov yawn. His life was more convoluted than crime fiction and more complicated than drama. It didn't fit neatly into the literary canon and the women in it never stayed longer than one night so that their names and faces were gone from his memory before the scent of their perfume. He paid prostitutes in forged notes on the grounds that counterfeit love deserved counterfeit money. «Nobody needs anybody,» Karimov loved to say and this epigram was always on the tip of his tongue.
The phone rang and Karimov reached out for it, his sleeve sweeping a cardboard building onto the floor.
«I've got a riddle for you.»
The dry, grating voice made Karimov wince.
«Ten goods wagons leave Station A. Eight goods wagons reach Station B. The question is what happened to the two wagons…»
«What's this about,» asked Karimov, snapping his cigarette case shut.
«Just a riddle. A child could solve it.»
Outside, Karimov could see the production units, the rail tracks stretching away from them.
The line had gone dead. Karimov lit a cigarette, pondering who could have betrayed him and smiled: after all, so far everything was going to plan.
Karimov stole because he was bored. It amused him to put his hand in someone else's pocket so that they could see it but couldn't catch him. He was taunting the man who had made him factory manager, convicting him in that dry, grating voice. He wanted revenge for being exiled here, which was the worst possible punishment for Karimov. Hot-blooded and dynamic, he loathed the sleepy town and this factory where even the conveyor belts seemed unwilling to do any work and the trains loaded with ore had to force themselves to move.
The man with the grating voice was nicknamed Pipe after the fancy meerschaum pipe he kept packed with strong French tobacco. Even when he was forced to stop smoking, he carried on with the ritual, fiddling with Pipeall day and then throwing the unused tobacco away in the evening and cleaning Pipecarefully. The doctors had pronounced his sentence and now there was a pipe sticking out of his throat but he showed no signs of dying, looking so scathingly at the people around him that they felt naked and insignificant. When he spoke, he put a device under his chin that projected a mechanical, artificial voice, like the sound of metal on glass.
When he found out that Karimov was illegally taking loaded wagons out of circulation, Pipe suspected something wasn't quite right. «He's not the kind of guy to be dealing in wagons,» sniffed the old man, crumpling up the documents he'd been given. He realized Karimov was trying to distract him from something bigger but he couldn't work out what it was so he lost his temper, flying off the handle at his staff.
«You think you've got eyes in the back of your head and you know everything that's going on here, do you?» Karimov smirked, doing mental battle with Pipe. «And you can't see what's going on right under your nose!»
«You think you're giving me the run around but I'm the one who's leading you on — by the nose.» Pipe insisted to himself, imagining he was talking to Karimov.
Karimov's only source of entertainment was the children's home which he visited at the weekend. He made the staff nervous. They were scared of the hawk nose that sliced through the air like a ship's prow and of the sticky eyes like those of the babies dumped on the doorstep of the home. Karimov brought toys and treats and, while his bodyguards dragged the boxes out of the car, he would stroke the heads of the children crowding round him and stare at a fixed point, wondering how life would have turned out if the stranger who became his father hadn't picked him up from the steps of the home one morning where he lay, wrapped in his mother's dress.
The cemetery nestled on the outskirts of town, entirely surrounded by new buildings. Savely Savage wandered among the graves looking for the food relatives brought the dead. Young faces looked out from the photographs on the gravestones. Savage could hear their cries and lamentations and their prayers. He felt as if he was the only dead person there.
Death had come to the cemetery. A hunched old woman with a crook, she was so bent over that the dead seemed to be drawing her to them. She had a huge hump like a tombstone and her eyes were empty black pits. Her crook struck the ground before her and the homeless people trailing in her wake collected the gifts left on the graves. Seeing Savage, the tramps grabbed hold of sticks, the old woman started to screech, thrusting her crook in the air, and Savely fled from the cemetery.
As he scrambled through the fragrant pine brakes, Savage looked back to that ill-fated evening when he had started to live back to front, knowing about tomorrow before yesterday and remembering when he was a little boy and it had seemed as though everything was still to come when in fact it was already behind him.
«You keep on studying, son,» Savage's parents would say tenderly, looking at their son bent over his books.
Savage's daughter would rip pages out of her textbooks and make them into paper aeroplanes which she threw out of the window.
«Why have I got to study stuff I'm not going to have any use for?» she yawned when Savage tried to talk to her. «You studied and where did that get you? Take a look at yourself. Studying makes people into failures!»
Savely blushed and bit his lip, while his daughter carried on, swatting at him like a fly on the window: «Better no college than no money!»
If life were a book, then someone had torn out Savage's ending and stuck in pages from someone else's novel. Only yesterday, Savage had been drawing plans of mineral deposits. Now, here he was, striking sparks from a stone, which wouldn't turn into a fire. In the past, when he scanned an ethnography book, he had scarcely been able to hold back a smile at his sense of superiority over northern savages who worshipped stones. Now, here he was, crawling around a boulder, weeping and wailing, and waiting for a dry branch to burst into flame like Moses and the burning bush.
On Saturdays, the factory sirens sounded and the town fell still. Windows closed and the streets emptied. Explosions shook the ground. A dirty cloud rose from the quarry, covering the town like a shroud. Savage marked this latest Saturday by scratching his arm with a piece of glass so as not to lose track of time.
One lake flowed into another, stretching out in a chain across dense forest that was broken up by stony outcrops. There was a leaky wooden boat on the lake shore. A tiny creature lived underneath and jumped out when Savage kicked the boat. He walked along the water's edge, not knowing where he was going. There were no other towns around apart from abandoned workers' settlements. He didn't even know what he'd say to someone he met should he ever come across another living soul. His thoughts teemed like gnats, buzzing and biting, but they couldn't help.
Savage considered crossing the border or escaping to Moscow where he could disappear among the other down-and-outs. He imagined finding a job, buying a passport in a new name, starting a family, beginning again from scratch. Then he remembered an old school friend who had gone off to earn a living in the capital. He had spat with rage as he recounted rattling around in a train for several hours, without a seat, packed like a sardine into a stuffy, overcrowded carriage. Then there had been backbreaking work until nightfall as a freight handler, too embarrassed to tell his fellow drudges he had a pocketful of qualifications. He swapped one job for another, choosing between jobs that paid where you were treated like dirt and jobs where you weren't paid for several months and then you were beaten up with baseball bats that damaged your kidneys. «What is life?» he had enjoyed philosophizing in the past, stabbing a bit of sardine on his fork as their glasses were refilled. «You know what life is?» he asked Savage when he ran into him on his return home. «It's this!» he said, pulling up his sweater and revealing the bruises. Remembering that black and blue stomach, Savage reckoned Moscow was scarier than the taiga.