Free The Living by Anna Starobinets

Correction!’
    ‘…Because each one of us can be corrected!’
    Three ‘becauses’. Every day, morning and evening, in unison. I fell asleep and woke up to this refrain. And I was myself a part of that choir: I shouted out the answers to the questions resounding in their heads. Cracker said the questions out loud for me. I never asked him to, he just liked doing it.
    ‘Why are there no crimes in the world of the Living?’ he would whisper animatedly.
    …Because there are no criminals in the world of the Living…
    ‘Why are there no criminals in the world of the Living?’ he flashes his eyes in surprise.
    Because they keep us in a House of Correction…
    ‘Why is a destructively criminal incode vector not a sentence ?’ he giggled ticklishly in my ear.
    …Because each of us can be corrected…
    He liked it. He liked the questions themselves. But his responses were different. Like the other correctees he hadn’t had the Living Fingers educational program installed, but he had learned to write with his hands in first layer and scrawled out his answers on scraps of paper:
    ‘Because in the world of the Living crimes are referred to as “maintaining harmony”.’
    ‘Because in the world of the Living the criminals are in power.’
    ‘Because the day will come when we break free.’
    Cracker was two years older than me. A big forehead and small, dull eyes. Slender limbs, sharp at the joints like a spider. His right eyelid twitched like he was winking all the time. No one ever went up close to him. Everyone knew that he was crazy. I knew too, but it didn’t put me off.
    In fact they recoiled from him for another reason. They were afraid. They were almost as afraid of him as they were of me. Everyone knew why Cracker was there in the House of Correction. Everyone knew what it was he’d done a long time ago, many pauses back. I also knew, but that didn’t put me off. I was the only one who would talk to him and listen to him. He didn’t present the slightest threat to me. Nor I to him.
    This sense of mutual harmlessness – that’s what united us. During the day we usually stuck together. At night we slept in neighbouring beds and the two other beds – on both sides of us – were empty. We were not friends because we were both outcasts. We were friends because we weren’t afraid of each other.
    To start with it was difficult for me to sleep next to Cracker. He would lie on his back, pass out almost immediately and start snoring loudly straightaway. I needed a lot more time to fall asleep and I never managed to switch off before the noise started. Sometimes I lay for hours without sleeping and in the morning I would be exhausted and unrested. Later I learned to get into the rhythm of his breathing. Rumbling was replaced with silence at even intervals. I would pretend that his snoring was a piston moving up and down, blocking and then freeing up my way through to sleep. I learned to scurry forward until the piston came down for the next time. I loved this nightly game and got used to it, like it was a lullaby.
    Once I started telling him about Hanna. About how we lived together, how she sang, and how she left. He didn’t ask me to say anything – I just got the urge to get it off my chest, and I would never have found someone else to listen to me. My mother probably meant nothing to him, but Cracker listened very attentively and didn’t interrupt me once. He quietly scratched the red patches on his neck with his slender fingers and occasionally gave a barely perceptible nod. When I had finished, he didn’t tell me – he was the only person to hearHanna’s story who didn’t – that there was no reason to be sad, that she was alive and healthy, that there is no death… he didn’t say anything at all. But from that time on he started showing me the forbidden notes with his responses.
    He would only show them to me. Then he would hide them. He rolled them up with his spidery fingers into tiny little