Arkady Who Couldn't See and Artem Who Couldn't Hear Read online

  The twins picked up their small cases, the polythene bag filled with matchsticks and the wreck of their memories and stood on the platform in the bright morning light, tiny flakes of slowly-falling snow shining around them. They would wait for the next train, they told me, and I watched them recede as I walked off to find a hotel.

  Goodbye, they called. Remember us, and never trust a woman called Olga. They waved to me and I waved back, each of us in perfect time.

  Recently, I was back in the city where I had last seen the brothers. I spent the few hours between trains walking its icy pavements and admiring the steep banks of snow that rose up from the sheer white river. I thought of Arkady and Artem and worried about disposable plastic lighters imported from China. Should the twins, wherever they were now, still be constructing their model, they would surely run out of their raw material.

  On the way out of the city, I noticed some wooden houses, not dissimilar to the one they had begun and never finished building. Its windows were broken, some parts of it were boarded up with plywood and cardboard rather than elm or birch timber. A faded bouquet of flowers hung in the window casement and the house leaned madly, sinking into the snow like a ship running aground a thousand miles from the nearest sea.

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