Korov's Children

Once, at the beginning of the last century, small children cleaned narrow stove and steamboat smokestacks. An adult or a well-fed child wouldn’t have been able to squeeze into such a narrow space to clean out soot and rust. That’s why contractors hired small, skinny kids—most often homeless orphans. One of the contractors for an artel that cleaned steamboat boilers—nicknamed “Cow”—decided to use teenagers for his dirty work too. When the announcement for small workers went out, the kids came running from all over the Zasypleya district, seemingly—visible and invisible. Everyone agreed to work all day for a groat in the worst conditions. Cramped in iron, often with his head down, the child cleaned the inside of the boiler, freeing it from soot and rust. One day, a case like this happened. A boy climbed into the boiler. He worked inside for about six hours. Sweat mixed with soot; his whole body was bruised and scratched. Then it was time to get out—but he couldn’t. The little body had swollen and wouldn’t fit through the opening. And the boiler needed to be heated—by morning the steamboat was departing. What could be done? You can’t cut the boiler apart for some little boy—it costs too much money. Leaving the child inside might mean he would die…

A story about how this ended, and how the fates of other “Cow’s” children turned out, awaits you in Nikolay Matyash’s audiobook “Cow’s Children.”