Han Ong

He confiscated three sacks of samizdat, but the drawings were never found.

By then, Muratov was at the house of an old woman who had been trying to sell green onions and parsley at the Kimri port.

All she'd come home with was a traveler who'd missed the last boat, De Novo Okatovo.

Muratov paid a ruble to spend the night in a small barn, sleeping on a bale of hay covered with a sheet.

At dawn, he washed up at the well and took the 6 a.m.

ferry.

The old woman turned out to be a saint.

She never reported him.

That evening, he was in the distant and inaccessible village of Danilovi Gorki, sitting in an old peasant house that belonged to his friend Nikolai Mikhailovich, who was also an artist.

He explained his situation and asked if he could stay either there or in the bathhouse for a period of time, posing as a cousin or something of the sort.

Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn't refuse him.

That's how Boris Ivanovich's life on the run began.

Danilovi Gorky wasn't so much a village as a tiny settlement of five houses.

One was Nikolai Mikhailovich's,

Another was abandoned, empty since the death of its owner two years earlier.

The other three housed summer vacationers along with their year-round owners.

Hardly anyone stayed on for September.

Nikolai Mikhailovich's mother had come from an aristocratic line and his father was a priest who had been executed in 1937.

thus nikolai was always prepared he said that it would be safe to stay for the summer while there were plenty of strangers around but afterward boris would be dangerously visible nikolai mikhailovitch's house was packed with people children the elderly two single female relatives and some long-term house guests

Everyone did a bit of work, though it wasn't compulsory.