Get PDF The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia book. Happy reading The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia Pocket Guide.
Editorial Reviews. Review. 'If you really want to get to know a place, ask a local - and in Red The Road of Bonesis the story of Russia's greatest road. For over.
Table of contents

We skirted a meadow where even in July the snow momentarily blinded us; it never melts because the permafrost hugs the surface. In this region a botanical curiosity marks the onset of winter, according to Shalamov: The dwarf cedar serves as a weatherman.

The Road of Bones by Jeremy Poolman - Book - Read Online

A few days before the first snowfall, the cedar senses what is coming, the devil knows how. Its two-fists-thick trunk bends over, and it lies on the earth and stretches itself out on the ground. A day or two later, a blizzard blows in. The prophetic dwarf remains buried for months. Then, even as humans despair that spring will ever return, the cedar decides that winter has gone on long enough.

It stands up and shrugs off its mantle of snow. And within days, a thaw begins. I kept watch for outlaws, but the road was empty. Road of Bones: the nickname is not merely metaphorical. Because of the difficulty of digging up the frozen earth, the dead reportedly were buried under the highway and paved over.

Among the laborers were children as young as twelve, the woman said. Seldom are the garrulous interesting, but I began taking notes. Perhaps it pleased him to have a foreign reporter as a captive audience.

The driver kept nodding to the rhythm of the car, like a meditating Buddhist, or maybe he was agreeing that everything we were hearing should be received as gospel, such as the story about how Igor arrested the wrong suspect and broke his own arm in the process. Igor was full of the schemes and wisdom of the Far North. Whenever we stopped to stretch our legs, clouds of mosquitoes attacked us.

He told us his cure for the itching: daub the bites with salty water. When I asked about the winters here, he told a tale of his own survival. Once, when the thermometer fell to minus fifty-eight, his car sputtered to a stop on an empty road.

Woollahra Libraries Catalogue

The gasoline in the engine was freezing. So he dragged his spare tire from the trunk and set fire to it to stay warm, he said, then defrosted the gas tank with a blowtorch. When I idly wondered whether I would find e-mail access at our hotel, Igor asked the driver to pull off by a rural bank branch, and dashed inside.

He returned a few minutes later. Turned out he had told the manager he was with the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the KGB, and he needed to check his Hotmail account. Igor also volunteered highlights from a crime-fighting career that had begun in glory and ended in a prison sentence, but fate was queen, and we all were her vassals. Igor had outwitted the guy. The suspect described the crime, and the cops had their man. Igor became a cop. The men were downing glasses from a pail of beer of the sort you refill from a keg at a local kiosk.

I no longer remember her name. Every time her husband, the gambler, lost, he played another round. In the end, he had nothing left to bet. Clothes were worthless; kitchen utensils, too. He glanced around, and his eyes settled on his wife. The bitch.

The one who was always after him. What did beauty matter if your woman was impossible to live with? This must have been his line of thinking. Igor looked at Zoya in surprise. She was standing behind her husband, and she stared right back at Igor. He was single in those days. There were times when a woman pierced your soul, and you entered hers, with a glance. We knew what he meant, right? Or maybe Zoya just thought anything was better than being married to a drunk. Thing was, she agreed. Fine with me. Go ahead.

Bet me. The gambler dealt. Igor had always been a cool player, but he was wildly excited. His face was hot. The only thing he could think about was stripping Zoya naked and—but then, glancing at Nonna, he said, Well, anyway. But lovely Zoya was thinking the same thing. You could tell.

Comments (30)

And he won! He won a girl! Zoyechka the beauty! My God, was she really scurrying to gather her coat and purse and toiletries? Did she mean to come home with him—tonight?! Defending himself, Igor severely injured one of his assailants, and he —could we believe it? Who knew? Maybe she had no use for an ex-cop behind bars. Who could blame her? Story for another day: In prison Igor and three hundred other ex-cop inmates rioted against fifteen hundred common felons, your basic thieves and rapists and parricides and whatnot, who had been preying on the police.

Account Options

The cops won. This is what Igor claimed, anyway. Sometimes everything in Kolyma seems to have literary antecedents. Shalamov tells of a brute named Naumov who loses all his possessions in a card game: pants, jacket, blanket, the pillow treasured by criminals. The man refuses; his wife had sent him the sweater. The criminals knife him to death and strip the sweater from his corpse. Blood leaves no stain on red wool. Naumov bets the sweater.


  • Account Options.
  • Installation Anti-Terrorism Program And Planning Tool.
  • road of bones russia.

He loses it, too. Shalamov and the memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg were not alone in creating literature from the camps of the Northeast. Solzhenitsyn would wonder why so many great writers of the Gulag emerged from Kolyma.


  • 7th Edition Hollywood’s Most Horrible People, Stars, Times, and Scandals. From the stars who slept with Kennedy to Sex Pests & the Casting Couch. (Hollywood Erotica and Scandals Book 1)?
  • Account Options;
  • Jeremy Poolman.
  • Account Options.
  • Top Authors.

These camps also produced or, rather, failed to kill the poet Yelena Vladimirova, who wrote the verses about the band with the one-legged drummer. Arrested in , she was dispatched to Kolyma; her husband was shot. As she worked on a logging crew, she discovered a capacity for composing verses in her head. She then revised the entire saga in her mind, a task even harder than writing it in the first place, she later said. Fellow zeks memorized sections and spread them like samizdats. Vladimirova found a young woman who was willing to commit the entire poem to memory, risking a ten-year extension of her sentence.

If anyone had overheard a single word, both of us would have been finished. She wrote in the open; it was essential not to look secretive. One day a guard looked her way and came running at her. But the guard was staring at something over her head. Someone had committed the frightful offense of hanging out their wash on the roof behind her.