Good People by Nir Baram Read Free Book Online Page A

in the whites of their eyes.
    ‘Yes, run along now, Thomas,’ Hermann said. ‘On a night like this, you really shouldn’t leave your mother all alone.’
    Now he understood.

LENINGRAD
    AUTUMN 1938
    One by one the guests fell onto the red Turkish sofa, eyeing each other in a way that reflected years of friendship tinged with suspicion. With a thunderous greeting the massively built Vladimir Morozovsky, reputed to be one of the largest men in the city, approached the sofa, upon which the poets Konstantin Varlamov and Emma Feodorovna Rykova had already settled, while between them, hunched over and shrinking into himself, sat the literary critic Brodsky. Varlamov placed his hands over his ears, and Emma waved to Morozovsky to show there was no more room. He retreated, leaned against the faded wallpaper and looked out at the murky evening sky.
    Even before greeting each other, they had ticked off the names of those who had been invited but had not come. It was well known that, at such gatherings, the absentees were the most important people—their timidness endowed those who did come with an aura of courage and gave them the right to condemn those absent as disgraceful cowards. Nevertheless, the more absentees there were, the more intrusive thedoubts of those present. Do they know something we don’t? they asked themselves in panic. What do they know? If someone warned them, why didn’t they tell us? But if someone wanted to uncover any plots being hatched at the meeting, then he needed an informer to be here. So those who hadn’t come were harmless cowards, while the really dangerous person, the traitor, is actually here among us!
    The hidden recesses of the informer’s heart cannot be laid bare—better to hope that there was no person in the world so base as to betray his friends. Still, rumours circulated every day about people who turned in those closest to them. ‘In 1938 a wise person reveals nothing to anyone,’ Brodsky had declared, ‘except his name and place of work.’
    ‘Where is Osip Borisovich?’ complained Varlamov. ‘Ever since they arrested Nadyezhda Petrovna he’s vanished.’ With his fingers he smoothed the white locks that fell rakishly over his dark, wrinkled brow, while darting looks of satisfaction at the men around him, as though to ask: and you, young fellows, do you have such a splendid head of hair?
    Indeed, the absence of Osip Borisovich Levayev made the people sitting in the living room uncomfortable. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Nadyezhda Petrovna, and in the past he had even obtained handwritten permission from Sergei Kirov, when he was the most powerful and admired man in Leningrad, to print a book of her poems. And then there was the scandal when he headbutted the author Alexei Tolstoy, after the latter labelled Nadyezhda Petrovna’s first book ‘decadent cosmopolitanism’.
    ‘His wife would rather he was dead,’ announced Emma Feodorovna. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, fluffed her hair up and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke straight at Brodsky’s spectacles. Her greenish eyes glowed with the argumentative light that tormented the offended faces of her friends, but Alexandra, whom everybody called Sasha, always saw in that light the lovely lament of a dissatisfied soul. ‘So long as he isn’t arrested,’ Emma went on, ‘because then she’d have to run around for him instead of lying in bed all day with that stammering sister of hers, slandering the whole world.’
    Sasha was standing against the wall in her darkened room. A mocking twitch fluttered over her lips. When she was little, Emma used to pick her up, cover her face with kisses smelling of cigarettes, and tell bad stories about everyone, even about Sasha’s own parents. Now Sasha nudged the door so she could see the whole living room, including the eastern side where her parents were. This was the second time in a month that this weary bunch had met to make a plan about Nadyezhda Petrovna’s