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

icy slope that rose behind their house. Her laughter that night, they remembered, was the most wonderful thing Arkady had ever heard, and the most beautiful thing Artem had ever been told about.
     
    Somewere in the middle of the vast emptiness the train ground to a halt and did not move again. I looked out of the window to see nothing but endless birch forest, then looked again a few hours later, somehow hoping the view may have changed, but it hadn’t. A harried conductor pushed his way through the train telling us we had been blocked by a heavy snowfall, and that it was possible we wouldn’t move again for several days.
     
    Unseeing Arkady snapped the blackened head from a match and placed it at the foot of the newspaper hill and they remembered the time a meteorite had landed in their garden. It wasn’t a meteorite, said Artem with the deliberate speech of the deaf. It was part of a spacecraft. When we were young, continued Arkady, we wanted to be cosmonauts. Every boy did at the time. There was a street in our town, he said, one which ran between the new blocks, ulitsa Kosmonauta. One of the buildings had a huge mural on its side showing our brave pioneers of the future: the scientist, the soldier and the spaceman. It was red and gold, said Artem, and shone in the sun. When I was a boy I thought it the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. We learned about Gagarin at school, said Arkady, but our mother told us he wasn’t the first. There had been many more before Gagarin, concurred Artem. They died out there in space like the dogs, and nobody ever spoke of them. Sometimes parts of their craft would fall back to earth and land in the Siberian tundra or the endless forests of the Urals, and if anything was found what was left of them would be given a quiet burial in cities that were left unmarked on any map. This was what landed in our garden, said Artem, laying his finger on the tiny fragment of cosmic disiecta membra. Some though, he said, are still out there, endlessly circling the earth, their withered bodies still wearing their protective suits.
     
    The train stayed where it was, in the lee of the gigantic snow dune, and time slowed. The twins continued with their model, our companion drank, chewed at his piece of vobla and played cards. Sometimes we slept. When Artem was asleep, I asked Arkady how his brother had become deaf. Our father was not a violent man, he said, but he did have many troubles. Once he came home in a rage and beat Artem around the head. The bruises soon passed, but he was never able to hear again.
     
    In one part of the garden they had laid a small pile of completely burnt matchsticks, curled and blackened threads which threatened to disintegrate into ash. This is to remember the time the house nearly burned down, they said. When I asked how this had happened, the twins moved uneasily. We try not to remember the time Arkady began to drink, said Artem, and the time Artem got God, said Arkady.
    It was after he had gone blind, said Artem later while Arkady slept. He was angry, he said, and turned to the one-eyed devil of the bottle. I asked Artem why his twin had such rage in him. ‘Because he had been cursed with blindness,’ said Artem. My brother turned away from God, as I turned to him.
    I asked Artem how he had gone deaf.
    I was born like this, he replied, and rapidly continued his brother’s story. The Komi religion, he began, is very different to Christianity. For us the human soul, which we call the lov, has a double, its ort. The ort is born with each human being and gives a premonition of death to the soul. After our father had gone away and our mother had died, each of us began to believe that we were the other’s ort.
    With that, Artem took two matchsticks, broke one into uneven lengths and added it transversally to the other to fashion a simple patriarchal cross.
    I went to see the priest, he said. Our parents had never taken us to the church and once inside the waxy smoke of