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flat. The ice creaked and groaned. He moved across it, a foot or two, then stopped. It groaned again, then split. Down he went.
    â€˜That’s him gone,’ said one.
    â€˜Stupid idiot,’ said the other.
    â€˜The knife’s still there.’
    â€˜Leave it. No one will bother with it.’
    â€˜What about him? What will we say?’
    â€˜Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. Some sort of accident. I know the right people. No questions asked.’
    â€˜A noble end, I suppose. Sacrificing himself like that, for the good of others.’
    â€˜Exactly, comrade. I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

    Katerina looked at the face of Vassili Ivanov as he lay in his coffin in the room above the kitchen in Oleg’s house. They were alone in the room, accompanied only by the sound of Mrs Ivanova’s voice drifting gaily up the stairs from the kitchen where she sat and trilled away, like a canary released from a lifetime down the coalmine, at Oleg’s mother regarding the happy practicalities of the funeral. And no one really cared too much about the funeral. The next day, Vassili Ivanov would be transported to the gateway of the hereafter, leaving the dwellers of this earthly dimension in something a little nearer peace – and that was all anyone really cared about, except, if the truth be told, Katerina Kuznetsova. As she looked at the becalmed body, the dark shroud of his beard and the battered shaven skull, she thought of his blue eyes, how they had smiled ather as he gave her unpleasant-tasting sweets from distant lands, and she knew, though not at all on a conscious level, that she had lost some sort of kindred spirit, someone who had also recognised a part of himself in the girl on the step in the rain, and whose cold eyes had melted just a fraction when they alighted upon her because he had seen no fear in her face as she fixed her own stare upon him. Now she reached out towards the corpse and lifted an eyelid and saw a blue eye looking back at her, but he was gone now and she quickly closed the lid again and remembered how he had been when he was alive. And by all accounts he had been truly terrible, a living hell for almost anyone who crossed his path, but she had seen another side of him and that was the only side she could ever see.
    â€˜Bet you wouldn’t have dared be alone in a room with him when he was alive.’
    It was Oleg, standing in the doorway.
    â€˜Why not? I wasn’t afraid of him, you know.’
    â€˜Should have been. Everyone else was.’
    Katerina left the body in the room and went downstairs with Oleg.
    â€˜Are you going to his funeral?’ she asked.
    â€˜Don’t suppose so.’
    â€˜Suit yourself.’
    The next day, Katerina followed the coffin through the streets and into the cemetery and between the brambles that suffocated that part of the graveyard. Mrs Ivanova’s solitary tear was prompted by relief not grief, and her fingers rested calm and motionless around a pristine handkerchief. When they had finished, everyone soon went back about their business with nothing to remember Vassili Ivanov by but their brutal memories and their scars.
    Katerina went back home and knocked on Oleg’s door. ‘Do you want to come out? We could go to the Mushroom Woman’s shop.’
    â€˜I can’t,’ he said.
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜I’m busy.’
    Katerina looked at him dubiously.
    â€˜Really, I’m busy. I’m going to my ballet class.’
    â€˜Your what? Ballet?’
    â€˜What’s so funny about that?’
    Katerina stopped laughing. ‘I can’t imagine you . . .’ She laughed again. ‘It’s for girls, anyway.’
    â€˜No, it’s not.’
    â€˜Yes, it is. And for queers.’
    Oleg closed the door rather less gently than usual. Katerina sat on her step and waited a few minutes until Oleg emerged again.
    â€˜What are you looking