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 Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 11:44 am
Chapter One: A Sorry State
The road to the house of Gorbachyov was long into the countryside, and so far from home that Toris felt twice as lost as the carriage rolled across the dirt road. The young man had been told nothing of the estate to which his parents had sold him, and that did nothing to soothe the uneasy pit in his stomach.
It seemed strange that he was avoiding being sent to a concentration camp for resisting the USSR occupation by being sent to live there. But the World Wars had left the Lietuvos Respublika- the Republic of Lithuania- in a sorry state. And now Lithuania was all but a part of the USSR, if not completely annexed to it already. The soldiers stationed there certainly acted like it. There was not much hope or help in sight there.
It was August. The estate that Toris had been sold to was so far from any city that there were no paved roads or cars that led there, and Toris began feeling like he was going back to a simpler time altogether. The heat was stifling and he wasn’t sure if the moisture that clung his shirt to his body was humidity or sweat or both. The horse and carriage driver, too, stank of exhaustion. By train, car, and carriage, it had taken a week and a half to get there, and Toris had run out of food the day before last. He shared putrid water with the horse whenever he could, which was not often; he had grown used to the sticky, dry feeling inside his mouth, like he had been chewing cotton.
Things were certainly in a sorry state, everywhere.
Toris took advantage of one of the only good things about the USSR occupation- that they were taught to speak and write in Russian in schools- and tried to strike up conversation to get through the last day of the journey, forcing his desert of a tongue to work.
“What does Mr. Gorbachyov do?” He could at least get a sense of the kind of work he would be doing.
For a long minute the carriage driver didn’t reply, which wasn’t unexpected. It was hot and he was tired. Toris’s Russian wasn’t what anyone would call perfect, either, especially with his accent, or lack thereof. But, slowly, as the heat made the horse drag on, the driver answered.
“Nothing, really. He’s one of those that had some important ancestor nobody knows about anymore that left the family lots of money and a big house.”
A big house. So Toris would probably be cleaning a lot. That was alright- cleaning had normally been his chore at home. He wasn’t necessarily great at it, but it was something he could do.
By afternoon, the greatest sign of civilization that they had passed was a lone plank of wood, slightly tilted, that at one point must have been part of a fence. It was sticking out of the flat ground like the last soldier standing among corpses on a battlefield. It passed by quickly, and despite the heat Toris felt a chill that stayed with him for a while. They were nowhere.
By almost sundown, a dusky orange-pink color tinted the air and all the nothingness that it touched. Toris was hungry and thirsty and had to use a bathroom, but he had been rocked into a lethargic state that would not release him or allow him to speak. He was fairly certain that the driver had fallen asleep and the horse was trudging on sluggishly with nothing but a sense of duty and the hope that there might be a stall with fresh hay, water, and oats waiting at journey’s end.
A sorry state, indeed.
The lingering bits of orange and pink faded to dark purplish-black, and a million stars covered the sky. It was pitch black on the earth, however, except for the lantern that the carriage driver had lit after a brief stop for water and relief.
“We should be about there,” the carriage driver said in a low mumble, as if speaking too loudly would interrupt the silence and invite Fate’s worst disasters. “Best of luck.”
No more words were spoken between them for the next hour, toward the end of which dark, stalk-like figures rose around the sides of the dirt road. When Toris leaned out of the window he could see rectangular and square shapes of light. At least the estate had electricity- that was more than Toris had expected, though he hadn’t seen any power lines. With any luck there might be a radio and air conditioning and a heater for the winter, too. Rich people usually expended some of their wealth on comforts like that.
The driver pulled up to the front porch of the mansion and Toris hesitated in one last homesick panic. He’d take another week and a half of boredom, discomfort, hunger, thirst, and lack of a bathroom to be home. But ‘home’ might be doing hard labor in the Kolkhoz.
Someone came out of the manor, spoke a few words in Russian to the driver that were too quick for Toris’s ears, and opened the door. Toris wearily stepped out. The earlier break had not stretched his legs nearly enough and he walked stiffly and awkwardly.
It was an older gentleman, as Toris had expected, wearing a nice suit and a serious, professional expression. He handed the carriage driver some money and pointed him in the direction of the stables, where he would be spending the night. The carriage and all hope of going home lurched away by the will of a tired horse.
It didn’t seem like a ranch, but so far out in the country, a stable might just be common sense to have. It certainly seemed close to the mansion.
The man seemed to be sizing Toris up- an odd, teenage foreigner- that’s what he was. Toris’s usual desire to please rose to his voice and he said in his very best Russian, “Are you Mr. Gorbachyov?”
The man did not speak slowly, but with crispness that was very to the point, so Toris struggled to understand it all. “No, and you will find no Mr. Gorbachyov here. He passed away long ago. The lord of the Gorbachyov estate is Mr. Sokolov. Are you Toris Kabaila?”
“I am.”
“Have you any luggage?”
“Only myself.”
The man gave out a sound that was something along the lines of ‘harumpf’, which might or might not have been a word, and said, “My name is Mr. Sidorov. I’ll show you around and get you started before I leave. I hope you learn to learn quickly, for I am not a patient man. Come this way.”
Even as they moved inside, Toris asked, “Leave?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, you don’t work here?”
“Only on occasion, when a new servant needs training.”
Toris cringed at the word ‘servant’ but went on. That was what he was now, after all. A free servant, paid with a room to sleep in and food to eat, hopefully. “Couldn’t the other servants teach me?”
Mr. Sidorov ‘harumpf’-ed again. “Normally I dislike mouthy servants who ask too many questions, but I will excuse you this once. You will be told everything you need to know. There are no other servants.”
Toris thought to ask why, but it didn’t seem wise after what Mr. Sidorov had just told him.
Mr. Sidorov went on. “There are chores to be done daily and weekly. Everyday you must cook and clean the main rooms- the kitchen, living room, family room, guest bedroom, den, and dining area. The animals must be fed and watered and the stables cleaned. Breakfast must be made at dawn, lunch by midday, and dinner before sundown with dessert afterward. After each meal you must wash the dishes and put them away properly. Any immediate laundry is to be done after dessert and brought in after breakfast the following morning. Otherwise, laundry is a weekly chore, as is taking inventory of the food and writing a list of all the food that needs to be bought. I trust that you can write?”
Toris nodded.
“Good. Weekly you will clean the minor rooms. Do not go into Mr. Sokolov’s room under any circumstance- do you understand? Never.”
Again Toris nodded.
“Good.”
Mr. Sidorov began showing Toris through the house, all the various rooms and repeated the chores and the importance of the rooms as Toris would be using them. The clothesline was not outside, but in the furnace room.
“This is the door that leads to the stables.”
At that, Toris had to ask a question.
“Why is there a door to the stable?”
Mr. Sidorov gave him a short, sad look mixed with pity, and appeared as if he wasn’t going to answer. When he did finally answer in a low, murmuring voice, he said, “You’ll understand when you meet Mr. Sokolov.”
Toris didn’t bother asking what that meant.
Lastly, Mr. Sidorov showed Toris to his room. It was small, just a bed and a trunk for clothing that was already filled with five green, suit-like uniforms, complete with ties.
“I’m sure you’re tired. You start tomorrow. Good night.”
Toris fell onto the bed, buried his face in the pillow, pulled his arms over his head, and cried himself to sleep.
He could have slept for a week, but Mr. Sidorov woke Toris before dawn.
“Get used to it,” he said gruffly. “It’s time to make breakfast.”
Toris struggled with the recipe. Mr. Sidorov had to teach him almost from scratch how to do the measurements and what the ingredients were.
Even after they made breakfast, no one else came down to eat. Mr. Sidorov took the plate and headed upstairs, where there was nothing Toris had seen but forbidden, locked doors and a vase at the end of the hallway that needed to be cleaned weakly. Mr. Sokolov’s room must be among them- Toris slept on the ground floor.
“Mr. Sokolov usually takes time to adjust to new servants,” he said by way of explanation.
“What happened to the old one?”
Again, the look of sorrow, pity, and… fear. “He got old and died. Nothing happened.”
The rest of the day was constant activity. Cleaning, cooking, cleaning, cooking, laundry- and none of it easygoing. Mr. Sidorov supervised but did not help, except when it came to cooking, and even then his interference was very little. Toris was sore all over and by the time he found his way back to bed he was exhausted.
Getting up the next morning to do it again was agony. All of Toris’s muscles were sore and crying, and he was tired and hungry. He hadn’t worked that hard in all his life.
“You’ll get used to it. The sooner, the better,” Mr. Sidorov assured him.
That day after breakfast Mr. Sidorov had Toris come up to the double doors that led to the master bedroom with him, carrying the tray of kotlety.
“If Mr. Sokolov is in no mood to leave his bedroom, set his plate here-” he pulled a small shelf from the wall- “and leave him be. Put an extra glass of water on it, though. Understand?”
Toris nodded.
“Good.” Mr. Sidorov set the tray there.
Sure enough, when they went up for lunch, the dish was sitting on the tray, almost completely cleaned. Toris took it down to clean.
By the fifth day, most of the soreness had worked its way out of Toris’s body. He slept deeply during the night but woke one his own before dawn and had gotten used to the cooking and cleaning routine. The more he got used to it, the less strenuous it became, and soon he didn’t need Mr. Sidorov’s help at all. Even the cooking came easily with the aid of a recipe book. It did, however, get boring.
Mr. Sokolov had yet to show himself and Toris was starting to feel general humanly concern.
“Why hasn’t Mr. Sokolov come down yet?” he asked finally on the seventh morning after setting the lord of the estate’s breakfast on the shelf for him. He had tried not to ask anything and considered anything relating to the untouchable Mr. Sokolov especially forbidden, but he couldn’t help himself.
“I told you, he takes a while to adjust to new servants. You’ll meet him when he’s ready. Don’t push it. But we may as well go over a few things now, some good advice. First, be sure to make noise wherever you are. Enough to be heard through the house- it doesn’t take much with the echo. Hum, sing, clank dishes as long as you don’t chip them. Never speak to Mr. Sokolov unless spoken to. And never, never go into his room.” The previously seen look of sorrow and fear and pity glinted in his eyes for a moment. “You’d do well not to spend much time looking out of windows. And if the food gets low and he isn’t out yet, feed him okroshka made with sour milk and skip lunch. He’ll get the message. Understand?”
Toris didn’t, but he nodded anyway.
“Good.”
The next morning Mr. Sidorov had gone. He had left less like a businessman who had finished his job and more like a frightened dreamer scrambling away in panic from his worst nightmare. Toris was all but alone in the manor, and the silence had never been more deafening nor the openness more crushing.
As an afterthought, he nodded- he understood about making noise now.
Things were in a very sorry state indeed, and again Toris cried while still cooking breakfast.
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Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:53 pm
Chapter Two: Ivan
In the week that followed Toris had cooked and cleaned daily and taken inventory of the food. They weren’t low on anything. Shopping was probably a monthly affair, maybe even less; it made sense, with as far away as the town was. So far as Toris knew he didn’t do anything with the list but leave it tacked to the cupboard in the kitchen.
All of Toris’s cleaning had given him time to explore the house. He soon came to realize that cleaning was more or less just a way to keep busy and pass the time constructively, as things rarely or never got very dirty after just a day.
In his exploration Toris had made a few other key discoveries. There was no radio, no phone that he could find (though there must be one somewhere- how else would one contact Mr. Sidorov when a servant died?), and at least two bathrooms with working toilets that Toris could use- one with a shower and one without. He was fairly certain that the master bedroom had a full bathroom as well. And, yes, there was air conditioning, which must have been running constantly, because the house was close to freezing despite it being the hottest part of the summer.
The bathrooms were a good find. Even if he did have to let the water run for a few minutes before the water got to a good temperature, it was worth it to have a nice, warm shower after a long day of work and boredom.
The other two bits of information unnerved him though. If the phone was behind those forbidden double doors, he would be unable to contact anyone. Toris had thought of writing a letter home to his parents to let them know that he had arrived safely, but he doubted the postman came out that far anyway. And, with a sickening thought, he remembered that they might be dead now, or worse, in a concentration camp. He pushed them out of his mind painfully.
By about the end of the second week, the only confirmation that Toris had gotten that Mr. Sokolov was still alive was a pile of clothing outside the door. Toris never saw the door open, much less Mr. Sokolov come out of the room, and he didn’t have any real desire to. He had long since decided that Mr. Sokolov was at least a strange man, possibly eccentric, with the slight chance that he was insane or at least not ‘together’ mentally.
So it was quite a bit of a surprise that at the beginning of the third week, whine the loneliness had started to take its toll on Toris, Mr. Sokolov was suddenly, without warning or reason, there.
‘There’ was at the table, waiting rather patiently while Toris recovered from his fright and set the plates of pelmeni down. Toris felt strange, eating with someone after over a week of solitary meals, and he found it hard to look at Mr. Sokolov.
To begin with, he wasn’t the old man that Toris had expected he would be. The young man had been expecting someone like Mr. Sidorov, but he was young, no older than his mid twenties and not that much older looking than Toris himself. His blonde hair was so light a the top that it almost looked white, darkening to a sandy color near the bottom. His eyes were dark brown and fixed on Toris.
He did not eat, but watched the new servant with calculating interest. His gaze was intimidating to say the least, never wavering for even a second. Toris said nothing because neither did Mr. Sokolov, and he hadn’t forgotten the advice Mr. Sidorov had given him about speaking only when spoken to.
He knew what to do if Mr. Sokolov didn’t come down for meals, but what about when he did, but didn’t eat even just one bite? Toris had finished eating, but Mr. Sokolov still hadn’t even so much as picked up his fork, and the young man couldn’t clear the table with Mr. Sokolov’s whole breakfast still sitting there while the man stared at him like a cat or snake, ready to strike ad the slightest movement that tipped the carefully balanced scale.
Finally, Toris had to ask. “Mr. Sokolov… ah, sir- are you… would you like me to take your breakfast to the door of your room?”
He carefully avoided saying ‘your room’, which might imply that he planned to go in. If nothing else, Toris knew that Mr. Sokolov enjoyed his privacy.
He expected the answer to be ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘leave it here and I’ll eat later’ if he was lucky. And the answer was indeed one word like the first two expected responses, but nothing Toris would have thought the answer could be.
“Ivan.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ivan. Call me Ivan.”
“Oh… alright. Would you like me to take your breakfast to your door, Ivan?”
“Which door? All the doors of this mansion are my doors. The rooms are mine, too. Everything in this manor and the land around it belongs to me. Why-” he chuckled, “- even you, and the food in your belly, belong to me. If I were to cut you open with a knife and take it back, you couldn’t complain that I was stealing, now could you? Hm… Toris, wasn’t it?”
“Uh… y-yeah,” Toris responded. “I-I meant… the double doors, upstairs. Where I put your food before.”
“Hm. No. I’ll eat. Go on and clean and I’ll put it in the sink when I’m done. I hope it tastes good.”
Toris grabbed his own plate and practically ran from the table. Ivan’s eyes when he had spoken, with or without the sadistic words… tremors of fear ran down Toris’s spine. He had a voice like honey, but within that sticky sweetness was something vile and deformed and twisted. It was too happy to say those awful words in the same tone that others would use to speak of love, the laughing sing-song quality of it insincere and mocking.
‘I hope it tastes good’… for your sake, Toris mentally added, because it had obviously been a veiled threat. Barely, at that.
Toris had thought the pelmeni was fine, but what if Ivan didn’t like it?
Nothing will happen, Toris assured himself. He made it very clear that he thinks of me as his property, nothing more or less. No one would damage his own property. He’s probably just still upset because I’m the replacement of his old servant. Or maybe he’s just joking with me.
Toris held onto these thoughts as he swept and dusted, right up until he heard the clinking of dishes in the sink. He emptied the dustpan into the wastebasket and went to the kitchen.
Ivan was still there, looming over the sink like a giant shadow. It was at this time that Toris took notice of how much taller and broad-shouldered Ivan’s frame was, as compared to his own.
He looks like he could snap me in two if he wanted, Toris thought, and though his view of Ivan’s muscles was obscured by the jacket that he wore, the servant was very certain that he was strong enough. Insane people usually were unnaturally strong somehow, as if their bodies were compensating for the frailties of their minds.
“Where were you just now?” Ivan asked. There was no syrupy, tainted delight in his voice.
Toris’s hairs pricked up on his neck. “I was… I was just in the other room. Cleaning.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
Toris winced as he realized his mistake. He’d been so worried about breakfast that he had tried to put all of his focus on cleaning and had forgotten to make any noise. He hadn’t realized before that the noisemaking was for Ivan and not to simply fill the empty space of the mansion.
“I’m sorry. I’ll make sure that I hum or something next t-”
Before Toris’s eyes could register the movement, he felt pressure against the sides of his neck, squeezing. He coughed and realized that Ivan was grabbing him- choking him.
“I had hoped that having Mr. Sidorov to train new servants before I met them would remove the need for lessons like these. But I guess you Liets are just too quiet, hm? Except when you complain about Russia- when you should keep your mouths shut tight.”
He clamped his other hand over Toris’s mouth briefly, then tossed him aside.
As Toris gasped for breath, the honey-sweet tone of delusion returned to Ivan’s voice. “Later I’ll teach you some good songs to sing. That would brighten this place up, don’t you think? And maybe I could bring in something from the garden…”
He smiled and walked away like nothing had happened.
Oh, dear God… Toris thought, still sputtering noisily- on purpose now. He’s… this guy is… This guy is a complete psychopath!
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:19 pm
Yet another writer with their own unique written voice. That's a good quality for writing to have.
I'm going to say, I don't normally read historical fiction. So as such, I can't really say much to the effect of how it is compared with what else is in the genre. But I do like this story, and I am liking the characters. So far, so good. Don't hesitate to add more!
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Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 10:45 am
Oh, right! Sorry!
(Oh, I should say now, the Christmas part later on isn't very accurate...)
Also, I just lost the game.
Chapter Three: The Game
Toris lost track of the days. When the list of groceries that they needed disappeared and a carriage filled with food came in, he assumed it had been about a month. Four whole weeks.
Ivan hadn’t acted violently to him in the last two weeks, though he had said more than a few creepy things and spent most of his time downstairs looming over Toris’s shoulders as he worked (though the majority of his time was still spent upstairs). The servant hadn’t forgotten to hum or whistle, and the echo of the house carried the sound everywhere.
Sometimes Ivan would take up the song with quiet, whispering words, usually changing the lyrics to something dark. That seemed to be his strange sense of humor.
Toris learned to learn quickly. As long as Ivan’s voice was made of honey and light, nothing he said, no matter how cruel or sadistic, was serious. When his voice dropped that sickening sweet tone, it was time for Toris to make himself scarce and hide in the bathroom if he could get there in time. So far he had evaded any violence Ivan might have intended.
The stable was the worst place to be when Ivan tipped into the violent side of the scale. Tools aside, the animals might suffer if Toris dodged out of Ivan’s way.
The stable held two horses, an old mule, a cow, and a handful of chickens, along with a mother cat that was raising three kittens. When Ivan got upset, Toris feared for those animals, but no visible harm ever befell them that he could see, though they did shy away from their owner.
Ivan always accompanied Toris into the stable when he fed the animals, let them out to graze in the fenced in area outside, and cleaned out their stalls. It was the only time either of them left the mansion for fresh air that was quickly cooling in the prelude to the winter that would soon be upon them. It wasn’t much of a break, with Ivan so close that Toris could sometimes feel his breath stirring the stray hairs on top of his head.
It was always Ivan who opened the stable doors, too- never Toris.
To occupy his time and increase his chances of survival, Toris composed a mental list of Ivan’s habits and how best to get around him. So far he had come up with:
1. Never go into Ivan’s room, ever, even if invited, under any circumstance (and Toris had no desire to).
2. All the doors on the second floor were locked, so it was best not to even bother with anything on that floor except the vase at the end of the corridor that needed to be cleaned weekly.
3. Never open doors or look out of windows for any more than a few seconds. (He didn’t know why, but-)
4. It was best not to question anything. So long as he went along with it and tried to laugh (or at least not cringe) at Ivan’s jokes and speak only when spoken to (or not, if he could avoid it altogether) things ran rather smoothly.
5. Always make noise. Ivan seemed to like classical music, ballet scores, and lullabies, even if Toris didn’t know them very well and massacred them when he tried singing.
6. Make for a bathroom and create noise by pretending to be sick if Ivan went into one of his ‘fits’.
Those rules got Toris through most of the days. Ivan didn’t have too much to do with him outside of meals (which, Toris noted, added rule seven: eat earlier to avoid being stuck with Ivan at the table, since he never ate in front of Toris anyway). Life went on peacefully enough, though fear and nervousness now replaced boredom.
Toris was surprised one morning after breakfast by a loud knocking on the front door. In accordance to rule three, he avoided it, moving his plate to the kitchen to clean while Ivan rose from the table to see who it was.
The lord of the estate returned moments later in a flustered hurry, saying things in Russian that would have gotten Toris shot in Lithuania, nearly breaking the china by practically throwing his dishes and unfinished breakfast in the sink. His eyes were narrow and burning; he grabbed Toris around the neck and dragged him up the steps. When the servant tried to protest, Ivan’s grip tightened; clearly he was meant to stay silent.
He could feel his tender skin bruising as they reached the second floor.
Toris let out an audible whimper as one of the dreaded double doors opened and he was thrust inside. Ivan tossed him down, still moving with the speed of a whirlwind, while Toris yelped and resisted the urge to rub his bottom where it had hit the floor. Ivan grabbed two things from a drawer- a small gun, something in the quick draw-type family, and something much larger of that distant relation that could intimidate by appearance alone. He tucked the larger one under his coat.
“Stay here until I come to get you out,” Ivan barked, and went back downstairs.
Toris couldn’t stop shuddering. He was breaking rule one; the greatest rule he’d ever been taught. Even Mr. Sidorov had been terrified of crossing the threshold of this room with a single toe, let alone the whole body. So, of course, Toris was confused as far as what to do next.
His natural instinct was to explore, but he was still stunned by the sudden- and rough- treatment. And who knew what was going on in Ivan’s mind? If he moved from that spot, it might make Ivan even angrier. And now Toris knew for certain that Ivan had at least two guns, on hand, too.
Curiosity won out. This might be the only time that Toris ever saw the room, and he wanted to see.
For a room that was never cleaned by servants, it was spotless, and beautiful. There was one window, large and paned, and the head of the bed had been placed beneath it. The pillows were fluffed and soft-looking, and an elegant quilt adorned the covers. Beside it was the excellently furnished drawer, upon which there was set a beautiful crystal lamp that undoubtedly sparkled like the night sky and filled the whole room with starlight when it was turned on. A vanity mirror was attached to a board at the back of the drawer.
On the other side of the bed was a glass case filled with imitations of Fabergé eggs. A nearby door led into the full-sized bathroom, with its own toilet, bathtub, and sink, which was covered with luxurious scented lotions and what looked like bubble bath mixture. If there was a phone, it was kept out of sight.
Toris opened one of the drawers against his better judgment- not the one that Ivan had pulled the guns out of- and looked inside. There were no clothes in it as the wardrobe in the opposite corner took care of that, but there were photographs.
The servant eyed the photographs curiously. They seemed to be family photographs, but their faces were unclear, blurry, like someone had smudged their faces on purpose. Toris couldn’t find Ivan in any of them, at any age.
Toris put the pictures back carefully, just as he’d found them, closed the drawer, and put his ear to the door.
There were several uproarious voices coming from downstairs. They didn’t seem afraid at all, though Toris knew that they should be. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they seemed happy, if not loud, at the very least.
The sound of gunshot. More laughter, and a few words that were probably vulgarities. Were these other people friends of Ivan’s? Toris found it hard to believe that Ivan had any friends, let alone so many.
Minutes passed. Another loud BANG! followed by the same gleeful commotion of cursing.
It must have gone on for an hour at least. There were no clocks, in Ivan’s room or anywhere else, so Toris didn’t know. Those loud moments between gunfire seemed to last forever, though the strength of the laughter grew weaker after each burst of bullet from gun.
After waiting and listening for a long time, Toris could hear only one voice laughing, a high-pitched, somewhat keening sound, now filled with appropriate nervousness and fear.
There was one last shot fired, and silence filled the house with its haunting chill.
Footsteps clunked up the stairs and Toris scrambled back from the doors, looking for anything that could protect him from a gun. There was nothing, and no way or where to hide. He was quite certain that he was going to die, only seventeen years into his short life, and the only reason why he wasn’t soiling himself in terror was the thought of how embarrassing it would be to meet the Lord with wet pants.
The door opened.
Ivan stepped in.
Deep down, Toris had always known that Ivan would be the one to walk away, though it didn’t seem as if he’d exactly chased the other men around the house with guns blazing like a horror picture show.
Ivan’s long coat was sprayed and splattered with blood. One side of his forehead and lips were stained with red. He looked down at Toris’s trembling form and smiled, breath smelling of vodka and filling the air with the stench as he spoke.
“It was a fun game.”
He moved to the bathroom and took off his coat, then tossed it to his servant nonchalantly. Toris caught it on instinct and dropped it when slick blood crossed his palms.
“Clean that up. Downstairs, too. You may open the stable door; take the bodies out and I will bury them later.” Ivan frowned. “Hm. On second thought, leave them. I’ll take them out later and you can clean that mess then. Don’t bother with lunch today.”
The tub began to fill with water and Ivan closed the door.
Toris didn’t want to go downstairs, but he feared what would happen if he was still there when Ivan finished his bath. As slowly as he could, he made his way down the steps, carrying the bloody coat at arm’s length.
It was the first time Toris had seen dead bodies. The USSR never openly or publicly killed in Lithuania. At least, not that Toris had ever seen, but he had always lived a fairly sheltered life. He always imagined that they waited until the dark of night and pulled people into alleys like common thugs. In any case, they could always just ship them off to concentration camps.
But these bodies, in broad daylight, laid out grotesquely around the front room for all the world to see, if but Toris were the whole world. Their bodies slumped in impossibly natural positions. Their mouths hung open wider than human mouths should hang, as if frozen in screams that Toris hadn’t heard. Blood and brains were strewn about the floor from sometimes still-smoking holes in the sides of their heads. A bottle of vodka sat pristine on the coffee table. There was one neat, empty shot glass next to it. The others were laying haphazardly on the floor or clutched in the hands of the corpses.
There were seven bodies total, all dressed in USSR uniforms.
Toris turned away and went to the laundry room, adding his own clothes to the bucket of soapy water, trying to scrub out the taint of death from the folds of cloth.
Toris didn’t like to cry, but he seemed to be doing a lot of it lately.
Ivan had the bodies buried by the time Toris was done scrubbing the memories into oblivion. They all came rushing back as he tried to wash the blood out of the carpet, attacking the stains with the brush and cleaner until his fingers bled and it was time to make dinner. He unenthusiastically stewed beef, potatoes, corn, carrots, and an onion in a pot, not caring if he was punished for serving such a watery soup with tasteless bread.
For once, Ivan seemed to understand.
“They said they were soldiers looking for Liet refugees. I think they were just looking to steal from me and were using the uniforms as an excuse. Either way, they would have killed both of us if they got the chance. I managed to get them into a game of Russian Roulette instead… appropriate, hm? Winner take all. Black-hearted thieves like that have no honor. They saw the game as creating less shares, so the winner could have all the jewels and money they could find. They were happy to play, especially when I added in a little vodka for every time the gun didn’t go off.”
“You…” Toris swallowed a hard lump in his throat. “You talk like you knew you were going to win.”
“I did,” Ivan said. He held up the little gun, which he’d been carrying in his jacket. “This is an old one, but faithful. It always stalls every two and a half times that it’s pulled. I could play with it fully loaded and always win as long as I keep track of the mathematics.” He put the cold steel of the gun to his left temple and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Nothing.
“You see? There is one half-pull left. But if someone pulled it all the way back, it would fire. Of course, they didn’t know that, so I always had at least that one-half pull to fall back on.”
He pointed the gun at Toris, pretended to fire, and put it back into his pocket.
Toris stared down at the beef stew, poked half-heartedly at it with his spoon, then set the silver utensil down. “I’m not hungry.”
Ivan gave a nod. “Alright. Feed the meat to the cats and the vegetables to the horses. Clean what you can, and sleep well tonight. It’s the best way to get over it.”
As if he would sleep well for at least a month, though it was the slightest bit comforting that Ivan wasn’t a complete raving, homicidal lunatic, and seemed to want to keep Toris alive and unhurt. For the time being.
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