Flights

FLIGHTS

Over the world at night hell rises. The first thing that happens is it disfigures space; it makes everything more cramped and more massive and unscaleable. Details disappear and objects lose their features, becoming squat and indistinct; how strange that by day they may be spoken of as ‘beautiful’ or ‘useful’; now they look like shapeless bodies: hard to guess what they’d be for. Everything is hypothetical in hell. All that daytime heterogeneity of form, the presence of colours, shades, reveals itself to be utterly in vain – what purpose could possibly be served by beige upholstery, by floral wallpaper, by tassels? What difference does green make to a dress slung over the back of a chair? It’s difficult to understand the covetous gaze that fell upon it as it clung to its hanger in the shop window. There are no buttons or hooks or clasps now; fingers in the dark find only vague bulges, rough patches, lumps of hard matter.

The next thing hell does is drag you out of sleep. You can kick and scream; hell is implacable. Sometimes it provides disturbing images, frightening or mocking – a decapitated head, a beloved body covered in blood, human bones in ashes – yes, yes, hell likes to shock. But more often than not it awakes without standing on ceremony – your eyes open onto darkness, launching a stream of consciousness; your gaze, aimed at nothing, is its advance guard. The nocturnal brain is a Penelope unravelling the cloth of meaning diligently woven during the day. Sometimes it’s a single thread, sometimes more; complex designs break down into prime factors – warp and weft; weft falls by the wayside, and only straight parallel lines remain, the barcode of the world.

Then you realize: night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without sugar-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order. The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold.

She sits straight up in their bed, tickled by beads of sweat between her breasts. Her nightgown sticks to her body like skin about to be shed. She strains to hear in the darkness and catches the quiet whimpering that comes from Petya’s room. For a moment she tries with her feet to find her slippers, but then she gives up. She’ll run barefoot to her son. Beside her she sees the murky outline of a person as it budges and sighs.

‘What?’ murmurs the man, still asleep, falling back into his pillow.

‘Nothing. Petya.’

She turns on a little lamp in the child’s room and right away sees his eyes. They’re wide open, looking at her from inside the painstaking black cavities the light carves into his face. She puts her hand to his forehead, instinctively, as always. His forehead isn’t hot, but it is sweaty, clammy to the touch. Carefully she pulls the boy up into a sitting position and massages his back. Her son’s head falls onto her shoulder; Annushka can smell his sweat, recognizing pain in it, a thing she’s learned to do: Petya smells different when he is in pain.

‘Can you make it till morning?’ she whispers, softly, but then she quickly realizes what a stupid question it is. Why should he suffer until morning? She reaches for the pills on the nightstand, pops one out and puts it in his mouth. Then a glass of warmish water. The boy drinks, chokes, so a little while later she gives him another sip, with greater caution. The pill will take effect any minute now, so she lays his limp body on its right side, tucking his knees up under his belly, thinking he’ll be most comfortable this way. She lies down beside him on the edge of the bed and rests her head against his bony back, listening to the air turn into breath as it enters his lungs and is released into the night. She waits until this process becomes rhythmic, easy, automatic, and then she rises, gingerly, and tiptoes back to bed. She’d rather sleep in Petya’s room, as she had until her husband had come back. That had been better, her mind had been easier, falling asleep and waking up facing her child. Not folding out that double bed each evening: let it be deserted. But a husband is a husband.

He’d come back four months earlier, after two years away. He’d come back in civilian clothes, the same ones he’d been wearing when he’d left, now out of fashion, though you could tell they’d barely been worn. She’d smelled them – they hadn’t smelled like anything, maybe very slightly of damp, that smell of stillness, a shut-up storehouse.

He’d come back different – she’d noticed right away – and so far, he’d stayed different. That first night she’d made an inspection of his body – it was also different, harder, bigger, more muscular, but oddly weak.

She’d felt the scar on his shoulder and his scalp, his hair obviously getting thinner and grey. His hands had become massive, his fingers thicker, as though from physical labour. She had laid them on her bare breasts, but they’d remained uncertain. She’d tried her own hand at persuading him, but he’d continued to lie there so quietly, breathing so shallowly, that it had made her feel ashamed.

At night he’d wake up with a kind of hoarse, furious groan, sit up in the dark, and then a moment later get up and go over to the spirits shelf and pour himself a shot. Then his breath would smell like fruit, like apples. And then he’d say, ‘Put your hands on me, touch me.’

‘Tell me what it was like there, you’ll feel better, tell me,’ she said, whispering into his ear, tempting with her hot breath.

But he didn’t tell her anything.

While she would deal with Petya, he would walk the apartment in his striped pyjamas, drinking strong black coffee, looking out the window onto the apartment blocks. Then he’d look in on the boy, crouching down beside him sometimes, trying to make contact. And then he’d turn on the TV and draw the yellow curtains, making the daylight sickly, dense and fevered. He didn’t get dressed until around noon, when Petya’s nurse was about to come, and even then he didn’t always. Sometimes he’d just close the door. The sound of the TV would grow fainter, become a rankling rumbling, a summons to a newly senseless world.

The money came in like clockwork, every month. And in fact it was enough – plenty for Petya’s medications, for a better, barely used wheelchair, for a nurse.

Today Annushka will not be dealing with the boy, she has today off. Her mother-in-law will be here soon, though she doesn’t know which of them she’s really coming to watch, her son or her grandson, which of them she’ll fuss the most over. She’ll lay her plaid plastic bag down by the door and extract from it her nylon housecoat and her slippers – her home uniform. She’ll look in on her son, ask him a question, and he’ll respond, without taking his eyes off the TV: yes or no. Nothing else, no point waiting, so she’ll go to her grandson. He needs to be washed and fed; his sheets, drenched in sweat and urine, need to be changed; he needs his medications. Then the laundry needs to be put in, and their lunch needs to be made.

Then she’ll spend time with the child; if the weather’s nice, the boy can be taken out onto the balcony, not that there is much to see from there – just apartment blocks like great grey coral reefs in a dried-up ocean, populated by industrious organisms, their ocean bed the hazy horizon of the gigantic metropolis, Moscow. But the boy always looks up at the sky, hovering over the underbellies of the clouds, following them for a while, until they drift out of view.

Annushka is grateful to her mother-in-law for this one day a week. As she heads out the door she gives her a quick kiss on her soft, velvety cheek. That’s all the time they spend together, always at the door, and then she’ll rush down the stairs, feeling lighter and lighter the further she descends. She has the whole day ahead of her. Not that she will spend it on herself, of course. She has many things to take care of. She’ll pay the bills, go grocery shopping, pick up Petya’s prescriptions, visit the cemetery, and then finally she’ll go all the way to the other end of this inhuman city so she can sit in the encroaching darkness and burst into tears. Everything takes forever because there are traffic jams everywhere, and crushed between people she watches through the windowpanes of the bus as the gigantic cars with tinted windows glide effortlessly ahead, invested with some diabolical power, while the rest of them are at a standstill. She looks out at the squares filled with young people, at the mobile bazaars selling cheap Chinese goods. She always transfers at Kievsky Station, where she passes by all sorts of people as they make their way up and out from the underground platforms. But there is no one who attracts her attention, no one who terrifies her like this bizarre figure standing by the exit, against a backdrop of makeshift fences concealing the dug-up foundations of some construction under way, fences pasted over so densely with advertisements that they seem to be screaming.

That woman’s orbit is the strip of untamed land between the wall and the just-lain pavement blocks; in this way she bears witness to the uninterrupted procession of people, receives that parade of tired and hurrying pedestrians whom she tends to catch still in the middle of their journeys from work to home or vice versa – now they’ll switch their modes of transport, change from metro to bus.

She’s dressed differently from all of them – she’s wearing a plethora of things: trousers, and over them several skirts, but arranged so that each sticks out from below the next, in layers; and the same on top – multiple shirts, sheepskins, vests. And over everything a grey quilted drill coat, the height of refined simplicity, an echo of a distant eastern monastery or a labour camp. Combined these layers makes some aesthetic sense, and Annushka even likes it; it strikes her that the colours have been carefully selected, though it isn’t clear if the selection is a human one or rather the haute couture of entropy – fading colours, fraying and falling apart.

But the strangest thing is the woman’s head – tightly wrapped in a scrap of material, pressed together by a warm hat with ear flaps – and her hidden face; all you can see is her mouth as it emits a ceaseless stream of curses. The sight of this is so upsetting that Annushka never tries to understand the meanings these curses might contain. And now, too, as she passes by her, Annushka speeds up, fearful that this woman might latch onto her. That in the rush of those furious words, Annushka might even hear her own name.

It’s pleasant December weather, the pavements are dry, cleared of snow, and her shoes are comfortable. Annushka doesn’t get on the bus, instead crossing the bridge and then promenading along the multi-lane highway, feeling like she’s walking down the shore of an immense river with no bridges. She enjoys this promenade, won’t cry until she gets to her church, in the dark corner where she always kneels and remains in that uncomfortable position until she’s lost sensation in her legs, until she’s attained the stage that comes after the stiffening and shooting pains – the stage of nothingness. But now she throws her purse over her shoulder and holds on tightly to the plastic bag that holds the plastic flowers for the cemetery. She tries not to think about anything, and least of all about the place she’s come from. She’s approaching the most elegant neighbourhood of the city, so there are things for her to look at – it’s full of shops here, where smooth, slender mannequins indifferently exhibit the most expensive clothing. Annushka pauses to look at a purse sewn from a million beads, embellished with tulle and lace: a kind of miracle. Finally she reaches the specialized pharmacy, where she will have to wait. But she’ll receive the necessary medications. Futile medications, which only barely relieve her son’s symptoms.

At a covered stand she buys a bag of pirozhki and eats them sitting on a bench in the square.

In her little church she finds a lot of tourists. The young priest who normally bustles around the sanctuary like a merchant amidst his wares is busy now, telling the tourists about the history of the building and about iconostasis. In a singsong voice he recites his teachings, the head on his slim, tall body looming over the little crowd, his pretty light beard like an extraordinary halo that’s slipped off his head and slid down to his breast. Annushka backs out: how could she possibly pray and cry in the company of all these tourists? She waits and waits, but then the next group comes in, and so Annushka decides to find another site for her tears – a little further on there is another church, small and old, more often than not closed. She once went in but didn’t like it – she’d been repulsed by the chill and the scent of damp wood.

But now she isn’t picky, she has to find a place where she can finally cry, a secluded place, but not empty; it has to have the palpable presence of something larger than her, of big outstretched arms trembling with life. Annushka also needs to feel someone’s gaze on her, to feel that her crying is witnessed by someone, to feel it isn’t just addressing a void. It can be eyes painted on wood, always open, eyes that never tire of anything, eternally calm: let those eyes watch her, unblinking.

She takes three candles and drops a few coins in the tin. The first is for Petya, the second for her reticent husband, the third for her mother-in-law in her non-iron housecoat. She lights them from the other few that burn here and looks around and finds a spot for herself on the right side, in a dark corner, so as not to bother the old women who are praying. She crosses herself sweepingly, commencing in this way the ritual of her tears.

But when she raises her eyes to pray, another face emerges from the gloom – the vast face of the gloomy icon. It’s a piece of square board hung high, almost right under the dome of the church, and on it the simple features of Christ, painted in shades of brown and grey. The face is dark, against a dark background, with no halo, no crown; only the eyes glow as they stare straight into her, just like she’d wanted. And yet, it wasn’t this type of gaze Annushka had been thinking of – she’d expected gentle eyes filled with love. This gaze, hypnotic, paralyzes her. Under it, Annushka’s body shrinks. He was here just for a moment, floats down from the ceiling from afar, from deepest darkness – that’s God’s place, his hiding spot. He has no need of a body, just the face she must confront now. It’s a penetrating gaze, driving painfully into her head, as though with a screwdriver. Drilling a hole into her brain. It might as well be the face not of the saviour, but rather of a drowned man who didn’t die, shielding himself against omnipresent death under the water instead, who now, due to mysterious currents, has floated up under the surface, conscious, highly aware, saying: look, here I am. But she doesn’t want to look at him. Annushka lowers her eyes, she doesn’t want to know – that God is weak and has lost, that he’s been exiled and that he is creeping around the rubbish heaps of the world, in its fetid depths. There’s no sense in crying. This is not the place for tears. This God won’t help, or support, or encourage, or purify, or save. The gaze of the drowned man bores into her forehead, she hears a murmur, an underground thunder off in the distance, a vibration below the church’s floor.

It must be because she barely slept last night, because she’s barely eaten anything today – now she feels faint. The tears won’t flow, dry beds where they’re supposed to be.

She jumps up and walks out. Stiffly, straight to the metro.

It feels like she has had an experience of some kind, that something’s got into her, making her tense on the inside like a string on a musical instrument, causing her to make a clean sound, inaudible to anyone. A quiet sound, meant just for her body – a short-lived concert in a brittle acoustical shell. She still listens for it anyway, all her attention turned inward, but in her ears there is only the rush of her own blood.

The stairs go down, and she has the impression that it lasts forever, some people going down, others up. Ordinarily her gaze slips over others’ faces, but now Annushka’s eyes, struck by that sight in the church, can’t manage. Her gaze alights on each and every passerby – and every face is like a slap, hard, stinging. Soon she won’t be able to bear it anymore, she’ll have to cover her eyes like that crazy woman in front of the station, and just like her she’ll begin to shout out curses.

‘Have mercy, have mercy,’ she whispers and sinks her fingers into the handrail, which moves faster than the stairs; if Annushka doesn’t let go she’ll fall.

She sees the silent swarm of people going up and down, shoulder to shoulder, packed in. They glide toward their spots as though on tethers, heading somewhere in the suburbs, to a tenth floor, where they can pull the covers over their heads and fall into a sleep made up of scraps of day and night. And in reality in the morning that sleep does not dissolve – those scraps form collages, splotches; some configurations are clever, you could almost say premeditated.

She sees the brittleness of arms, the fragility of eyelids, the unstable line of people’s lips, readily contorting into grimace; she sees how weak their hands are, how weak their legs – they will not, cannot, carry them to any destination. She sees their hearts, how they beat in time, some faster, some slower, an ordinary mechanical movement, the lungs’ sacs are like dirty plastic bags, you can hear the rustle of exhalations. Their clothes have become transparent, so she watches them wed entropy. Our bodies are poor, dirty, grist – without exception – for the mill.

The escalators take these beings all straight down into the depths, into the abyss, here are the eyes of the cerberi in the glass booths at the bottom of the stairs, here the fraudulent marble and columns, massive sculptures of demons – some with sickles, others with sheaves of grain. Massive legs like the columns, giants’ shoulders. Tractors – infernal machines towing sharp-toothed instruments of torture that deal the earth never-healing wounds. From all sides cramped groups of people, their hands raised pleadingly in panic, their mouths open to scream. The Last Judgement takes place here, in the depths of the metro, lit by crystal chandeliers that cast dead yellow light. The judges are nowhere to be seen, it’s true, but everywhere you feel their presence. Annushka wants to retreat, run up against the current, but the escalators won’t permit her to, she has to keep going down, she won’t be spared. The mouths of the underground trains will open before her with a hiss and suck her into their gloomy tunnels. But of course the abyss is everywhere, even on the upper floors of the city, even on the tenth and sixteenth floors of the high-rise buildings, at the tops of spires, on the tips of antennas. There is no escape from it. Wasn’t it maybe this the madwoman was screaming about, in between her curses?

Annushka staggers, leans against a wall. It imprints her wool twill coat with white traces, anointing her.

She has to get off, it’s dark already, she gets off slightly at random because you can’t see anything out the windows of the bus, frost has already etched silvery twigs across them – but she knows the route by heart, she was right. Just a few courtyards – she takes a shortcut – and she’ll be at her building. But she slows, her legs don’t want to take her to her destination, they resist, her steps get smaller and smaller. Annushka stops. She looks up and sees the lights on in her apartment. They must be waiting for her – so she starts up again, but a second later she stops again. The cold wind pierces through her coat, blows apart the bottom, seizes her thighs with its icy fingers. Its touch is like razor blades, like broken glass. Tears fly down her cheeks from the cold, which suits the wind, finally providing it a way to sting her face. Annushka rushes on, towards their stairwell, but when she gets to the door she turns, puts up her collar, and as fast as she can she goes back to where she just came from.

It’s only warm in the big waiting room at the Kievsky Station or in the bathroom. She stands unable to make her mind up as the patrols pass by her (they always walk with a slow, loose step, moving their legs lightly as though meandering along a seaside boulevard), she pretends to read the timetable; she doesn’t even know why she’s afraid, after all she’s done nothing wrong. And in any case the patrols are interested in something else, unerringly singling out olive-skinned men in leather jackets and women in headscarves from the crowd.

Annushka walks out in front of the station and sees from afar that shrouded woman still scrambling, her voice hoarse from cursing – in fact, neither it nor the curses themselves are really recognizable now. Good then – after a moment’s hesitation she approaches her calmly and stands in front of her. This throws the woman off for just a second – she must be able to see Annushka through the material that covers her face. Annushka takes another step closer and now stands so near she can smell the woman’s breath – dust and must, old oil. The woman speaks softer and softer until she finally falls silent. Her scrambling turns into rocking, as though she can’t stand still. They stand facing each other for a moment as people pass them by, but indifferently; one person just glances over at them, but they’re in a hurry, their trains will leave at any moment.

‘What are you saying?’ asks Annushka.

The shrouded woman freezes, holds her breath, and then starts sideways, spooked, towards the passage through the construction, over the frozen mud. Annushka follows her, does not take her eyes off her, is a few steps behind her, behind her quilted coat, behind her tiny teetering wool felt boots. She will not let her get away. The woman looks over her shoulder and tries to speed up, almost running, but Annushka is young and strong. She has strong muscles – how many times has she carried both Petya and his carriage all the way down the stairs, how many times has she carried them all the way up, when the lift wasn’t working.

‘Hey!’ Annushka shouts intermittently, but the woman gives no reaction.

They pass through the courtyards between homes, pass rubbish heaps and trodden squares. Annushka doesn’t feel tired but drops the bag with flowers for the cemetery; it would be a waste of time to go back for it.

Finally the woman squats and pants, unable to catch her breath. Annushka stops a few metres behind her and waits for her to stand back up and turn to her. The woman has lost; now she has to surrender. And sure enough, she looks over her shoulder, and you can see her face, she’s pulled the covering off her eyes. She has light blue irises, frightened, looking at Annushka’s shoes.

‘What do you want from me? Why are you chasing me?’

Annushka doesn’t answer, she feels as though she’s caught a big animal, a big fish, a whale, and now she doesn’t know what to do with it; she doesn’t need this trophy. The woman is afraid, clearly in this fear all her curses have escaped her.

‘Are you from the police?’

‘No,’ says Annushka.

‘Then what?’

‘I want to know what you’re saying. You’ve been saying something all this time, I see you every week as I go into town.’

To this the woman answers, more boldly:

‘I’m not saying anything. Leave me alone.’

Annushka leans over and extends her hand to help her stand, but her hand changes course and caresses the woman’s cheek. It is warm, nice, soft.

‘I didn’t want anything bad.’

At first the woman freezes, astonished by this touch, but then, seemingly mollified by Annushka’s gesture, she scrabbles and gets up.

‘I’m hungry,’ she says. ‘Let’s go, there’s a kiosk right here, they have cheap hot sandwiches, you can buy me something to eat.’

They walk silently, side by side. At the booth Annushka buys two long rolls with cheese and tomatoes, watching to make sure the woman doesn’t run away. She can’t eat anything. She holds her roll out in front of her like a flute about to play a winter melody. They sit on a wall. The woman eats her roll, and then wordlessly she takes Annushka’s. She is old, older than Annushka’s mother-in-law. Her cheeks are broken up by wrinkles that run diagonally from her forehead to her chin. It’s hard for her to eat because she’s lost her teeth. The tomato slices slip off of the bread, she grasps at them, saves them at the last minute and carefully puts them back in place. She tears off big bites with just her lips.

‘I can’t go home,’ Annushka says suddenly and looks down at her feet. She’s stunned she said something like this, and only now does she think in terror what it means. The woman murmurs something indistinct in response, but after swallowing her bite, she asks:

‘Do you have an address?’

‘Yes,’ says Annushka, and she recites it: ‘Kuznetskaya 46, apartment 78.’

‘So just forget it,’ blurts the woman, with her mouth full.

Vorkuta. She was born there in the late sixties, when the apartment blocks, which now seem age-old, were just going up. She remembers them as new – rough plaster, the smell of concrete and the asbestos used as insulation. The promising smoothness of the PVC tiles. But in a cold climate everything gets older faster, the frost breaks down the consistent structure of the walls, slows electrons in their ceaseless circulation.

She remembers the blinding whiteness of winters. The whiteness and the sharp edges of the light in exile. Such whiteness exists only in order to create a framework for the darkness, of which there is decidedly more.

Her father worked at a massive heating plant, and her mother in a cafeteria, which is how they got by – she always brought something home for them to eat. Now Annushka thinks that everybody there had a kind of weird illness, hidden deep inside the body, under clothing, a great sadness, or perhaps something vaster than sadness, but she can’t think of the right word.

They lived on the seventh floor of an eight-floor building, one of many identical buildings, but with time, as she grew up, the upper floors emptied out, people moved away to more amenable locales, usually to Moscow, but anywhere, as far away from there as possible. Those who stayed moved downwards, took up residence in the lowest-level apartments they could, where it was warmer, closer to people, to the earth. Living on the eighth floor during the many months of polar winter was like hanging from the concrete vaults of the world in a frozen drop of water, right in the middle of a frozen hell. When she’d last visited her sister and mother, they lived on the ground floor. Her father had died long ago.

It was fortunate that Annushka got into a good teaching school in Moscow; unfortunate she didn’t finish the course. If she had, she would be a teacher now, and perhaps she would never have met the man who had become her husband. Their genes would never have blended together in that toxic mix that was to blame for Petya coming into the world suffering from a disease that had no cure.

Many times Annushka had tried to barter with anyone she could, with God, with the Virgin, with Saint Parascheva, with the whole iconostasis, even with the closer, vaguer realm of fate. Take me instead of Petya, I’ll take his illness, I’ll die, just let him recover. She didn’t stop there – she threw in others’ lives: that of her reluctant husband (let him get shot) and of her mother-in-law (let her have a stroke). But of course, there was never any answer to her offer.

She buys a ticket and goes downstairs. There is still a crowd, people returning from the city centre to their beds, to sleep. Some already falling asleep in their carriages. Their sleepy breaths fog up the glass; you could draw something in those with your finger, anything, it wouldn’t matter because regardless it would vanish a moment later. Annushka gets to the final station, YugoZapadnaya, gets off and stands on the platform, only to realize a moment later that the train will go back, the same train. She sits back down in the same seat and from there returns, and then comes back again, until after several rides like this she switches to the Koltsevaya line. This line takes her in a circle, until around midnight she reaches Kievsky Station as though coming home. She sits on the platform until a menacing lady comes along, insisting that she leave, saying they’re about to close the metro. Annushka leaves, although she doesn’t want to – outside the frost is biting – but then she finds a small pub near the station, with a television up by the ceiling; the tables are peopled by a few lost travellers. She orders tea with lemon, one after another; then borscht, terrible, watery, and with her head propped up against her hand she drifts off briefly. She is happy, because she doesn’t have a single thought in her head, a single care, a single expectation or hope. It’s a good feeling.

The first train is still empty. Then at each station more and more people get on, until finally the crush is such that Annushka stands squashed between the backs of some kind of giants. Since she can’t reach the handles she’s condemned to having anonymous bodies hold her up. Then suddenly the throng thins out, and at the next station the train is empty. Only a couple of people remain. Now Annushka learns that some people don’t get off at the end stations. She alone gets off and switches trains. But she sees the others through the windows finding themselves spots at the ends of their carriages and setting out around their feet their plastic bags or their backpacks, usually old, made of hemp. They doze off with their eyes half-shut or unwrap the paper off some food and, excusing themselves over and over, mumbling, chewing reverentially.

She changes trains because she’s scared someone might spot her, might grab her by the arm and shake her or – worst of all – might lock her up somewhere. Sometimes she walks over to the other side of the platform, and sometimes she changes platforms; then she travels by escalator, by tunnel, but never reading any of the signs, completely free. She goes, for example, to Chistye Prudy, changes from Sokolnicheskaya to Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya and goes to Medvedkovo and then back to the other side of the city. She stops in the toilets to check her appearance, to make sure she looks all right, not because she feels the need to (in truth she does not), but rather to avoid being spotted, due to unkemptness, by one of those cerberi that guard the escalators in their glass booths. She suspects that they have mastered the art of sleeping with their eyes open. At a kiosk she buys some pads, some soap, the cheapest toothpaste and toothbrush. She sleeps through the afternoon, on the Koltsevaya line. In the evening she emerges from the station by way of the stairs, so as to maybe meet the shrouded woman out front – but no, she isn’t there. It’s cold, even colder than the day before, so she’s relieved to be going back underground.

The next day the shrouded woman is back, swaying on stiff legs and shouting out curses that sound like gibberish. Annushka stands in her line of vision, on the other side of the passageway, but the woman evidently does not see her, lost in her lamentations. Finally Annushka, taking advantage of a momentary lapse in the crowds, goes and stands right in front of her.

‘Let’s go, I’ll buy you a roll.’

The woman stops, snapped out of her trance, rubs her gloved hands together, stamps her feet like a saleswoman at a bazaar who is frozen to the bone. They go up to the kiosk together. Annushka is truly happy to see her.

‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

The woman, busy with her roll, merely shrugs. But a moment later she says with her mouth full:

‘Galina.’

‘I’m Annushka.’

That’s it for conversation. Finally, when the frost drives her back towards the station, Annushka asks another question:

‘Galina, where do you sleep?’

The shrouded woman tells her to come back to the kiosk when the metro closes.

All evening Annushka rides the same line and indifferently examines her own face reflected in the window against the dark walls of the underground tunnels. She already recognizes at least two people. She wouldn’t dare try to talk to them. She’s travelled a few stops now with one of them – there is a tall, thin man, not old, perhaps even young, it’s hard to say. His face is covered in a sparse light-coloured beard that comes down to his chest. He’s wearing a flat cloth cap, a worker’s cap, ordinary and threadbare, a long grey overcoat, pockets stuffed with something, and a weathered backpack. Then tall lace-up boots with homemade socks protruding out of them, the legs of his brown trousers tightly tucked in. He seems to not be paying attention to anything, immersed in his own thoughts. With verve he hops out onto the platform, giving the impression that he’s heading for some distant but concrete destination. Annushka has also seen him twice from the platform; once he was sleeping on some completely deserted train that seemed to be retiring for the night; the other time he was also dozing, resting his forehead against the glass; his breath conjured up a mist that concealed half his face.

The other one Annushka remembers is an old man. He walks with difficulty, with a cane, or rather, a walking stick, a thick piece of wood that curves a little at the end. When he gets into a carriage he has to hang on to the door with his other hand, and usually somebody helps him then. Once inside people give up their seats for him, reluctantly, but they do it. He looks like a beggar. Him Annushka does try to hunt down, as she hunted down the shrouded woman earlier. But all she manages to do is ride with him for some time in the same carriage, stand in front of him for more or less half an hour, so that she knows by heart every detail of his face, his clothing. She isn’t brave enough to talk to him, however. The man keeps his head down, not paying attention to what’s happening around him. Then a crowd of people going home from work sweeps her away. She lets herself be carried by this warm stream of scents and touches. She becomes free of it only after it has carried her through the turnstiles, as though the underground had spit her out like some foreign body. Now she will have to buy a ticket to go back in, and she knows that she will run out of money soon enough.

Why does she remember those two? I suspect because they’re constant, somehow, as though they moved differently, more slowly. Everyone else is like a river, a current, water that flows from here to there, creating eddies and waves, but each particular form, being fleeting, disappears, and the river forgets about them. But those two move against the current, which is why they stand out the way they do. And why they aren’t bound by the river’s rules. I think that this is what attracts Annushka.

When they close the metro she waits in front of the side entrance for the shrouded woman and just when she gives up, the woman finally appears. Her eyes are covered, and with all those layers of clothing her shape is that of a barrel. She tells Annushka to follow her, and Annushka obeys. She is very tired, to be frank, has no energy at all and would be thrilled to just sit down somewhere, anywhere. They walk along the bridge of boards over the excavation, passing tin fencing pasted over with posters, and then they go down into an underground passageway. For a while they walk down a narrow corridor, where it is pleasingly warm. The woman indicates a place for Annushka on the floor, and Annushka lies down without getting undressed and immediately falls asleep. As she’s dozing, just as she has always wanted – deeply, without a thought in her head – the image she just saw walking down the cramped corridor returns for a moment under her eyelids.

A dark room, and in it an open door that leads into another room, bright. Here there is a table, and people sitting around it. Their hands are arranged on the tabletop, and they are sitting up straight. They sit and look at each other in absolute silence and without moving. She could swear that one of those people is the man in the worker’s cap.

Annushka sleeps soundly. Nothing wakes her, no rustling, no creaking of the bed, no TV. She sleeps as though she were a piece of rock against which stubborn waves are crashing, or a tree that has fallen and is now being covered by moss and mushroom spawn. Just before waking she has a funny dream – that she’s playing with a colourful toiletry bag, with a pattern of little elephants and kittens, which she’s turning over in her hands. And then suddenly she lets it go, only the bag doesn’t fall, it hangs between her hands, suspended in mid-air, and Annushka finds that she can play with it without even touching it. That she can move it with the power of her will. It’s a very pleasant realization, with a great joy in it that she hasn’t felt for a long time, since childhood, in fact. So she wakes up in a good mood, and now sees that this is not some abandoned workers’ dormitory at all, as she’d thought yesterday, but rather a common boiler room. That’s why it’s so warm in here. And she is sleeping on cardboard laid out alongside a pile of coal. On a piece of newspaper lies a quarter loaf of bread, quite stale, and an ample helping of lard mixed with hot pepper. She guesses this is from Galina, but she won’t touch the food until she has relieved herself in the disgusting bathroom without doors, and managed to wash her hands.

Oh, how good it feels – how incredibly good – to become part of a crowd that gradually warms up. Overcoats and furs give off the smells of people’s homes – grease, detergent, sweet perfumes. Annushka goes through the turnstile and from there allows herself to be carried by the first wave. The Kalininskaya line this time. She stands on the platform, then feels the warm underground air. No sooner do the doors open than Annushka finds herself inside, pressed between bodies, so much so she doesn’t need to hold on. When the train curves she gives into that motion, sways like grass amidst more grass, a blade among other grains. At the next station people still get on although you really couldn’t even squeeze a match in now. Annushka half-closes her eyes and feels as though her hands were being held, as though from all sides she were being embraced affectionately and rocked by reassuringly kind hands. Then suddenly they pull into a station where many people get off the train, and one must stand on one’s own two feet again.

When the carriage almost completely empties out near the final station, she finds a newspaper. At first she stares at it suspiciously – maybe she’s forgotten how to read – but then she picks it up and anxiously leafs through it. She reads about a model who’s died of anorexia, and how the authorities are thinking about prohibiting overly skinny girls from being displayed on the runways. She also reads about terrorists – yet another plot’s been foiled. TNT and detonators found in an apartment. She reads of disoriented whales swimming up onto beaches where they die. Of the police tracking down a ring of paedophiles on the internet. Of the forecast predicting it will get colder. Of mobility becoming reality.

There’s something wrong with this paper, which must be falsified somehow – which must be fake. Every sentence she reads is unbearable and hurts. Annushka’s eyes fill with tears and brim over, big drops plopping onto the news. The poor-quality paper instantly absorbs them like the barely-there pages of a Bible.

When the train goes above ground Annushka rests her head against the glass and looks out. The city’s every shade of ash, from dirty white through to black. Made up of rectangles and unformed masses, of squares and straight angles. She tracks high-voltage lines and cables, then looks up over the roofs and counts antennas. She shuts her eyes. When she opens them again the world has skipped from place to place. Right at dusk, revisiting the same place once again, she sees, just for a moment, just a few instants, the low sun break through from behind the white-blooming clouds to illuminate the apartment blocks with a red glow, but just their tips, the highest floors, and it looks like giant torches being set alight.

Then she sits on a bench on the platform beneath a large ad. She eats what was left from her breakfast. She washes up in the bathroom and returns to her seat. Rush hour is about to begin. Those who went one way in the morning will now go back the other way. The train that stops in front of her is well lit and almost empty. Just one person in the whole carriage – that man in the cap. He stands taut as a chord. When the train starts, it jostles him a little; then the train disappears, swallowed up by the black mouth of the underground.

‘I’ll buy you a roll,’ Annushka says to the shrouded woman, who stops her rocking for a second, as though only able to digest a sentence if she stays still. Then after a second she sets off towards where the sandwiches are sold.

They lean against the back of the kiosk and eat, after the woman has crossed herself a dozen or so times, and bowed.

Annushka asks her about the people who were sitting in silence in the boiler room the day before, and once more she freezes, this time with a bite of the roll in her mouth. She says something unconnected, something like, ‘How so?’ And then she spits out spitefully, ‘Get the fuck away from me, little miss.’

She leaves. Annushka rides the metro until one o’clock in the morning, and then, when it shuts down and the hellhounds chase everyone away, she circles around the place where she thought the entrance to the warm boiler room was, but she doesn’t find it. So she goes to the station and there, scraping up almost all of her remaining money, she spends the night over a series of teas and borshchts in small plastic cups, valiantly propped up on her elbows over the laminated tabletop.

The second she hears the grating of the bars being opened, she buys a ticket from the machine and goes downstairs. In the window of the train she sees her hair’s become greasy already, that there’s no trace left of her hairstyle, and that the other passengers are somewhat reluctant to sit beside her now. Periodically she panics at the fleeting thought she might run into someone, but the people she knows don’t take this line; just in case she finds a place in the corner, against the wall. Come to think of it, who does Annushka even know? The postwoman, the woman from the shop downstairs, the man who lives across from them: she doesn’t even know their names. She feels like covering her face like that shrouded woman, that’s actually a good idea – putting a covering over your eyes to be as little visible to yourself as you can be, and to be seen as little as you can. She gets bumped into, but it only brings her pleasure, to be touched by someone. An older woman sitting near her takes an apple out of a plastic bag and offers it to her, smiling. When at the Park Kultury station she stands in front of the pirozhki kiosk a young guy with close-cropped hair buys a portion for her. She gleans from this that she must not look her best. She says thank you, and she doesn’t refuse, although she still has a couple of coins left. She is witness to a number of events: the police nabbing a guy in a leather jacket. A couple arguing, voices raised as loud as they will go, both of them drunk. A young girl, a teenager, who gets on the train at Cherkizovskaya and sobs, repeating: Mum, mum, but no one has the courage to do anything to help her, and then it’s too late, the girl has got off at Komsomolskaya. She sees someone running away, a short dark man, knocking into passers-by, but he gets stuck in the crowd at the stairs and gets caught there by two other men, who pry open his hands. A woman fleetingly bemoaning having just had everything stolen, everything, but her voice arrives from an ever-greater distance, dies down and finally dies away. And twice today she sees a stiff old man with absent eyes flitting before her on the brightly lit train. She doesn’t even know that it’s been dark for a long time now, and that lanterns and lamps are on, seeping yellow light into the icy, thick air; today sunlight has completely escaped Annushka. She goes up to the surface at Kievskaya and heads towards the temporary passageway along the building being built in the hopes of finding the shrouded woman.

She is where she usually is, doing what she usually does – scampering in place, tracing circles of sorts and figures of eight and snarling out her same old curses, looking like a clump of dampened rags. Annushka stands in front of her for so long that the woman finally notices and stops. Then – although they’ve made no plans to – they both start hurriedly walking, without so much as a word, as though rushing towards some objective that will vanish for all time if they’re not quick enough. At the bridge the wind hits both of them like a kind of lady boxer.

At the kiosk on the Arbat they have delicious blinis, not expensive, dripping with grease and with sour cream on top. The shrouded woman puts some coins on the little glass saucer and gets two warm servings. They find themselves a place on the wall where they can eat this treat. Annushka gazes as though hypnotized at the young people all along the benches despite the cold, playing guitar and drinking beer. Making a ruckus more than singing. Shouting over one another, mucking around. Two young girls ride up on horseback; an unusual sight indeed, the horses are tall, well-cared-for, evidently straight from the stable; one of these Amazons greets the kids with the guitar, elegantly dismounts, chatting, keeping a tight hold on the bridle. The other girl tries to talk some straggling tourists into giving her some money to feed the horse – or so she tells them – but they deduce the money is really for beer. The animal does not look like it lacks for nourishment.

The shrouded woman elbows her. ‘Eat,’ she says.

But Annushka cannot take her eyes off this little scene, she looks greedily at the young people with her blinis steaming in her hand. In all of them she sees her Petya, they’re around the same age. Petya comes back into her body, as though she’d never given him up into the world. He’s there, curled up, heavy as a stone, painful, swelling inside her, growing – it must be that she has to give birth to him again, this time out of every pore she has in her skin, sweating him out. For now he comes up in her throat, sticking in her lungs, and he won’t emerge in any other way besides a sob. No, she won’t be able to eat a blini – she’s full. Petya’s lodged in her throat, when he could have been sitting there and reaching up with a beer can in his hand, giving it to the girl with the horse, leaning into it with his whole body, bursting out laughing. He could have been in motion, could have bent down to his boots and then lifted his arms and placed his foot in the stirrup and swung his other leg over. Sat on the back of that animal, traversing the streets sitting straight up and smiling, a scraggly moustache shading his upper lip. He could have run down the stairs, storming them, after all he is the same age as these boys, and she, his mother, would have worried about him failing his chemistry class, not getting into university and winding up like his father, worried he’d have trouble finding a job, that she wouldn’t like his wife, that they’d have a baby too soon.

This ocean of lead gathers heavily inside her and becomes unbearable and runs into a gesture one of the girls makes, wanting to tame the impatient horse – she jerks his head down by his bridle to force him to be still. And when the horse tries to pull away she cracks a whip over his back and screams, ‘Stay, goddammit! Hold still!’

And now Annushka’s blinis with sour cream fall from her hand, and she has launched at the girl fighting the horse, begun attacking her blindly with her fists. ‘Leave him alone!’ she shrieks, her voice straining in her throat. ‘Leave him alone!’

It takes a second for the startled kids to react, to try to pull off this woman in the checkered coat, suddenly deranged, but by now another woman is rushing to her aid, some shrouded lunatic all dressed in rags, and both of them are trying to take away the reins from the girl and to push her away. The girl whimpers, shielding her head with her hands – she hadn’t expected this furious attack. The horse kicks, whinnies and gets away from the girl, running down the middle of the Arbat, spooked (it’s a good thing the promenade is almost empty at this hour); the clatter of his hooves echoes off the walls of the buildings and brings to mind a street fight, a strike; people’s windows open. But now at the end of the street two policemen appear, walking serenely, probably talking about video games – there’s nothing happening – but then they see the commotion, swing into action, grabbing their truncheons, taking off at a run.

‘Sway,’ says the shrouded woman. ‘Move.’

They’re sitting at the police station awaiting their turn for the flushed and disagreeable policeman to take down their statements.

‘Sway.’ And for these couple of hours she chatters in a kind of frenzy, no doubt scared. Adrenaline has awakened the shrouded woman’s tongue. She whispers directly into Annushka’s ear so that no one else is privy to their conversation – not the man who was robbed, not the two young dark-skinned whores, not the man with the wounded head holding a bandage in place with one hand. Meanwhile Annushka cries, tears spilling down her cheeks incessantly, though her reserves will run out soon, it’s clear.

Then, when their turn comes, the red-faced policman shouts over his shoulder to someone in the other room:

‘It’s that runaway woman.’

The voice from in there answers:

‘That one you can just let go, but write the other one up, for disturbing the peace.’

And to the shrouded woman the policeman says:

‘Next time we’re going to ship you out of town, a hundred kilometres out, got it? We don’t want any cult members around here.’

Meanwhile he takes Annushka’s I.D. from her, and as though he couldn’t read he also has her repeat her first name, patronymic and last name, and her address, he asks for her address. Annushka touches the tabletop with her fingertips and, partially closing her eyes as though reciting a poem, gives him her information. She repeats her address twice:

‘Kuznetskaya 46, apartment 78.’

They release them separately, an hour apart, first the shrouded woman, so by the time Annushka gets out, there is no trace of her. Nothing surprising about that, the cold is horrendous. She meanders around the station, her legs urge her on, would carry her down these broad streets off somewhere to the source of all streets, to where they emerge from the hilly outskirts, and past them, to where new and different vistas open up – of the great plain that plays with its breath. But Annushka’s bus is arriving, she runs up and gets on it just in time.

People are in motion already, the streets overtaken by morning movements even though the sun is not yet out. Annushka’s on the bus for a long time, reaching the city’s edge, and then she’s standing at the base of her apartment block, looking up at her windows, all the way up. They’re still dark, but when the sky starts to get lighter she sees that in the kitchen of her apartment there is a light that switches on, and she heads for the entrance.