Free Arkady Who Couldn't See and Artem Who Couldn't Hear by C.D. Rose Page A

sticks became the well, the vegetable plot in the garden, an abandoned cart or rusting car.
    Arkady pointed at the model of a man holding a rifle. Our father, he said, was a hunter. It wasn’t a pastime, said Artem, it was his job. He caught animals for us to eat, and when he was lucky he would trap and kill enough to sell to the butcher or at the market. When we were small, there was always plenty, said Arkady. Once, though only once, he caught a bear, said Artem. The meat was tough, remembered Arkady. It tasted like beef, said Artem. As the city grew around us, there was less for him to catch, they told me. Some rabbits, but they went quickly. Arkady said a word in Komi, but Artem corrected him before I had a chance to ask what he had said. It’s not true, Artem insisted, there were never dogs. He never hunted dogs. We never never ate dog.
    The twins had the smell of Russia on them, as did the whole train, that particular odour of time-worn sadness, vegetable decay and vodka seeping from skin pores that used to be so typical of the country. After a few days travel, I myself had begun to acquire the smell, like an animal adapting to its surroundings. I wonder now if it was this gradual change that allowed me to see what should have been obvious from the start, namely, that Arkady was blind, and Artem was deaf.
    I had noticed that Arkady did not look directly at the person speaking to him, taking his evasion of eye contact for intent listening, but I could now see the milky cataracts which clouded his dark eyes. Artem, meanwhile, watched whoever spoke to him intently, not out of politeness, but hanging his gaze on the speaker’s lips in his efforts to read them.
     
    Artem remembered the wolf. It slunk around the tower blocks, he said, near the garbage bins and the scrap of land where other boys played football. I was the only one who saw it. It had come in from the forest after a hard winter, and kept coming for days. I fed it whenever I could steal some food from the kitchen.
    It was a dog, said Arkady. He never saw a wolf, it was a stray dog.
    I know what I saw, said Artem.
    They took two matchsticks, slit them with the sharp blade of Arkady’s penknife, then bent them like knuckles to fashion a small, four-legged animal, the burnt stub of the match its head. A dog, repeated Arkady. A wolf, muttered Artem, and each touched the figure, and it became as real as any wolf, or dog.
     
    I have not mentioned the fourth inhabitant of our compartment. A red-faced Russian had joined us at some unmarked stop deep in the night, clutching a bottle that remained a third full no matter how much he drank from it. He slept soundly for the first several hours, but later woke and unwrapped a crumpled copy of Pravda to find a dried, salted fish, which he set at with repulsive sucking noises. His repast finished, he produced a pack of cards and began to play all by himself. The cards had unfamiliar markings, and I could not discern the rules of the game he played so intently and alone. Over the next few days he became more gregarious, and started up conversations of which I understood little, though Arkady and Artem nodded and laughed politely. He cajoled us into playing a game which he called durak and consisted of trying to rid oneself of all one’s cards. I found the rules complex and confusing, though the others found it hilarious, especially when I became the durak, or fool. At a certain point the train slumped to a halt, and to my relief the game ended. The twins fell asleep, but the man remained half-awake, losing himself once again in his solitary game which he claimed he had to finish before he arrived.
     
    The twins remembered the time their mother had gone sledging one night and added a sled to their model, on a hill formed from a balled-up sheet of newspaper. She had crept out one winter night with her sister, the twins in bed but awake, listening to their young mother who had taken a tray from the kitchen to speed down the