She-bear. Alexandr Keldyushov

out a puff of smoke. And he took a puff again. His thoughts were twisted like a disturbed swarm. For so many years, he had never found a clear answer to the main question: who should be punished for all this mess? And he sighed heavily again, having dully waved his hand.

      – God will understand himself, who is guilty of thousands of ruined souls… He will identify and punish the villain. I will mind my own business. – But the belief in just punishment did not find the proper relief. He limply lowered his head, which became very heavy in one moment, and turned in upon himself, unable to soothe pain, gripping his soul.

      He felt sorry that their cosy little world faced the same fate. The trouble did not pass by. The once densely populated village was dying out today. His fingers involuntarily clenched of the feeling of despair. He knew that he was deceiving himself, hiding behind the words: ‘everything was going to be alright’, a terrible reality. Klyuevka was not dying out. The truth was worse. It was already dead. It was remaining only as the name of the settlement marked on the map of Russia with an inanimate point. A settlement without inhabitants. A haven of abandoned houses and fallen fences. Another ghost station on the railway atlas of Russia, with an empty platform. And regardless of one’s emotional experiences and attempts to turn back the clock, the past was gone. One could not breathe life into a dead decomposed body. But even if one could, it was unlikely worth doing. It was possible that one’s efforts would resurrect a new Frankenstein. And its fate would be more disastrous. It’s all in God’s hands. ‘What must be, will be’. One needed to accept the terrible reality. People were surrounded by the frightening reality, and there was no way to break free. And a single voice had no value. All posts in the world were allotted long time ago. The position of ‘the saviour of the world’ was already taken by those, who had destroyed this world by themselves.

      – One can accept many things, but not outright injustice, – he said sadly. He wearily bowed down and, hiding his face in his palms, ruffled his thick grey hair with naughty fingers. – People have become too callous and aggressive, not like our generation. They are ready to rip each other’s throats. And they have bags of envy. They smile in the face, and when one turns around they spit on the back. But the worst thing is that the death of a person today is measured by dry figures. Today, twenty people died in a car accident, three of them were children of preschool age. Yesterday, the explosion of domestic gas in a residential building claimed the lives of one hundred people. The day before yesterday, the ship sank and took the lives of another hundred people. And here the ink writes out the soulless statistics: weekly, monthly, annual… ‘So much’ departed. But last year, this figure was better – it was smaller. For whom was it a better figure? For the family? For friends? For relatives of the deceased? Unlikely. It was better only for the report. And that’s it. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, but something will certainly happen and someone will die. There is no doubt. Hundreds of thousands are put in the coffins, and their entire course of life, the way of life and the lifestyle are reflected at the impersonal tags. Hundreds of thousands… but few of them are known by the names, and even fewer – by the surnames. And one could write off all the deaths on the concourse of circumstances or the evil will of fate if most of the tragedies were marked by the trace of alcohol. Some reckless deadly demon, trapped in a vodka bottle for hundreds of years, broke free. It was his time… The time of confusion and despair. And he began his mad dance, smiting hopes, trampling the will, smearing conscience and shame, destroying what was formerly a person, showing a raging monster.

      – And its vicious influence reached us too, – the old man hopelessly forced himself to speak, helplessly listening to the melancholy howl of the neighbour’s dog.

      Out of eight thousand residents of Klyuevka, only less than one thousand remained. And almost all of them were the elderly ones. Young people, who did not run away to the cities, went on the bottle, trying to cope with sorrow. The demon of drunkenness firmly held the lost souls, injecting doses of poison into the minds fogged with alcohol, creating the illusion of universal prosperity. And in the morning, the hangover came. Sharp and painful. And there was the realisation that the world was not ‘pink’, not even with black and white stripes, but solid grey. The power in this world belonged to the gloomy cardinal named hopelessness. He ruled with an iron fist, brutally suppressing any attempt to escape from captivity. It was dissolving the remnants of the human mind in tonnes of cheap surrogate alcohol.

      Unscrupulous businessmen. Bandits. Police. Officials of all sorts and ranks. Like ticks, they stuck to the extremely profitable ‘feeding through’, and no force could tear them away. Yes, there was no such power in the state that was able to keep order. All the ‘politically unreliable’, going against the decrees of the oligarchic elite, honest and decent police chiefs and business leaders were put out to pasture. They were replacing with obedient servants. And corruption began to thrive. One only needed to reap benefits on time. Dollars. Marks. Pounds. They flowed, like the river, settling in the pockets of thieving dealers. Shadow bigwigs came out of their holes, beginning to build their own world order. Under the motto: ‘scratch my back and I will scratch yours’. The article about speculation was seized from the Criminal Code. There was no speculation in Russia, but there were free market relations. There began the wave of legal democratic relations between the seller and the buyer. And nobody cared that the product was not created with their own hands and was just resold at exorbitant prices. Coupons for alcohol were out of use, and vodka itself disappeared from the shelves of the shops as well. The notorious ‘dry law’ was gaining momentum. The state rushed to fight alcoholism at breakneck speed, uprooting vineyards and closing liquor factories, depriving people of high-quality alcohol. Meanwhile, hundreds of cisterns of denatured alcohol ‘Royal’, ‘made in China’, flooded the railway siding of Transbaikalia. Dealers launched a brisk trade of real poison in the country sides and villages. Excitedly rubbing their sweaty palms from anticipating the profits, they fell into the greedy trance. They were enriching the offices of funeral services, which they owned at times. These were the market relations. The double income was obvious: kill and then bury. The business on blood was profitable. People were dying like flies, dozens a day. During the year, the local cemetery grew to immense size, turning into a horrible and sad sight. Any new grave belonged to a man or a woman, younger than forty years old. And there was not a single initiated case, not a single conviction. Everybody knew the perpetrators of the crimes, but nobody was imprisoned. And it was impossible to put someone into prison as government officials were controlling everything. Everybody was in the mix: prosecutors, regional chiefs of police, investigators, and chiefs of local departments. Therefore, everybody knew and said nothing. And there was nothing else to do. One could write to Moscow and there would be no result, if not worse. Or one could be put in prison for ‘slander’. Or a more serious article could be fabricated. Or one could be simply killed by some criminals, who would be set at a certain person. In those troubled 90s, it seemed that all the atrocities took place under the connivance of the higher management from the capital. The country was ruled by oligarchs, who were happy with drunken people, as they required less, were satisfied with the crumbs, did not interfere their enrichment, their ‘cutting’ of the budget. And if someone died, it would be even better, as the number of people dissatisfied with social injustice would be smaller.

      – When one remembers the past, one begins to tremble. All this was so disgusting, – the old man signed bitterly, – low and meanly. We defeated the Nazis, won a victory over the hunger, rebuilt the cities. Over time, we began to feel that life was getting back to normal. And it turned out that there was some internal enemy in the country, hiding and waiting for the right time to destroy everything. And the consequences of his attack were even more catastrophic than those caused by all the previous wars together. What for did our fathers and grandfathers die during the Great Patriotic War, clearing the land from the ‘brown evil spirits’? Well, certainly, it was not for the fact that their children would die from counterfeit vodka, gangster and police lawlessness, bureaucratic indifference. It was unlikely for the descendants to put up their medals for sale, to glorify traitors and executioners, to consider true heroes to be the occupants, destroying their monuments with the frenzied hatred. Despising the Soviet symbols, they would raise their hands in a Nazi salute, tattooing the bodies with the Nazi symbols and the swastika. What made them betray the memory of their fathers and follow the doctrines of the Nazi ideology? Most young men were not the descendants of the traitors but the usual Russian teenagers. Many