A STOKER

Ivan Matveyevich Skryabin, a retired army major, stokes furnaces. His wife left for Detroit; his daughter’s main interests are fur coats, men and her father’s money. Ivan has next to no possessions, hands over his earnings to his daughter, and lives among his furnaces so she can have the family home. His sole purpose in life is to tell the story of the treatment suffered by his ethnic group, the Yakuts, in the tsarist era. He is typing up his account, letter by letter, on an old Russian typewriter. Another chink of light in Ivan’s life comes from two little girls, who come to gaze in awe at his furnace fires. He tells them stories about wrongdoers: apart from a whiplash injury, the legacy of his military service is a firm belief in the military code of honour and the clear distinction between good and evil. Ivan accepts any kind of fuel for his furnaces: wood, coal, the corpses occasionally brought to him by his former comrade-in-arms Mikhail. The successful businessman and contract killer makes the same mistake as everyone else: he mistakes Ivan’s lack of artifice for simplicity in a world where lies and murder are a matter of course. In the middle of the Russian winter, with merry jingles playing in the background, something unexpected occurs: a corpse to which Ivan cannot be indifferent lands in his furnace. The stoker takes a decision.