Free The Living by Anna Starobinets Page A

tubes and jammed them into different cracks. He set up hidey-holes everywhere – he even hid them in the terrariums with the pets: he would push the little tubes into the dried out wood and bury them in the wet sand.
    Sometimes – rarely – Cracker would discover ‘other people’s’ hidey-holes: with a faint smile he would pull a stiff tube of paper from some dusty hole, hurriedly unroll it and show it to me: ‘Because in the world of the Living crimes are called the maintenance of harmony… Because in the world of the Living the criminals are in power… Because the day will come when we break free…’ I would ask, ‘So what? Wasn’t it you who wrote that?’
    Cracker would nod his big head and smile enigmatically:
    ‘Let’s go and see the Butcher’s Son!’

    The Butcher’s Son was on the Blacklist. He was kept in the Secure Unit, on the minus second floor, in a transparent conical correction chamber. The chamber was exhibited for all to see in the centre of a brightly lit oval hall. Cracker and I sat right on the floor, facing the Son. The floor was clean and white. And so were the rounded, sparkling mica walls. The oval of the ceiling was one huge flat lamp. No windows, no corners, no shadows – nothing to hide, nowhere to hide away. Artificial midday. Direct, honest, correcting light.
    It would be hard to imagine a less secluded place, but nonetheless it was here that we normally used for our private chats. Every now and again tour groups or scientists would come in, and at those times there was no way of elbowing your waythrough the crowd on minus two, but as for ordinary days, hardly any of the correctees came close to the Son’s chamber, apart from Cracker and me. They weren’t afraid of him: they were afraid of his smile.
    A Blacklister’s smile was believed to be a bad omen or even a curse: it was like it was capable of ‘casting a spell’ on the correctee and stopping the correction process forever. But Cracker and I weren’t superstitious. What is more, the Butcher’s Son didn’t know how to smile. He was twenty-three. He spent most of the time sucking and gnawing at his fingers, picking his nose or watching the way his multi-coloured uniform glowed and flashed iridescent in the light. The Son had his clothes changed every day, a collection had been developed for him consisting of seven outfits in ‘feeling lucky’ style – with sequins, gold brocade, light-inserts and a full range of colours. This fancy dress of his seemed to be part of some
socio
advertising campaign. Be that as it may, his ‘feeling lucky’ clothes clashed with the stark, penetrating sterility of the place. In his garish suits, in his transparent house, the Butcher’s Son was like a pet. He was like a speckled butterfly in a sound-proof bell-jar.
    …We sat on the white floor facing the Son. Cracker turned over the note from the hidey-hole in his spidery fingers. The Butcher’s Son was licking the pads of his fingers, then putting them up against the glass and looking at the marks they left.
    ‘So, you’re saying that it wasn’t you who wrote them?’
    ‘Look.’ Cracker pushed the note right up in my face with such a sharp movement that the Butcher’s Son shuddered and pulled his slobbery hand from the glass. ‘Look, it’s completely different handwriting. Not to mention the fact that it wasn’t my hidey-hole…’
    He had already said that before. About the different handwriting and it being someone else’s hidey-hole. But I didn’tfind it very convincing. I didn’t see the difference in the handwriting (a scribble is a scribble), and Cracker had so many hidey-holes that he could have just forgotten.
    ‘You could’ve just forgotten.’
    ‘Of course,’ his eyelid twitched, or, perhaps, he really did wink at me. ‘Of course I could have forgotten. I must have forgotten. No one would be able to remember where he had stashed a scrap of paper before the pause…’
    Cracker was convinced that he had