Free Good People by Nir Baram

declaring that pain was a matter for young people, who were still thrilled by it, but it bored old people like him.
    Afterwards the children, having become fidgety around the grownups, would run down the long, dark pathway that led to the scruffy neighbouring courtyard, and rush across it, too, and on into the gloomy corridors of the adjoining four-storey building. The moment she was swallowed up by those hallways she felt she had fallen into the unknown, as in a nightmare. Fear rose in her throat as she ran like a blind girl in the shadowy corridor until that bracing leap back into the sun-drenched courtyard. A deep breath. She wanted to linger, but the children were already running down the next dark hallway, and she ran after them. ‘Death-birth-death-birth,’ they would shout. In the corridors they would be dead, and in the sunlit courtyard they were reborn.
    The car passed by the railway station. A group of people was standing outside, the men carrying battered suitcases spotted with travel stickers, and the women holding lumps of wood and crates. These were not city folk but sad nomads who filled the station night and day, and waited—sometimes for months—for permission to travelonwards. They weren’t allowed to live in Leningrad, they were required to clear out, but they were unable to leave; meanwhile they had set up encampments next to the station or on the banks of the Neva. Sasha saw them sometimes in the evening next to the canals, digging trenches, lighting campfires, cooking stew for their children. Sometimes they were arrested. Clumps of people from the same village wandered together, intent on clinging to a last bit of their lost world. They were the remnants of the masses of peasants who had been uprooted from their land six or seven years earlier, at the time of collectivisation. Most had died, been exiled or resettled, and those who managed to escape were wandering across vast swathes of the country. Nadya and Emma used to lament the dreadful famine of the kulaks, and Levayev or her father would sometimes make a critical remark, but for the past two years no one had dared to talk about them.
    On Nevsky Prospect, their headlights lit up a well-dressed man of about fifty crossing the street. He was apparently drunk, or he would have noticed the approaching car. Now he stood, petrified and astonished, in the middle of the road.
    ‘Out of the way, idiot,’ shouted the driver.
    The man didn’t move. It was clear that he didn’t know what to do. His back was bent, his neck was twisted and he didn’t dare stand straight.
    He must be going home from his mistress’s apartment, thought Sasha. These are the hours when adulterers rush home. He was frightened. The black cars aroused fear in people’s hearts because of all their sins; even those who were expecting the second coming of Christ believed that the cars would judge them. The black crow was Judgment Day, no matter what your faith.
    ‘I fucked your mother,’ the driver cursed. His companion was examining the cleft in his chin in the rear-view mirror, cursing the razor that always missed the bristles there. The adulterer began stepping backwards, making a gesture that simultaneously begged forgiveness and denied his own existence.
    As the car swept by him the driver said something and smoothedhis leather coat. The other man answered him. Sasha heard them, but they jumbled their words together into a single stream and she couldn’t understand. She felt that a mighty force was seething in the car and overflowing like glowing lava, so that throughout the city people were fleeing it to avoid being burned up.
    They stopped at a crossroads. One of the agents lit a cigarette and leaned his forearm on the ledge of the open window. Sasha could smell the sweet scent of fresh rye bread. She imagined her fingers crumbling it. It had been too long since she had tasted bread straight out of the oven. People complained that the nomads from the station stood