The Living (35 page)

…And there in the Garden I meet the mistress, and her hair is all black, and there are bits of dye on her forehead and neck. She’s dragging the dog along on a lead. The dog is wheezing, and shaking all over, and there is foam coming out of her mouth – she’s ever so scared of all of us except the Wise One.

I say to her, ‘Three-Headed Lord, mistress, what have you done with your beautiful honey-coloured hair?’

And she laughs, all strange like, and says, ‘I was set on fire and now I’m all black.’

I say, ‘What have you got the dog for?’

And she replies, ‘What do you mean what for? For science. And you should come with me too, Layla. You do want to take part in an experiment, don’t you, to contribute to science?’

Well, so I go with her to the lab, because I’m ever so pleased that I can be of use to science. And the mistress squeezed us into these long metal things, me in one, the dog in another, and before that she gave us some sort of jab too. Well, I got a little bit scared in there because it was dark and there was no air, and the dog was howling away all sad, but everything pretty much went alright. The mistress let us out fairly soon.

The dog puked right there on the floor and then ran off.

‘I’ll mop it all up right away, don’t you worry,’ I say to the mistress. ‘But tell me, did we contribute to science?’ And she says, ‘Of course! I’ll send the result to your inbox now.’

And at that moment I got a mail from the mistress, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

This is what it said: ‘Dust – five seconds of darkness – life – five seconds of darkness. All the little volunteer doggies have given the same result.’

And then she hugs me, just like that, without any contact gloves and says:

‘Farewell, Layla.’

I ask her, ‘Where are you going?’

And she says, ‘I’m off to the Festival.’

‘What are you on about?’ I say, ‘Mistress, stay here, there, outside, it’s dangerous. You won’t make it as far as the Festival, and anyway they’re banned!’

But the mistress is stubborn.

‘I make it, I don’t make it,’ she says, ‘it makes no
difference
…’

On the doorstep she turns around and says, ‘Do you hear that, Layla? The noise has stopped.’

And she leaves. And I’m left to mop up the mess the dog has made. And, smin, I listen closely, and the noise really has disappeared.

But it never really bothered me. It was just like the wind.

Dozens of fat, two-headed beetles fly about the room and crawl over my skin. I can no longer move. I can’t chase them off.

My consciousness is still there, it never went away. It’s just cold. So cold that I can’t breathe, look or move. And it’s very quiet. Quiet in my chest.

It seems to me like now I am made of ice. My eyes have rolled up into my head and frozen to my eyelids; my arms have gone stiff; my legs have gone stiff and stuck together.

It seems to me now that I am hard and icy, I cannot be broken. But if you took my body out into the sun, it would melt and soak into the ground like watery lymph…

But there is no sun.

My son is sitting at the opposite end of the room and sniffing. I hope that he feels at least a little bit sorry for what he has done to me… Somewhere nearby there is the rumble of gunfire.

The dog comes over. She pokes her face into my stiff body and yelps thinly.

Quietly and imperceptibly I am temporarily ceasing to exist, and after five seconds I will appear in the System again. With the number nought.

And then another nought will spring up. And another.

Small round holes in the body of the little man made of
numbers
, more and more of them all the time…

The dog howls over my corpse. Gunfire rattles the glass, but the dog stays by me. She licks my frozen hands.

She is so consumed by her grief that she lets the Son come up very close.

They both sit over the body. The dog’s breathing is heavy and fast, and a hot, rotten smell comes from her mouth. An explosion makes the glass burst and fly out; the dog trembles in fear. The Son carefully reaches his hand out to her and strokes her raised fur. She growls limply, but stays where she is.

She lets him touch her.

‘No death,’ the Son says to her and smiles tentatively. The dog looks at him, cocking her head to one side.

His smile is utterly childlike.

Anna Starobinets was born in Mosow in 1978 and graduated in philology from Moscow State University. She is a Russian journalist and internationally published author whose first book,
An Awkward Age
, is published by Hesperus Press.

James Rann is a translator and scholar of Russian literature, which he studied at Oxford University and University College London. A former winner of the Rossica Young Translator Award, he is also the translator of
It’s Time
, by Pavel Kostin. He lives in London.

HESPERUS PRESS

Hesperus Press is committed to bringing near what is far – far both in space and time. Works written by the greatest authors, and unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world, are made accessible through new translations and a completely fresh editorial approach. Through these classic works, the reader is introduced to the greatest writers from all times and all cultures.

For more information on Hesperus Press, please visit our website:
www.hesperuspress.com