[story] borrowed skin
author: beth winter (bwinter)
email: bwinter [at] extenuation.net
MOSCOW, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The following are some of the leading stories in Russian newspapers on Saturday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
KOMMERSANT
- The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed 10 years ago - on December 8, 1991 - after then Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus issued a document proclaiming the Soviet Union dead during a meeting at the Viskuli residence in the Byelovezhskaya Forest in Belarus
(c) Reuters Limited 2001
KIEV, July 18 (Reuters) - President Leonid Kuchma ordered Ukraine's government on Thursday to prepare a new crime-fighting programme following a bomb attack on the prime minister.
"The actions of anti-government forces are growing and they are taking on a more threatening character. There is blackmail, threats against officials and government representatives are even being killed," said a decree signed by Kuchma.
(...)
His decree gave the government a mandate to eliminate Ukraine's huge shadow economy and create an anti-terrorism centre. Security would be tightened around the president and top officials.
It also recommended increasing the powers of regional chiefs in areas where crime has grown and specifically named the Donbass coalmining region and the autonomous Crimean peninsula.
(...)
(c) Reuters Limited 1996
It was eight years after the Great Change. This was what the village people called it, like the Great War and the Great War before it. The word itself had a greatness to it, an ancient air, and it suited a meeting in a forest, among a herd of wild animals that were to cattle as wolves were to hounds, where three warlords had signed the death warrant of the one who had fed them and armed them with their very power. None of the villagers knew the words of the warrant, and even though the shaggy beasts wandered down to their own forest sometimes, they kept their silence and their secrets.
Sometimes, you could touch the Great Change, in the sleek lacquer-work of the cars that stopped in front of old Anton's bar. It had been the collective bar, but now it belonged to Anton, like the cars belonged to people who owned factories and shops and guns as bright as their cars.
Hanna didn't own her shop, but she was the queen of it, and she decided that the young man, who came in on an autumn evening eight years after the Great Change, only owned a gun. Maybe a car. The men who owned factories never looked this grey-faced, bright-eyed. This one looked like a boy, not a man, except for the line that cut his cheek in two and made his left ear disappear above it, halfway.
The boy put a bottle on the counter. Hanna didn't ask why he didn't go to Anton's; the old goat sold water-christened vodka and too-loud music. Hanna preferred her spirits with a Pugachova song. It went down better.
Then she looked into the boy's bright eyes. He tried to smile, young and free, but she saw young and scared.
"Just vodka?" she asked.
"Yes, mother," he said with the right respect, like the young men had said to Hanna's mother when there had been little eagles on their caps. "Unless you sell miracles."
"Not here," she said and tutted. Tut, tut. "You can take the lake road, away from the lake, if you want to buy a miracle."
Later, Hanna didn't know why she'd said it. It was a woman's place, that cottage, and the boy didn't look like his trouble was that of a woman. She told him that, and she told him of the times she had gone there. She showed him the rings the visits had got for her, the policeman, the book-keeper, the shop director. She had buried all of them, but she wore their rings.
The boy listened closely, then thanked her and went out into the street. It was dark, apart from the light in Anton's inn and the cigarettes of the girls of the Great Change along the road, the girls who followed the men in their sleek cars. The boy found the oldest of the girls, and when he told her what he wanted from her, she laughed and said yes.
An hour later there was a girl walking up the path from the lake to the heart of the forest. She stumbled in her red shoes on broken branches. She shivered in a thin purple dress and thinner jacket that said "Dynamo". Her hair was brushed over one eye, one cheek and one ear. Her skin was grey, and her eyes were bright.
She walked the path until it was almost gone. When it was gone, she stood in front of a tiny house, shorter and older than the houses in the village. The window was made of small pieces of glass put together with copper wire, and there was a fire in the chimney place.
A woman opened the door to show the girl in, down the three steps onto the greying grass on the floor. There were chairs, and for a while they sat in silence as the girl gathered thoughts and words and a tone of voice high enough.
"You make me curious," the woman said. She threw a bundle of pine branches into the fire, and the twisting, burning needles lit her dark hair and her bright eyes. She was not as old as Hanna, and she was older. "Men are too scared to come here. And you're not drunk."
"I gave the bottle to the woman who lent me this dress," the boy admitted. "How did you know?"
The woman laughed. "I knew. Isn't it enough?" The fire danced in her eyes, over the cloth-leaves that made her shirt. "You walk right. You look right. You hide your hands and your neck. But I knew."
"Will you turn me into a frog because of it?"
She had a warm laugh, big enough to fill the room from the dark bookcase to the curtains to the alcoves. "Not unless you ask me to."
"Can I tell you a story?" he asked, going down on one knee before her. His nails were painted pink, and the stockings on his legs reached only a handspan above his knees.
The witch took his hands between her own, fire-warm. "Tell me, Vanya," she said. "Tell your old mother all your troubles."
Vanya's story was a long one, and a new one. There were evil bandits in the story and good bandits, but this was a story after the Great Change, and so the lines were blurred like mud and water after a zhubr walked through a stream. It wasn't clear who stole from whom, and who had burned to the ground. The old stories had been better stories.
When it was done, the witch reached for a poker and prodded the flames, so close that the sequins on her sleeves glowed red.
"You want vengeance and blood?" she asked. "You need a worse witch than me for that."
"I just want to escape," the boy said, smoothing out his skirt and the silver fringe at the hem. "And you are a nice witch."
"And you are a man, and men are blind," the witch said. "You don't need my help to escape. You can buy a ticket, or you can walk into the lake. What you want is for your problems to disappear."
The pink-nailed fingers moved, the purple fabric bunched between them. "I can't do it. It'd start a war in the entire region."
"And you don't want to die," the witch whispered.
The fabric fell again smoothly over the boy's legs. "And I don't want to die."
The witch touched the boy's cheek. Her fingers were hot from the fire.
"You cannot do this, yes. Go into the alcove and tell me what you find inside."
The boy entered the alcove and crouched tentatively on a girl's high heels.
"It's an animal fur," he said, touching the grey, speckled hairs. They were soft, inviting to the touch. They wrapped around his hands, then his arms. "A lynx?"
"It's not a fur," the witch said as the warm softness covered the boy's waist. "It's a skin."
The lynx who had been the boy meowed his agreement. Then he rubbed against the witch's legs, just to hear her laugh as he almost knocked her off her feet.
The witch cuffed him lightly between the ears, then opened the door for him. Then she went back inside to try on the purple dress.
That night, old Anton's bar was almost empty, except for the girls and their raised voices. The people of the Change had lit a fire at the edge of the lake, where the cars were biggest and sleekest, and the tables groaned under food and spirits. There was music and there were stories of the war that was fought in shadows and in banks, and in the coal mines that funded both. This was why the girls outside Anton's were bored and cold and angry, except for the one in flat-soled shoes with her bottle of vodka. At the lake the men danced with their wives and daughters, because it was a night of victory.
The dark-eyed man whose victory it was stood in the tightest circle, by the mayor and the mayor's daughter, who felt less honoured than her father did to be in this company. She had hoped that the dark-eyed man would fail, but he was golden and careful, and even politics ran his way. There had been trouble, in the summer, but people said the boy was dead.
The mayor's daughter had been asked to dance, by the dark-eyed man and others, but she remained where she was, wrapping herself tightly in her shawl. Her mother had come from this village, and she remembered the way the forest at night looked darker than it was, with strange lights beyond the trees.
There were wives and daughters here, but it was late and they were less used to moving by moonlight than the men were. For a moment the dancing stopped, but the dark-eyed man clapped his hands and the men moved forward. The music was no longer new. The instruments remembered the rhythms, the melodies. The dance of men, with jumps and kicks and embraces, the dance of brotherhood and brawl.
The dark-eyed man danced in the circle, because he remembered the way it went. His father had taught him, before the change before the change. It was the old men who had to be shown how to dance to his music, before he let the young men take the lead. It was always like this, with dance and gold and blood, because that was how he was, how the world had made him.
He clapped his hands, stepping back to the edge of the circle, edge of the bonfire, edge of the shadows of branches overhead.
And this was where the lynx fell upon him and slew him with sharp claws and sharper teeth.
The man fell back into the bonfire, smothering it. The music screamed as the musicians dropped their instruments. The men ran for their guns, and one of them knocked the mayor's daughter down to the ground.
She fell by the bonfire, and the first thing she saw was the dead man's face. His eyes were no longer dark. There was darkness, but the eyes had been torn out. Then the lynx turned his head and looked at her with the brightest eyes she had ever seen.
She was the only one who saw the lynx jump over the fire and into one of the large, dark cars, open and empty, transports for the tables and musicians and guns. The bright eyes glowed, and she struggled to her feet, because it seemed to her that it was wrong, the way the darkness was not complete.
"Close your eyes," she said as the first shots echoed. The men did not see that the lynx was no longer by the corpse.
The lynx looked at her with his bright eyes until the last of the shooting was over. Someone screamed about searching the camp.
The mayor's daughter threw her shawl over the lynx and sat by him, letting his fur warm her. When the men with the guns looked into the car, she looked at them until they walked away.
When the men dragged the body from the fire and kicked at the last of the embers, the lynx put a heavy paw on her knee. She took the shawl off his head, and for a moment he stared at her with his bright eyes. Then he was gone, and she buried her face in her hands.
The lynx ran back to the witch's house, though he did not take the path. The trees grew close together there, embracing each other with branches, and the lynx ran over them. Later, when some of the men tried to look for the path, there was no room for them to pass between the trees.
The witch kept her fire going, and the lynx lay at her feet, his tufted ears twitching as the witch scratched them. He smelled the herbs about her, a trace of blood, and the forest. Then he slept.
When he woke, the sun was setting, and he was lying in the alcove, the lynx skin rolled under his head. He heard the door open, and he pulled up the edge of the alcove's curtain.
The witch was sitting in her chair. Her hair was darker than it had been the night before. The mayor's daughter knelt in front of her.
"What is your wish?" the witch asked, her fingers holding the ends of the girl's golden hair.
"I want to meet a man," the mayor's daughter said. "I want to meet a man with the brightest eyes I have ever seen. I want to meet a man with the lynx's eyes."
"Only meet?" the witch asked. "Not marry?"
"I can do that myself." The mayor's daughter bowed to the witch. "Wise mother, I will pay you a price for this wish."
The witch tilted her head from one side to the other.
"I can give you the sound of my laughter," the mayor's daughter said.
"I like the silence of the forest," the witch answered.
"I can give you the gold of my hair."
"Is mine not dark enough?"
The mayor's daughter bowed again. "I can give you the tears of my heart. I can give you-"
"I can give you the name of our firstborn son," the boy said as he pulled the curtain aside.
The witch nodded. "This is a good price," she said.
When they left the cottage, the mayor's daughter wore the purple dress with her eyes puffy from tears and her hands bleeding where the nails were bitten to the quick. The boy wore her jeans and jacket with the dark lines about his eyes and his hair curled the way it had been over the collar of the dress. In the bag over his shoulder was a roll of something that was not fur.
"A borrowed skin can be a freedom," the witch had said as she scratched him behind the ears.
the end
Author's Notes:
Both quotes come from the Reuters newswire and are used for illlustrative purposes with no intent to infringe on the Reuters service.
email: bwinter [at] extenuation.net
MOSCOW, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The following are some of the leading stories in Russian newspapers on Saturday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
KOMMERSANT
- The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed 10 years ago - on December 8, 1991 - after then Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus issued a document proclaiming the Soviet Union dead during a meeting at the Viskuli residence in the Byelovezhskaya Forest in Belarus
(c) Reuters Limited 2001
KIEV, July 18 (Reuters) - President Leonid Kuchma ordered Ukraine's government on Thursday to prepare a new crime-fighting programme following a bomb attack on the prime minister.
"The actions of anti-government forces are growing and they are taking on a more threatening character. There is blackmail, threats against officials and government representatives are even being killed," said a decree signed by Kuchma.
(...)
His decree gave the government a mandate to eliminate Ukraine's huge shadow economy and create an anti-terrorism centre. Security would be tightened around the president and top officials.
It also recommended increasing the powers of regional chiefs in areas where crime has grown and specifically named the Donbass coalmining region and the autonomous Crimean peninsula.
(...)
(c) Reuters Limited 1996
It was eight years after the Great Change. This was what the village people called it, like the Great War and the Great War before it. The word itself had a greatness to it, an ancient air, and it suited a meeting in a forest, among a herd of wild animals that were to cattle as wolves were to hounds, where three warlords had signed the death warrant of the one who had fed them and armed them with their very power. None of the villagers knew the words of the warrant, and even though the shaggy beasts wandered down to their own forest sometimes, they kept their silence and their secrets.
Sometimes, you could touch the Great Change, in the sleek lacquer-work of the cars that stopped in front of old Anton's bar. It had been the collective bar, but now it belonged to Anton, like the cars belonged to people who owned factories and shops and guns as bright as their cars.
Hanna didn't own her shop, but she was the queen of it, and she decided that the young man, who came in on an autumn evening eight years after the Great Change, only owned a gun. Maybe a car. The men who owned factories never looked this grey-faced, bright-eyed. This one looked like a boy, not a man, except for the line that cut his cheek in two and made his left ear disappear above it, halfway.
The boy put a bottle on the counter. Hanna didn't ask why he didn't go to Anton's; the old goat sold water-christened vodka and too-loud music. Hanna preferred her spirits with a Pugachova song. It went down better.
Then she looked into the boy's bright eyes. He tried to smile, young and free, but she saw young and scared.
"Just vodka?" she asked.
"Yes, mother," he said with the right respect, like the young men had said to Hanna's mother when there had been little eagles on their caps. "Unless you sell miracles."
"Not here," she said and tutted. Tut, tut. "You can take the lake road, away from the lake, if you want to buy a miracle."
Later, Hanna didn't know why she'd said it. It was a woman's place, that cottage, and the boy didn't look like his trouble was that of a woman. She told him that, and she told him of the times she had gone there. She showed him the rings the visits had got for her, the policeman, the book-keeper, the shop director. She had buried all of them, but she wore their rings.
The boy listened closely, then thanked her and went out into the street. It was dark, apart from the light in Anton's inn and the cigarettes of the girls of the Great Change along the road, the girls who followed the men in their sleek cars. The boy found the oldest of the girls, and when he told her what he wanted from her, she laughed and said yes.
An hour later there was a girl walking up the path from the lake to the heart of the forest. She stumbled in her red shoes on broken branches. She shivered in a thin purple dress and thinner jacket that said "Dynamo". Her hair was brushed over one eye, one cheek and one ear. Her skin was grey, and her eyes were bright.
She walked the path until it was almost gone. When it was gone, she stood in front of a tiny house, shorter and older than the houses in the village. The window was made of small pieces of glass put together with copper wire, and there was a fire in the chimney place.
A woman opened the door to show the girl in, down the three steps onto the greying grass on the floor. There were chairs, and for a while they sat in silence as the girl gathered thoughts and words and a tone of voice high enough.
"You make me curious," the woman said. She threw a bundle of pine branches into the fire, and the twisting, burning needles lit her dark hair and her bright eyes. She was not as old as Hanna, and she was older. "Men are too scared to come here. And you're not drunk."
"I gave the bottle to the woman who lent me this dress," the boy admitted. "How did you know?"
The woman laughed. "I knew. Isn't it enough?" The fire danced in her eyes, over the cloth-leaves that made her shirt. "You walk right. You look right. You hide your hands and your neck. But I knew."
"Will you turn me into a frog because of it?"
She had a warm laugh, big enough to fill the room from the dark bookcase to the curtains to the alcoves. "Not unless you ask me to."
"Can I tell you a story?" he asked, going down on one knee before her. His nails were painted pink, and the stockings on his legs reached only a handspan above his knees.
The witch took his hands between her own, fire-warm. "Tell me, Vanya," she said. "Tell your old mother all your troubles."
Vanya's story was a long one, and a new one. There were evil bandits in the story and good bandits, but this was a story after the Great Change, and so the lines were blurred like mud and water after a zhubr walked through a stream. It wasn't clear who stole from whom, and who had burned to the ground. The old stories had been better stories.
When it was done, the witch reached for a poker and prodded the flames, so close that the sequins on her sleeves glowed red.
"You want vengeance and blood?" she asked. "You need a worse witch than me for that."
"I just want to escape," the boy said, smoothing out his skirt and the silver fringe at the hem. "And you are a nice witch."
"And you are a man, and men are blind," the witch said. "You don't need my help to escape. You can buy a ticket, or you can walk into the lake. What you want is for your problems to disappear."
The pink-nailed fingers moved, the purple fabric bunched between them. "I can't do it. It'd start a war in the entire region."
"And you don't want to die," the witch whispered.
The fabric fell again smoothly over the boy's legs. "And I don't want to die."
The witch touched the boy's cheek. Her fingers were hot from the fire.
"You cannot do this, yes. Go into the alcove and tell me what you find inside."
The boy entered the alcove and crouched tentatively on a girl's high heels.
"It's an animal fur," he said, touching the grey, speckled hairs. They were soft, inviting to the touch. They wrapped around his hands, then his arms. "A lynx?"
"It's not a fur," the witch said as the warm softness covered the boy's waist. "It's a skin."
The lynx who had been the boy meowed his agreement. Then he rubbed against the witch's legs, just to hear her laugh as he almost knocked her off her feet.
The witch cuffed him lightly between the ears, then opened the door for him. Then she went back inside to try on the purple dress.
That night, old Anton's bar was almost empty, except for the girls and their raised voices. The people of the Change had lit a fire at the edge of the lake, where the cars were biggest and sleekest, and the tables groaned under food and spirits. There was music and there were stories of the war that was fought in shadows and in banks, and in the coal mines that funded both. This was why the girls outside Anton's were bored and cold and angry, except for the one in flat-soled shoes with her bottle of vodka. At the lake the men danced with their wives and daughters, because it was a night of victory.
The dark-eyed man whose victory it was stood in the tightest circle, by the mayor and the mayor's daughter, who felt less honoured than her father did to be in this company. She had hoped that the dark-eyed man would fail, but he was golden and careful, and even politics ran his way. There had been trouble, in the summer, but people said the boy was dead.
The mayor's daughter had been asked to dance, by the dark-eyed man and others, but she remained where she was, wrapping herself tightly in her shawl. Her mother had come from this village, and she remembered the way the forest at night looked darker than it was, with strange lights beyond the trees.
There were wives and daughters here, but it was late and they were less used to moving by moonlight than the men were. For a moment the dancing stopped, but the dark-eyed man clapped his hands and the men moved forward. The music was no longer new. The instruments remembered the rhythms, the melodies. The dance of men, with jumps and kicks and embraces, the dance of brotherhood and brawl.
The dark-eyed man danced in the circle, because he remembered the way it went. His father had taught him, before the change before the change. It was the old men who had to be shown how to dance to his music, before he let the young men take the lead. It was always like this, with dance and gold and blood, because that was how he was, how the world had made him.
He clapped his hands, stepping back to the edge of the circle, edge of the bonfire, edge of the shadows of branches overhead.
And this was where the lynx fell upon him and slew him with sharp claws and sharper teeth.
The man fell back into the bonfire, smothering it. The music screamed as the musicians dropped their instruments. The men ran for their guns, and one of them knocked the mayor's daughter down to the ground.
She fell by the bonfire, and the first thing she saw was the dead man's face. His eyes were no longer dark. There was darkness, but the eyes had been torn out. Then the lynx turned his head and looked at her with the brightest eyes she had ever seen.
She was the only one who saw the lynx jump over the fire and into one of the large, dark cars, open and empty, transports for the tables and musicians and guns. The bright eyes glowed, and she struggled to her feet, because it seemed to her that it was wrong, the way the darkness was not complete.
"Close your eyes," she said as the first shots echoed. The men did not see that the lynx was no longer by the corpse.
The lynx looked at her with his bright eyes until the last of the shooting was over. Someone screamed about searching the camp.
The mayor's daughter threw her shawl over the lynx and sat by him, letting his fur warm her. When the men with the guns looked into the car, she looked at them until they walked away.
When the men dragged the body from the fire and kicked at the last of the embers, the lynx put a heavy paw on her knee. She took the shawl off his head, and for a moment he stared at her with his bright eyes. Then he was gone, and she buried her face in her hands.
The lynx ran back to the witch's house, though he did not take the path. The trees grew close together there, embracing each other with branches, and the lynx ran over them. Later, when some of the men tried to look for the path, there was no room for them to pass between the trees.
The witch kept her fire going, and the lynx lay at her feet, his tufted ears twitching as the witch scratched them. He smelled the herbs about her, a trace of blood, and the forest. Then he slept.
When he woke, the sun was setting, and he was lying in the alcove, the lynx skin rolled under his head. He heard the door open, and he pulled up the edge of the alcove's curtain.
The witch was sitting in her chair. Her hair was darker than it had been the night before. The mayor's daughter knelt in front of her.
"What is your wish?" the witch asked, her fingers holding the ends of the girl's golden hair.
"I want to meet a man," the mayor's daughter said. "I want to meet a man with the brightest eyes I have ever seen. I want to meet a man with the lynx's eyes."
"Only meet?" the witch asked. "Not marry?"
"I can do that myself." The mayor's daughter bowed to the witch. "Wise mother, I will pay you a price for this wish."
The witch tilted her head from one side to the other.
"I can give you the sound of my laughter," the mayor's daughter said.
"I like the silence of the forest," the witch answered.
"I can give you the gold of my hair."
"Is mine not dark enough?"
The mayor's daughter bowed again. "I can give you the tears of my heart. I can give you-"
"I can give you the name of our firstborn son," the boy said as he pulled the curtain aside.
The witch nodded. "This is a good price," she said.
When they left the cottage, the mayor's daughter wore the purple dress with her eyes puffy from tears and her hands bleeding where the nails were bitten to the quick. The boy wore her jeans and jacket with the dark lines about his eyes and his hair curled the way it had been over the collar of the dress. In the bag over his shoulder was a roll of something that was not fur.
"A borrowed skin can be a freedom," the witch had said as she scratched him behind the ears.
the end
Author's Notes:
Both quotes come from the Reuters newswire and are used for illlustrative purposes with no intent to infringe on the Reuters service.