Читать книгу Thinking With the Blood - Owen Matthews - Страница 6

The kid with the Kalashnikov isn’t happy.

The kid with the Kalashnikov isn’t happy. He scowls at us from under a rain cape, water dripping off the peak of his army cap. He flourishes my passport.

“Britain.” he says. “You are from Britain.”

I can only agree. I try a tentative smile.

We are standing at a rebel roadblock on the main Donetsk to Zaporozhiye highway which does not appear to be under any kind of adult supervision. The skinny soldier with my documents stands alone under a lashing September rainstorm. His even younger comrades huddle under a nearby tarpaulin draped over a pile of sandbags, eyeing us idly. I have seen this dangerously unpredictable stage of adolescent boredom before, in various war-torn places far from here.

He is a scrawny farm boy, no more than twenty. He has one of those broad, round South Russian faces, too toothy to be handsome. But it is the kind of open face which should have a smile on it. Instead, his mouth is soured into an ugly pout. He leans into the car with a weary, murderous langour.

“Tell your Daniel Radcliffe,” says the young rebel. “Tell him that I used to love Harry Potter. But then I read that he was a drug addict. Tell him I’m very disappointed.”

The kid shoots me a look of pure anger, which makes what he’s just said suddenly sad, rather than funny.

“I’m sorry to hear that. But I don’t think its true.”

The kid snorts, cocks his head in a gesture of contempt, and hands me back my passport and press accreditation. “But I read it,” he says, putting a definitive end to the discussion.

I scroll through a variety of possible responses to this, pocketing and zipping my passport.

“No. Really. It’s wrong, what you read. Daniel Radcliffe is not a drug addict.”

The kid nods resignedly as if he’d love to believe me, but knows better. He waves my driver and me back towards our car and turns back to the sagging tent of camouflage netting by the roadside.

Poor kid. He used to love his Harry Potter. But now he’s grown up, and the world has disappointed him.