Wolves Eat Dogs Read Free Page B

should have something. Tell him some jokes. Be a jolly soul. Make him laugh.”
    “I’ll try to think of some jokes.”
    “Go to a movie, maybe kick a ball back and forth. The boy needs to get out more, to socialize. We offer psychiatric evaluation, proper diet, music classes, a regular school nearby. Most children thrive. Zhenya is not thriving.”
    The shelter appeared to be a healthful setting, a two-story structure painted like a child’s drawing with birds, butterflies, rainbow and sun, and a real vegetable garden bordered by marigolds. The shelter was a model, an oasis in a city where thousands of children went without homes and worked pushing outdoor market carts or worse. Arkady saw a circle of girls in a playground serving tea to their dolls. They seemed happy.
    Zhenya climbed into the car, put on his seat belt and held his book and chess set tight. He stared straight ahead like a soldier.
    “So, what will you do, then?” Olga Andreevna asked Arkady.
    “Well, we’re such jolly souls, we’re capable of anything.”
    “Does he talk to you?”
    “He reads his book.”
    “But does he talk to you?”
    “No.”
    “Then how do you two communicate?”
    “To be honest, I don’t know.”
     
    Arkady had a Zhiguli 9, a goat of a car, not prepossessing but built for Russian roads. They drove along the river wall, past fishermen casting for urban aquatic life. Considering the black cloud of truck exhaust and the sluggish green of the Moscow River, for optimism fishermen were hard to beat. A BMW shot by, followed by a security team in an SUV. In fact, the city was safer than it had been in years, and chase cars were largely for form, like the retinue of a lord. The most ferocious businessmen had killed one another off, and a truce between the Mafias seemed to be holding. Of course, a wise man took out all forms of insurance. Restaurants, for example, had both private security guards and a representative of the local Mafia at the front door. Moscow had reached an equilibrium, which made Ivanov’s suicide all the harder to understand.
    Meanwhile, Zhenya read aloud his favorite fairy tale, about a girl abandoned by her father and sent by her stepmother into the deep woods to be killed and eaten by a witch, Baba Yaga.
    “ ‘Baba Yaga had a long blue nose and steel teeth, and she lived in a hut that stood on chicken legs. The hut could walk through the woods and sit wherever Baba Yaga ordered. Around the hut was a fence festooned with skulls. Most victims died just at the sight of Baba Yaga. The strongest men, the wealthiest lords, it didn’t matter. She boiled the meat off their bones and when she had eaten every last bite she added their skulls to her hideous fence. A few prisoners lived long enough to try to escape, but Baba Yaga flew after them on a magic mortar and pestle.’ ” However, page by page, through kindness and courage, the girl did escape and made her way back to her father, who sent away the evil stepmother. When Zhenya was done reading he gave Arkady a quick glance and settled back in his seat, a ritual completed.
    At Sparrow Hill, Arkady swung the car in sight of Moscow University, one of Stalin’s skyscrapers, built by convict labor in such a fever for higher learning and at such wholesale cost of life that bodies were said to have been left entombed. That was a fairy tale he could keep to himself, Arkady thought.
    “Did you have some fun this week?” Arkady asked.
    Zhenya said nothing. Nevertheless, Arkady tried a smile. After all, many children from the shelter had suffered negligence and abuse. They couldn’t be expected to be rays of sunshine. Some children were adopted out of the shelter. Zhenya, with his sharp nose and vow of silence, wasn’t a likely candidate.
    Arkady himself would have been harder to please, he thought, if he’d had a higher opinion of himself as a child. As he remembered, he had been an unlovable stick, devoid of social skills and isolated by the aura of fear