Pig: A Thriller Read Free Page A

crayons with a sharpener on the back. Eighteen years later we come out with uni-colour ball point pen. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost sixty three colours and the ability to keep sharpening ourselves .”
    In Kolyma, she began her real education. One of the Asian inmates had introduce d her to it . Forced to stand in the snow as a disciplinary measure holding buckets of water in outstretched arms until the water got cold enough to freeze solid, Magda came to learn that stillness was peace, serenity, was strength. Only in the stillness could decisions be properly made. Think of a mountain or a tree, how still they are. Only when you became as still as a mountain or rock would you be able to think. The Japanese even had a proverb for it: Ishi no ue ni mo san nen -- to spend three years waiting on the same stone. 
     

     
    With her background in Physics and math, Magda was often called upon to work on the camp finances. She also trained herself in cosmetology, calling herself a Mathabeautician, and doing makeup for the other prisoners and guards, hours spent keeping her mouth shut and her mind and ears open. By the time she was let out of Kolyma , she spoke seven languages, but paradoxically began to talk less, sure enough in herself that she didn’t mind if someone might not like her. Even after she was released, s he carried the camps around in her thinking like others carried their passport or a small Bible. She either had no ego, or one so large it was impregnable.
    If you always knew where Pig was, clanking and blustering along, Magda  could stand absolutely still, like one of those submarines with the engines off, on sonar silence, waiting to hear the clues that resided in the deep . What was the American running shoe company’s slogan? Just do it? Running, skating, never thinking, just doing? It seemed to suit the age perfectly. Magda preferred meditation.  Movement brought only chaos.
    If she was telling the truth, she could tell you exactly how many trees we re in any given square kilometre of Siberia.
     

     
    "Fight the bastard,” the Doctor brayed, because he knew that’s what he was supposed to say, a vat of slivovitz hanging over his belt, his accent the colour of a winter suicide and a tattered Inter Milan football jersey loosely untucked to hide his belly . If he’d washed since yesterday, you couldn’t tell. Completely bald from the ears forward , he compensated for his lack of hair with a Stalin esq u e moustache and a surfeit of unsubstantiated opinions , from Putin’s triumphs to the perfidy of the Jews, the price of vodka in the shops and who was Lady Di’s real assassin . I t was as i f he couldn’t have hair, he could have opinions.
     

     
    The Doctor had once misdiagnosed colon cancer in a very prominent Palestinian politician, which explained how he came to be here in Siberia. It was the only place that would accept his qualifications and provide him with paid work.  As the politician was later heard to blackly joke , “He had his head so far up his own ass he couldn’t see up mine.”
     

     
    “I wond er if she’ll put out for me?” the Doctor mused , watching Magda grieve over Snow’s comatose body. Magda noted that both the D oc tor ’s grin and the teeth inside it seemed false, like the colour of creamer mixed into chicory broth instead of fresh farm milk in an elixir of brewed Colombian beans.
    Bandar, his mother and father had christened him and that was the name he insisted everyone in camp call him; not Bandy, not Band, but Bandar, emphasis on the first syllable only , never the second . Call him anything else and he would refuse to answer, stomping off in a snit and running to complain. As a result, inventing variations of his name and watching him go into contortions over it had become the main camp sport, beating out even shooting empty vodka bottles with Kalashnikov s.
     

     
    Doctor Ba n dar ha d answered Magda’s numerous questions about Snow -- treatment