Politika

THREE

The flour mill was silent.

In his half century of life, Veli Gazon had grown all too familiar with the monstrous things nature could do when it turned hostile. He had lost two sons in the cholera epidemic just six years ago, his wife in an earthquake two decades earlier, part of his farm in the floods that had swept across the grasslands when the river overflowed its banks. The lines and wrinkles on his face were a record of the hard times he had weathered. The somber depths of his eyes spoke of survival despite bitter loss.

He was not a man who had a great need for physical comfort, or believed it was anyone’s due. That way of thinking was alien to him; he could not understand it. An Alan tribesman whose people had been cultivating the soil for centuries, he had an inborn belief that it was enough to work and persevere with dignity. To complain, or wish for more, might only bring a curse upon oneself, and provoke the world into another cruel demonstration of its power.

And yet today, standing here amid the empty storage bins that had once been filled with wheat; amid the huge, still framework of elevators and conveyors and scouring machines and rollers and sifters…

Today he felt angry. And scared.

Very scared.

He took a long pull on his hand-rolled cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs a moment, and let it gust out his nose. His family had managed the flour mill since the days of Soviet controls and collectives, and assumed full ownership when state factories were sold back to the territories. Combining their resources, Veli, his brother, and their cousins had paid corrupt officials many times the value of the old machinery to purchase it — and somehow, even during the worst of the previous shortages, had kept that machinery running.

But now… now the mill was silent, shut down, its shipping floor deserted. The rail cars that normally transported the raw wheat from the farms to the mill, and sackfuls of processed flour from the mill to warehouses in the northern regions, sat clustered at the receiving station, their engines cold and dead beneath the gray October sky.

There was no grain to process.

Nothing.

The chyornozyom, the fertile black earth that had nourished the crop through the most devastating of catastrophes, had failed to produce even a meager harvest. In August, when the wheat had come up stunted, some men from the Ministry of Agriculture had arrived from the capital and tested the soil and explained that it was fouled. It had been overfarmed, they said. The rain had poisons in it, they said. But what the bureaucrats had not said was that the overfarming had been ordered by their own ministry back when it would set compulsory production quotas and regulate the distribution of food. What they had not said was that the water had been contaminated by wastes from government chemical and munitions facilities.

What they had not said before they finally left was whether there was any way to repair the damage in time for the next planting season, or even the one after that.

Perhaps it was too late, Veli Gazon thought.

The mill was silent, now.

Silent as a tomb.

There was no grain.

Veli moistened the tips of his thumb and forefinger with a little saliva, pinched out his cigarette, and dropped the stub into his shirt pocket. Later, he would add the tobacco inside it to that of other stubs and reroll them, wasting nothing.

There was no grain.

Not in his village, or the neighboring one. Not in any of the fields between the Black Sea and the Caspian.

And what that meant was that soon…

Frighteningly soon…

The only things that would be plentiful in Russia were the cries of the hungry and the dying.