Pig: A Thriller Read Free

Magda Perskanski now took great pride in being a “chub.” She was that most disconcerting of combinations, a closed face attached to an open mind. Pleasantly plump from living on perogies, pertsovka and perpetual disappointment, you could usually tell where she was by following the trail of Coffee Crisp wrappers left streaming behind her . It was a sign of defiance. She had gotten fat as a kind of revolt.
    Her face was unremarkable, plain but somehow very sensual. Perhaps it was the way she enjoyed each moment for itself, enjoying it for its own sake. She had a huge, heroic nose and a voice low and cat’s-tongue rough.  Her breasts were too heavy for her to run with them unencumbered , pendulous and purple-tipped. When she did run – not often these days, she never used her body for much after the camps for much more than to carry her head around, which is where she lived most of the time now -- they jiggled in the natural shape of a figure eight. U nder her skirt was a large, low-slung bottom, h er large, dusky triangle beckon ing like eggplant from beneath her hem . “Friends” in the camps had said Magda did too much thinking. Most of those were long dead.
     

     
    Soon after they’d met just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pig had asked Magda which political camp she belonged to, the Communists or the Capitalist s .
    “ The Kolyma camp ,” she’d answered. As in Kolyma , home of the gulag . She had been given the gift of not having an ideology. A loose cannon in a camp of tight assholes, Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski was of the opinion that everything happened for a reason. Except maybe baseball, which she found utterly comprehensible. That’s why she never questioned why she had been sent to the prison camps or complained about wasting her youth in them.
     

     
    "You think you were too good for them," Pig had once accused her. “The camps.” Other than seeing them as useful receptacles for his semen, Pig was disgusted by women, trailing Kleenex and Tampax everywhere they went. She smelt the musk of diesel, vodka and something unidentifiable on him. It was not an aphrodisiac. If she was waiting for some show of pity out of him for Snow’s condition , she should have brought a sandwich.
    “Too good,” he’d accused. But instead of getting angry, Magda had only sh aken her head and told him, no, what bothered her was that she hadn't been good enough. She hadn't earned it. Only Russia's best got to go to the gulag . She didn’t even belong in th at class. All she’d done was to refuse to manipulate isotopes, not people.
     

     
    Being Slavic, Magda Perska nski disliked many other people , but never for anything as inconsequential as religion or the colour of their skin. People liked her because when it came to skin colour, nationality, ideology, social status, money, politics, sexual orientation or religion she truly did not care. Magda Perskanski didn’t give a shit whether you were white, red, black or maple walnut. The church to which she belonged was the one she carried deep inside herself.
     

     
    Maple walnut. Yummm!
     

     
    A graduate student at M.I . P . T. – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, known as P hystech, the U.S.S.R.’s version of M.I.T. -- Magda had been expelled and sent to Kolyma on charges of treason against the State. Upon graduation, she’d received her napravleniye , just like every other Soviet university graduate, assigning her to her new place of work, a branch o f the Soviet arms industry developing new weapons of destruction. When she refused, they sent her to the gulag instead. A physicist, she’d committed the heinous crime of wanting to make ploughshares, not bombs.
    “Science should be the investigation of the unexplained rather than the explanation of the uninvestigated,” she’d complained to one of her doctoral supervisor s one day. “Look what happens to us in the system. We start kindergarten with a book bag and sixty four colours of