Free Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta Page A

he shrugged his shoulders.
    â€˜Now that I think of it, it was my cousin who did the fightin’.’
    There is no telling where they came from, all these rumours, and I have wondered at times whether the Colonel himself was responsible for putting them in circulation, though for what purpose, other than sheer bravado, I am at a loss to say. Suffice it to state that he was the kind of man to whom legends attached themselves like lice. Every so often he would pick one out of his pelt, and pop it between his fingernails. Why not? There would always be more.

    Pavel spent most of the afternoon in bed. By dinnertime he was hungry again and fried himself a piece of offal that the boy had left behind. The electricity ran out halfway through the cooking and some of the meat remained frozen at the centre. He found a bottle of beer in a cupboard over the sink, but was too impatient to wait for it todefrost by the oven. In the end he broke open the neck and sucked on slivers of beer ice. The alcohol went straight into his blood and muffled his feelings. He realized he was still very sick and crawled back into bed.
    It was ten or eleven before he rose again and faced up to what he had wanted to do ever since lunchtime. He was ill-equipped for the task. It was hard work even to get the trunk to open. Both its hinges and copper latches were frozen and he had to work on them with the ice pick. Eventually he managed to remove the lid and slid it onto the boy’s bed. When he tried to lift out the body, his kidneys rebelled and he had to sit down in front of the oven and warm them up for half an hour. He tried again, this time by turning the entire trunk upside down and waiting for the corpse to roll out. There was no sound, and when he lifted the suitcase up an inch, he saw that the midget had become glued to its lining by his own frozen blood and hung suspended halfway between trunk and wooden floor. Exasperated, too exhausted to flip the whole thing over one more time, Pavel slid a knife into the leather from above and in this manner cut enough of the lining until it finally ripped and dropped the midget onto the floor. After another break in front of the oven, Pavel pushed the trunk aside and grabbed the body’s wooden feet. He’d decided to drag him over to the front room, where the light was better. The head banged the floorboard both times he cleared the doors’ elevated thresholds. By the time he finally had him in front of the coal oven, Pavel was so exhausted, he slipped to the floor next to it and nearly nodded off.
    The opening of the door snapped him out of his lethargy. He could not believe he had forgotten to lock it. He expected the boy, of course, but in came Sonia in her heavy tweed dress, a glass of what looked like fruit juice in one hand. When she saw him sitting there next to the body she stopped dead in her tracks. The liquids that surrounded the midget were starting to melt in the heat from the oven and a heavy, livid smell had begun to spread through the room.Pavel tried to speak, to make up some sort of explanation. His mind was a blank. All he managed to say was: ‘It’s a midget. Dead.’ It sounded so callous to him that his cheeks flushed with shame. Any second now she would scream, and dial for the Colonel.
    â€˜You should put a blanket under him before all the blood starts running,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it will seep into the floorboards. Here, have some juice.’
    She crouched before him and passed him the glass.
    â€˜It is important you drink a lot, now that you are on the mend.’ When she smiled some of the pallor seemed to leave her face. Pavel drank the juice greedily, and pointed out a blanket they could use.
    â€˜Wait,’ she said, ‘I will fetch it for you.’
    Without her help, he would never have managed to cut the clothing off the midget’s body. It was she who fetched the scissors from her apartment and dared the first cut. They