Page 32 of White Wolf

As a boy, Sasha had traveled by both horse and dog sled, in the winter, with his father to deliver pelts to some of Tomsk’s smaller satellite villages. By comparison, those primitive cottages made Tomsk seen like a metropolis, bustling with university students, eastbound travelers, miners, trappers, and craftsmen. Thanks to the permafrost layer, Tomsk hadn’t suffered the farming collectivization that had ravaged the more western, agricultural areas of Siberia, and so the city had remained somewhat prosperous under Soviet control.

So Sasha thought he knew what a big city looked like.

He was wrong.

Even in the dark, Moscow gave an impression of vastness: all clashing rooflines, twisting alleys, and the smell of too many people. Filthy snow, scurrying rats, crumbling stonework. The factory belched powdery smoke against the black sky, and crouched at its feet were a half-dozen wooden buildings with open, glassless windows, sounds of voices and crying babies coming from inside: barracks for the factory workers.

The building looked new: flat-faced white concrete lacking all the charm of the imperial-era buildings. Utilitarian and featureless, half of its windows lit up in checkerboard pattern all the way up its ten stories.

“We’re on eight,” Nikita said, leading them to the building’s main door. It boasted a fresh coat of black paint, glimmering faintly with condensed moisture in the glow of an overhead electric light. Sasha thought of the intricate detail on the front door of his home and found this one flat and foreboding by comparison. There was no decoration on this door, no love. No life.

Nikita let them into a dim concrete stairwell that smelled of dampness and garbage. Sasha’s breath caught in his throat. Nothing in Tomsk smelled like Moscow had so far. Nothing looked like it, either, the sheen of more condensation on the stair treads and walls, the crawling patches of mildew.

Nikita kicked aside a bundle of cloth that looked like a holey, discarded jacket and started up the stairs, unaware of the horror blooming inside of Sasha behind him.

Their footfalls rang loud, echoing off the concrete, and the walls seem to tighten fraction by fraction as they trooped up the stairs. Every other landing fed out into a long hallway lined with doors. Sasha heard the high, thin wails of several babies crying, and the rough shouts of grown men, the words muffled by the walls. Garbage and broken furniture was piled up outside apartment doors, and the smell seemed to intensify as they climbed.

On one landing, a family of five sat huddled in rags, their faces sooty and their knuckles scraped. They ate beans straight out of the can. The mother held a two or three-year-old child on her lap, and his eyes, enormous and blue, followed Sasha as he walked past, caught between averting his gaze and staring back.

He’d seen families camped out in reindeer-hide tents back home, wood smoke billowing through ventilation holes rigged carefully at the tops, but even that sort of life seemed preferable to camping in a concrete stairwell. More dignified, for sure.

“Better than the barracks,” Kolya muttered.

Sasha thought of the long wooden building he’d seen outside the steel factory and shivered.

Behind him, Monsieur Philippe began to huff and puff as the stairs switched back, and then back again, over and over.

“Not as young as I used to be,” he lamented, wheezing. “I wasn’t built for apartment living.”

“Where do you live, then,Dedushka?” Feliks asked.

Philippe made a breathless sound and didn’t answer.

Finally, they reached the eighth floor, another hallway like all the rest, smelling strongly of cramped humanity, the air cold enough to turn their breath to white plumes. Dim electric bulbs set at intervals down the ceiling cast their shadows in monstrous shapes, hump-backed and long-fingered, like something from a folk tale.

Nikita fished his keys from his pocket with a jingle and let them into the third door on the left. There was a quietclickand the room filled with light.

It was small, that was the first impression. And sparse. A narrow living room fed through a propped-open doorway into a narrow kitchen with one window, greasy panes smearing a haze of light from outside across lino floors and metal-faced cabinets. Two stacked mattresses on the floor behind the sofa clearly served as someone’s bed, heaped with blankets and crumpled pillows.

Sasha spotted a radio, an oddly dainty table, a few solid wooden chairs. The sofa boasted a folded stack of blankets at one end, like someone slept there also. A hallway turned a corner, leading to what must be bedrooms and a bathroom.

Someone closed the door behind him, and for a moment he knew claustrophobia, trapped in such a small space with six men who were essentially strangers…and essentially the enemy. He hadn’t been brought up a proper White, but his parents weren’t Bolsheviks, and neither was he. He…he…

A hand landed on his shoulder, solid and grounding. “Home sweet home,” Ivan said, cheerfully, and the sudden surge of anxiety eased.

Sasha took a deep breath and smelled the faint musk of dried sweat, a hint of melted snow, and the echo of tea. Human, lived-in smells.

And then he began to see the small signs of such things: the dog-eared paperback book on the table. The row of socks hung up on a line to dry over the radiator. The homely clutter of pots, and pans, and tea kettle and tin cups beside the kitchen sink. Dried mushrooms on a string above the stove. A row of polished, knee-high dress boots beside the door – city boots. The hooks for coats and scarves.

“Do you all live here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kolya said. “Thankfully we don’t have families.”

When Sasha turned to glance at him, he found Pyotr’s gaze instead.

“Sixteen people live next door,” he explained, sadly.

Oh.

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