Read Online Despite the Falling Snow by Shamim Sarif - Free Book Online Page B

minutes the focus of her evening, and perhaps even her life’s work has changed. The heady excitement of attraction and potential romance has brewed within moments into a more bitter, but more real possibility of stolen government secrets, the possibility of making herself useful firsthand, not just as a go-between. This, after all, is what she has always struggled for. Let the real work begin now, Katya, she thinks. You can do it; let the work begin.
One Month Later
     
    Katya squints into the bright morning. She can hardly see her way to school through the snowfall that flurries down around her. There is no hint of a blizzard in this springtime snow; there is barely any wind, and the snowfall itself is not heavy, but her head is light, and the glare of the whiteness that has already coated the streets is dizzying her further. She walks along in the right direction; after all, she knows the way to her own place of work. But all around her, fat flakes of frosted water land gently on the ground, on her head and on her arms; one or two alight upon her eyelashes. She narrows her eyes to close down her field of vision. The snow dances lightly around; when she tries to watch, and follow the descent of some few, particular flakes, she finds them eddying about her, disconcerting her and teasing her, following a balletic path, spiralling downwards, and whirling back up, pausing to whisper kisses of cold moisture against the exposed tips of her ears.
    She thinks briefly of Alexander. It has been three weeks since the night they met and she has seen him a few times. Fewer meetings than he would have liked, which is just how she feels it should be; she is teasing out his eagerness. He came to see her again last night, and she had talked to him. That, she knew, was the way to begin. To reveal something of herself, not to probe him, not just yet. And although she has asked him a little about himself, he has been uninterested in replying at any length – in that respect, he seems unlike most other people that she knows. Instead, he has been full of questions to her – her work, her daily life, her thoughts and hopes and fears. She told him of the first two things. I am a school administrator. I run the school. And I get up at this time, and eat that for lunch, and do this in the afternoon, and sleep at around this time. The rest could come later, or not at all. He will wait for her tonight, this time at his apartment. For dinner. She smiles to herself. Although she told him little of real depth, she felt a liberation of some kind simply by speaking to him. Any kind of self-revelation is so rare for her that the mere fact of spending several hours with one human being who is focused solely on her, interested only in what interests her, has given her an unfamiliar sense of release. Of light-headedness. What will happen if she does not find her way back through this shower of snow? What if these pattering, dancing, floating flakes blind her and unhinge her and mislead her, and whisk her far away into the immutable, unending whiteness of the desert, and what if she never makes it home again? The long, pure vista of snow that she sees stretching out before her will continue for ever and ever, she feels, and her head is almost spinning with the seductive pain of being surrounded completely by whiteness and cold, no humans, no life, no end to it.
    At the street corner, she stops, disconcerted, and finds that she is standing next to other people. Coated, hatted, bundled black shapes, blurry against the ice. She is back in the city, she suddenly finds, back on the street that she knows by heart, and has been removed from the vast, snowbound Siberian plain of her imagination. So, she thinks, as she crosses the street with the other shapes; so I will continue to live in this new world of mine, I will see him tonight, and he will see me, and we will carry on this game of getting to know each other a little better.
    Five minutes later, she is inside