Moscow Noir

THE COAT THAT SMELLED LIKE EARTH by Dmitri Kosyrev (Master Chen) Birch Grove Park ^{Translated by Mary C. Gannon}

That dude, by the way, he never took his coat off,” the girl told me. “For the first time in my life I did it with a guy in a coat. You know, an old coat, pretty gross.”

A coat in the middle of a hot, stifling Moscow summer? I began to understand my client, the mother of this underage creature. When a girl gives way to her fantasies to such a degree, her friends can deal with it. But not her mother. To the mother, a child will always be a child, even if that child has developed a habit of talking about sex with a definite world-weariness. That’s when I get a phone call that goes, Doctor, can you tell me if a normal person would think something like that?

But, whereas you can lie to your mother and enjoy scaring her, you can’t deceive a shrink. A professional will easily be able to detect whether an overripe teenager is merely fantasizing, or fantasizing while fervently believing in the fantasies, or simply…

Simply telling the truth.

“Did you tell your mother about that? About the coat?” I asked in a gloomy tone. “Do you realize that a normal person would never believe that? Look out the window—the concrete is so hot it’s melting—and you’re talking about a guy having sex in a coat. It wasn’t a fur coat, by any chance, was it? Think before you tell your mother things like that. Or do you want her to pack you off to a mental institution after this?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is all about,” she said, and examined me with a long look. “Is that your diagnosis? All right, then. Let’s go to the loony bin. Just let me grab an extra pair of pants, and off I go.”

She waved her palm over her head in a circular motion imitating the flashing light of an ambulance.

Most of my income (not reported to the IRS) comes from single mothers who refuse to believe that their children have grown up. Not just grown up, but grown up to become coarse and ugly, so that if they’re boys they contemplate throwing their mothers facedown on the kitchen table. And if they’re girls, their mothers suddenly become spiteful, idiotic obstacles to achieving very concrete physical desires.

It’s one thing when these are classic teenage fantasies, even if they border on pathology. (And they always border on pathology.) What I had just heard, however, was something completely different. Her eye movements, the tone of her voice, and the internal logic of the story attested to the complete absence of any fantasy. Yes, she said she’d do it with that guy for five hundred rubles in Birch Grove Park, which stretches from the Polezhaevskaya subway station to Peschanaya Square. Yes, she went with him to the end of the grove and waved a condom she’d pulled out of her pocket in front of his face. And then she was smelling the earthy, moldy smell of the gray overcoat, or even more likely a raincoat, that the man never took off in spite of the heat.

“He could’ve killed you, you know,” I reproached her.

“He was all right,” she said very convincingly. “Just wanted to get laid. Then again, I picked him. For his eyes. He had such—”

“Remind me how old you are?”

“What? So what if I’m fifteen? Does that mean I’m too young to want it, huh?” She opened her eyes, thick with makeup, very wide. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. My mom forgot to tell me.”

“Okay, let me give it to you straight,” I said woodenly. “If you’re not careful what you tell your mother, she’ll end up in the funny farm, not you.”

“Good riddance,” replied the young creature in a sweet voice, and stared with disgust at my untrimmed beard and my baggy turtleneck sweater.

“Hold on a second. That means that I end up without a client, which isn’t good for my business. Your mother needs professional help, not you; she’s the one who called me, crying frantically and saying, ‘Can you take a look at my girl? She tells me horrible stories. Is she crazy?’ We need to calm your mother down or she’ll be off her rocker in no time. Not you—her. Get the picture? So here’s the deal: you made the whole thing up. I’ll think of something to say to your mother. I’ll say that you’re fine for now, though you need to be under observation. And you keep your mouth shut about sex in coats. And at the same time you’ll tell me about this guy—dude, that is—who goes around dressed like that in the summer. To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in him than you. Because who needs maniacs wandering around the streets of Peschanaya?”

“Mister, you’re a maniac yourself,” said my client’s daughter, clearly enjoying herself. “He was a big, tall, funny guy, nice, with kinda faded hair. Still pretty young. Tan, like a construction worker or something. Maybe he’d just gotten out of the hospital and that’s why he was wearing a coat. A weird coat.”

“Oh, so now it’s a weird coat, eh? Well, tell me more about the coat.”

“The material… I’ve never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t synthetic. Gabardine, or twill, or something else great-grandmotherish. A long coat down to his ankles. Big buttons. You know, like from a museum. Yellowish edges. And it smelled like it’d been buried underground for a hundred years. But the dude wasn’t a bum. He was clean. I wouldn’t do it with a bum, no way! You kidding? The dude himself smelled really nice, actually.”

“Girl, just listen to yourself. You walk down an alley, see a man sitting on a bench wearing an overcoat… Okay, you think he’s been in the hospital, but still… And so what do you do next, tell me again?”

I paid great attention to the pupils of her eyes, her body language, the movements of her head and shoulders.

“Nothing. I saw the coat, saw the dude. I wanted to get some action, so I batted my eyes at him and blushed like a schoolgirl.”

“You are a schoolgirl.”

“Well, I’m overdeveloped. So the rest is history.”

I sighed and made a mental diagnosis. Teenage hypersexuality and an underdeveloped personality, with no pathology in my area—psychiatric, that is. I also realized that the girl’s desire to torture her mother was spent for the day.

“Okay, to sum it up: you made the whole thing up and you’re not talking about it anymore. Mom gets some peace of mind, and you, young lady—if you start seeing weird things, or if life starts to suck real bad all of a sudden, give me a call. I’ll fix it all up for you. I mean it. We’ll deal with the money thing later, a little bit at a time. And weird things need to be sorted out quickly.”

“Dr. Weird,” she said, and cast a sad glance at my sink filled with dirty dishes.

I walked to Birch Grove Park to get some fresh air and hide from the heat. And just to think a little.

After sunset, the squirrels went quiet in the branches of elm trees. Disappointed spaniels and dobermans hauled their owners back home; but pensioners remained seated in their usual spots, finishing their games of dominoes.

I peered across the park that was slowly succumbing to darkness. The girl hooked up with that dude somewhere not too far from here, and they went to most remote spot in the grove, which still hadn’t been cleared of fallen trees after the disastrous storms of 1998. A person with an underdeveloped personality simply has no clue what a stranger wearing a long overcoat in hot weather can do to her.

Uh, wait a second—according to her, he hung the coat over his arm while they were walking, but put it on again before he laid her down on a concrete slab, took the condom out of her fingers, and rolled up her miniskirt.

She didn’t make that up—that much was certain. So if this was the case, it was the guy who worried me. It seemed like more than just ordinary fetishism.

The local police station was located on 3rd Peschanaya Street, on the other side of Birch Grove Park. The precinct was a hole in a wall, splotched with shiny brown paint. The hole opened onto a short corridor that led down to a semibasement room, decorated in the best traditions of Brezhnev office style: cheap wall panels of faux wood, wrinkled linoleum imitating mahogany flooring, and painted white bars on the windows.

“Sexual predators? No, haven’t had any of them in here in a long time,” said the inspector with the fitting last name of Bullet. “It’s good you stopped in, but I don’t see a crime here. Okay, she’s underage. She was hitting on him. No law against wearing an overcoat in the summer. Got anything else on him? No? Okay, I guess I could ask around. At least I’ll be able to get off my butt, get some exercise. Come back in a week. You’re a private doctor, I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he concluded skeptically.

And only three days later…

The flashing lights of the police car cast an unnatural blue pall on the gray stump of a body covered with a blanket. The figure lay on a stretcher that floated slowly into the yawning mouth of the ambulance. But I caught a glimpse of tangled hair and a wet forehead amidst the absurdly blue uniforms of the orderlies. Her face was uncovered, so she was alive. Inspector Bullet gave me a dark look and said, “The reason I asked you to come right away was that if she dies, I’m gonna have to interrogate your underage client. There’s an overcoat here too. Looks like it’s all true.”

“I’d rather tell you her story myself,” I said, thinking hard. “It would make more sense.”

“Well?”

“Nice guy, funny, youngish, sun-bleached hair, tan, tall?” I asked.

“Far from it. Not very tall. The overcoat he wore dragged along on the ground behind him. The victim says the coat was strange, like something from the Stalin era. Other than that—well, maybe he was tan, maybe funny. Why shouldn’t he be funny? So much fun to bash in a girl’s head. They’re probably gonna have to drill a hole in her skull. They say it’s that serious. She went with him on her own at first, and then later she suspected something wasn’t quite right… Yep. That’s about it.”

The investigation reached a dead end very quickly. Two construction workers, migrants, one tall and one short, who had been painting the building on the corner of 2nd and 3rd Peshchanaya Streets, vanished into a thin air. This greatly surprised their foreman, who couldn’t locate his countrymen after returning from Moldavia. To find their whereabouts or prove anything was virtually impossible, since the photographs of the suspects that were soon faxed from their hometown, a place called Yassy, were only suitable for a trash can. So the building with the unfinished paint job returned to its peaceful slumber among the sticky lime trees and sounds of car alarms.

“We can’t issue ‘wanted’ posters or arrest an overcoat without its owner,” said the inspector. “But you know what I think? I think this is your department. After you stopped in the other day, I called all the old geezers from our precinct. They’re better than any archive. Thought maybe there had been something like what you described two years ago, before I began working here. Turned out there was a case in 1973. Right here in Birch Grove Park. Then again, where else would someone work the walls with a girl? So there was this sex maniac who wore a wide-brim hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, who was always on the lookout for schoolgirls. Funny thing was that the girls didn’t even hesitate. He took them to some broken-down barracks near Khodynka and made them wear white socks and a school uniform with a white apron. When he got busted, he threatened that the entire police force would have hell to pay when they found out who he really was. He hinted that he was some big shot in the Communist Party, or even one of the higher-ups in the government. To make a long story short, instead of going to jail, he ended up in a funny farm—your department, in other words. Never came back from there. He’d be in his nineties by now, I’d say. And he was a local, not a construction worker from Moldavia. Period. Case closed… What do you say to that?”

Quite frankly, I couldn’t say anything at all, except a few standard comments about fetishism.

But fetishism isn’t contagious. Especially when there’s no direct contact. And fetishists rarely choose the same location twice.

Lighting up a cigarette, I sat down on a chair on the balcony and put my bare feet up on the railing. I had thought that I lived in one of the best neighborhoods in Moscow. Right next to the Sokol subway station and the large triangle of Bratsky Park, with its stately old lime trees. The park ends right at a lane of chestnuts, straight as an arrow, bordering an elegant square. That lane runs up to the famous Birch Grove Park, as big as a small forest. To live in a place surrounded by trees and green parks—what more could you wish for? Well, for one thing, that there weren’t sexual predators roaming around in them.

But what could I do? I had (along with Inspector Bullet) very odd facts at my disposal. There was not one, but three maniacs, all strangely attractive to underage girls. The girls followed them willingly; my young patient even seduced him herself. Only one of them put up any resistance; but even she followed him voluntarily at first—a man she’d never seen before wearing an overcoat. She went with him to a remote, deserted corner of the park. And it was only when they got there that something happened she didn’t like.

So, three maniacs. The second was short, since the coat dragged on the ground. The first one was taller; the coat only came down to his knees. And the third maniac was already history—also featuring an overcoat, however.

If there’s only one overcoat, then two different people would have had to wear it. As for the two builders from Moldavia, one of them could have just borrowed it from the other, and… and interesting things began happening to them.

But what about the 1973 maniac, who also wore an “old-fashioned overcoat,” for god’s sake? Old-fashioned even in 1973? When was it in style, then? The ’50s? ’40s?

The cigarette smoke drifted over the tops of the poplar trees, behind which stood gray brick buildings that looked like gingerbread houses. The clicking of a woman’s high heels, fast and nervous, resounded on the concrete somewhere below.

The next day I went to visit the inspector with a silly question: had they found any link between the 1973 case and today’s pedophiles from Moldavia? But, of course, there was no link. And, of course, no one wondered back in 1973 what had happened to the gray overcoat that the sex maniac wore to go skirt-chasing. Inspector Bullet had read in the 1973 file that the maniac had had a whole underground bunker, like an abandoned bomb shelter, right on the edge of Birch Grove Park. The police might have kept the white socks or the coat; but only the socks would probably have made good material evidence.

“What about the bunker?” I asked. “What happened to it? Where is it?”

“Who cares about the bunker, doc? When we come across a place like that, you know, a basement or an attic, we just seal it up and check the locks from time to time. So that winos or bums can’t live there. I’m sure that was what happened to the bunker. Sealed up and forgotten. Come on, let’s go. I’ll show you why we have Comrade Stalin and his minister of internal affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, to thank for a good cop shop.”

“Why Beria?” I asked absently, lost in my own thoughts.

Inspector Bullet didn’t answer. Instead, he proudly motioned me to follow him down the corridor, where it ended at a plywood door. He opened it, revealing another door behind it. This one was made of heavy, rough cast iron, painted blood-brown. It had something like a ship’s steering wheel, two feet in diameter, attached to it. No, it wasn’t a ship’s wheel—it looked more like the lock on a bank safe. I was standing in front of the door to a huge safe, the height of a grown man, covered in a slapdash way with multiple layers of paint. Numerous iron levers and knobs stuck out of the door—all parts of the locking mechanism.

“Does it work?” I asked in a grim voice, staring at the magnificent contraption.

“You bet,” said Inspector Bullet. “We have the key, it weighs almost a pound. But frankly, none of us has ever felt like going behind the door.”

He paused significantly, enjoying my confusion.

“No mutant rats or skeletons in rotten trench coats there, though,” he added shortly, and wiped his large face with his hand. “But I suggest you don’t go in there, either. Because… well, doc, I guess you’ve figured out this is an entrance to a bomb shelter. And our station is like the front lobby of the shelter. We’re on the corner of Peshchanaya Square and 3rd Peshchanaya Street, right? We go into the bomb shelter from here, and using underground passages we can walk all the way over to the lane of chestnuts on your 2nd Peshchanaya. Think there’s not a bomb shelter in your basement? It’s just locked. But if you go down into the basement, sooner or later you’ll end up in front of a metal door just like this one here. And behind it you’ll find a passageway all the way to the Sokol subway station, or even the airport station, where the old airport use to be, on the former Khodynka Field. There was a secret subway line that went all the way there from the Kremlin. So, you go for a stroll underground, and when you figure you’re lost, you start banging on this two-foot-thick door from the inside. But no one’s going to open it, because even if someone’s there, they won’t hear you. It could get lonely, don’t you think? Especially when it’s pitch-black in there.”

“You think Comrade Stalin and Comrade Beria wandered around in these bomb shelters?”

“Well, maybe they didn’t. But all the gray brick houses on all the Peshchanaya streets have these bomb shelters. They were built by German prisoners of war. You know, ‘You bombed ’em, you rebuild ’em.’ They say that in the ’50s, when Khrushchev set them free, they thanked everyone here for giving them the chance to return home with a clean conscience. And Comrade Beria, in addition to being the minister of national security, and then the minister of internal affairs, was also head of the prisoner camps. So it was all under his jurisdiction. The best buildings in Moscow are called Stalin buildings, but they should be called Beria buildings.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said. “Beria and company—very interesting. But are you going to catch the maniac?”

Inspector Bullet sighed and looked at me unsympathetically. “At least the girl is alive. She says when he laid her down on some mossy hill, she changed her mind. And then he asked her to put on white socks, like a schoolgirl. Just like the other maniac. She didn’t like the socks—too dirty. She began to fight him off. That’s it. The case is basically closed. Not gonna dig up anything more on him.”

“A hill… on the edge of Birch Grove Park, right by the concrete fence at Khodynka Field,” I said with sudden clarity. “And who took her there? It was probably him. That’s his place. Or their place? The same place as in 1973? And at first she followed him, as if… as if she were hypnotized. Right. See you, inspector; I’ll be back.”

“Hey, come work in the police force, why don’t you? We really need a shrink in the department,” replied Inspector Bullet.

The girl, Julia, gave me a much warmer welcome than her mother. The mother probably wasn’t too keen on paying me for another session. She just sadly gestured with her hand toward the girl’s room, saying, “Don’t be shocked. Her majesty’s wearing new clothes.”

The red-haired Julia had dyed her hair jet-black and put on black and red lipstick. Metal trinkets of all shapes and sizes dangled from her wrists. A metal cross hung between her large breasts, which were virtually spilling out of her T-shirt, and were spotted with pimples.

“Come to lock me up in the funny farm?” she asked.

“They don’t put goths and heavy metal fans away in mental institutions,” I said. “Now listen carefully, sweetie. Two days ago, a man in an overcoat stinking of dirt cracked open the head of a young woman. The police are looking for him. Do you catch my drift? You have the ass of a grown-up woman and the head of a teenager. And when someone lowers a rock onto a head like that, and the brains begin to—Did you say something?”

In one quick, nervous motion, the gothic Julia lit a cigarette and stuck it to her mouth. Then she took it out, smeared with lipstick, and stared at me silently.

“So I need you to fill me in on some details, here,” I said hastily, before she had quite recovered from the shock. “First, who was leading who? He you, or you him?”

“Him,” she replied immediately. “He took me to the cement fence.”

“You said there was a concrete slab. Was it hard?”

“Don’t worry, it was soft enough for my butt.” She was herself again, the first wave of shock already past. “It was covered with moss or something. It wasn’t concrete, I mean… it was really old, more like a tuft of something in the ground. To the left of the path leading to a hole in the cement fence by Khodynka, the field. So it was real soft. Try it yourself. If you need company, I’ll come with you. Doctors get a discount.”

“One last thing. When you were going there with him, what were you thinking about? What did you feel?”

“What do you think I was thinking about? I was thinking about that,” said Julia. “I felt a little high. I was like, you know, a little girl. Real curious. Like it was the first time. A big guy with a big thingy.”

“Did you think those thoughts before?”

“I used to do a lot of things before. And now—hello, grown-up world.”

I headed to the concrete fence, behind which the white towers of a whole new residential district, constructed on Khodynka Field in just under a year, soar up to the skies. The tops of the buildings bask in the sunset, and the fresh new walls glow pink, like the Cadillac Hotel. To the left stands the spire of Triumph Palace, the tallest residential building in Europe.

But all that is on the other side of the concrete fence. There, in a forgotten area of the old park, which is essentially a forest, twilight was thickening. An empty bench stood askew (what was it doing there—did someone drag it all the way over from the lane?), and weeds and burdocks grew on the tufty ground. Like gray mushroom caps covered with green mold, and slightly protruding from the ground at about knee height, there were two concrete slabs disappearing into the ground at a slant. A little farther on was another slab, level with the earth around it.

I thought I could make out something resembling small orifices, half covered in earth, by each slab. Passageways that once led down?

The slabs were covered with shards of broken bottles, sausage wrappers, and… a torn piece of foil—a condom wrapper.

So this was the place.

I had nothing more to do there.

Gray haze and a soft path silenced my footsteps. A shaggy dog emerged quietly from the bushes and stared at me with an unblinking, almost human stare, keeping a safe distance. Then it took two steps toward me. My heart fluttered in fear, but the the dog didn’t come any closer.

For two hours I listened to a plump editor from Sokol, the local newspaper. She had suggested I do an interview on the topic of psychiatry, because “we do this with all the prominent people in the district.” Then she talked about those who had died on Khodynka during the coronation of the last czar, when many people were crushed and their bodies were hauled away on carts. About Peshchanaya Square, which was built on a large graveyard for Napoleon’s soldiers. The remains of the French soldiers were taken away, nobody knows where. A similar story about the dead in Bratskoye Cemetery: they were buried during World War I, and their remains were exhumed under Beria and Khrushchev, when the remote suburb of Moscow was turning into a beautiful new residential district. The bunkers on the edge of Khodynka? Those were located in a special area that belonged to the Moscow Military District—part of the defense line at the farthest end of the airbase. Airplanes took off over the heads of soldiers, their propellers droning heavily, and flew further west, to the railroad. Nothing interesting, apart from that. Stories about the living dead from the past? No, no; nothing of that nature. I would have heard. I left the editor and walked home through the empty treelined streets in complete silence, greedily breathing in the fresh air.

Parks built on human bones. Graveyards that no longer exist. An ominous name—Khodynka. More parks, couples with baby carriages, cyclists, poplars, lime trees. Graveyard shadows sleep peacefully among bushes and alleys. Sleep, O souls of long forgotten soldiers. Sleep in the best neighborhood in Moscow. You are welcome here, because all cities stand on the bones of the past. Carts, then hearses, rolled down these streets. These days, from the open balcony doors, you could hear women’s laughter and music, and from the sidewalk you could see the tops of bookshelves and white ceilings with circles of honey-colored lights cast by chandeliers. A cat sat in the window and stared gloomily at the gray concrete below. The cat’s name was Grymzik. He belonged to my neighbor, and I was almost home. And I needed to make an urgent phone call.

“Sergey? Hi, how’s your precious health today?”

“Ah, good doctor! Nice to hear your voice. I’m great, actually. Physically exhausted, but glowing with mental health. I’m afraid I no longer make a very interesting patient. You’re a regular magician, I’ll have you know.”

“Believe me, Sergey, no magic involved whatsoever. What was it that bothered you? Depression and a couple of neuroses. Well, who wasn’t depressed in the ’90s? I used to have two patients who loved to discuss the benefits of suicide and its various methods with me every day. I didn’t try to contradict them, and even participated in their discussions. What do you expect from someone who’s been designing rockets all his life, and is then told: Thank you, but we really won’t be needing any more rockets. Rope and a piece of soap is the only way out. And you… half the people in the U.S. take Prozac; and they had no major crisis or economic collapse to contend with in the ’90s. So there’s no magic to it whatsoever. But you should hear about my new patient. You won’t believe it if I tell you. Actually, that’s why I’m calling you. Do you still have your connections in the archives?”

“Oh, I never lost them. Still work there. Deputy director, if can you believe it. So the entire archive is at your disposal. What exactly are you looking for?”

“Well, you see, it’s a very serious case,” I said, improvising. “A fetishist, a rapist, most likely a murderer. Fixated on particular objects, locations, and events from the past. And particular names. I have a theory, which I thought you could help me test. Just promise me that you won’t think I’m off my rocker when I start asking my questions. You wouldn’t believe what kinds of nutcases there are out there.”

“Indulge me,” said the archivist joyfully. “What particular historical fetishes does your maniac have?”

“Coordinate number one is the area between the edge of Khodynka Field and the back of Birch Grove Park. Apparently, that part of the city is connected with some important people. And I’m talking famous historical people—from the Soviet era. Some bigwigs in the ruling party. Then there’s a fetish, which is a summer coat, or an overcoat. Light gray, no belt, made from good material, like gabardine, worn by a man of above-average height. Do you think you could help me determine the exact era and style of an overcoat? It would help me figure out who he’s fixated with. Because the bastard wouldn’t tell me. So, the overcoat is coordinate number two. Then, since we’re talking crazy people here, there’s one peculiar detail: with him it’s all about underage girls—white socks and all that nonsense. And that’s your third coordinate. So, what do we get at the point of intersection?”

“Well, doctor, you’re an intelligent man. You know your history. It’s not what; it’s who. Some concrete historical figure. But I’m curious. This guy—does he wear the old-fashioned overcoat and rape young girls in white socks?”

“Sergey, don’t ask questions. Who’s the psychiatrist here? Yet, indeed, you guessed it. Only the particular location is also significant here—the back of Khodynka Field and Birch Grove Park.”

“But of course, my dear doctor. Let’s begin with the overcoat. It’s probably from the postwar era. In the ’30s, the fashion was to wear military-style overcoats with a belt. Then, after that, up until the ’60s… Well, take the photographs of the Soviet party during that muddy period between Stalin and Khrushchev, and you’ll see about five overcoats like that in every picture. As for underage girls, it’s perfectly clear. I’m sure you know who was infamous for meddling with them.”

“Beria,” I said under my breath, looking down at the dark treetops from the balcony. “Lavrentiy Beria.”

“That’s right. Of course, other party leaders have been know to savor similar worldly pleasures; but schoolgirls were Beria’s particular preference. Well, not just schoolgirls; often women with specific figures and mannerisms. Am I using the correct terms?”

“Absolutely.”

“Imagine a black car driving slowly along the sidewalk behind a girl with plump calves. Two men get out of the automobile and introduce themselves to her. According to some sources, they just push her into the car and drive off to the famous house on Sadovaya Street. Across from Krasnaya Presnya, in case you didn’t know. Other sources suggest that the scenario was a little more genteel. They would talk the girl into it first. If need be, they’d dress the teenager in a school uniform, or sometimes a ballet tutu. Then they sat her on a sofa and told her to wait. Dozens of books have been written about it; and just two months ago, some TV people approached me about it. They’re going to make a program. Have I told you anything you didn’t already know?”

“The particular spot,” I reminded him. “Our entire district was built by Beria. I know this already. He, of course, always took off from the airport on Khodynka; but other people boarded planes on the other side of the field. What does our maniac know about that other, forgotten part of the field? And what does that part have to do with Beria?”

The archivist took a deep, noisy breath. “He knows something that very few people know, frankly. And I find it strange that a maniac could get his hands on such information. It’s extremely difficult to come across. What’s on that side of the field now?”

“A construction site. Just like every other goddamn neighborhood in the city… New buildings crawling up to the skies all over the place.”

“And you want to know which building stood there before?”

“Can you tell me this over the phone?” I asked after a pause.

“Yes, after Mr. Suvorov’s novel The Aquarium, I can,” the archivist reassured me cheerfully. “The Aquarium, the main intelligence directorate of the Red Army, stood there. Around it were various military fences, barracks, even tents, when the troops were training for the parades on the occasion of the Bolshevik Revolution. The area belonged to the military, in other words. That wasn’t much of a secret. The secret, for a long time, was what was there underground.”

“Do you mean catacombs, bomb shelters, underground tunnels?” I recalled the heavy metal door with the spindle wheel.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said the archivist. “Back then they were building bomb shelters everywhere, and Beria was in charge of it. In the summer of 1953 they took him into one such bomb shelter at the far end of the airfield, just after Comrade Stalin died. That was where he spent his last days. How long exactly is difficult to say. They say that they executed him first, and prosecuted and sentenced him later, in December. It’s possible, by they way, that he was executed in that very basement, right between Birch Grove Park and Khodynka Field. The site of his final orgasm, as it were.”

“From the point of view of psychiatry, it’s interesting that you would refer to an execution as a last orgasm,” I said pompously. “Would you be so kind as to explain what you mean in more detail?”

“Doctor, not everyone’s a maniac. Could you hold on a second? I’m going to go grab something… here. A memoir of someone who loathed Beria with all his heart. For various reasons. The Bystander, by one Mr. Dmitri Shepilov, minister of foreign affairs under Khrushchev. He was also in charge of culture, arts, and ideology in the Communist Party. He was, by the way, a handsome man who loved women. Ordinary women, mind you, not underage schoolgirls. The chapter is called ‘The Battle.’ And I quote… hold on a minute, I’m going to quote him where he talks about where they put Beria. ‘And when he was told he was under arrest, his face turned green and brown from his chin to his temples and up to his forehead. Armed marshals entered the meeting hall. They escorted him to the automobile. It had been earlier agreed upon that the Beria would not be put in the internal jail in the Lubyanka or the Lefortovo detention cells: that could lead to unforeseeable consequences. It was decided to keep him in a special detention cell in one of the buildings of the Moscow Military District under surveillance by armed guards.’ He’s referring to your Khodynka; or, rather, the farthest end of it. Later the military closed some of the buildings there and gave them away. Oh, and here’s the part about orgasms: ‘He persistently from the depths of his memory recalled the most erotic scenes and relived them, voluptuously enjoying all the little details, in order to excite himself, seeking oblivion for at least a few precious moments. The supreme officers who guarded the door of his cell all day and night could see through the peephole how Beria, covered with a rough military blanket, writhed underneath it in spasms of masturbation.’ What style, doctor! Note, however, that I wasn’t quoting from the book. I was quoting from the original manuscript that I received from one of his publishers. Even though this was way after the Soviet era, the publishers had scruples about printing the piece about the military blanket, so they left it out.”

A blanket, I thought. A military blanket. And clothes.

“Sergey, do you happen to know if they confiscated his clothing, too, after he was arrested?”

“Clothing? My dear doctor, not just clothing. Shepilov very clearly states in his memoirs that they they took away his shoelaces, his belt—even his famous pince-nez, so he wouldn’t cut himself with the glass.”

“And where did they take it all?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know. Does it really matter? I doubt they would have kept that information in the archives. Although, it’s possible they might have written it all down in some official document somewhere.”

On the other hand, I thought, it doesn’t really matter. I imagined the military investigators fingering every little wrinkle of a light gray overcoat and then… then tossing it in some corner… and then…

Suddenly, I heard my mother’s voice in my head. When was it? How many years ago did she tell me about the cold day in June 1953, before I was even born? It was a story about her and my father. They were sitting alone on some stone steps by the river, cigarette butts floating past, next to a tall Stalin-era building on Kotelnicheskaya embankment. They must have felt very happy on that short June night, when the sun rose almost as soon as it had set. They felt happy until the stone steps began to tremble under their feet.

Because tanks started rolling down the boulevard next to the embankment.

And my father—who had run off to fight in the war as a boy, and who ever since had been able to tell the difference between tanks on their way to military parades and tanks going off to war (portholes shut tight, armaments at the ready)—got up from the stone steps to watch. Then he went back to where my mother was and said somberly, “I think I’d better run home.”

But it wasn’t war. It was Marshals Zhukov, Nedelin, Mos-kalenko, and others, getting ready to enter the Kremlin and arrest the omnipotent minister of national security.

And arrest him they did. The troops under Lavrentiy Beria’s command did not rise up in his defense. The door to the dungeon at Khodynka slammed shut behind him.

A cold, cold summer in 1953. A summer coat. An underground bunker that looks like a bomb shelter. Its roof, covered in moss, disappearing into the ground.

“Hello? Doctor, you still there?” said the voice on the other end. “I could tell you things that have come to light in other documents just beginning to surface nowadays. For example, Beria’s not the only one to blame for the purges and execution of prisoners. After the war, he was involved in the A-bomb and nuclear power (glory be his name), and construction, and a number of other things. There were people whose hands were just as bloody as his. They were the ones who assassinated him. Are you interested in hearing more?”

“I am,” I said honestly, “but not now. I have a crazy man walking the streets. Thank you very much, Sergey.”

What happened after 1973 in terms of maniacs in overcoats? Nothing, really. They were dormant. Why was that? And why has that suddenly changed? I remembered the construction site, all the dozens of new houses that had risen up in the past few months on Khodynka Field. The large wasteland of the former restricted airfield was no more. It was crawling with…

Construction workers.

Construction workers clambering up and down the stairwells of the new buildings, dumping garbage by the surrounding fences, excavating… and excavating some more for the foundations of new buildings.

I had one slim chance left, and I used that chance the next day.

Because the foreman of the defunct brigade of two vanished construction workers from Moldavia was still occupying a lone structure in the next courtyard.

“So they’re not coming back, eh?” I asked the foreman, and sat down on the porch next to him.

He shook his head furiously.

“Too bad,” I continued. “Say, uh, they borrowed a book from me… about space invaders. You seen it?”

“No,” replied the foreman mournfully, and again shook his head. “Haven’t seen it.”

“I understand.” I was moving closer to my goal. “I just need the book. It’s the cops who need the rapist. But the book is still mine, you see—”

“My guys are no rapists. They’re good guys,” the foreman said, finally able to muster a coherent sentence. “The book… go ahead and look around. There’s no book in there.”

I could hardly believe my luck. I went inside the little house where the construction workers had stayed. A strong, unpleasant odor from a portable toilet assaulted my nostrils. Then, in an instant, I saw a dull gray garment hanging on a coatrack right in front of me.

The rest was easy.

“By the way, I need to do a paint job,” I said. “This thing here, is this your work coat? How much do you want for it?”

“That’s no work coat,” answered the foreman. “The guys left it here. You can have it. Instead of the book. Go ahead, they won’t be needing it. They’re not coming back. Their families keep calling and calling…”

Holding the gray overcoat at arm’s length, I asked: “Where did you work before? Wasn’t there a construction site over there? On the other side of the field, by that concrete fence? I believe that’s where I met your guys.”

“Oh, sure,” said the foreman. “The finishing team arrived when we were done over there. And we moved here. And now… we’re done here too.”

I remember at one point I felt the urge to bury my face in the coat and inhale the smell of a cellar and potatoes. It took me some effort not to do so. I threw it down on the landing in front of my door. I had no intention of bringing the thing into my apartment. I went inside and found a large shopping bag, put the overcoat in it, and left it in front of the door. Then I scrubbed my hands thoroughly. In a closet I found a bottle of flammable liquid for barbecuing and dropped it into the bag as well.

I was in a hurry. It was getting late, and I didn’t want to leave the coat outside for the night. Someone might take it.

Then I was in that deserted edge of Birch Grove Park. An empty bench, and the remnants of the bunkers protruding from the ground.

I dumped the coat onto the surface of the nearest bunker, on the concrete slab covered with moss. I poured the liquid onto the coat and set fire to it with my lighter. Thick, oily smoke billowed up and gravitated to the concrete fence and beyond, where the floors of the nearby buildings mounted into the sky.

It burned very, very slowly.

“Now why did you do that?” The thin, tremulous voice came from somewhere below.

No, I wasn’t scared. Even when I noticed that someone had been sitting on a nearby bench the whole time. It was… an old lady? That’s right, just an old lady in a light summer coat and a funny straw hat trimmed with two wooden cherries. The red paint on one of them had almost completely peeled off. But her cheekbones burned with the same color, in an almost invisible network of blood vessels. When I saw those liver spots on her powdered cheeks, I thought in panic, How old is she? Why didn’t I notice her before?

Or maybe she hadn’t been there when I set fire to the coat?

“Do you think it’s about the coat?” the old lady asked in a childish—no, not childish, but teacherish—voice, high as a violin string. “It was just fabric. Good fabric too. Very durable. That was silly. Just plain silly.”

“No, it’s not about the coat,” I replied through my teeth. I had to say something, just to break the silence—and so I wouldn’t be afraid.

“You haven’t even seen him,” the old lady continued, not paying any attention to my words, and staring vaguely in the direction of my sneakers with her light gray eyes. “You weren’t even born yet in ’53. Not to mention before that.”

“Did you see him?” I asked.

“Just like I see you now,” the voice went on. “Only closer, much closer. As close as can be.”

And slowly, very slowly, she parted her thin, bloodless lips.

EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN by Alexei Evdokimov Kiev Station ^{Translated by Mary C. Gannon}

If you ride out from the center of the city on the Filevskaya line, a minute before Kievskaya, the train, whistling and puffing, slows down and emerges out into the light on the subway bridge. Your eyes try to take in the sharp bend in the river, the angular, protruding architectural ruins along the embankments, and the broad flat façade of the White House, its flanks a bold invitation to gunfire from weapons mounted on tanks.

On this day the picture seemed to be smeared like bad reception on a TV screen with whitish rain showers, frequent and driving. I frowned and hunched my shoulders, anticipating the discomfort, but when I crawled out from underground into the station, it had already stopped. The darkened asphalt breathed out a bathlike moisture, passersby shook off their umbrellas fastidiously, and the returning sun was multiplied in puddles.

I glanced at my watch and walked down the street, slowly making my way over to a fountain that looked like the remaining evidence of the recent shower; I wanted to turn it off. Some people had already sat down, sticking backpacks and plastic bags under their behinds, on the steps of this stunted amphitheater. Others peeled off their jackets or simply shook the water from their soaking heads; this hot spot for the young filled up quickly. I remembered that I had waited for Yanka here; I remembered that, stretching my hood as far as it would go and trying to light up underneath it, I had regretted my choice of meeting places. When the St. Petersburg girl had finally arrived, I took her to the new pedestrian bridge, where we blended in with other couples.

Together with them we staggered through the stuffy glass passageway from one side of the bridge to the other—I pointed with my finger, explaining that this was probably the only place in the city where you could see, more or less up close, four of the seven Stalin skyscrapers at once. Nodding at the MID building with a coat of arms on it, I explained that according to the original design it was to have been the only one without a spire. At the last minute Stalin announced that it looked too much like an American skyscraper that way. It was too late to change the design—the building was almost finished; but who would be the one to contradict Stalin’s wishes? So they ran a gigantic metal rod through the top floors, and placed a ridge-roofed tower on top of that, painted to look like stone. After Khrushchev unmasked the cult of personality, he was reminded that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to remove this idiotic detail of Stalin’s gloomy legacy. Nikita snorted and ordered that it stay right there, as a monument to the tastelessness of the generalissimo.

On the left side we moved onto a path that led along a high, grassy slope past the Turkish embassy toward the Borodinsky Bridge. Europe Square was now below and opposite us.

I like this place.

Here, the river and the open space in front of Kiev station leave a large expanse open to view. Here, you can really see the sky, which is rare in this capital city that squeezes you between enormous stone slabs. The view that spreads out before you here—the Gothic silhouette of the university on a distant bluff to the left, the palisade of mighty pipes on top of the Radisson, the spire of the Hotel Ukraine perpendicular to layers of lilac clouds—is one of those typical and utterly urban landscapes that create the face of a city, which Moscow, monstrous and vague with its eroded individuality, so lacks.

That’s what I said to Yanka, trying to show her the city from its most presentable perspective, trying to be amusing and casual, not pressuring her. I knew my role and my place. When I met her a year before in her native Petersburg, I invited her out of politeness (but not only that, not only…)—I invited her (that is to say, them, her and Igor) to “visit us in our capital with no culture,” promising to show them around and entertain them. Of course, they didn’t jump at the opportunity—not because they had anything against me, but because in the absence of any other attractions in the city, the prospect of hanging out with me was not sufficient inducement to overcome a distance of six hundred kilometers. Then, suddenly, Yanka found a reason—the wedding of a college friend. The event was to take place over several days (the newlyweds belonged to circles that had money to waste on lavish parties). But the other guests weren’t really to Yanka’s taste; and that’s when she remembered me.

Exceedingly pretty, with a slight, charming unevenness in her features, and with that rare combination of intelligence and spontaneity, that balance of self-assurance and sincere goodwill that you sometimes find in people from very well-to-do families—smart, prosperous, and affable; that was Yanka.

During those three days, I mobilized all my meager resources of joie de vivre and sociability. My guest was as open and friendly as ever; she listened attentively and meekly tasted the shark at Viet-Café, but on the whole she seemed fairly indifferent. As I later became convinced, people who feel that they are equal to life’s demands don’t experience an excess of curiosity about the range of its phenomena: they already know exactly what they need from it.

I had absolutely no chance of ever landing on the list of things that those people wanted from life. Back then I hadn’t abandoned my rock and roll efforts. Officially, I was supposed to be a journalist, which is how I presented myself (I was a freelancer). I was also acquainted with progressive, and sometimes even high-profile people; and I was, after all, a Muscovite. Theoretically, I belonged to practically the same circle as my female contemporary from the Petersburg theater crowd; the sense of insurmountable social and psychological distance was completely unfounded.

I felt not only a distance, though—I felt an abyss. In our relations, which seemed on the surface to be relaxed, there was something reminiscent of a conversation in the lingua franca of a Norwegian and a Malaysian who sit side by side on a flight in a transcontinental Boeing; however well-disposed they might be toward each other, they are still from different worlds. At that time, a little over four years ago, I had only begun to guess about the nature of that difference.

Yanka’s generosity of spirit, which so impressed me at first, gradually began to disturb me. It was difficult, if not impossible, for me to share a perspective in which the world appears to be acceptably, if not optimally arranged.

I became suspicious of Yanka’s self-sufficiency. I understood perfectly the origins of this feeling, since I’d had the opportunity to glimpse from afar the reality which the girl had inhabited for a long time already—the reality of her beloved theater, where she was highly regarded, with its well-established, intimate, exclusive company of actors. The same company was home, as well, to Igor; an amicable, handsome, easygoing guy who had a promising career ahead of him. In short, this world was so harmonious that at a certain moment it began to feel absolutely artificial to me.

Then I understood that I was merely deceiving myself. All I really wanted to do was expose the futility of affluence—so that I would see one advantage in my own deprived and uncomfortable existence. The advantage of authenticity.

A not uncommon compensatory trick.

Actually, all lives are equally real or unreal. The quality of everyday private and public loathsomeness in one of them affords no metaphysical bonuses to others.

It’s just that for some people, everything in life works out. For others, it doesn’t. And you can’t draw any moral lesson from it. Other than: Grief to the vanquished.

I looked at my watch again and frowned. I couldn’t do anything about my habit of turning up early for every appointment, whether important or completely inconsequential; even appointments with people who never show up on time anywhere in their lives.

And really, what’s the hurry?

“But you can always try—”

“Look, Felix, Yanka was a very gregarious young woman. She could have met up with anyone… Plus, it’s been over a year already.”

“Maybe you’ll think of someone else.”

“Oh, I don’t know… Well, there was Pasha from Moscow—she met him shortly before that, I think…”

“Who’s this Pasha guy?”

“Uh, what’s his name—Korenev or something. Just an acquaintance. A long time ago, maybe five years ago, he went to Petersburg, and then, I guess, Yanka saw him in Moscow.”

“So he went back to Petersburg?”

“Looks like it.”

“What did Yanka say about meeting him?”

“Oh god, I don’t remember…”

“Do you have any idea where he lives? A phone number?”

I walked around the square, stomped around on one spot, and sat on the damp stone. I started to smoke, paying close attention to my movements. I remember very clearly how one time, when she was watching me smoke, Tatiana mentioned that I had the gestures of an ex-convict. She didn’t know anything at that time, though. She didn’t know anything yet.

Feeling a moist caress on my face, I raised my head, but it was just the spray from the fountain.

Tin cans rolled around under my feet; empty beer bottles stuck up everywhere.

Suddenly, a dozen or so guys in orange pants sprang up out of nowhere and fell upon them. They quickly tossed the clanking bottles and cans into black plastic bags and hurled them into the maw of a toy tractor.

The struggle for cleanliness continued, apparently in an effort to live up to the name of the place—Europe Square.

Gleb, I remembered, was moved to laughter at the inscription on a plaque by the fountain: As a sign of the strengthening friendship and unity of the countries of Europe, the administration of Moscow endeavored on such-and-such a date to create the ensemble of Europe Square.

There was not much to be said about the friendship between the countries of Europe and Moscow—but most touching of all was the clear sense of identification of the bald mayor of Moscow and Co. with the European Union (immortalizing this was just as logical in Phnom Penh as it was in Moscow, in Gleb’s opinion). We discussed the sacred conviction of our fellow citizens that they live in a brilliant European capital—as evidence for which they usually cite the number of high-end boutiques. Gleb, a dyed-in-the-wool “westernizer,” said that the sincere incomprehension of the difference is the clearest evidence of the difference itself.

Having traveled from one end of the continent to the other and lived in London, with a multientry Shengen visa, Gleb considered himself to be in a position to judge and compare. As an indigenous Moscow resident, he just didn’t like it enough; and he categorically refused to recognize it as a part of Europe. His basic argument was the flagrant disproportion of the size of Moscow to the human being, a point that was difficult to counter.

It was rare that anyone wanted to argue with him. I have hardly ever met a person with such sound and penetrating points of view. Also, his talent for expressing them with charm and panache, both verbally and in writing, made Gleb the soul of any gathering, and the star of liberal journalism.

Liberal, in his case, didn’t refer to a position regarding civil society, but was a synonym for measured restraint. As a matter of fact, for Gleb, this restraint stood surrogate for political views to a certain degree—he wrote equally well, and with equal conviction, in both servile and seditious (and, naturally, glossy) publications. The logic of his ideas was so unassailable that even in the preelection hysteria, the most patriotic bosses didn’t find fault with the author on the subject of his loyalty. Indeed, Gleb possessed the talent (without a tinge of sycophantism) of making every boss like him. I still remember back in school, where he and I became friends, how I looked on in amusement as the slightly wilted schoolmarms of a certain age fell involuntarily in love with the straight-A student.

Gleb began publishing at the age of fourteen; at fifteen he had already made it into print in the prestigious union-wide Soviet journals. At twenty he became the head of a weekly magazine, where I too—after trying to make a living as a homegrown punk rocker and from various meager supplemental earnings—got my first steady and meaningful employment (though I was never officially on the payroll).

Many people back then (and not just friends) said that I was a fine writer. In addition to everything else, I worked a lot, carried out all the assignments from the higher-ups, and got everything in on time. Nevertheless, both my articles and myself (no matter the subject, genre, or depth of pathos) were greeted (and published—if they agreed to publish them) by all managers with some vague initial skepticism, as though they were suppressing (and, later, no longer trying to suppress) the instinct to shrug their shoulders. When I asked point blank one day why they hadn’t printed any of my reviews for more than a week, and some fat-assed jerk of a deputy editor muttered in slight exasperation, “You always pan everything, but, you know, people watch those movies and read those books; you just turn up your nose at them!”—I finally decided that it was time to call it quits.

And I did. For two years. Though I firmly believe this had nothing to do with journalism itself.

Of course, in a frenzy of self-searching, I acknowledged (according to an elementary logic) my own mediocrity. But to be honest, I never believed it. And I don’t think it was only due to self-love. I knew I was good at what I did. The fact that no one needed it was another matter altogether. It was precisely my product that they had no need for. Someone else’s—Gleb’s, for instance—of the same subject and quality would be snatched up immediately.

I never understood why. I ultimately came to the conclusion that there was no reason. There are no rules, and no laws. It’s just that some people make it in their jobs, while others don’t. And this work has no objective value. More than that—nothing has objective value.

He should’ve been here already, I thought, looking around and trying to match a person with the voice from the phone yesterday—but none of the men there were paying any attention to me, and one of the two girls sitting right across from me frowned slightly and looked away.

“Dmitry?”

“Felix?”

“Yeah, Dmitry, hi. I called you earlier and you told me you saw Pasha last week.”

“Right.”

“Well, I came down from Petersburg just to meet him and I can’t find him. People say he just dropped out of sight; no one seems to know where he is.”

“Uh-huh, that’s what I heard too; that he, like, disappeared, about a year or so ago. So I called around without much hope of finding him; but what do you know, I got through right away. He’s in Moscow. We got together at that… what’s it called, by Kiev station? You know, Europe Square. We used to hang out there a lot. We used to cross the river and drink beer on that slope, on the grass, with the view…”

“But you don’t see him much these days. Is that right?”

“No, we don’t hang out at all anymore. Almost two years now. When Pasha got out we cooked something up together, but we got busted pretty fast. Somehow, we never saw each other after that.”

“What do you mean, ‘got out’? Did he do time or something?”

“Well, yeah. For something incredibly stupid… A few joints, can you believe it? What bullshit—getting sent up for something like that is truly an art. There was a raid. And he hardly ever smoked. I shit you not, man, they dragged him in purely to meet their quota. For a few measly sticks of weed… but that’s how it works here, right? They can throw you in jail for anything they want. Article 228, section 1: acquisition and storage. The most they can give you is three years, I think—and that’s what they slapped on him. I don’t know why—the judge probably didn’t like his face or something. He did two of the three. Actually, it’s really not that long; but the pen did a number on him. He kind of jitters and jerks a bit when he moves now. See, Pasha always gets, you know, screwed over, somehow. Things never go his way. If you get mixed up with him, you’re gonna get caught red-handed, no matter what. Not because he’s low-down, or a cheat—on the contrary, he’s always honest; in fact, he’s way too honest. He’s a real German, you know—a pedant. Just has bad luck, that’s all. I got burned once because of him, and I started to avoid him after that.”

“What else happened to him?”

“What didn’t happen to him? I’m telling you. He never had a real, bona fide job; never had any money. He wrote for the papers—but he was never on any payroll. All his attempts at business failed. He wrote some kind of novel—same thing. Every publisher he contacted about it—eleven in all, I think—turned it down. Then, six years later or so, one publisher took it on. A minuscule print run; they paid him less than a thousand bucks. No one took any notice of it, naturally. Though Pasha himself said that’s par for the course here in Russia.”

“Why did you decide to get together again, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“He left behind some documents for that company we registered two years ago. And I wanted to see him again—see how the years have treated him. I just wanted to find out, you know, if his karma had taken a turn for the better.”

“So?”

“Well, same as ever. He’s gotten really weird… he’s drinking, I guess. Or shooting up. Not too good, anyway, from what I could see. But I tell you, I did enjoy seeing him. In the sense that, you know, nothing has changed. Because sometimes you think, you know, everything’s okay for me, things are working out, money’s piling up. You’ve got everything you need. And then suddenly something unexpected happens—just out of the blue. And, boom, you’re totally broke, your pockets are empty. Or the meter’s ticking. And so I took a look at Korenev, and, you know, I was convinced: if someone has bad luck, it’ll always be that way. And if your life has always worked out well, most likely it will continue that way…”

“Do you know a Gleb Mezentsev?”

“A little. Through Pasha.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No…”

“He was in a car crash. Two months ago.”

“Whoa… what happened to him?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

“Hurt bad?”

“Pretty serious.”

“Hmmm… I guess that’s how it goes.”

“Pasha and Gleb were friends, weren’t they? I’d like to see Pasha, to talk to him. Could you give me his phone number—the one you reached him at? I’m looking for him, but everyone says he disappeared…”

“His number? Sure.”

I tossed my cigarette butt away, folded my arms behind my head, and stretched. A girl sitting directly across from me glanced over and then mechanically turned away. I just as mechanically slid my gaze above her head, a bit to the right: slid it along the concave façade of the Radisson, along the pseudoclassical colonnade of the station, along the bent stainless steel pipes in the center of the fountain, which were supposed to represent the horns of the bull who abducted Europa, according to the Belgian sculptor. A gift, you understand, to the city.

They’d probably be ashamed to erect something like that in the middle of Brussels.

A shaggy black dog gulped voraciously from the fountain. Little children waded in up to their knees. The girls sitting across from me finally stood up and walked by me, passing to my left toward the bridge, their heels clicking along. I thought to myself that if I had been here with Dmitry, like in the old days, an exciting little encounter with them would have taken place—at least a 70 to 80 percent chance of it.

I can’t say that I really envied his garrulous nature. His ability to get along with anyone, anywhere, at any time, and talk about whatever came up could be tiresome. But his very communicativeness bewitched me sometimes—in its universality and inexplicability. I couldn’t figure out what attraction Dmitry held for people of all ages, social backgrounds, and IQs. He didn’t have, say, Gleb’s brains. He wasn’t especially charming or handsome. He didn’t have the rudeness that is so attractive to girls. On the contrary, Dmitry’s manner and appearance were characterized by a faint, slightly intentional goofiness. A person without much education and wit, he played the role of an enfant terrible. And in this niche he enjoyed condescending but indubitable success, even when he behaved like a complete idiot. Everyone teased him, but at the same time they sought him out and called him incessantly (often without any reason whatsoever), and gathered around him in remarkably large, motley crowds. He affected people like a beautiful woman or free drinks: in his presence people began to chatter loudly, guffaw, and swagger. Guys gave themselves over as drinking buddies, girls as lovers. From the day he was born, Dmitry hadn’t had to lift a finger to find either business partners or bedfellows—in spite of the fact that the guy never stayed loyal to either.

I was no different from his other friends. I was glad to drink with him, prepared to lower my standards of intellect and wit, and was forgiving about minor and not so minor character flaws; I generally took on a protective role, even when our social and financial status suggested the exact opposite…

I thought about our spontaneous encounter last week. There was something very strange, and at the same time very predictable, in the repetition of the classic scenarios of the old days—two people with a bottle on the grassy slope across from Europe Square. Right above the station we saw a golden slash through the gray clouds. Dullish rays fell in fan-shaped sheaves on the shimmery heights of the construction site, its signal lights winking on the straining arms of the giant insectlike cranes. (When we used to sit here back then, there weren’t any cranes.) Below, from the Rostov embankment, a steady hum rose up, interspersed with bellowing horns and the gunning of engines. A Miller beer ad the size of a small building hung above the square, where everything ended for me…

We sat and drank, like before—both of us understanding perfectly well that it would never again be like it used to be. And then it dawned on me that Dmitry had started this phony demonstration of solidarity to prove to himself the absolute and fundamental inequality between us; two people who don’t differ in any fundamental way, neither superior to the other, yet one of them receives everything and everyone without asking, and the other is shunned and doesn’t even get what he has honestly earned. And neither one is to blame for this. And this is nobody’s fault. No one is to blame for anything—actually, there is never rhyme or reason to anything whatsoever.

It’s all just the way it is. For no reason. Just because. Just—because.

I looked up and met someone’s searing gaze. A fairly unpleasant one. It belonged to a burly man who had suddenly materialized in front of me; someone of about fifty with the broad, crudely chiseled mug of a charismatic antihero. The fellow was walking toward me—uncertainly at first, but with every step more and more purposeful. I realized right away who it was. I was about to get up when the guy stopped abruptly, shoved his hand inside his coat, and, staring at me from under his brow, clapped a cell phone to his ear.

Kostya from the Criminal Investigation Department called; he was a great resource for Felix here in Moscow.

“Hello?” Felix answered in a quiet, curt voice, not taking his eyes off Pasha Korenev.

“You’re trying to find out about Dmitry Lisin?” Kostya asked cautiously, his voice full of concern.

“Yeah.”

“Were you able to see him?”

“Yes. Yesterday.”

“Well, that’s lucky,” Kostya snickered. “Just in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I happened across his name this morning. I thought of you right away. The report on the explosion on Sirenevy Boulevard came in from the eastern precinct.”

“What explosion?”

“You haven’t heard? At 2 Sirenevy Boulevard. It looks like a gas main burst. Several apartments were destroyed, three people died. One of them was Lisin. He lived in the apartment right above the one that blew up.”

“A gas main?” Felix repeated slowly, looking at Korenev, who sat serenely in the same spot.

“That’s what they suspect. The cause hasn’t been determined yet.”

“It wasn’t gas, Kostya. I mean, maybe it was gas—but it wasn’t an accident. It was murder.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” Felix barked, then hung up.

He approached the bastard, who stared calmly back at him and seemed like he was about to hold out his hand in greeting; but Felix’s facial expression stopped him.

“Pasha…?” Felix asked, surprised at the hesitancy of his own voice.

The bastard nodded. “Felix…?”

A plain, pale fellow, who seemed paradoxically both younger and older than his thirty-some years. Absolutely average, a somehow ineffably unprepossessing appearance. At the same time, a certain detail that Felix didn’t catch—probably something in the guy’s eyes—triggered his memory of the words of the late Lisin: He’s gotten really weird. He’s drinking, I guess. Or shooting up…

They stood there facing each other—Korenev, calmly expectant. Felix suddenly realized he didn’t know how to begin, or what to do. Or why he needed to see the guy so urgently… Since Felix had homed in on the creep, reason only intermittently guided his actions. The situation was dictated exclusively by emotions: Felix was impatient to see the monster, to stand near him, to observe him at close range—and to let him know that he knew everything. That this bastard had no way out—he would cringe in fear, he would feel terror so fierce it would hurt…

“My name’s Shakhlinsky,” Felix finally said, in the same strangled voice.

“Uh-huh,” Korenev replied, nodding slightly to himself. Something flickered behind his eyes—but no, it wasn’t fear.

“I’m Yanka’s uncle,” Felix added.

“Please accept my condolences,” Korenev said after a slight pause, and Felix was ready to rip him apart right there. He knew why the son of a bitch had suggested meeting here, in a place full of people. He was afraid…

“I’m a colonel in the police force, Criminal Investigation Department.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“You know what I want,” Felix said, and mastered himself with a deep intake of breath. “They say it was several hours before she died. And you, son of a bitch, will suffer ten times longer, and worse. Do you think I’m going to send you up for this? No, you don’t, of course.” He struggled to assume a gentler expression. “You know there’s not enough evidence. Only I don’t need any friggin’ evidence; I’m going to kill you myself…”

The bastard smirked. Felix could hardly believe his eyes—the guy was smirking without the slightest sign of fear.

“So you think I killed her?”

“And you didn’t think anyone would find out? Right. No clues, and—the main thing—no motive. But I was lucky. Just by chance I learned about a few of your acquaintances. About what happened to them during the past year. The year when you suddenly disappeared. When no one could find you, except a few who died soon after. Or ended up as vegetables on life-support systems—like Gleb Mezentsev.”

“Wait a minute—Gleb was in a car crash.”

“Right. His BMW flew into a ditch after someone drove him off the road… It was a hit and run.”

“You think I did that? That’s crazy—I’ve never even had a driver’s license. Although the fact that you single me out at all is kind of cool. You say you were lucky…?” Korenev stared at Felix, who had a hard time not averting his gaze. But he held out, of course—the bastard lowered his eyes, and nodded. “So you decided I killed them… There’s just one thing I don’t get—why me?”

“Because you, motherfucker, envied all of them. Because you’ve been a sniveler your whole life. Because your life has been a pile of shit. Because you never got a fucking thing you wanted. Because you, you little shit, hate everyone who has it better than you, who lucks out—”

“Lucks out,” Korenev interrupted. “What does that mean, ‘to luck out’? You think you have the right to judge who’s lucky and who isn’t? Do you think there’s any logic to anything? But of course. We always look for some rationale, some system to explain things. But we really invent them ourselves. Simply because we think in these categories; we don’t know any other way. Only there is no system, and no explanation.” Still staring, Pasha Korenev shook his head slowly back and forth. “They only exist in our own minds. That’s what none of you want to understand. What I myself didn’t understand for a long time. I kept thinking there had to be rules of some kind. And I tried to play by them! To do things conscientiously. To keep my word. Not let anyone down. I kept thinking if I was good to people, they’d be good to me.” The corners of his mouth contorted. “But it’s all a load of crap. There are no rules. Nothing depends on your personal qualities or the efforts you make. Either you’re lucky or you aren’t. Only that”—he suddenly took a half-step toward Felix, almost pressing up against him—“doesn’t mean a damn thing. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s why I come to all of you—so you’ll finally start thinking about it. Rules don’t exist here either. And even if you luck out all the time, it doesn’t guarantee anything. Nothing. At. All.”

“Mm-hmm.” Now Felix moved forward slightly, forcing Korenev to fall back a step. “And you took the role of fate upon yourself?”

Korenev snorted in exasperation. “You’re not listening. You try to attach meaning to everything. To find someone to blame. Naturally, it’s easier that way, when there’s someone to blame.” He took another step backward, as if to observe Felix from head to toe. “But you must understand—there is no one to blame. And nothing you can do.” Another step backward. And then, from the side, a group of loud, gesticulating young people surged around him. There was some minor scuffling, after which Korenev ended up about five meters away from Felix. Somehow following fluidly in the wake of the young people, he moved away, skirting the fountain. He quickened his pace, weaving in and out of people in the crowd.

When the bastard was about fifteen feet away, Felix started following. He had no plan—but he wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch get away. Felix had to somehow lead him to a more secluded place, to set him straight or just tie him up and gag him…

In pursuit of Korenev, who maintained a fairly brisk pace and never turned around, Felix crossed the square and made it to the corner of the station—and there he realized the bastard was heading for the subway. He sped up, gaining on Korenev; but only when he was in the crowded vestibule of the station, only when he saw the bastard getting in line to pass through the turnstile leading to the escalators, did he look back at the ticket booth—a hopeless throng of people—and think: I’ll jump the turnstile. Right then, however, he met the gaze of a cop on patrol. Damn…

Korenev pushed his way toward the escalator without having bought a ticket… He completely blended in with the crowd at the turnstile. Felix watched him descend underground—his feet, his waist, finally his neck and head vanished from view…

Rudely pressing against some heavyset lady (who cackled at him indignantly), Felix slipped through the turnstile. Pushing his way in front of everyone else, he hurried to the escalator, expecting to see Korenev rushing down the stairs.

The descent at Kievskaya is a long one; but the bastard was nowhere to be seen. What the…? Felix scoured the length of the escalator with his eyes, oblivious to the complaints of the people whose way he blocked.

Gone… gone…Just like that… slippery bastard…

Shuffling around aimlessly for another minute or two, Felix sighed deeply several times then made his way back outside.

No big deal, really. He knew who to look for, and, thank god, he knew how to search. He’d been doing it his whole life. He never even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t find the bastard again. And besides, Felix was always lucky…

Moving toward the parking lot where he had left the car, he came to the street. He waited for a lull in the stream of traffic and stepped out onto the pavement. In his pocket he felt a buzzing—then he heard the beep of his mobile. Felix hesitated, his hand scrambling around for his phone… Kostya from the Criminal Investigation Department. Felix finally managed to press the answer key, then turned his head at the furious sound of screeching brakes—but for some reason he didn’t feel the impact of the blow at all.

“Hello, Felix? Hello! Hello!?” But after a short, sharp sound, he heard a steady beeping—the connection had broken off. Never mind; he’ll call back.

Kostya stared at the monitor again. Huh, no way, colonel. That Pasha Korenev, the one the Petersburg cop was looking for, had died; according to a document Kostya had just located, it happened twelve months earlier. In the Sklifosovsky Hospital, in the intensive care unit. Fractured skull, swelling of the brain. They found him by the fountain on Europe Square. He had been beaten, and his wallet and cell phone were gone. That place was bad news, Kostya thought, always full of bums.

What a stupid death…

MOSCOW REINCARNATIONS by Sergei Kuznetsov Lubyanka ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

Nikita dozes off holding my hand.

Such a handsome hand he has. Strong fingers, smooth oval nails, nicely defined tendons. Light hairs, almost imperceptible, but stiff to the touch.

He’s sleeping holding my hand, but I just can’t.

I’m afraid of dozing off. It’s like walking into cold water, slowly immersing yourself, diving headfirst and not knowing what you’ll see on the bottom.

That Crimean summer I dove alone while Nikita watched from shore. Only later did he admit he was afraid to swim.

I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was twenty-eight. Never before had I been as beautiful as I was that summer.

Nor will I ever be again.

Time has wrung me out like laundered linen and thrown me into the dryer like a crumpled rag. Back then I thought, Time spares no one, but now I know that’s not so.

Time changes everyone, but men are grazed by a touch of gray, a leisurely gait, a solidity of figure. At least Nikita has been. As for anyone else, to be honest, it’s been a long time since I’ve cared.

His hands have barely changed. Except that seven years ago a wedding ring appeared.

My skin is tarnishing, withering, covered with a fine fishnet inside of which the years I’ve lived thrash around like caught fish. My hair is falling out and in the mornings I look at my pillow, fighting the temptation to count them.

Once I couldn’t stop myself. Now I know: 252 hairs, almost a handful.

I’m afraid of going bald. I’m afraid of my breasts disappearing in a few years, my belly sticking to my spine, my eyes sinking. Sometimes I feel like a living corpse.

Nine years ago I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now I can’t fall asleep out of fear.

But Nikita isn’t afraid of anything. In those years he’s lost all fear. Blind swap? as we used to say in kindergarten.

I didn’t want to go to kindergarten. I was still afraid then. I thought one day my mama wouldn’t come for me and would leave me there forever. Only later did I learn where that fear came from; it was the echo of my orphanage infancy, the first months of my life.

My mama told me the story herself. You see, sometimes children are mistakenly born to people who aren’t their parents. So they can take them to a special place where their real parents find them. The way we found you.

I was six years old and I didn’t know where children came from. I probably thought about a stork that might mix up his bundles, or a store where after a long line you could buy a child—and they might sell you the wrong one by mistake.

When I was ten, my papa explained: The ancient Hindus believed in the rebirth of souls. I believe you are the little girl your mama couldn’t give birth to.

I knew by then that children came out of the belly, but I didn’t really understand how you could not be able to give birth.

I no longer believed in the stork, or the store, but I believed in the rebirth of souls immediately. And I still do. I believe the soul travels back and forth through history, and can even be born several times in the same century, miraculously not meeting herself in a previous (subsequent?) guise.

I believe that. Or, rather, I know it. And that’s why I lie here sleepless, squeezing Nikita’s hand. I’m afraid to fall asleep.

In the filmy, viscous dimension between waking and sleep my past lives return. Men, women, children. They fill me until it seems like there’s no room left inside for me.

I squeeze into a ball and try to push the past out—it was mine, it wasn’t mine, it may not have existed at all.

No surprise I’m losing weight. I must think that if I shrivel up completely the ghosts will decamp and find themselves another receptacle.

Though I could get used to them. Ultimately, these are my past lives. I recognize them: the old lady twirling in front of a mirror; the man gazing at the river; the young woman hugging her pregnant belly; the man crushing out a cigarette butt; the soldier pulling a grenade pin; the naked man cooking breakfast; the little girl staring at the Black Sea; the man dropping to his knees in front of his lover.

They shout, laugh, cry, moan, and sigh… Sometimes I feel like throwing myself open, embracing them, and saying, Come in, it’s me, your unsafe haven, your future, reincarnation, rebirth. Don’t cry, everything worked out fine, look at me, I’m much happier than you. My life is wonderful: a loving husband, a home, a car, a household, a full cup. They didn’t beat me during their interrogations, my friends weren’t killed, radiation didn’t eat up my flesh, and I didn’t wait to be arrested. I don’t worry about money or survival, I don’t worry about where I’m going to sleep tomorrow or what I’m going to eat. I can’t remember the last time I was hungry.

But the incorporeal ghosts sway in the stratum of sleep and swirl in the murky corners of my huge apartment.

They’ve already lived their own lives; they’re not rushing, being sold off, drinking up the bitter water of earthly existence, or eating the bitter bread of posthumous exile anymore.

They’re always hungry.

They’re eating me from the inside out. My life is food for those I once was. They’re gnawing at my flesh—and every month blood flows out, attesting that the feast continues, the ghosts are not sated, they are still unhappy.

Every month, following the phases of the moon, plus or minus a day, I receive the same letter: You aren’t going to have a child.

Dozing off, we hold hands. My Kolya, Kolya-Nikolai. I want to sleep facing you, but every month that gets harder. You might even say we’re sleeping for three, right? Only two months to go—and our bunny will be born. I wonder whether it’ll be a boy or a girl. The old women in the countryside always guessed—based on your walk, the shape of your belly, and other signs.

Just think, it’s been five years and I still can’t get used to the idea that my Berezovka’s gone. True, old Georgich’s great nephew wrote last month saying they were planning to build a state farm in its place. I don’t even know… I guess that’s good. The cows will moo again and the chickens will run around, as if there’d been no war. You just look at it and it’s all so horrible what happened; how are people supposed to live there?

I told Kolya about it, and he said, So the fact that we’re living in a dead soldier’s apartment doesn’t bother you? That’s the way it should be. New people come to take the place of dead fighters.

Except that we didn’t have any fighters in Berezovka. Foolish Lushka hid two partisans—and that was it.

Nina looks at the street, lined with two-story wooden houses; an invalid on a bench is talking to two old women. The sound from a gramophone reaches her from a neighbor’s window.

This is Moscow, the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first worker and peasant state in the world. Marina Roshcha.

Nina gazes at her round belly and tries to persuade the boy or girl to hold on a little longer and not kick but lie quietly. The doctor said she could talk to him already. Or her?

Nina’s waiting for her husband. She sits home for days on end, afraid to go out. Even in the daytime they could attack her on the street, take her money away, or just strip her. They could jam a knife into her, or a bullet. There are an awful lot of thieves.

Kolya says it all started after the war. Before, Moscow was different. But now that people have been taught to kill, they just can’t stop.

Nina doesn’t know how to kill. She only knows how to hide so she won’t die.

For two months she hid in the forests, surviving on berries and occasionally digging up potatoes in Berezovka’s charred gardens. At the sound of an engine she would fall to the ground, perfectly still.

Nina loved walking in the forest before. Her mama would laugh and call her my little forest girl.

Her mother burned up along with the rest of the village.

Nina survived because that morning she’d gone out for mushrooms when the punitive expedition showed up. She hid out in the woods and didn’t emerge until it was all over.

Until everyone was dead.

Kolya says he wouldn’t have lasted a day in the forest. I’m afraid of wolves, he says. She laughs; he’s probably not afraid of anything.

Nina is afraid for him.

Afraid they’ll slit Kolya’s throat to take away his gun.

Afraid Kolya will stop someone to check his documents—and the person will start shooting.

Afraid Kolya will go after a thieves’ den—and be killed in a shootout.

Afraid Kolya will walk into a building—and into an ambush.

Nina says, Take care of yourself, for god’s sake. If only you could wait until the child is born!

But Kolya replies, I took an oath. If I don’t stop them they’re going to keep on killing. Pretty recently they butchered a whole family in Marina Roshcha. Even a tiny baby. Got away with 25,000 rubles.

A huge amount. Kolya’s salary is just 550. How long do you have to work to make that kind of money?

How old was the baby? Nina asks.

Still in its cradle, absolutely tiny, Kolya answers. They killed him so he wouldn’t cry.

Why is he telling her this? Nina wants to hear one more time how after she gives birth Kolya is going to take time off. No, Kolya doesn’t want to talk about leaving work, he answers Nina. Wait for us to catch them all, and then we’ll start living well and happily!

Nina doesn’t believe it. She remembers how people used to say, We’ll drive Fritz out and then we’ll start living well and happily. Where is that happiness now? Now it’s like seeing her husband off to the front line every single day.

Actually, it’s her own fault. She knew who she was marrying. From the very first second. Only Kolya was so handsome in his new uniform, blue with red trim. His cap with its sky-blue band. His boots. The moment she saw him at the dance, she fell in love. Kolya later admitted he’d gone into the police force because of the uniform; they issued it for free and he liked wearing it.

There was a star on the cap, and in the center a soldier with a rifle at the ready. Nina liked that a lot too.

At the time Nina had only just arrived and she was afraid of Moscow. It was awful! Everyone cutting in and out, sideways, down the streets—and the locals pushing their way past, swaggering, spitting at their feet, not afraid of anything. You could spot them right away: soft eight-panel caps, boxcalf boots, and white mufflers.

Later Kolya told her those were the thieves. Crooks.

Why can they walk down the street like that with no one arresting them? Nina asked.

Well, you can’t arrest someone for an eight-panel cap, Kolya laughed. Don’t worry, they won’t be walking around for long. Too bad they’ve abolished the vyshka . But that’s all right, if need be we’ll take matters into our own hands—and he winked.

Vyshka was short for capital punishment. Execution. It was abolished a year ago. Kolya says there’s no one to chop timber in Siberia.

Nina thinks, We’re going to have a child—and how are we going to live? It’s good the war’s over. But still, are we really going to spend our whole life in the city? No forest, no real river. You can go to the big park, people dive and swim from the pier—but Nina feels shy. She swims like a country girl, after all, and in Moscow everyone must have some special style.

Nina sits home waiting for her husband. Sits and waits, worried, troubled, and afraid. She can’t make heads or tails of what she reads, and they don’t have a gramophone, or even a radio speaker; it’s an old building. I don’t know whether there were any televisions back then, but Nina and Kolya definitely didn’t have one.

I’m sitting home too, and I’m waiting for Nikita too. I’m worried for him—even though I have no cause for worry. Nikita’s business is peaceful and he drives carefully. I’m still worried, though.

I’d like to say, I don’t know if I could deal with being in Nina’s place, but I can’t. She and I are one and the same, which means at some point I was sitting there like that, waiting for my husband to come home from work, bored, looking out the window, stroking my pregnant belly, afraid to go outside.

It’s weird to feel other people’s lives inside you. Snatches of other people’s thoughts and irrelevant facts suddenly surface in my memory. Edible berries. The best place to gather mushrooms. How to climb a tree and get settled so you don’t fall out at night.

And sometimes a tune gets stuck in my head and keeps ringing in my mind hour after hour. Sometimes I can even make out the words.

I know this is what the little boys sang when Nina walked around the yard. Nina heard this song, and now I hear it in my head. All the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn—and I don’t know whether this song amused, frightened, or annoyed Nina. I get my melancholy from her. All the time, everywhere—that is, in this life and the ones before, around the clock, night and day, I sit in an armchair, on a seat, on a stool, and wait for my beloved to come home. And I’m afraid something’s going to happen to him.

When I’m Nina, I caress my big pregnant belly. When I’m Masha, I paint my toenails over and over again, though I have no plans to go out. It calms me.

Kolya comes home and tells me how they picked up the Kazentsov gang a few days before, on a train, and how there was shooting. The gang had hidden out in the children’s car but the conductor noticed them and called it in. It turned out they were hijacking cars. They’d ask a driver to take them out of town, where they’d kill him. Now they were the ones getting killed, at least two of them.

Kolya says there are too many guns in Moscow. Captured and brought back from the war, taken away from policemen, stolen from the Hammer and Sickle plant, where they’re selling old inventory to melt down.

To make sure a policeman can’t have his gun taken away, Kolya explained, the cop attached it to a special red cord. The cord goes up one side of his uniform, around his neck, and down the other side. The grip has a special loop where the cord is attached. Kolya explained and even showed me, but I still don’t understand. Better they just take the gun. That way, if some crook decides he wants your gun, he doesn’t have to kill you for it.

I’m really scared for Kolya. Since I got pregnant, I’m even more scared.

At first I was so glad we were going to have a child! I imagined him growing there, inside me. I went to the doctor once a month and the doctor told me when his little eyes appeared, and his little hands. I’m only sorry he’s going to be born in Moscow and not the country. What kind of a life is this? Why did I ever come here? I must have known I’d meet Kolya. There’s nothing else good here in Moscow.

I’m glad I didn’t enter the institute. I’d have had to study—but before you know it, a little baby is going to be born and Kolya will come to his senses. We’ll go away together, wherever we want.

I’ve been living in Moscow nearly a year and I still can’t figure out what draws people here. In line at the doctor’s I met a woman, also near her due date but older than me, her name was Marfa, also from the country, but she’s been in Moscow a long time, from back before the war. She’s a good woman and she reassures me, says giving birth isn’t so terrible. What’s terrible, she says, is living, and even more terrible—dying. Then I said, Well, I know, my whole village perished. And she stroked my head and said, Poor thing!—and for a second it felt like my mama was with me again. Though it’s a sin to say so, of course, because I’ll never have another mama. I’m a mama myself now. Only two months to go.

In line at the doctor’s the women were talking about something terrible. They said you could get rid of a child for money. If you didn’t want to give birth. In Berezovka they said that girls drank all kinds of potions to make it happen. I was little but I understood what they were saying. Well, a potion is understandable. But here apparently you could find a secret doctor and for fifteen hundred rubles he would take care of… well… it… everything.

Fifteen hundred! That’s so much money! It’s terrible to think who might have that! Here I am working out how to survive on 550 every month. For two—it’s hard. And now a child as well, and he has to be fed.

I wish he could be born as soon as possible, my little bunny. If it’s a boy, I hope he looks like Kolya. And if a girl, like my mama. I want her to have the same kind of eyebrows, and ears too.

I hope she’s like my mama. I don’t have anything left of her, not even a photograph. Everything burned up.

Mama would have been happy for me now. She must have been just as happy when she was dying. She knew I’d been saved.

Kolya laughs at me, but I know: there is a God somewhere. And my mama is with Him right now, on a cloud, watching me and seeing that I’m going to have my own little bunny, my own little boy, my own little girl—instead of her, instead of Papa, instead of Aunt Katya and Uncle Slava, instead of lame Mitrich and old lady Anfisa. Instead of our whole village.

Hurry up and get born, little bunny. I mean, get born when it’s time, but don’t make me wait too long. I’m a little afraid of giving birth. In Moscow you have to go to the hospital. There are strangers there and who knows what they might do. And people say there are doctor-wreckers around now too. And crooks probably.

Here she sits, day after day, little Nina from ’48, getting heavier and heavier—and so is my heart. Because all the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn—it’s the same old story, and I know what happens next.

Two weeks before the birth Nina puts jacket potatoes on the burner and suddenly remembers she’s out of salt.

She goes over to Aunt Vera’s, her neighbor.

She knocks and no one answers, so Nina pushes on the door and shouts, Aunt Vera! She walks in and she’s struck by a cast-iron pot. They were aiming for her head but she managed to jump to the side, and then she hears a whisper: Finish the bitch off! She shields her unborn baby with her arms and starts yelling, but not loudly enough. When the second attacker strikes her in the belly, she screams loudly enough for the whole building to hear, the whole courtyard, even the street—and the sound barrels over the neighboring roofs, over the quays of the Moscow River, over the attractions at the central park, over the pavement of Red Square, over the Mausoleum’s pyramid, over the Kremlin’s stars, over the empty pit where the demolished temple once stood, over the wooden buildings built after the war, over the thieves’ dens and lairs, over the police stations, over the prisons and penal colonies, over the subway entrances, over the movie theaters and cultural institutions—over all of postwar Moscow, over the unlucky victor city, over the kids without fathers, the women without husbands, the men without arms, legs, conscience, fear, family, memory, or love.

While Nina is still falling on the bloody ground, screaming and screaming…

One more blow and she would have been silenced forever. The attackers killed Aunt Vera and they could have killed Nina too. Smashed her head in, slit her throat, beat her with whatever came to hand—but they fled.

They would be caught two days later. Maybe they’d shoot someone during the arrest.

But Kolya was running down the street, holding the tiny body close, and the umbilical cord dangled like one more piece of red piping, and his whole handsome uniform was covered in blood. Kolya was running, cursing, weeping, and too late.

It was a boy.

Two years later they left Moscow. The state farm built where Berezovka had burned down gave them a house; a good muzhik always comes in handy in the countryside. And so they lived, until their death. Kolya trained to be a tractor driver; Nina worked as a milkmaid, poultry maid, and clerk at the general store—whatever opportunity arose. For a while she was even a kindergarten teacher. But not for long.

They didn’t have children of their own. Kolya died in 1985, Nina a year later.

Sometimes I see her very old. Her hands are folded in her lap, she’s sitting on a stool by the window, and the older teenagers, the girls and boys, are giggling on the bench. Music reaches her from an open car.

Nina has no one to wait for and nothing to fear. Her life is over.

Only in her head, like a worn-out record. All the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn, from one night to the next, and again till morn is like an obsession, an incantation, a promise that it will all happen again.

I doze off holding Jan’s hand, but it doesn’t matter. At night I dream of my lovers. The men I couldn’t have. The boy from our school, a year younger than me, his curly fair hair escaping his school cap: a car ran him down right in front of his house, in front of his parents and nanny. The Menshevik agitator, his glasses shattered, his cracking voice turning into a short screech when a bullet forced the petals of a crimson rose open on his jacket chest. The Red soldier in the dusty helmet silently bowing over the corpse of his comrade who was captured by the White Cossacks; a star was carved on his salt-strewn back—a five-pointed star gone from red to brown. A fifteen-year-old kid shouting through tears, Swine, swine!, his ginger hair soaked with sweat and stuck to his forehead, so you wished you could run your hand over it. A stout man, temples lightly touched with gray, looking back for the last time before boarding that barge—a spark in his dark pupil, like a gleam of light, but from the other shore.

I doze off holding Jan’s hand. It’s a strong hand covered with fine faded hair, his closely trimmed nails edged in black.

I kiss his fingers and imagine that this narrow dark stripe is caked blood, the congealed blood of the people he’s ordered to be executed. I kiss his hand and think that this is the hand of someone who separates life from death, who splits human existence in two, the hand of someone used to deciding for others, whether they are to live or die.

My lips flick across his palm, travel up toward the bend in his elbow, and slip over the tendons of his forearms. When he makes a fist they tense, like a belt drive, and I feel the flow of blood, the faint pulsing, and my lips continue their journey, and I kiss his armpits, the hair smelling of grim soldier sweat, the only patch of real hair on his body, if you don’t count the thick growth at the base of his mighty shaft, which rises down there somewhere. I forbid myself to think about that, run my tongue over his smooth chest, just grazing his nipples—and then Jan places his heavy hand on my back, and his nails start quietly clawing at my skin, always in the same spot, between my shoulder blades—and even after who knows how many reincarnations I still swoon when Nikita strokes my back like that—I swoon, and then I shudder, and my tongue turns downward, following the narrow path between his heaving ribs, crossing the puffy scar from the saber blow—He did get me, after all, the snake, after I shot him with my revolver—and run my finger over the scar, imagining some White officer drawing his sword against his killer with the cold fury of desperation, and at the same time I drop lower with my lips, to the rosette of his navel, and Jan puts his hand on the back of my head, urging, directing, hastening the now inevitable movement. My tongue goes into a spiral, feeling his great axis, around which my night revolves, rise higher and higher as it swells with blood. Finally, squeezing his two globes, I open my mouth and swallow the crimson head, sucking in air through fluttering nostrils, as if it were a line of cocaine, moving up and down, feeling the weight of his hand on the back of my head, the resilience of his cock between my lips, the trembling of his testicles in my hand, and the quivering of his powerful male body.

I’ve known the taste of quite a few men’s cocks. My tongue and palate have learned to distinguish adolescent languor, animal fear, ominous hatred, trembling adoration, impatience, burning, itching, haste, the urgency of unspilled semen, the pressure of lust, and the spasm of passion.

Jan’s taste is the taste of gun grease and machine oil. Viscous and sticky, it makes me shudder just to think of it. I hold on to his balls—easy to take, hard to let go—and feel his shaft moving in my mouth—the almost toylike barrel of a revolver, though not small—the taste of which so many have learned in years past. No, the huge hot barrel of an artillery gun, the organ of a machine of destruction, poised to fire, just waiting for the command.

I’m moving faster and faster, the hand on the back of my head won’t let me rest, my lips itch with a sweet pain—I press my whole body to Jan, and from the depth of my heart rises the sacred word. It runs through my veins, flies up my throat, and opens my mouth even wider with the violent magic command: Fire!—and a sticky stream of semen explodes in my head.

At school, in scripture class, they taught us that the seed dies and yields much fruit. Jan’s seed is dead and cools on my lips in a whitish film. The fruit it brings… they’re beautiful those fruit—and tears run down my cheeks. Then he takes his hand from the back of my head, sits down on the bed, and jerks me toward him. I bury my sticky lips in his shoulder, and his hand lazily rakes my spine.

Then Jan starts talking. He recalls the Civil War, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Antonov uprising, the counterrevolutionary plots. He tells me how his day went.

His days pass with mundane matters. Compiling lists, dictating telegrams, and listening to reports, denunciations, interrogations, resolutions, and decisions. Now Jan almost never does the executing himself—Let the others do some work, he says. At the beginning of our affair I asked him whether he remembered how many people he’d killed, and Jan answered, In battle doesn’t count, and when they lowered me into the barge—there was really no one keeping score.

Sometimes I tell myself, Right now I’m crying on the chest of a man who has killed people without count—and my heart pounds like a hammer. I ask, Could you shoot me?

Of course—Jan grabs me by the shoulders—of course I could. I’ve shot men I slept with. They were traitors. I serve the Revolution, but you understand, Kolya, and the Revolution does not forgive treason.

I don’t ask him how many men he’s slept with. I’m afraid he doesn’t remember them any more than he does those he killed. I’m afraid of getting lost on his list, his long list, like his list of executions.

I don’t ask him whether he’s ever slept with a woman. That thought is unbearable: imagining Jan with a woman, imagining his mighty cock plunging into those fusty wet human insides. The female secretion is disgusting, like rust eating into the barrel of a rifle. I can’t imagine Jan’s seed, the seed of death, spilling in a woman’s lap, that nauseating source of new life.

I’d like to hold Jan’s cock in my hand and squeeze it with my lips always—to know that not a single drop of his seed would fertilize a woman. Small children are awful, their howls are a parody of passion, and their stinking diapers, strollers, and bonnets are the gloomy prophecy of old age’s impotence, which I will not live to see.

One morning I’ll see my cock dozing between my hips like a feeble worm. One evening, at the sight of a man’s nakedness, it won’t perk up and will stay wrinkled and pathetic. That’s the day I’ll realize my old age has arrived. And I’ll ask Jan—because Jan will always be by my side, forever young—to add me to his execution list and—in memory of our love—finish me off himself.

Right now Jan almost never takes part in the executions. I’m saving my bullets, he jokes. I have a dream about shooting a countess. A real live countess.

When he told me this the first time I got scared. I imagined some high society love story: little Jan, an errand boy; the countess he lusts after (or who lusts after him); the old count who in the murk of the conjugal bedroom reveals to Jan the mysteries of homosexual love; a woman’s silhouette in the doorway; the shouts, the hysterics, maybe the police or a lashing in the stables; the vow for revenge, underground cells, the party of Bolsheviks, revolution, war, Cheka, execution lists, my tears on his shoulder…

That time Jan reassured me.

You have to understand, he said, I’ve never seen a genuine countess. Only in the movies. So I want to see how countesses behave before death, how they die, what color blood they have.

Aristocrats have blue, I joked, but Jan didn’t answer. I saw his cock stiffen up again, and in an onset of jealousy I squeezed it and Jan’s nails dug into my back. Then he loosened my fingers and laughed. What are you, jealous? Do you want me to take you along when we send her off to Dukhonin?

Since then we’ve spoken of this often. Jan’s dream has become my dream. We’ve imagined finding a countess: a spy infiltrated by White émigrés from Paris; an aristocrat in hiding who survived the Revolution in some out-of-the-way house, masquerading as a peasant, factory worker, or student. On the day of her execution she’ll be wearing a white dress, holding a parasol, wearing black high-laced shoes on low heels. Sometimes we’ll lead her down a brick corridor to the last wall, sometimes we’ll take her out into the snow in the Cheka courtyard (they haven’t executed anyone there in a long time, but in my dreams for some reason I see her walking, stumbling in the snow, across that courtyard), sometimes we’ll take her out of town, to the Gulf of Finland. Even in his dreams Jan won’t let me carry out the sentence myself—I just hand him the revolver and then he, squinting, slowly raises the muzzle and the countess turns pale, opening her parasol with a trembling hand or dropping it in the snow, covering her face in elbow-length white gloves. Jan always says, Farewell, countess!—and the seed of death bursts from his barrel, and her white dress turns red, soaked with blood, ordinary red blood, the same color as everyone else he has shot.

His dreams go no further than that shot, but in my visions I drop to my knees before him, kiss the revolver’s smoking muzzle, and then carefully take the other shaft into my mouth, a shaft poised and ready to fire.

I doze off holding Jan’s hand and think, Today it seems like he isn’t really with me, as if he’s thinking about something else, not the Revolution even, but some other young man, a year or two younger than me maybe, a twenty-two-year-old beauty with curly fair hair. Half-asleep, I see the three of us, then Jan goes away somewhere and my new lover kisses me on the lips—and then Jan’s voice wakes me, and I don’t understand right away what he’s said, but when I do I squeeze his hand even harder—and fall asleep for real.

I’ve found her, Jan says. I’ve found the countess.

There’d been a joint meeting to fight banditry—the police, UgRo, and OGPU. When they were done, Jan went outside and saw a young woman standing with her elbows resting on a fence, almost stock-still, her entire figure replete with bourgeois refinement, the aristocratism of the old regime. She was out of place there, among the strong men in leather jackets. I should ask for her documents, Jan thought, but at that moment an UgRo officer he didn’t know ran up to the girl, hugged her, and kissed her on the lips.

Jan walked away so as not to attract attention, only later he asked, Who was that kissing the woman over there?—and in reply he heard the man’s name.

All the rest was a technical matter. Jan made inquiries and found out more about the man. Some Civil War hero, a fighter against banditry, a distinguished comrade. True, he had to dig deeper when it came to the girl. A student at the university—so Jan stopped by her department and checked her documents. Everything seemed in order, a worker family, but her name put him on his guard. He went to the address where her mother and sister lived. My revolutionary instinct did not mislead me, he chuckled. When the house committee saw his warrant, they told him everything. A former bourgeoise who started at the factory recently so she could get into the university.

The street cleaner volunteered to show him where they’d lived before—in their own house, it turned out. And there, not believing his own ears, Jan heard this: The dead count’s wife and daughter.

I’ll collect some more documents, he said, and I felt his fingers trembling in my hand, and report to Comrade Meerzon that a representative of the exploiting classes concealed her origin when entering the university, and with criminal intent entered into a liaison with an officer of the workers and peasant militia. This means the death penalty, believe me, Vitya, I know how to write.

I pressed my whole body to Jan, soaking up his trembling.

Why didn’t you say something? I whispered. After all, this is a gift for both of us.

Yes, Jan replied gravely, for the Revolution’s birthday.

The anniversary isn’t until the next week, but I realize that Jan is already counting the days until his Farewell, countess!—when the crimson rose blossoms on her white dress.

He said the Revolution’s birthday, as if the Revolution is a person, a woman he’s in love with. I adore that chivalry in him, that obedience and sterility, the cold flame of unearthly passion eating him up from the inside. For Jan we are both the Revolution’s lovers, and our intimacy is just an attempt to get close to Her; for him a new attempt, after years of war and execution lists, to replace death cries with cries of pleasure and the lead seed of the revolver with the seed of our love drying on my lips.

In the morning I watched Jan dress. He turned his back to me and I gazed at his butt, rounded and resilient, gazed at the scar between his broad shoulder blades… Aroused and trembling, I ran over and kissed the back of his neck.

Jan smiled over his shoulder.

Not now, Vitya, I have to go, and so do you.

Yes, I went to work too. A boring office job. If it hadn’t been for meeting Jan, my life would have been as flat as the papers I sorted through. I despised my job, though Jan did say, This too is service to the Revolution.

I got dressed and wanted to leave with him—but Jan wasn’t going to wait for me.

In a hurry to see your countess? I asked.

Our countess—and he smiled in the doorway.

I often think those words were the greatest avowal of love in my life, a magnificent epilogue to our romance, the farewell moment in a string of nights that smelled of semen and gun grease, long nights we shared the way we shared the Revolution, that stern Virgin; the way we shared the countess, the snow-white lamb doomed for slaughter in Her name.

Jan didn’t come back that night. Sometimes he was kept late, but he always warned me in advance. After midnight, tortured by suspicion, jealousy, and fear, I ran all the way across the city to Lubyanka Square. I imagined the attempted arrest, the resistance of the counterrevolutionary conspirators, a foolish bullet, and a bloody rose on his broad, hairless chest.

I asked the guard whether Jan was there and in reply I got, Get out of here, contra!, words that are doubly frightening on OGPU’s threshold. Lost, I wandered off; turning the corner, I heard the sound of an engine. A car was pulling up and behind the wheel sat a young boy. I knew him; he’d brought Jan home a couple of times after nighttime operations.

Are you Viktor? he asked.

I nodded, hesitant to ask about Jan. But he told me without waiting for my question. Later I thought they might have been lovers too. The boy’s voice held a sadness, and he told me the truth, which an OGPU agent isn’t supposed to share with an outsider—unless, of course, something more connects him to that outsider than the nighttime street, the predawn hour, and the dim glow of the streetlamps.

We got a warning, he said, that Jan is supposedly linked to the SRs and is planning a terrorist act. An UgRo agent reported that some petty thief happened to give testimony about this during a roundup.

What nonsense, I murmured. Jan has nothing to do with thieves.

I don’t know, the boy said. They killed the thief when he tried to escape. But the UgRo agent is such a distinguished comrade—he fought in the Civil War and can’t be doubted. He spoke with Comrade Meerzon in his office for two hours, and Meerzon personally signed the arrest order.

In the camps people sometimes talk about how they learned of the arrest of their near and dear. Usually they say, We believed they’d sort things out there and release him. I grinned ever so slightly. That night I had no illusions. I knew how this machine worked. I knew I’d never see Jan again. I knew it was pointless to go see Meerzon and tell him that the UgRo agent’s lover was a former countess and he had slandered Jan when he realized Jan was getting close to her. Yes, I knew it was all pointless. Pointless and dangerous.

If there had been roosters in Moscow, that night they could have cockadoodle-dooed without end. I renounced my love in a flash—I said, Well, Comrade Meerzon knows better—and hunched up, went to meet the graying dawn.

My love died before the bullet entered Jan’s smooth neck, right where I’d kissed him for the last time. My love died. The man I loved couldn’t sit in a cell or answer any interrogator’s questions. He could only ask the questions himself, only lock other people up in cells, with every movement asserting the great invigorating power of revolutionary death, which boiled in him like an eternal spring, gave strength to the roots of that mighty tree, filled with sap the strong shaft that swelled between my lips.

After Jan’s disappearance I was gripped by a dreary sadness, as if the whole postcoital tristia our nights had never known had simply been biding its time. My dreams were pale, colorless, like the pages of the daily newspapers with their reports about new achievements, new construction, and new enemies. I went back to my hopeless, faded existence, now even more insipid than before I met Jan. Even young boys and men didn’t excite me now, as if deep down inside I had found a secret inner courtyard where I made the very possibility of intimacy and love face the wall.

One day, at dawn, I dreamed of a girl in white carrying a parasol and wearing high-laced boots. She was walking arm in arm with a man I didn’t know who was wearing a leather jacket, and I had no doubt that this was my love’s murderer, Jan’s murderer. I was reminded of the unbearable contrast between the white lace and black leather jacket where their arms touched. The man seemed my age, broad of shoulder, round-headed, and like many in those days, shaved bald. The glance he cast at the girl radiated tenderness, but the moment he looked away his eyes turned into two black circles, two endless tunnels, two rifle muzzles ready to fire.

I woke up. On my lips was the forgotten taste of gun grease and machine oil. For the first time since Jan’s disappearance I started to caress myself, turned over on my back, shutting my eyes, and squeezed my hardening cock in my hand. I imagined Jan—his powerful hands and fingers covered in fair hair, the scars on his back and belly, the prominent tendons of his forearms, his hairless chest, the forgotten smell of wartime sweat; but the familiar features faded and through Jan’s image his murderer peered imperiously, as if Jan had turned into that man, as if the murderer had swallowed Jan up. When the metamorphosis was complete, a thick stream spurted up and fell in dead drops on my belly.

The countess was a mirage, a fata morgana. A set trap, a temptation Jan could not resist. The Revolution did not forgive infidelity; the Revolution’s jealousy was worse than my youthful jealousy. The false promise to bring a lamb for sacrifice could not fool Her; in the secret order to which Jan and I belonged there was no place for women—only Her. Passion that did not belong to the Revolution could only be given to another man, as if to one’s own reflection in the mirror, one’s own double, one’s own partner in the strict service of the cruel maiden.

I knew my turn would come sooner or later. I was going to pay for the dreams Jan and I shared; I would pay for our countess.

I waited for many years, and when the time came, I signed the investigation’s protocol without reading it—but I didn’t tell them anything about Jan, or our love, or the bewitching fata morgana who drew us into the fatal abyss.

Sometimes I think I didn’t betray our love after all.

I was waiting for them to execute me, but times had changed. The Revolution required slaves, not sacrifices. They sent me to a camp, where I was certain I would die. I could die in transit, in Siberia, or at the colony; or, after the second arrest, in the transit prisons, in Dzhezkazgan or Vorkuta. I probably didn’t perish because the death-infused seed I’d spilled into my throat so many nights in a row had filled me with strength.

In ’56, during the wave of Khrushchev’s rehabilitations, I returned to Moscow. I thought, They’ve rehabilitated Jan too. I thought I might learn the name of the UgRo informer, meet with him and look into his deep dark eyes… But I didn’t try. What would I have done if I’d met the man? In my dreams I sometimes killed him, sometimes I had sex with him, and often at the decisive moment the countess would walk into the bedroom, a ghost, still very young, walk in and watch silently, and his mighty round-headed cock would soften in my lips.

Once I dreamed that the bullet—my lover’s lead seed—would not let time waste my flesh. I’d been twenty-four—and the same number of years have now passed since I came back from Kazakhstan, although once again I thought I would soon die. The years have faded my memory of Jan, my memory of our love, my memory of the camp, the countess, and her round-headed companion, everything that happened in the last seventy-odd years. I’ve spent nearly my entire life alone; and in old age even the old ghosts refrained from violating my solitude.

I know this is how I’ll die. Alone, in an empty apartment, the summer of 1980, the sixty-third anniversary of the Revolution’s birth.

Death is a great cheat, a fata morgana. I once dreamed of it, but it slipped away, over and over. Eventually I gave up, weary, and backed off.

Now it’s coming for me and I say, Listen, I don’t understand why I ever loved you. In reply you squeeze my old fingers in your cold hand.

Is this really what I dreamed of half a century ago?

Too bad. You’ve taken so long to get here, I almost forgot how much I once loved you!

A little girl on Crimea’s cliffs, a young woman from a burned-out village, an old woman in front of a mirror. A sailor floating down the Volga, a soldier pulling out a pin, an old man waiting for death, a man finding it for himself. And more and more new souls keep crowding in behind them.

All of them are me.

My god, so many! None of them are left—the son, the daughter, the heir, the heiress—no one is left, no one and nothing, there’s not even anyone to remember, anyone to tell, anyone to utter a word to those who came after. No one sees or hears them.

Only me…

Masha weeps, she weeps for everyone who vanished without a trace, weeps and repeats: Only me, only me… and does that mean I’m their heir? Does that mean I have to bear all this, preserve these souls in my emaciated body, bear them eternally in exchange for my unconceived children?

I’m as alone as alone can be, Masha tells herself. I never knew my real parents, my mama and papa drove me out, I have no brothers or sisters, and will never have children. How will I carry this burden alone? Am I a medium or something? Did I summon up the dead? No, they came to me of their own accord, entered me the way a rapist enters a sleeping woman, a woman who has lost the strength to resist.

Oh well, if you’ve come, make yourself comfortable, eat me, enjoy. Here is my flesh, here is my blood, but no bread and wine are served here. Be my guests, only know it’ll be a short story. Because I’m not going to be able to bear all this any longer.

I can’t alone.

And I can’t call for help.

I’ll go to Nikita and say, I hear voices, I have other people, dead people, living inside me. Instantly his voice will become very patient, sympathetic, and upbeat. That voice will make even me start to think I’ve lost my mind and belong in a psych ward. It’s probably better if I don’t say anything at all.

Just so he’s nearby, just so he doesn’t leave, just so he holds my hand—and I’ll keep quiet, I’ll deal with the rest myself.

I’ll say, Wasn’t it nice in the Crimea nine years ago? Remember I was still telling fortunes on the quay? Could that have been when it all started? Could that be where I let all these alien lives inside me, all these lost, dead, unfortunate, barren souls? But we were still having fun that evening, drinking wine, eating shashlik. We were young and foolish. Strong and confident. Maybe deep down I still have that strength, maybe it’s enough at this age, what do you think, Nikita, eh?

Don’t answer, you don’t have to. After all, you and I know ourselves how much we can withstand. Don’t answer, all right? Just don’t go away, please. Don’t go.

I’ll just hold your hand—we’ll all just hold your hand—and maybe we’ll surface, or maybe we’ll finally learn to breathe underwater.