Читать книгу Chernobyl - Ilinda Markova - Страница 5

ONLY ONCE DID THEY take them to the cinema in the town, and it never happened again because Fatzy Dembo pissed in the auditorium, Gosho the Poet inscribed one of his verses on the leather seat with Rob’s spring folding knife and Sali picked the purse of the director of the cinema, who herself had personally arranged the free show. They couldn’t get him because Sali knew the town like the back of his hand, every corner of it. He boasted that he could manage even if they let him out blindfolded at night. It was no surprise because everyone knew that Sali often ran away from the Home at night, helped by his father, who needed him, being smaller, to steal without being noticed and he had a good alibi available. Yes, his father would use him like some kind of stainless tool and in the morning return him to the Home like to a toolbox.

Everyone envied Sali for his father’s strong attachment to him; he would come to see him even when drunk and Sali’s boasting of his father’s love might have been the reason for that boy drowning. His name was Tisho and he was a bit older than them. He had run away from the Home twice, to go to his parents, he knew them, unlike Rob, who for a long time didn’t know from what he’d come from: a tree, a bird, the lake, Aunty Dobreva or Uncle Mito. Tisho knew also his parents’ house and was first to voice his suspicion about Aunty Dobreva’s theory about an old presumably demented postman of a stork misplacing them around. The parents would inevitably return the boy back to the Home, but he went mad and ran off again and again.

Then he drowned. Sali swore that he had seen Tisho and the boy’s father together by the lake that same day, but who would believe Sali?

The waters were cool, calming. Rob dived with his eyes open; he watched the fish and the little crustaceans running nervously on the clean sandy bottom. He watched the stems and the leaves of the reeds that grew under water near the shore and he thought life was better down there because there were no people.