"Vignette of the Silkworm" by Katya Kachur, summary Automatic translate

"Vignette of a Silkworm" is a novella by Katya Kachur, written in March 2021 and self-published later that year. The action takes place in Tashkent in 1950, a Soviet city where the wartime past still lingers in the bodies and biographies of people, and the criminal underworld has been swelled by escapees from the Ashgabat prison that collapsed during the devastating earthquake of 1948. Told in the third person, the story relentlessly follows Arkashka, a sensitive third-grader who witnesses a murder and, unwittingly, is driven toward a solution that could shatter his world.

Corpse at the market

Arkashka — a bald boy with enormous ears and bottomless blue eyes, which his mother’s friends describe as "sapphires cut from black diamonds" — stumbles upon a dead man’s head in a public toilet at the market. He’s dragged out into the yard, awakens after hitting a watermelon stand, and that evening comes down with a fever. His communal apartment neighbor, a former field doctor named Uncle Dodik, shakes his head: "You can’t be so impressionable in this world, Bella."

Arkashka lives with her mother, Bella Abramovna, in a four-room communal apartment on Poltoratskogo Street. There are two neighbors: Grisha, a large front-line soldier with a German shell fragment in his thigh and a well-known radio enthusiast nicknamed "Soldering Iron," and Uncle Dodik, a widower. The fifth resident is Lida, officially recognized as mentally retarded. Everyone has taken turns looking after her since her aunt, who was her guardian, died: they buy food with government benefits and leave scraps from every meal. Lida always burns her porridge, and the yard is permeated with the smell of burning.

Silkworms and the Secret Prince

Arkashka and Lida have been raising silkworms for two years now, nesting in three shoeboxes on green leaves. They call the fattest worm Musya: they watch it methodically, "with the precision of a jeweler," nibbling at the leaves, leaving wavy, arched lines. They take the cocoons to the factory and receive a reward.

One day, Lida tells Arkashka that a prince comes to her window at night, bringing her ice cream and promising to take her to the seaside. She considers the cross around his neck proof of his honesty: "With a cross, you can only tell the truth." Arkashka doesn’t have time to process what he’s heard — a lyanga (a dance) is already starting in the yard, and he wins three kopecks with his signature fox-skin puck on a lead button.

Meanwhile, classmate Levka Feglin, the district’s information hub, discovers that the man from the restroom has been identified: a thief implicated in the theft at the Kharuzovs’ house. He had a cross tattooed on his neck and a knife wound in his side. At the funeral, the boys overhear conversations about the fugitive crime boss Dik and the market knife sharpener Ravil, who was seen leaving the restroom that night. Ravil was Arkashka’s idol: he used to go with his father to sharpen knives for him and personally witnessed the ritual — the knife sharpener cutting a falling hair with a razor. Now this man is being dragged in for questioning.

Elya takes the investigation into her own hands

In the midst of this story, Elya’s cousin arrives with her parents — her father, Boris, and her mother, Grunya. Elya is a voracious reader of Conan Doyle and Simenon and dreams of heading the Moscow MUR. At first, she ridicules Arkashka and Fegina’s chaotic surveillance — "Why was it necessary to wander through the wastelands and make up stories?" — and then seizes the initiative.

Without a trace of embarrassment, Elya sits down with the local crime boss, Lyoshka Palom — the nephew of the district lieutenant — and, posing as the daughter of the Dushanbe prosecutor, proposes a plan: release Ravil as bait, so the real killer will come after him. A few days later, in class, Lyoshka tells Arkashka: that’s exactly what they did.

That same night, Arkashka and Elya discover someone visiting Lida through the window. The stranger arrives while everyone is asleep and leaves through the back door into the courtyard. Lida is clearly not happy about the visit.

Boiler house on Salarka

On the eve of Eli’s departure, Levka comes running in the middle of the night: Ravil has left the house and headed for the old, ruined boiler house by the Salarka River. The three of them rush there. In the abandoned steam room, they overhear Ravil assuring someone in a hooded robe that he didn’t say a word during the interrogations. "I didn’t see you that night. Period."

As the two men pass the children pressed against the wall, Arkashka is stung by a recognizable scent — the amber fumes of rosin, inseparable from Grisha’s soldering. He meets Levka’s gaze and mouths, "Soldering iron." At the same moment, Grisha, with a sharp movement, kills Ravil with two stabs, finishes his cigarette near the body, and drags him to the river. A powerful splash — and the sharpener is forever accepted by Salarka.

The children scatter. Arkashka falls in the dark, scraping his knees. In the morning, he’s burning with fever, clinging to his mother and demanding she lock him in. Grisha, meanwhile, cautiously kicks Arkashka’s boot — a shard of gravel from the boiler room falls out. "Sand, you say?" the neighbor smirks.

Motive

That same night, the real thing begins behind the wall. Grisha bursts into Lida’s room, whips her with an army belt, and demands she come with him: "He won’t come for you, idiot! I’m your prince, I’ll take you to the sea!" Lida screams that she doesn’t believe him — a real prince wears a cross around his neck, which means he was only telling the truth.

Arkashka flings the door open. He throws a fox fur coat with a lead button at Grisha, then Lidka’s shoe — it knocks a box of silkworms off the top of the cabinet, and Musya and her fellows fall into the killer’s face. While Lidka rushes to save the worms, Grisha jumps out the open window and disappears from Tashkent forever.

Coming to, Arkashka tells Lida the truth: her prince is the very same corpse from the market toilet, killed by Grisha. Lida asks, "Killed by a dragon?" Arkashka breathes out, "By a dragon."

At dawn, he tears a sheet of paper from his notebook and writes the formula Elya asked him to find: "M = S + R, where M is motive, S is passion, R is jealousy." He folds it into a triangle and signs it: "Ele. To the North." By four in the morning, Grisha is riding away on a passing truck. The train carries Elya to Siberia. Musya is crushed by a soldier’s boot on the windowsill. And Lida sobs out the open window — for her "prince," whom no one will bring back.