There’s a long but low-built block of flats smoldering beneath an overcast November sky. Its charred face, pelted by freezing rain, its insides gutted.
Residents in wrinkled tracksuits and dingy sleeveless undershirts lower their surviving earthly belongings by rope from gaping holes in cement walls that once shielded their makeshift bedrooms and cluttered kitchens from the courtyard below, where onlookers now stand perched in mud peering up at yet another, perhaps unintended, target of the latest Russian missile attack on Kyiv.
Inside the building it’s dark and dank. Pale-faced people flit about in the ruins, while hardened old men in orange vests perform their duties gravely.
In one flat just beneath the roof, at the corner of the building, squats a child near his mother, a hawk-faced woman with black wiry hair in a faded print dress.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“The Black Ferret.”
The boy’s dark eyes grow large and round, his imagination is inflamed.
“Never turn and run from the Black Ferret,” his Babushka used to say. “And never look him straight in the eyes.”
But he hadn’t heard such dark admonitions, such frightful premonitions since he wore short pants, could barely speak. And Babushka had died peacefully in her bed a few years back.
And what do these spooky wives’ tales have to do with a toy pirate’s dagger wrapped up in old newspaper – written in English!
The old woman must have hidden it beneath the floorboards of her room, only to have it vomited up from the bowels of the building during last night’s rocket attack.
Sure, the blade looks sharp, and might even do someone some bodily damage if wielded with sufficient aggression, thinks the boy, but it could hardly serve as a real weapon, and even he can see that. Nevertheless, he remains silent, as his mother is not one to suffer insolence.
The flat was as cold as a refrigerator and stunk of smoke.
The woman, for her part, appears lost in thought, as she balances the dagger on the back of her hand, rubbing its tin-plated hilt across her palms.
Ever since the father had abandoned them, his mother had become reclusive and even odd. Life was hard, and the war made things even worse. But instead of growing bitter, the woman became superstitious, possibly even slightly insane.
Babushka had attributed her behavior to the nightshifts she used to work.
The boy would often be off to school before his mother had returned home from her job.
And then there were her English-speaking man friends. The boy could tell that Babushka did not approve of them, but his mother had a mind of her own.
She even took to earnestly learning English, and Hebrew, too. The flat soon filled up with foreign periodicals and hardback books, as well.
But more recently she’d taken to burning her collection, one or two at a time and at night. This behavior even attracted the attention of their neighbors, one of whom had spread a malicious rumor in the building that her nocturnal book burnings were a signal to Russian war bombers.
But this was the first time the boy had heard her invoke the name of the Black Ferret, the family boogeyman that Babushka had used to scare him when he was naughty, when he wouldn’t go to bed on time or do his lessons for school.
Suddenly, the woman rises to her feet and, looking more like a circus performer than a house wife – back straight, eyes narrowed – she pinches the dagger blade between thumb and index finger and flings it expertly at the wall, plunging it deep into a wooden panel.
The boy’s eyes again grow large and rise to see his mother rush out of the room.
When he again lowers his gaze, the boy notices a headline on the newspaper wrappings.
“Hassidic Strip Bar Closed in Wake of Murders.”
To be Continued