Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Strange Circumstances

CHAPTER 9

Excerpt 18…. then me. She couldn’t reach me by phone. She couldn’t get a ticket at the airport. She stormed the director’s office, brandishing the telegram, and he gave her a note, but it wasn’t much help. There were no planes ready for takeoff, and the ones that arrived were going the wrong way. Finally, in desperation, she took a plane to Kharkov. Then the whole story started over again, but it was pouring rain there to boot. It was only toward evening that she managed to get to Moscow by a freight plane that was carrying refrigerators and coffins. From Domodedovo Airport she rushed over to Sheremetyevo, and she finally got to Leningrad riding in the cockpit. She hadn’t eaten a single thing since she left and spent most of the time weeping. Even as she was falling asleep, she kept threatening to go to the post office first thing in the morning with the police and find out whose work it was, what bastards were responsible. Naturally, I agreed with her, saying, of course, we won’t leave it at this; for jokes like this people should be punched out; no, more than that, they should be arrested. Of course, I didn’t tell her that nowadays, thank God, the post office wouldn’t accept a telegram like that without confirmation, that it is impossible to play practical jokes like that, and that it was most likely that no one sent the telegram, that the Teletype in Odessa just printed it out by itself.

I couldn’t fall asleep. It was morning anyway. It was light outside, and despite the blinds the room was bright. I lay still in bed, petting Kaliam, stretched out between us, and listened to Irina’s even breathing. She always slept deeply and with great pleasure. There was nothing so bad in the world that it would give her insomnia. At least, so far there hadn’t been.

The sickening sense of impending doom that befell me the moment I read and finally understood the telegram had not left me. My muscles were in cramps and inside, in my chest and stomach, was a huge, shapeless cold lump. Once in a while the lump moved, and then my skin crawled.

At first, when Irina fell asleep in mid-word and I heard her even breathing, for a moment I felt better. I wasn’t alone. Next to me was the person nearest and dearest to me. But the cold toad in my chest stirred and I was horrified by that sense of relief; so this is what I’ve sunk to; they’ve reduced me to this: I can be happy that Irina is here, that Irina is in the same foxhole under fire with me. Oh no, we go for her ticket first thing in the morning. Back to Odessa. I’ll push everyone aside, I’ll chew our path through the lines to the ticket office.

My poor little girl, how she suffered because of those bastards, because of me and that lousy interstellar matter, all of which isn’t worth a single wrinkle on Irina’s face. And they got to her, too. Why? They needed her for something? The bastards, the blind bastards. They hit anyone who is in firing range. No, nothing will happen to her. They’re just using her to scare me. They’re playing on my nerves, one way or another.

Suddenly, I pictured dead Snegovoi—walking along Moscow Boulevard in his striped pajamas, heavy, cold, with a clotted bullet hole in his thick skull; coming into the post office and getting in line at the telegram window; a gun in his right hand, the telegram in his left; and nobody notices. The girl takes the telegram from his dead fingers, writes out a receipt, and, forgetting the money, calls out: Next.

I shook my head to dispel the vision, quietly got out of bed, and padded to the kitchen in my underwear. It was sunny in there, the sparrows were making a racket in the yard, and I could hear the janitor’s broom. I picked up Irina’s purse, fished out a crumpled pack with two broken cigarettes in it, sat down, and lit up. I hadn’t smoked in a long time. Two, maybe three years. Proving my willpower. Yep, brother Malianov, you’ll need your willpower now. Hell, I’m a lousy actor, and I don’t know how to lie. Irina must know nothing. She has nothing to do with it. I have to do this alone. No one can help me, not Irina, no one.

And what does help have to do with it, anyway? Who’s talking about help? I don’t tell Irina my problems if I can at all avoid it. I don’t like making her sad. I love making her happy and hate making her sad. If it weren’t for all this crap I would have loved to have told her about the M cavities, she would have understood immediately, even though she’s no theoretician and is always putting down her own abilities. But what can I tell her now?

There are different problems, however, different levels of problems. There are minor ones that it’s no sin to complain about, that are even pleasant to kvetch about. Irina would say: Big deal, what nonsense, and everything would get better. If the problems are bigger, then it’s just unmanly to talk about them. I don’t tell Mother or Irina about them. And then there are the problems of such magnitude that it becomes a little unclear. First of all, whether I want it or not, Irina is in the firing line with me.

Something very unfair is happening here. I’m being battered to death, but at least I understand for what, can guess who’s doing it, and know that I’m being battered. These are not stupid jokes and not fate; they’re aiming at me. I think it’s better to know that they’re aiming at you. Of course, it takes all kinds, and probably most people would rather not know, but my Irina is not one of them. She’s reckless; I know her. When she’s afraid of something she rushes headlong right into her fear. It would be dishonest not to tell her. And in general, I have to make a decision. (I haven’t even tried to think about that yet, and I’ll have to. Or have I already chosen? Have I made my choice without knowing it?) And if I have to choose—well, let’s assume the choice itself is up to me alone. We’ll do what we want. But what about the consequences? One choice will lead to their tossing atom bombs, instead of plain ones, at us. Another choice—I wonder, would Irina have liked Glukhov? I mean he’s a nice, pleasant man, quiet, meek. We could get a television, to Bobchik’s everlasting joy; we could ski every Saturday, go to the movies. One way or the other the decision will affect more than just me. Sitting under a shower of bombs is bad, but finding out after ten years of marriage that your husband is a jellyfish is no picnic either. But maybe it would be all right. How do I know what she sees in me? That’s just it, I don’t. And maybe she doesn’t know either.

I finished the cigarette and flipped the butt into the garbage. A passport lay next to the can. Nice. We had cleaned up every last scrap, every penny, but there was her passport. I picked up the gray-green book and looked at the first page distractedly. I don’t know why. I broke out in a cold sweat. Sergeenko, Inna Fedorovna. Date of birth: 1939. What’s this? The photograph was of Irina—no, not Irina. Some woman who looked like Irina, but wasn’t. Some Sergeenko, Inna Fedorovna.

I carefully put the passport on the edge of the table and tiptoed to the bedroom. I broke out in another sweat. The woman lying under the sheet had dry skin, pulled taut on her face, and her upper teeth, white and sharp, were exposed, either in a smile or in a martyred grin. That was a witch there under my sheets. Forgetting myself, I shook her by her naked shoulder. Irina woke up immediately, opened her huge eyes, and muttered: “Dmitri, what’s the matter? Does something hurt?” God, it was Irina. Of course it was Irina. What a nightmare. “I was snoring, right?” she asked in a sleepy voice and went back to sleep.

I tiptoed back to the kitchen, moved the passport away from me, took out the last cigarette, and lit up. Yes. That’s how we live now. That’s what our life will be now. From now on.

The icy animal inside me stirred some more, and then was still. I wiped the disgusting sweat from my face; I had an idea and started digging through her purse. Irina’s passport was in there. Malianova, Irina Ermolaevna. Date of birth: 1933. Damn! All right, why did they need to do that? This was no accident. The passport, the telegram, Irina’s difficult journey, the fact that she had to fly in a plane with coffins—all that wasn’t accidental. Or was it? They were blind, Mother Nature, brainless natural elements. That’s a good case for Vecherovsky’s theory. If it was the Homeostatic Universe quelling a microrebellion, that’s just how it should have seemed. Like a man swatting a fly with a towel—vicious, whistling blows cutting through the air; vases tumbling from shelves; lamps breaking; innocent moths falling victim to the blows; the cat, its paw stomped on, making a beeline for the couch. Massed power and inefficiency. I mean, I really don’t know anything. Maybe somewhere on the other side of town a house collapsed. They were aiming for me and hit the house instead. And all I got was the crummy passport. And all this because I thought of the M cavities the other day? To think that I could have told Irina about them!

Listen, I probably won’t be able to live like this. I never thought of myself as a coward, but living like this, without a moment’s peace, terrified by your own wife because you’ve taken her for a witch. And Vecherovsky despises Glukhov. That means he’ll stop seeing me, too. I’ll have to change everything. Everything will be different. Different friends, different work, a different life. Maybe even a different family. “Since then crooked, roundabout, godforsaken paths stretch out before me.” And you’ll be ashamed to look at yourself in the mirror when you’re shaving in the morning. The mirror will reflect a very small and very tame Malianov.

Of course, you can get used to it, you can probably get used to everything in the world. To any waste. But this would be no little waste. I’ve spent ten years working toward this. More than ten years—my whole life. Since childhood, since the school science club, since the homemade telescopes, since the calculations of Wolfe’s numbers according to someone’s observations. My M cavities, I really don’t know anything about them: what I might have done with them; what someone else might have done with them after me; continuing, developing, adding to it and passing it on to another age, the next century. Probably something not so minor might have come of it; I was losing something not so minor if it could lead to revelations that the universe itself is trying to stop. A billion years is a long time. In a billion years a civilization develops from a blob of slime—

But they’ll squash me. First they won’t let me live in peace, they’ll drive me crazy, and if that won’t work, they’ll simply squash me. Oh boy! Six o’clock. The sun was broiling already. And then, I don’t know why, the cold animal in my chest disappeared. I stood up. Moving calmly, I went into the room and got my papers and a pen from the desk. I went back to the kitchen, settled down, and started to work.

I couldn’t think well—my head was stuffed with cotton and my eyelids burned—but I carefully went through my notes, throwing out everything that was no longer necessary, put the rest in order, and copied it all into a notebook, slowly, with pleasure, carefully choosing my words, as though I were writing a final draft of an article or a report.

A lot of people don’t like this stage of the work, but I do. I like polishing my terms, savoring the choice of the most elegant and economic turns of phrase, catching the mistakes hidden in the notes, plotting graphs, preparing tables. This is the scientist’s noble dirty work—the summation, a time for admiring oneself and one’s handiwork.

And I admired myself and my handiwork until Irina was next to me—hugging me with her bare arm and pressing her warm cheek against mine.

“Huh?” I said and straightened my back.

It was my usual Irina, and not that pathetic scarecrow she resembled yesterday. She was rosy and fresh, clear-eyed and jolly. A lark. She’s a lark. I’m an owl, and she’s a lark. I’d read about a classification like that somewhere. Larks go to bed early, sleep readily and with great pleasure, and wake up fresh and happy and start singing right away, and there’s nothing in the world that will make them sleep until noon.

“You didn’t sleep at all again?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer went to the balcony door. “What are they hollering about?”

I only then realized that there was a ruckus in our courtyard—the kind of crowd noises heard at the scene of an accident after the police have arrived and before the ambulance.

“Dmitri!” Irina shouted. “Look! Talk about miracles!”

My heart fell. I know those miracles. I jumped up…

Excerpt 19…. some coffee. And Irina announced cheerfully that everything had worked out marvelously. Finally, everything in the world was turning out marvelously. She had gotten sick of Odessa over those ten days because this summer it was more crowded than ever. She missed me and had no intention of going back to Odessa, particularly since she’d never be able to get a ticket, and her mother was planning to come to Leningrad in August; she could bring Bobchik then. Now she was going back to work, right now, as soon as she’d had her coffee, and in March or April we’d go skiing together in Kirovsk as we had planned.

We had a tomato omelet. While I cooked it, Irina combed the whole apartment looking for cigarettes, didn’t find any and got a little blue, made more coffee, and asked about Snegovoi. I told her what I knew from Zykov—carefully avoiding all sharp angles and trying to present it as the usual tragic story. I remembered the beautiful Lidochka in the middle of my tale and almost brought her up but bit my tongue.

Irina was saying something about Snegovoi, remembered something, and the corners of her mouth drooped sadly (“… now there’s nobody to borrow a cigarette from!”), and I sipped my coffee, thinking about what to do next. Until I decided to tell Irina or not, it was probably better not to mention Lidochka or the grocery order since that whole matter was rather unclear, or should I say very clear, since in all this time Irina hadn’t said a word about her friend or her grocery order. Of course, Irina might have forgotten. First of all, all that anxiety, and second of all, Irina always forgets everything, but for the time being—Satan, get thee behind me—it was better to skirt the issues. Well, maybe it was better to send out a small trial balloon.

Choosing an appropriate moment, when Irina had stopped talking about Snegovoi and had gone on to cheerier topics, how Bobchik had fallen into a ditch and my mother-in-law after him, I asked casually:

“Well, and how’s Lidochka doing?”

My small trial balloon turned out to be on the huge and clumsy side. Irina’s eyes bulged.

“Which Lidochka?”

“You know, your school friend.”

“Ponomareva? What made you think of her?”

“Oh, you know,” I mumbled. “Just thought of her.” I hadn’t anticipated that question. “You know, Odessa, the battleship Potemkin. Just remembered her, that’s all. Why the third degree?”

Irina blinked a few times and then said: “I ran into her. She’s so beautiful now, has to beat men off with a stick.”

There was a pause. Damn it, I just can’t lie. Some trial balloon. Got it right between the eyes. Under Irina’s inquisitive gaze, I put my empty cup on the saucer and said in a phony voice, “I wonder how our tree is doing?” and went over to the balcony. Well, it was all clear about Lidochka now. Definitely. And how was our tree doing?

The tree was in place. The crowd was thinning. There was only the doorman, three janitors, the plumber, and two cops. There was also a yellow patrol car down there. All of them (except for the car, of course) were looking at the tree and exchanging opinions on what to do and what it meant. One of the cops had removed his cap and was wiping his shaved head with a handkerchief. It was getting hot in the yard, and the familiar odor of heated asphalt, dust, and gasoline had a new strain in it—woodsy and strange. The shaved cop put his cap back on, put away the handkerchief, and dug his finger in the fresh dirt. I stepped away from the balcony.

Irina was in the bathroom. I cleared and washed the dishes. I was terribly sleepy, but I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep. I probably wouldn’t sleep until this whole thing was over. I called Vecherovsky. As soon as I heard the ring, I remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be home today, he was giving exams to graduate students, but before I could hang up he answered.

“You’re home?” I asked stupidly.

“What can I say?” Vecherovsky replied.

“All right, all right. Did you see the tree?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think so.”

I glanced over toward the bathroom and, lowering my voice, said:

“I think it’s me.”

“Yes?”

“Uh-huh. I decided to bring my notes into order.”

“Did you?”

“Not completely. I’m going to try to finish up today.”

Vecherovsky was silent.

“What for?” he asked.

I was stumped.

“I don’t know, I wanted to clean it all up, all of a sudden. I don’t know. Regret, I guess. I felt sorry for my work. Aren’t you going out today?”

“I don’t think so. How’s Irina?”

“Chattering and chirping,” I said. I smiled involuntarily. “You know Irina. Like water off a duck’s back.”

“You told her?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

I sighed.

“You see, Phil, I keep thinking about it myself. Should I tell her or not? I can’t figure it out.”

“When in doubt,” Vecherovsky declared, “do nothing.”

I was going to tell him that that was a piece of information I had learned without him when I heard Irina turn off the shower. I mumbled into the phone:

“Okay, I’m going to work now. If there’s anything, call me, I’ll be home.”

Irina got dressed and made up, kissed me on the nose, and hopped off. I lay back on the bed, cradling my head, and started to think. Kaliam appeared immediately, climbed up on me, and spread out along my side. He was soft, hot, and damp, and I fell asleep. It was like passing out. My consciousness disappeared, and then suddenly reappeared. Kaliam was no longer on the bed, and someone was ringing the doorbell. With the signal ta ta-ta ta-ta. I stood up. My head was clear, and I felt particularly scrappy. I was prepared for mortal combat and death. I knew that a cycle was beginning, but there was no more fear—just reckless, angry determination.

It was only Weingarten. A completely impossible thing: He was sweatier, messier, sloppier, and more unkempt than yesterday.

“What’s that tree?” he demanded right in the doorway. And another impossibility: He was whispering.

“You can speak up,” I said. “Come on in.”

He came in, stepping gingerly and looking around, shoved two shopping bags with manuscripts into the closet, and wiped his wet neck with his wet hand. I pulled Kaliam back in by the tail and shut the door.

“Well?” Weingarten said.

“As you see,” I replied. “Let’s go to my room.”

“Is the tree your work?”

“Mine.”

We sat down. I sat at the table, Weingarten in the chair next to it. His huge hairy stomach peeked out from under his net T-shirt and unbuttoned nylon windbreaker. He wheezed, puffed, dried himself off, and then contorted his body, getting at the pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. And he muttered a chain of curses, directed at nothing in particular.

“The battle goes on, then,” he finally said, exhaling thick streams of smoke through his hairy nostrils. “Better to die standing up, ta-ta, than on your knees… and all that. Jerk!” he shouted. “Have you been downstairs? You idiot! Did you at least see how it’s growing? It was an explosion! And what if it happened under your ass? Boom, ka-boom, and ta-ta!”

“What are you screaming for?” I asked. “Do you want some valerian drops?”

“Have any vodka?”

“No.”

“Some wine, then?”

“Nothing. What did you bring over for me?”

“My Nobel Prize!” he shouted. “I brought over my Nobel, that’s what! But not for you, you idiot! You have enough problems of your own.” He attacked his jacket, pulling off the top button and cursing. “There aren’t too many idiots nowadays,” he announced. “In our times, buddy, the majority quite rightly supposes that it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick. We don’t need much: a trainload of bread and a trainload of caviar, and the caviar can be black and the bread white. This isn’t the nineteenth century, buddy,” he said sincerely. “The nineteenth century is dead and buried, and everything that’s left of it is smoke and nothing more, buddy. I didn’t sleep all night. Zakhar snores and so does that freak son of his. I spent the whole night bidding farewell to the remnants of the nineteenth century in my consciousness. The twentieth century, buddy, is all calculation and no emotion! Emotion, as we all know, is lack of information and nothing more. Pride, honor, future generations—all aristocratic babble. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. I can’t do that. I don’t know how, ta-ta! A question of values? If you like. The most valuable thing in the world is my identity, my family, and my friends. The rest can go to hell. The rest is outside the parameters of my responsibility. Fight? Of course. For myself. My family; my friends. To the end, without mercy. But for humanity? For the dignity of earthlings? For galactic prestige? The hell with it! I don’t fight for words! I have more important things to worry about. You can do as you like. But I don’t recommend being an idiot.”

He jumped up and headed for the kitchen, a huge dirigible in the hallway. Water gushed from the sink.

“Our entire everyday life,” he shouted from the kitchen, “is a continuous chain of deals! You have to be a total idiot to make an unprofitable deal! They knew that even in the nineteenth century!” He stopped, and I could hear him gulping. Then the water stopped running, and Weingarten came back into the room, wiping his mouth. “Vecherovsky won’t give you any good advice. He’s a robot, not a man. And a nineteenth-century robot at that. If they had known how to make robots in the nineteenth century they would have made them like Vecherovsky. Look, you can consider me a vile person. I don’t argue. But I’m not going to let anyone wipe me out; no one. Not for anything. A living dog is better than a dead lion. And a living Weingarten is a hell of a lot better than a dead Weingarten. That’s Weingarten’s point of view, and that of his family and friends, I trust.”

I didn’t interrupt. I’ve known that big-faced lug for a quarter century, and not just any century, but the twentieth. He was shouting like that because he had pigeonholed everything in his own mind. There was no point in interrupting, because he wouldn’t have heard me. Until Weingarten has pigeonholed everything, you can argue with him as an equal, like with an ordinary mortal, and can even change his mind. But Weingarten, with everything settled, becomes a tape recorder on playback. Then he shouts and becomes inordinately cynical—probably stems from an unhappy childhood.

So I listened to him in silence, waiting for the tape to end, and the only strange thing was the number of times he referred to living and dead Weingartens. He couldn’t have been frightened—he wasn’t me, after all. I’d seen all kinds of Weingartens: Weingarten in love, Weingarten the hunter, Weingarten the coarse oaf, and Weingarten wiped out. But this was a Weingarten I’d never seen: a frightened Weingarten. I waited for him to turn himself off for a few seconds to get another cigarette and asked just in case:

“Did they frighten you?”

He dropped the cigarettes and gave me the finger, a big, wet finger, across the table. He had been waiting for the question. The answer had also been prerecorded, not only in gestures, but orally as well:

“I like that—frightened me!” he said, waving his finger under my nose. “This isn’t the nineteenth century, you know. They used to frighten people in the nineteenth century. But they don’t bother with that nonsense in the twentieth. In the twentieth, they buy you off. They didn’t scare me, they bought me, understand, buddy? It’s a nice choice! Either they flatten you into a pancake or they give you a spanking-new institute over which two scientists have already back-bitten each other to death. I’ll do ten Nobel-winning projects at the institute, understand? Of course, the merchandise isn’t all bad, either. It’s sort of like my birthright. The right of Weingarten to have freedom of scientific curiosity. Not bad merchandise at all, buddy, don’t argue with me. But it’s been on the shelves too long. It belongs to the nineteenth century! Nobody has that freedom in the twentieth century anyway! You can take your freedom and spend all your life as a lab assistant, washing out test tubes. The institute is no mess of pottage, either! I’ll start ten ideas there, twenty ideas, and if they don’t like one or two, well, we’ll bargain again. There’s strength in numbers, buddy. Let’s not spit into the wind. When a heavy tank is headed straight for you and the only weapon you have is the head on your shoulders, you have to know enough to jump out of its way.”

He talked a lot longer, shouting, smoking, coughing hoarsely, running over to look into the empty bar, running away from it in disappointment, and shouting some more. Then he quieted down, ran out of words, leaned back in the armchair, rested his head on the back of the chair, and made distorted faces at the ceiling.

“All right, then,” I said. “But where are you taking your Nobel Prize? You should have taken it down to the boiler room; instead you lugged it up five flights to my place.”

“I’m taking it to Vecherovsky.”

I was amazed.

“What’s he going to do with your Nobel work?”

“I don’t know. Ask him.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did he call you?”

“No, I called him.”

“And?”

“What and?” He sat up in the chair and started buttoning his jacket. “I called him this morning and told him I choose the bird in hand.”

“And?”

“What and? And… he said, well then, bring your materials to me.”

We sat in silence.

“I don’t understand why he wants your materials.”

“Because he is Don Quixote!” Weingarten barked. “Because he’s never been pecked at by a barbecued chicken! Because he’s never bitten off more than he can chew.”

I suddenly understood.

“Listen, Val,” I said. “Don’t. The hell with him, he’s gone nuts! They’ll hammer him into the ground up to his neck! Who needs it?”

“What, then?” Weingarten asked greedily. “What?”

“Burn it, your damn revertase! Let’s burn it right now. In the bathtub.”

“Pity,” Weingarten said and looked away. “What a pity. The work… it’s first class. Extra special. Deluxe.”

I shut up. And he was out of the chair again, running back and forth across the room, out into the hall and back, and his tape was back on again too. It’s shameful, yes. Honor suffers, yes. His pride is hurt. Especially when you can’t tell anyone about it. But if you think about it, pride is sheer lunacy and nothing else. Just driving himself mad. Why, most people wouldn’t even think twice in our situation. And they’d call us idiots! And they’d be right. Have we never had to compromise before? Of course, hundreds of times! And will hundreds more! And not with gods, but with lousy bureaucrats, with nits who are too disgusting to touch.

His running in front of me, sweating and justifying himself, was getting me mad, and I said that it was one thing to compromise and another to capitulate. Oh, that did it! I got him badly. But I wasn’t sorry in the least. It wasn’t really him I was jabbing in the solar plexus, it was myself. Anyway, we had a fight, and he left. He took his bags and went up to Vecherovsky’s. At the door he said he’d be back later, but I told him that Irina was back, and he collapsed completely. He doesn’t like it when people don’t like him.

I sat down at the desk and got to work. That is, not work, but organization. At first I kept expecting a bomb to go off under the table or a blue face with a noose around its neck to appear in my window. But nothing like that happened and I got caught up in the work, and then the doorbell rang again.

I didn’t go to answer it right away. First I went to the kitchen and got the meat hammer—an ominous thing: one side has spikes and the other side is an ax. If something went wrong, I’d let him have it between the eyes. I’m a peaceful man, I don’t like fights or arguments, or Weingarten either, but I’d had enough. Enough.

I opened the door. It was Zakhar.

“Hi, Dmitri, please, forgive me,” he said with an artificial casualness.

I looked down the hall against my will, but there was no one else. Zakhar was alone.

“Come in, come in. Happy to see you.”

“You see, I decided to look in on you.” Still in that same artificial tone that didn’t go at all with his shy smile and highly intelligent appearance. “Weingarten disappeared somewhere, damn him. I’ve been calling him all day, he’s out. And since I was coming over to see Philip, I thought I’d look in here and see, maybe he was here.”

“Philip?”

“No, no… Valentin… Weingarten.”

“He went to Philip’s,” I said.

“Oh, I see!” Zakhar said with great joy. “Long ago?”

“Over an hour.”

His face froze for a second when he saw the hammer in my hand.

“Fixing dinner?” he asked, and added, without waiting for an answer: “Well, I won’t get in your way. I’m off.” He started for the door, then stopped. “Oh yes, I almost forgot… I mean, I didn’t forget, I just don’t know. Which is Philip’s apartment?”

I told him.

“Ah, thank you. You see, he called and I… somehow forgot to ask… during the conversation.”

He backed up to the door and opened it.

“I understand,” I said. “And where’s your boy?”

“It’s all over for me!” he shouted joyfully, stepped over the threshold, and…