The Houses of The Russians by Robert Aickman

 

THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS by Robert Aickman 

“I fancy that daylight all the time would be worse than darkness all the time.”

You all surely know this story of a surveying student / trainee estate agent, a story  containing an attritionally told  inner tale of a young man, told when old, as told amid “fish-talk” to a group of younger  students in a pub, having been rescued by a strange crossing of himself, across his chest and earlier, in the tale he told, across an erstwhile sole ‘dangerous’  bridge to an island of empty houses that initially seemed full of house parties, and the lucky charm of a medal given to him by a strange boy on this swirly mist  of a Finnish island when the old tale-teller was younger — then, along with an older, girl-watching estate agent called Mr PURVIS who was also “vain about maps”, conducting the combined mission of seeking a property on behalf of a Mr Danziger, both of them eating meals at every house they visited throughout each day with the appetite of those in this author’s Hospice, no doubt, conducting this mission near a place called Unilinna that has, as its name implies, ‘a size you can take in as a whole’, but also has a Ligottian warehouse area as well as this island’s different houses where the Russians used to live or still live before or after an indeterminate historical atrocity, an event that we are made to smell the blood of. 

Some ‘squelchy , white creatures’, notwithstanding.  

Empty houses or full houses, they all have a level of sadness, especially when a larger-than-life Orthodox priest with sunken eyes and a huge white beard is seen presiding.  Not forgetting the woman whom the tale-teller saw, between the gaps, spinning or something. 

Not forgetting, also, Mr Purvis’s footbath that later needed to be continuously adjusted for the optimum level of heat. 

I only wish I also had a similar lucky charm medal now that I am old, too. And to rid me of the curse of this story itself since I read it during my youthful reading of it in the 1960s, long after the First World War.

My other reviews of this author:  https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/