A Whisper to the Living

Начало книги

It was cold.

Not so cold that Yuri Platkov would not do that which he had promised himself to do if the man was still sitting on the bench in front of the path into Bitsevsky Park. It was cold, but the boy could detect a faint drifting fall of moisture from the dark sky.

The man was still sitting there.

Was this the fifth day in a row? Yuri counted backward and decided that it was. It had snowed three days earlier, putting another white layer on the park. The man had been there before and during the snow.

Every afternoon as Yuri walked home from school the man had been sitting there. Sometimes he was reading a paperback. Sometimes he seemed to be just thinking. He was a block of a man made even bulkier by the thick coat and fur hat he wore.

The man with a broad face similar to that of hundreds of thousands of Russians did not look up from his book. Yuri approached and sat at the end of the bench away from the man, who turned a page slowly.

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