Short Story: The Siberian Cottage

A short story by me, written for a tutorial.

The stone walls in the kitchen are unclad, and Josef has just cooked, so they sparkle with condensation. The stone floor is unbearably cold. At least in the bedroom there is a rug, so his feet don’t freeze when he gets out of bed. The cottage is small, sparse and underused. There is no memorabilia, no sentimental novelties; no personal effects. The solitary kitchen cupboard contains root vegetables, vodka, milk, cheese and some canned fish. He doesn’t need a fridge. Josef has neither the facility to get a wider range of produce, nor the inclination.

Josef is walking to the bedroom to get a blanket. He bends his withered, time-ravaged body to pick up an envelope that has been pushed under the front door. It is un-addressed. He carefully opens the envelope, and pulls out a piece of card, which bears the typewritten legend Я наблюдаю [I’m Watching].

Josef is sitting, shivering, at the kitchen table. A big slab of oak, in its heyday it seated eight comfortably. Josef doesn’t know this. He purchased this cottage unaware of its history, only aware of its geography. He’d taken the train from Moscow to Arkhangelsk in January 1992, bought a car, and drove east. A tip-off in a village led him to this cottage: he’d have never found it otherwise. Not only were there no estate agents, but the house wasn’t on anything that Josef recognised as a road. It is barely a track today, just six kilometres of icy rocks and grit. It certainly isn’t a special cottage: it’s barely distinguishable from any of the cottages that are sporadically scattered upon the barren Siberian tundra.

For the last seventeen years, the only person to have sat at the kitchen table has been Josef. It’s either sit in here or in the bedroom, and due to the old stove leaking heat, this is the warmer of the two rooms. The third room in the cottage is beyond repair, certainly for a man of Josef’s age and capabilities. Rot, mould, damp, broken windows, plants, insects, and the occasional bird inhabit the third room. Josef has done his best to seal it off from the rest of the house. He knows that opening the door to that room would be akin to Chernobyl or the Ice Age occurring within the cottage. He doesn’t know that the previous inhabitants of the house, all ten of them, died in that room, from tuberculosis, pneumonia and grief.

He can feel the cold wetness of the walls on his face, and thinks he can see things in the window that aren’t there. He closes the curtains in the kitchen, unlocks the front door, takes the bottle of vodka, and fills the mug in front of him. His hands are shaking as he puts the bottle back down. He drinks the vodka, and coughs. He knows why they are watching him. He has tried to make this self-imposed exile into both a respite and a punishment. But there is only so much self-flagellation a man can put himself through. He can’t run, can’t hide anymore: he doesn’t want to, deserve to, not after all the things he has done. He pours more vodka, and drinks to his fate.