The Life of an Unknown Man

II

In his mind Shutov has contrived to add thirty years to the face of the girl he had known. To age her with a silvery patina, a fine web of wrinkles… The woman who opens the door to him has certainly grown older, but differently. He pictured a physical consolidation, a heaviness that, when he was young, women acquired from a certain age, their lives being hardly conducive to refinement. A female worker at the controls of a steamroller was not such a rare occurrence in the old days… Yana kisses him with a twittering welcome, and making a rapid visual adjustment, he has to accept this slim woman with ocherish blond hair and a youthful appearance.

“She looks like… Léa!” The realization is so disconcerting that now nothing else surprises him. Not the length of the corridor, nor all these rooms leading into one another (a communal apartment?), nor even this invitation of Yana’s: “Come along, I’m going to show you the Jacuzzi…” They arrive in an extremely spacious bathroom, half of which is occupied by an oval tub. Two plumbers are busily engaged around this pink monster. “Hey! Watch out for the gold plating!” Yana calls out, at once severe and teasing. The men respond with grunts of reassurance. She winks at Shutov and leads him into a large empty room.

“Look! This’ll be the drawing room. Leave your luggage, I’ll give you a guided tour.”

They resume their stroll through this very white interior, lit by clusters of halogen spotlights, which Shutov hesitates to call an “apartment.” As he put his bag down he had experienced a childish fear: would he be able to find it again in this labyrinth? Yana walks on, smiling, explaining. The kitchen, the dining room, another dining room, “in case we ever have a full house,” a bathroom but with an ordinary tub, a bedroom, another bedroom… She says “we” and Shutov does not dare to ask if she is married… He remembers that she works in the hotel business. So could this perhaps be a suite for renting? He lacks the Russian words to translate such a new reality.

He had noticed this deficiency a short while earlier. The taxi dropped him at the edge of a district closed to traffic. He was walking along, light, curious, relaxed-a demeanor appropriate, he thought, for his status as a foreigner whose clothes and movements would not pass unremarked. Very quickly he realized that no one was paying him any attention. The people were dressed as they would be in a city in the West, perhaps a little less casually. And if he did stand out in the midst of this summery throng it was thanks to his own clothes looking tired. Disconcerted, Shutov had told himself he was not far off being taken for a tramp…

“And here, you see, this part of the ceiling will open up. We’ll be able to see the sky. We need to take advantage of every ray of sunlight. We’re not in Florida…” Shutov subjects Yana to the intense scrutiny an explorer would reserve for a new species awaiting classification. She is reminiscent of Léa… No, this is a false similarity. Quite simply she corresponds to a certain type of European woman: svelte, sleekly blond, face carefully smoothed of wrinkles.

“So will your family live here?” He would have liked to talk to Yana about their past but he must first ask conventional questions like this.

“As a matter of fact, the move was planned for tomorrow. But with these celebrations we had to put everything off… As a result, if you’d like to sleep here… Finding a good hotel won’t be easy. We’ve got four in our chain but with the number of VIPs arriving, you’d feel as if you were in a fortress under siege, there are ten bodyguards at every entrance. So welcome to my humble abode! Two of the rooms are already more or less furnished… And this is another corridor, you see. When we joined all the apartments together we fixed up a two-room suite for my son. Vlad, may we come in?”

The young man who welcomes them looks strangely familiar: a gangling youth in T-shirt and jeans, a fair-haired twenty-year-old such as one might come across in London or Amsterdam or an American sitcom.

“Whiskey? Martini? Beer?” Vlad offers with a smile, indicating a tray with an array of bottles. “So this is it,” thinks Shutov. “We’ve reached the stage of irony.” At first Russia copied these Western fashions, now they delight in pastiching them. Near the window is a coatrack surmounted by a plaster cast of Andy Warhol’s shaggy head. Across from that a scarlet banner, with letters in gold: “Forward to the Victory of Communist Toil!” A poster of Madonna, with Second World War medals attached to her chest. A television set with a screen at least three feet wide: a car comes to a halt on a mountaintop, facing a magical sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” says the warm, virile voice of the commercial…

Vlad sits down at his computer. Yana smooths a tuft of his hair. Annoyed, he moves away: “Hey, stop that, Ma…” A momentary look crosses the mother’s face, which Shutov recognizes with a sudden intake of breath.

“I’ve checked,” says Vlad. “They don’t market you too well in Europe.” Shutov bends over and is stunned to recognize his photograph.

“I’m not too well… known. Besides… I didn’t know my books were listed on the Internet. In fact, I don’t have a computer. I write everything by hand, then I type it out…”

Vlad and Yana laugh uncertainly: their guest has a somewhat ponderous sense of humor.

There is a muffled cough in the room next door, which relieves the situation. Through the half-open door Shutov catches sight of patterned wallpaper, the foot of a bed covered in a dark green blanket, like those provided on night trains in the old days…

“Yes, this is pure Ionesco!” Yana exclaims, anticipating his question. “No, I must tell you. We managed to clear four communal apartments and that was on two floors. Eleven rooms to be joined up, twenty-six people to be relocated! A real estate management maneuver crazier than a game of chess. We’ve rehoused them all. For some of them we had to make a triple swap. Piles of paper, lots of red tape, palm greasing. I’ll spare you the details. In the end both floors were ours. There was just this room. With a housewarming gift in it! Yes, this old man (he’s paraplegic, poor thing), who was due to be admitted to an old people’s home ten days ago. And then, what happens? We have this wretched tercentenary, the city’s all closed off. And lo and behold, we have to live with a grandfather who doesn’t even belong to us! Well, actually, the day after tomorrow he’s going to be moved. But, as I say, it’s like the play by Ionesco, you remember, that apartment where there’s a corpse and no one knows how to get rid of it…”

The comparison is rather dubious and to retrieve the situation, Yana knocks on the door. “Georgy Lvovich, may we come in to say hello?” To Shutov she murmurs: “I think he’s a bit deaf. And what’s more, he’s lost… the power of speech.”

It is a slip of the tongue this “power of speech”; she should have said “he has aphasia” or “he’s mute.” But they are already entering the room.

An old man lies on a bed constructed from nickel-plated tubes, of a type Shutov believed had long since disappeared. On his night table is a cup in which a tea bag is macerating, and the glint of thick bifocal glasses. His eyes return Shutov’s look, with perfect lucidity. “It’s all been arranged, Georgy Lvovich. You’ll be in good hands very soon.” Yana speaks in loud and artificially cheerful tones. “The doctors are going to take you right out into the country. You’ll be able to hear the birds singing…” The old man’s face remains unchanged, maintaining its air of grave detachment, with no hint of bitter tension, showing no inclination to make contact through facial expression in default of language. Does he understand everything? Almost certainly, even though his only response is to close his eyes. “Fine. Have a good rest, Georgy Lvovich. Vlad’s here all the time if you need anything…” With a little tilt of her head, Yana indicates to Shutov that the visit is at an end. As he backs out he notices a book lying on the bed: the old man’s hand is touching the volume as if it were a living being.

Yana closes the door and raises her eyebrows with a sigh. “For someone of his generation it would have been better to depart this world before the latest upheavals. Do you know what monthly pension he gets? One thousand two hundred. Rubles. Forty dollars. That’s enough to strike you dumb. After fighting in the war all the way to Berlin. But, you know, these days, nobody could give a damn! And it’s a crying shame we can’t hear his voice anymore. He was a professional singer. His neighbors told me that in the war, well, during the siege of Leningrad, he went out with a whole choir to sing to the troops…”

She starts walking again, stops in front of an open window. A bright fresh May evening, strangely autumnal in feel. “You see, when we were young we didn’t have time to talk to people like him. But now he’s the one who can’t speak…”

Shutov is preparing to tell her why he came, to remind her of their youth… “Guess what this is!” Yana insists, resuming her tour guide’s voice. A huge marble hand placed on an occasional table in the entrance hall to the apartment. “It’s Slava’s hand!” Perceiving Shutov’s puzzled expression, she pulls a surprised face, as if failing to recognize “Slava’s hand” were a flagrant breach of taste. “Yes, Rostropovich’s hand. He’s a friend. It was my idea. Everyone has visiting cards these days and I thought our guests could leave their cards in this hand… People generally put out one of those earthenware things but a hand is much more original…” Shutov reflects that in the days of his youth he never saw anyone in Russia taking out a visiting card. Yes, their youth…

“You know, I didn’t come here for the celebration…,” he says with slightly gruff insistence. “I thought that…” Yana’s cell phone rings. “Yes, I’m on my way. I was in a traffic jam. Well, have you seen the chaos? I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour…”

She shows Shutov the two bedrooms he may choose between and races away. That “owner’s tour” of hers was also, in fact, a way of taking evasive action. Yana kept on talking, laughing, addressing other people, as if she were afraid of what he might have to say about their past. But how, in any case, could he have brought up those distant days that still form a bond between them? “I love you, Nadenka…” Shutov smiles. Yes, he could have quoted Chekhov.

He leaves the apartment five minutes after Yana. The gravitational pull of the city sucks him in, thrusts him toward a life in which he will be himself once again, speaking the language of his childhood, immersed in a human mass to which he belongs by origin. He feels like an old actor who has been performing in an overlong play (“my life in the West,” he thinks), now casting aside his tattered finery and losing himself in the crowd.

Not far from the Admiralty policemen bar his way. He makes a detour and encounters another street closed. Heads toward the Palace Embankment and finds himself thrust back into Millionnaya Street. He tries to argue, then, naively, demands an explanation, and finally walks away, no longer trying to reach the site of the celebrations. The festival is at its height, so close, just a few blocks away, yet inaccessible, as on a tortuous path in a nightmare. “You should have read the papers,” grunts one of the policemen. “They showed all the closed-off districts…”

He keeps moving, guided by increasingly vague indications. The luminous hiss of a firework, a gust of wind, autumnally sharp, coming from the Neva… Or else the two couples, walking along squabbling, who seem to know the route to the festivities. He is about to approach them but they get into a car, drive off…

He is so weary that when he comes to the Summer Garden he mistakes the high grille for yet another barrier. He grips the iron bars, his face straining toward the fragrant darkness of the pathways. The foliage is delicate, as always in this fleeting foretaste of summer. He has to force himself to concentrate so that the words dreamed of for so long can be spoken with fitting gravity: “Beneath these very trees, thirty years ago…”

He hears a groan, moves away from the grille, hesitates over what attitude to adopt. The young woman he sees appears to be drunk. Or rather… She has just trodden on a shard from a bottle and cut herself. The festive streets are strewn with fragments of glass. “You need rubber boots here…,” she moans. Shutov tells her to sit down on the ledge beside the railings, takes hold of the gashed foot, cleans the wound with the towel they gave him on the plane. The girl must be seventeen or eighteen. The age Yana was, he thinks. And he was right: she is drunk, she staggers, he needs to escort her as far as the metro. He goes down with her. The train comes so quickly they do not have time to exchange a single word. Beyond the closing doors he glimpses her sitting down, already absorbed into a life where he does not exist. And yet his hand still retains the ephemeral impression of that delicate injured foot.

He goes back to Yana’s new apartment after midnight. Vlad lets him in, his ear glued to his cell phone. The conversation is in English: the young man is talking to a client in Boston. Without breaking off he leads Shutov to the kitchen, shows him where the coffeemaker is, opens the refrigerator with a gesture of invitation, smiles, goes away.

Shutov eats, amazed by the variety of the food, the quality of the coffee. This is the kind of apartment, the type of food, which in the Soviet era the Russians used to picture when they spoke of the West… And here it is, they have re-created a quintessence of the West that he himself never really experienced in the West at all. A paradox that helps him feel less behind the times.

He goes to look for the bedroom Yana assigned to him, gets lost, smiles. “Why not go to sleep on the doormat, here upon the threshold of this new world?” In the great bathroom the taps gleam like weighty museum pieces. “Scythian gold…,” he murmurs, continuing on his way.

How should he regard this new life? With delight? With regret for its frenzied materialism? After all, in ten years’ time the young may well feel no feverish excitement when confronted by this intrusive stuff. Young Vlad, here, lounging on a leather sofa in front of the television. He sips a beer while on the screen, in almost the same pose, a young man embraces a blond girl whose shoulder is gradually bared in time with their sighs. A commercial break cuts short their clinch: a head of hair enriched by a particular shampoo flits by; a cat pounces upon the gleaming contents of a can; a tall, dark, handsome man inhales his cup of coffee; a car embeds itself in a sunrise… Shutov remembers the slogan and mentally repeats it: “To be on time, when every second counts!”

The old man’s door is ajar. A bedside lamp, a blanket, the outline of a motionless body. And suddenly the rustle of a page. Should he go in? Speak to him, even without any hope of a reply? Or simply say good night? Shutov hesitates, then resumes his journey: if he starts from Vlad’s office he can remember the way better.

In his bedroom he discovers what had escaped his notice earlier during the guided tour: volumes on a large wooden bookshelf painted silver. Russian and foreign classics in deluxe editions. Leather spines with generously wide bands, gold, paper that gives sensual pleasure to the fingers. Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy… He seizes a volume of Chekhov. The story he is looking for is there. Two lovers, their descent on a toboggan. “I love you, Nadenka…”

In the morning Shutov follows Yana, who talks incessantly on her cell phone, while performing a thousand useful acts: retrieving a stumbling child, pointing out the splashes of paint on the marble to the workmen in the bathroom, plugging in a kettle for breakfast, adjusting a skirt that Vlad’s young girlfriend is trying on… Catching Shutov’s eye she smiles, shakes her head by way of saying, “I’ll be with you in a second,” and the whirlwind resumes, the workmen want her opinion on the color of a sealant, Vlad asks for money, a woman laden with a bundle of clothes proclaims that tomorrow the old man’s room will be vacated. None of this prevents her from giving instructions over the telephone: “If he needs a sitting room get number twenty-six ready… He ought to be perfectly happy with a standard room… So what? We’ve got fifteen ministers in our hotels. If they all started demanding suites… Well, let Putin put them up in his Konstantin Palace! All right, give this one a different room but not the others… Let me know what happens!”

Before the next call she finds time to give Shutov the name of the restaurant where they can meet for lunch and “finally have a heart-to-heart talk.” The phrase is hackneyed but it touches him; he embarks on a sentence that is far too long, too nostalgic, ill suited to the frenzied rhythm of the morning. Along the lines of: “Do you remember that pathway through the trees in the Summer Garden?…” Yana blows him a kiss and runs toward the elevator, shouting into her cell: “It’s no good here. I’ll call you from the car.”

The energy of this new life is pleasantly contagious, a euphoriant that Shutov encounters again in the street in even stronger doses. He feels rejuvenated, almost mischievous, leaps up to catch the balloon a child has let go of, favors its mother with a wink. Buys himself an ice cream, gives directions to two young female tourists who are lost. And having reached the Nevsky Prospekt, attests to the miracle: he feels completely at one with the carnival crowd making its way toward the Winter Palace, and it is a physical belonging, a bodily adherence.

It is also a… face transplant! A violent image, but it expresses vividly what he feels. His new physiognomy has a skin that is regenerated by the glances alighting on him, amid a flood of smiles, shouts, embraces. Yes, a man with a skin graft must go through the same mixture of dread and delight on walking out into the street: Will they notice? Turn away as I pass by? Give me pitying looks? No, it seems they perceive nothing. They all smile at this man who is not me. So I have the right to live among them once again.

At first Shutov walks along with the wariness of just such a skin-grafted man. But quite quickly the madness of what is happening all around him rids him of any fear. The music from several bands creates such a din that people communicate by facial expression and gesture. Besides, the only message to be shared is one of permanent amazement. A giant inflatable cow with eight legs floats above the crowd, its enormous udder sprinkles the onlookers, who yell, dodging the jets, opening their umbrellas. A little farther on the human tide is cut in half by a procession of Peter the Great look-alikes! Military frock coats, three-cornered hats, mustaches like an angry cat’s whiskers, canes. Most of them are of a stature at least faintly evocative of the czar’s six foot six, but there are also some little ones and even a woman dressed as the czar. At one crossroads this regiment gets mixed up with a squad of near-naked “Brazilian dancers,” adorned with feathers. The czars’ uniforms brush against long bronzed thighs, graze the hemispheres of plump buttocks. And quickly these give way to courtiers in periwigs, the avenue is awash with crinolines, sunlight dancing off the high powdered coiffures. The whipped cream of their attire is succeeded by a new inflatable monster. A dinosaur? No, a ship. Shutov reads the name on its stern: Aurora. “That was the cruiser in the October Revolution,” a mother explains to her son of about twelve… If that historic gunshot, which children in the old days would have come across in primary school, now has to be explained, this really is a new era… The forgetfulness is refreshing: yes, spare them your wars and revolutions!

The loudspeakers cutting through the musical hullabaloo seem to be in agreement with Shutov: “Welcome to the launch of the Great May Revolution. Everyone to Palace Square. The mayor of Saint Petersburg is going to have his head cut off.” Laughter erupts, masks scowl, another Peter the Great, this time on horseback, towers above the crowd.

And down below, almost on the ground, a shrill voice rings out: “Let me through, I’m late! Make way!” A dwarf, an elderly man, dressed as a king’s fool, or rather a czar’s fool. This waddling figure scurries along, pushing the crowd aside with his short arms. One of the “Brazilian dancers” is with him, clearing a passage for him, shaking her feathers and her bracelets. Clearly they are expected at Palace Square and their disarray is both comic and touching. “A buffoon,” thinks Shutov, stepping aside for the little man. “A shut…” The half-naked dancer bumps into him, her feathers tickle his cheek, he senses the vigor of this young perfumed body but the woman’s gaze is strangely sad.

“Hey you, oaf! Why aren’t you laughing like everyone else? How dare you? A head with no smile belongs on the block!” Shutov tries to break free from the hands that grip him, then yields to the game. Actors dressed as executioners surround him, he remembers the orders repeated by the loudspeakers: people with sour faces are enemies of the carnival: off with their heads! There is nothing cruel about the execution: a hilarious sentence, the swing of a plastic ax, with the crowd shouting encouragement… One of the executioners asks him, “So, is it a long time since you were in Saint Petersburg?” but does not listen to the reply and rushes off to hunt down other resisters to the general merriment.

Once at Palace Square, Shutov begins to grasp what lies at the heart of the changes. A geyser of energy, held in check for a long time. The frenzied search for a new logic to life after the highly logical madness of dictatorship. He sees the mayor mounting the scaffold, yes, the mayor of Saint Petersburg in person! (Would this be possible in Paris or New York?) The firecrackers explode, the crowd hoots noisily, the mayor smiles, almost flattered. An executioner brandishes… an enormous pair of scissors, points them at the condemned man’s neck, seizes his tie and cuts it off! A wave of delirium ripples across the square at the sight of the trophy displayed. A loudspeaker chokes with delight: “A Gucci tie!” Shutov surprises himself by cheering with the others, slapping strangers’ hands, physically bonded with these thousands of living beings. The little clown seen just now climbs breathlessly onto the throne and a magistrate in ceremonial robes declares him to be the governor of the city.

“A collective exorcism,” he thinks as he goes to his rendezvous with Yana. “Three days of this burlesque May Revolution to undo decades of terror, to wash away the blood of real revolutions. To deafen themselves with the noise of firecrackers so as to forget the sound of bombs. To unleash these merry executioners into the streets so as to blot out the shadowy figures that came knocking at doors in the night not so long ago, dragging men out, still half asleep, throwing them into black cars.”

Behind the Winter Palace a placard announces a “family portrait.” Seated on folding chairs, a Peter the Great, a Lenin, a Stalin, and, beyond an untoward gap, a Gorbachev, complete with birthmark painted on the middle of his bald head. Stalin, pipe in mouth, talks on his cell phone. A Nicholas II and a Brezhnev (the missing links) rejoin the group, laden with packs of beer. Laughter, camera flashes. The barker, a young woman in a miniskirt, moves among the crowd: “Now then, ladies and gentlemen, spare a coin for the losers of history. We accept dollars too…”

“They’ve managed to turn the page at last,” Shutov says to himself. And the thought of being left behind, like a dried flower, between the preceding pages, gives him the desire to hurry, to catch up on lost time.

“You didn’t have time to change?”

“No… Well, I only brought this jacket.”

“I see…”

Their words are drowned by the music. He smiles, ruefully, fingering the lapels of his jacket. Bulging pockets, faded material… The restaurant staff know Yana and greet her with respect. Some of the customers nod to her. She is among her own people, thinks Shutov, unable to guess what criterion, in the new Russia, distinguishes such people from the rest. Friendship, simply? Profession? Politics?

They sit at a terrace overlooking a park where boisterously merry music is being played, so this disturbance is not the fault of the restaurant. The headwaiter offers his apologies. “Oh, this tercentenary…,” sighs Yana.

They need to shout to be heard, but what Shutov would like to say cannot be uttered in ringing tones. So they do as the others do; smile, eat, then yell and gesticulate. From this intermittent dialogue he learns about what he already knew: Yana’s life after their brief, undeclared love affair. Work, marriage, the birth of a son, divorce, return to Leningrad, which had once more become Saint Petersburg…

The words that falter within him, rendered fragile by the passage of so many years, are too frail to cut through the noise. “Do you remember that evening at Peterhof,” he would like to say, “the golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…” He also learns what he had not known: the hotel chain where Yana works belongs to her! Well, not to her in person, but to the mysterious “us” she refers to when talking about her life. Her partner and her? Their family business? More than the music it is this language barrier that makes comprehension hard.

Suddenly the din stops. An amazed silence, one can hear the rustling of the leaves… And the cell phones ring, as if the calls had all been waiting for this pause. No, it was simply that people could not hear them before. They all respond at the same time, delighted at having recovered the power of speech.

Yana is telephoned as well, and Shutov can already manage to identify the person she is speaking to from the tone she adopts. That slightly irritated voice is reserved for the staff of one of “her” hotels. The sulky, simpering tones for a man whose bad temper has to be soothed and who seems to be a part of this vague but powerful “us.” Her partner, no doubt. Or else a husband from whom she must conceal this lover of thirty years ago? No, that would be too stupid…

She puts the telephone aside and he hopes that at last he will be able to tell her the purpose of his visit. “We’re having a housewarming party, tomorrow,” she says. “Just a glass of champagne-it’s still a building site, as you saw. There aren’t even any tables. And in the evening we’re inviting everyone to our country place… Some of the key people in Saint Petersburg. I don’t know if you’d be interested. You won’t know anyone… The mayor should be coming…” This is someone Shutov does know: the beheaded man whose Gucci tie was cut short…

A couple come over to greet Yana. Rapid glances of appraisal at Shutov: Who is he? A Russian? But not dressed smartly enough for this spot. A foreigner? But lacking the ease of manner that can be sensed on encountering people from the West. Shutov reads this judgment in their looks. The embarrassment he had detected in Yana becomes clear to him: he is unclassifiable, difficult to introduce to friends, he has a poor social profile. When the couple move away he tries to assume the relaxed air of a former fellow student: “So this dacha, where did you build it? Yes, I’d like to drop by.” Yana hesitates, as if she regrets having issued the invitation: “It’s an old izba. The plot is a bit constricted for us, less than eight acres. On the Gulf of Finland…”

A man stops in front of Yana, begins talking to her. “The golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…,” Shutov recalls.

The man is handsome, young (under forty, or at least at that smooth and tanned age that people with the means know how to fix). “Tall, dark, and asinine,” Shutov thinks. (It was something Léa used to say and they would both laugh…) The malice of it makes him feel guilty. This handsome man can, in fact, be graded by American norms of virility, in such cases the French speak of B-movie heroes… An impeccably cut lightweight suit, the manner of a seducer indulgent toward his victims’ weakness. Yana adopts a voice that is new to Shutov, an assumed nonchalance, slipping into frail tones of fond helplessness. Her face, in particular, expresses this, her eyes, as she gazes up at the man: the concerned look of a woman who has lost a loved one in the middle of a crowd. The music starts again, she stands up, draws closer to the man, and this tender anxiety is even more visible when their words can no longer be heard.

“This must be her lover…” The brutality of the observation irritates him but he no longer has any wish to delude himself. “The golden haze over the Gulf of Finland…” It was idiotic to think that she would still remember it. He calls to mind the different voices Yana employs to speak to her staff, to her husband, to this tall, dark, handsome man. She leads several lives at once and it is clear that this excites her. She stands there before her lover, considerably shorter than him, and her whole body betrays the demeanor of a woman giving herself. Shutov feels like an actor who has just missed his cue.

The man brushes Yana’s cheek with his lips, takes his leave. She sits down, directs a look of radiant blindness at Shutov. They drink coffee without speaking to one another… As he escorts her to her car, Shutov is tempted to warn her to go carefully, as she seems so absent. But she quickly pulls herself together; she has to “dash off to a shareholders’ meeting” and advises Shutov to return on foot, “you take the main alley through the park and then turn left, remember.” She drives off as he embarks on an observation about how vividly he recalls those pathways amid the autumn foliage…

Emerging from the trees he encounters the Brazilian dancers. They are changing in a small van. Shutov recognizes the one who was running along earlier, clearing the way for the fool. She has taken off her plumage, washed away the mascara, her face is very young and her look a little melancholy, as before. Shutov perceives a tenderness in it, possibly intended, strangely enough, for him…

As he opens the door to Yana’s new apartment he hears Vlad’s voice: “Listen. It’s quite simple. We need two topless girls for the back cover. Then you call the editorial team. If they won’t include it in the article, we withdraw our ad and that’s that…” Intrigued, Shutov walks toward the voice. As he passes the little bedroom where the old man lodges he catches sight of that same green blanket, a hand holding a book.

Each title includes a woman’s name: Tatyana, or the Fire Tamer; Deborah and the Chemistry of Pleasure; Bella, a Woman with No Taboos… Vlad is showing Shutov the new series launched by his publishing house. They lifted the idea from Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, he concedes. But Nabokov himself borrowed it from women’s romantic fiction… The young man talks a language Shutov has never heard in Russia. “Market analysis,” “book promotion,” “boosting sales”… For the new series what they needed was a clear definition of the “generational niche,” which, happily, is quite broad: female readers between the ages of thirty and fifty who are “not very intellectual” (coming from Vlad, this is a compliment) and a small minority of men who “have a bit of a problem with sex” and will read these books on the quiet.

Seeing Shutov’s perplexed expression, Vlad hastens to add, “Fine, we also have more serious brands!” and he mentions various series of historical novels, family sagas, political fiction… But it is the word “brand” that disconcerts Shutov. Vlad translates: “They’re… how do you say it in Russian? Well… Yes. Makes, labels. You see, all these Bellas and Tatyanas, we have to bring them out at regular intervals. That’s how you create reading habits, you know, get people addicted. The problem is that each of these books runs to five hundred pages. No writer can keep pace with that. Unless he’s what my grandfather used to call a Stakhanovite. And so, several of them write under one name, preferably an American one. That’s a brand…”

Vlad notices that this explanation plunges Shutov even deeper in thought. He leans over, picks up several volumes that are lying there on the wall-to-wall carpet. “Look, there’s some heavyweight stuff as well.” Shutov scans the titles. Secrets of the Kremlin; Stalin, Between God and the Devil; Nicholas II, the Innocence of a Martyr…

“Are you sure he was really innocent?” asks Shutov, trying to rouse himself from his bemusement.

“Of course. They’ve just made him a saint!”

“For having led Russia into revolution…”

“No, hold on. The revolution was a plot hatched abroad. Look, this book here is quite categorical about it…”

Menacing shadows on a bloodred cover. The Occult Forces Behind the Revolution. Shutov smiles.

“Ouch! That’s scary!”

“That’s the idea. And you should have seen the ad I put together for the launch. There was this Russian monk praying in front of an icon with a crowd of devils dancing all around him…”

“That’s not very close to the historical truth. Especially if your monk looked like Rasputin.”

“Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet. You know what my boss’s motto is? ‘Only the blind are excused from buying our books.’ And it’s more or less the case. But you need imagination for it. When we were launching the book on Stalin I dug up a cleaning woman who’d worked at his dacha on the Black Sea. Imagine that! She’s a granny aged a hundred now, but I still managed to get her on TV and the interviewer (well, he’s one of our authors) questioned her in such a way that you might have thought she’d been Stalin’s mistress. The next day we’d sold out. That’s historical truth. Or take Bella, with No Taboos. It’s about a brothel where the Moscow underworld go. Well, to launch it on TV we had five prostitutes who swore everything in the book was true…”

Vlad gets carried away, soon Shutov has not enough arms to hold the rolls of posters, the large-format photographs; Nicholas II adorned with the halo of a newly canonized saint; Stalin with a female figure in the background and a gangster thrusting open the collar of a blouse with the barrel of his revolver to reveal enormous, very pink breasts.

“The same carnival yet again,” thinks Shutov, violently struck once more by the heady intoxication of the change. What energy this young Vlad has! And this easygoing cynicism, selling books like vacuum cleaners. All these publishing houses have sprung up in just a few years! And already they have this American-style know-how…

Suddenly, in the armful of documents, Shutov catches sight of a view of a park, with sculptures beneath autumnal foliage. The Summer Garden… The picture vanishes beneath a swatch of color photographs: women embracing, men exchanging tender kisses…

“That’s our series aimed at sexual minorities,” comments Vlad. “I told you. No one escapes us!” He laughs.

Shutov remembers the carnival executioners who cut off his head earlier: that’s it, no one is to look sad. The parallel is disturbing.

“You know, Vlad, in the old days, when I was young, a good many poets were published. The print runs for their books were not vast but there was… How can I put it?… Yes, there was real passion in those of us who read them. Often printed on very poor paper. Poetry was our bible…”

“Yeah. I can see what kind of books you’re talking about. The old folks heave a sigh and call it ‘Great Literature.’ Listen, I’ll tell you what I think about it. I once met a girl, an American, in the same job as me. And she started giving me a lot of stuff, like: oh sure, we publish crap but that’s so we can publish Real Literature! What two-faced bastards these puritans are! Well, I wanted to put her on the spot so I quoted Marx: the only criterion of truth is the practical result. And in publishing the result is the number of sales, OK? If crap books sell it’s because they’re needed. You should have seen her face!”

He roars with laughter then, glancing at the television, declares, “But the main thing is, if I published your poets with their small print runs, I’d never be able to afford wheels like that.”

On the screen (the sound is off) the car races up toward the sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” Vlad’s cell phone emits jazz notes and the conversation breaks into slangy English, incomprehensible to Shutov. Vlad covers the telephone with his hand, winks at Shutov, and whispers: “Only joking!…” Yes, only a joke, that remark about the car, thinks Shutov, as he puts aside the rafts of photographs piled up in his lap. A joke, shutka, the same root as his name…

Behind the door where the mute old man lodges, the chink of a spoon against a cup can be heard.

Shutov makes his way back to his room, his halting steps keeping pace with the arguments that jostle one another in his head. Wisdom after the event… He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author. Lines of verse carried the weight of long sentences north of the Arctic Circle where so many poets died…

He imagines Vlad’s mocking reply: “And you think that was good?” There it is. A naive question like this is hard to counter. Why should the Gulag be a criterion of good literature? And suffering a measure of authenticity? But, above all, who can judge the value of lives, of books? In what way can Vlad’s existence be said to be less meaningful than that of some poor bastard using his last few kopecks to buy a pamphlet by a banned poet printed on wrapping paper? To these young Russians no book is forbidden now. They travel the world (Vlad has just come back from Boston), they are well fed, well educated, free of complexes… And yet they lack something…

Shutov is trying not to think like a petty, embittered old man. No, Vlad has no reason to be jealous of that Soviet youth of thirty years ago. They had nothing to set him dreaming. Nothing. Except, perhaps, a volume of poems with grayish pages, verses aglow with the golden light of leaves in a park… “I should have told him,” thinks Shutov, and knows he could not have found the right words: a verbal block that makes him unable to explain the richness of that wretched past.

He opens the window, hears sounds in the background suggestive of a carnival grown weary, a gaiety running out of steam, sustained by dint of street performances now stagnating into pools of noise. Outside couples and groups of friends are passing. A far-fetched but tempting notion occurs to him. To go down and confide in them. “I’ve just come out of a coma lasting twenty years. I don’t understand anything. Explain it to me!” He smiles, closes the window again, and with nervous wariness switches on a large flat-screen television. The sound is deafening-several seconds of panic before he masters the remote control. And a resigned realization: this house is full of objects he will never learn to use properly.

On the screen is a thoroughbred dog, with a long, haughty, nervous muzzle. Hands with varnished nails fastening a glittering collar about the animal’s neck. A figure appears: 14,500. Fourteen thousand five hundred dollars, the presenter confirms, and specifies the various precious stones that decorate this accoutrement. A sequence of other models: rubies, topazes, diamonds… The numbers lengthen to match the rarity of the gems. The next scene features a dog with clipped hair, whose body, sensitive to the cold, is to benefit from a distinctive garment. Fox fur, beaver, or sable capes… The same range of furs for its ankle boots… The program now moves on to a more difficult species to domesticate. A lynx, which must undergo a pedicure if you care about your carpets and furniture. A vet is seen filing down the animal’s claws… For a dwarf hippopotamus, whose well-being depends on a good level of humidity, the installation of a hygrometer is essential. The brightness of the colors on your python’s skin can be enhanced by a wide range of food supplements…

Shutov feels anger mounting within him, but the program is more subtle than he thought. This feature about the pets of the new rich is supplemented by a debate between two commentators (one for, one against) with interventions from the audience. “No one escapes us!” Shutov remembers. The less well-heeled members of the audience fulminate and one of the commentators sides with them. The affluent approve and the second commentator defends them. At the end a compromise emerges: if there are madmen willing to buy diamonds for their doggies let them go ahead, this is a democracy. Shutov realizes that he was not far off thinking this himself, so his fury did not make much sense. New wealth makes such extravagances possible, and it would be naive to invoke who knows what moral principle to condemn them.

What a fantastic device for lobotomizing us, he reflects, hopping from one channel to another. The mind is chloroformed, the rebellious spirit is tamed. Every opinion is present. A procession of Orthodox priests files into a cathedral: the Greeks have brought the relics of Saint Andrei for the tercentenary. And on the very next channel two young lesbian rock singers are explaining that in London they had to “tone down” their concert because European audiences are too prudish. The “non-toned-down” version shows them sitting one on top of the other, massaging their crotches and howling into their mikes… A night scene: young men with shaved heads, Nazi salutes… An American sitcom: three idiots, two white, one black, saying stupid things to one another, intercut with canned laughter… More dogs, this time without diamonds; they are searching for explosives at the Kirov Theater, where the forty-five heads of state invited for the celebration will gather. A football match. An English great-nephew of Nicholas II arriving at Saint Petersburg in a vintage car. An erotic film-the cries of pleasure in Russian are reminiscent of the instructions for a domestic appliance. VIP guests in front of the equestrian statue of Peter the Great; it is raining, Blair shelters his wife under an umbrella, Putin is stoical, Chirac arrives on the double, having been held up at the Hermitage (the commentator explains) by his interest in antiques… Another football match. “To be on time, when every second…” Sequences in black and white: archives from the Second World War, Stalin on a platform, columns of soldiers setting off to defend Moscow. An interview with Madame Putin: “Women should choose personal dressmakers. This would save them from encountering guests at receptions wearing the same Yves Saint Laurent gown as themselves…” Reportage from the Summer Garden, where eighteenth-century courtiers are strolling, wigs, crinolines, lorgnettes…

Shutov gets up, he has just recognized the corner of a pathway in the park, a statue… Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed. The meaning of the transformation appears clear to him. Russia is attempting to erase the decades that came between her and her destiny: several of Vlad’s books spoke of this Russian destiny, interrupted by the disastrous Soviet digression. Yes, a beautiful river polluted by the sludge of massacres, intellectual slavery, fear. “And the truth is that young Vlad is closer to those crinolines than he is to the phantom of the USSR. He has more in common with Nicholas II’s English great-nephew than with a Soviet dinosaur like me…” Shutov smiles but the perception is painful: over his head history is returning to its course, becoming more limpid… while he remains mired in those accursed times everyone would prefer to forget.

“I was wrong to come…,” he tells himself. But has he really arrived anywhere? A journey from an attic in an apartment building in Paris, where he felt so little at home, to this luxury apartment, where he is even more of a stranger. “I came to see Yana again…” He glances at the clock on the television. Ten thirty p.m. At the restaurant, Yana had promised to call for him at about eight.

He goes down into the street, into that pale luminescence of northern nights, and begins to walk with a resolute tread, and a feeling that he is staking everything on one last throw of the dice.

The Hermitage is open all night, it was announced on television. He goes there, is glad to mingle with the throng crowding in at the entrance, laughs at the quip repeated by several voices: “So here we are, storming the Winter Palace again!” The memory of the carnival comes back to him, the tribal warmth, the hope of renewing links with that world on which he is twenty years in arrears. He will catch someone’s eye in front of a painting, strike up a conversation…

From his first steps inside he freezes, dumbfounded. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a train station. People sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, some of them asleep. Others, perched on the window ledges, are scanning the sky: a son et lumière above the Neva has been promised. Two adolescents stretched out behind a gigantic malachite vase are idly kissing. A tourist in shorts speaks very loudly in German to a female companion, clad in the same brand of shorts (but three times as wide), who nods as she bites into a thick sandwich. A group of Asians passes by, filming every picture in the room with highly disciplined synchronization. A husband explains to his wife: “The metro opens again at five. We might as well spend the night here.” Ladies in crinolines and mustached hussars materialize, like ghosts, in imitation of the ones who used to frequent the palace. But the crowd is too tired to pay them any attention.

Shutov walks on, observes, and his thoughts about Russia returning to the brilliant high road of her destiny seem to have been too hasty. For there is also a confusion of styles, the disappearance of a way of life and barely the first babblings of a new manner of being… In front of a glass case a little girl is laughing at the exhibits. He pricks up his ears and realizes that the chuckling of this child is, in fact, almost silent sobbing. She has lost her parents in a room where there’s a “big pot.” He is about to alert an attendant, then guesses that the big pot must be that malachite vase. They go to it and the child recognizes her parents: that young couple locked in an embrace whom Shutov took to be teenage sweethearts… As he leaves the child, he thinks he has surprised in her look the pained incomprehension he feels himself.

He walks out of the museum and allows himself to be sucked in by the throng. Thousands of people, like a sponge ever more tightly squeezed, are waiting for the sky to be set ablaze by the spotlights of a Japanese artist. New arrivals add to the pressure, the most agile climb trees. “Three million dollars, that’s what it’s going to cost us!” a voice proclaims, and a chorus responds with the sum total of the artist’s fees. The night is not dark enough for the luminous fantasies to materialize. The clouds light up but the wind from the Neva tears them apart instantly. The people rail wearily against the Japanese and begin to disperse.

All that remains of the jubilant enthusiasm for the carnival is this indifferent clustering of the crowd as it moves from place to place in search of the last stray sparks of the festival. On Palace Square Shutov listens to the performance of a former dissident singer. A familiar repertoire: camps, prisons, blood. The human mass laughs, yawns, moves off, and spills into the Nevsky Prospekt. There it divides up, Shutov is carried along by a section retracing its footsteps. He does not notice the precise moment when what he observes switches into a fantastic dreamscape. Perhaps when a batrachian figure breaks the surface of a canal: frogmen are checking the place where tomorrow the procession of the masters of the world is due to pass. Or else when the smell of urine invading the streets becomes intolerable. “Silks for fine ladies at their toilet,” jokes an elderly man. “But no toilets for the people.” At the English Embankment the crowd is turned aside by a police cordon: a cruise ship is moored there, the floating hotel for the presidents of the former Soviet republics. “Nine suites at six thousand dollars a night,” a woman announces in bizarrely gleeful tones. “I read that in the paper.” Her partner hugs her tightly. “It’s a disgrace,” he retorts. “That’s what you get in a year. And look at Bush. He’s taken over the whole of the Astoria Hotel…”

The rain gets heavier, breaks up the crowd into narrower trickles. One of these expels Shutov onto the edge of the Field of Mars. He crosses the esplanade where groups of young people are hanging about. They are drinking, throwing empty bottles, scuffling, leaping over the flame in the monument to the dead. One of them unbuttons himself to urinate into the fire. Shutov tries to reprimand him but his voice is lost amid the shouting. This saves him, for those who heard him are already bearing down on him, he can hear oaths, almost good-natured in their mockery: “Hey, old man. Do you want your balls fried or roasted?” He edges away, trying to slow his pace so as not to betray the humiliating fear stiffening his back.

But what saves him is the final coda to this nocturnal phantasmagoria: they start raising the bridges over the Neva and he is forced to hurry, making long detours to avoid the trap of the now disunited islands.

Catching sight of his own distraught face in the elevator, Shutov concludes with philosophical gravity: “I think I understand it all now.” He does not know whom he is trying to convince, but the lie helps him to hold back his tears.

Vlad greets him with exaggerated benevolence. “I’ve prepared stuff for your supper. There’s smoked sturgeon, unless you’d rather… And there’s wine, but you’re probably choosy on that front, like all the French… Ma called. Unfortunately she wasn’t able to get away… There’s also some Far Eastern crab… So how was Saint Petersburg by night?”

His warm friendliness moves Shutov. A man with his back to the wall can feel choked by emotion. Why not make a clean breast of it? This abortive trip, the failed reunion with Yana… He sits down at the table in the kitchen (a place of long sleepless nights for Russians of his generation, during which things both spiritual and spirituous were shared) and begins talking. The crinolines in the Summer Garden, the city as it used to be, so far from festive, and yet…

He quickly notices that the young man is not listening. Vlad stands there glancing discreetly at his watch, then finally, unable to hold out any longer, ventures: “Let’s talk about it tomorrow, if you like. We’ll have all the time in the world… The thing is… I did have a favor to ask you… You see, I’ve been working at home for the past four days and it’s not easy…” Shutov supposes that Vlad is after some advice linked to his profession, his opinion on an author, on a translation… He even has time to feel important, endowed with great literary experience… And then the nature of the request becomes clear.

“The truth is, if I’m hanging around here it’s on account of the old man. Ma is terrified that something might happen to him just before the move…” Vlad lowers his voice: “It’s not so much that he might kick the bucket. That’s manageable, we call a doctor, he makes a report and hasta la vista! No, what would be more serious would be… you see, he can’t speak. Who knows what’s going on in his head. Just imagine if he cut his own throat. He’s got a perfectly good pair of hands, he could do it. They might accuse us of maltreating him and who knows what besides. Especially as my stepfather has a very public position! Ma’s worried. I help her as much as I can. It’s just that… Since I got back from the States I’ve seen nothing of my… girlfriend. OK, she did come in this morning to try on the clothes I brought back for her. But with that whole crowd milling around here, it wasn’t very private…”

Shutov was part of “that whole crowd” himself. Vlad hastens to clarify. “We can’t really kiss one another under the nose of a grandpa! You see, here we are in the middle of these celebrations and I’ve got to look after an ancient ruin! So I’m watching the carnival on TV. It’s worse than being in jail. Then my girlfriend called me. She came straight out with it: ‘You choose. It’s either me or that old basket case!’ Sure, women always go over the top… But that’s how things stand. So I wanted to ask you a big favor. If you could stay with the old man until morning… I promise, on my honor, at half past six I’ll take over from you and at eight o’clock the medics will be collecting him… Are you sure? That wouldn’t be a problem for you?”

Shutov reassures him, mentions the time difference (“In Paris I go to bed at two a.m., which is to say, four a.m. here…”). Vlad stammers out his thanks, gives some instructions: “He’s already had his ration of food, so that’s done. Now if you see his pot’s full… But he doesn’t urinate much. Listen, I’ll be in your debt for life! When you’re back in Saint Petersburg next time, don’t hesitate…”

The door bangs shut and out on the landing the young man’s voice can be heard yelling the good news to his girlfriend into a cell phone.

The television opposite Vlad’s office is showing an opera (the eyes of the forty-five heads of state staring at the beads of sweat on Pavarotti’s brow). Through the half-open door to the bedroom can be seen a green blanket, a hand holding a book. From time to time the rustle of a page can be heard.

Shutov laughs, chuckling inwardly at first, then, recalling that the old man is doubtless deaf as well as unable to speak, stops holding back, his chest shaking with an attack of hilarity. The wistful beauty of the reunion he planned is toppling over into burlesque. Having come as a nostalgic pilgrim, he finds himself surrounded by modernity gone mad, a mixture of American razzle-dazzle and Russian clowning. He has sought to understand this new country and they reject him, along with the worn-out relics of Soviet times, in the company of a bedridden deaf-mute, whose chamber pot he will have to empty.

He laughs, aware that this is the only way he can avoid lapsing into emotionalism over that lost paradise. His childhood at the orphanage, a paradise? Or his impoverished youth perhaps? Or the history of this country, written between two lines of barbed wire? No, no, let’s laugh about it, for fear of weeping. Occasions for uproarious laughter are not lacking. On the screen Pavarotti’s stentorian rotundity is now abandoned by the camera as it focuses on quite a different vocalist, Berlusconi, who is singing along with half-closed eyes while Putin casts amused glances at him. Shutov changes channels. A feature on the parade of old streetcars. When the Nazis laid siege to Leningrad these vehicles were used to transport the corpses of citizens who had starved to death. Shutov surfs the channels: an Indian film, a woman in raptures, a man on a smart motorbike crushes his enemy. CNN: the stock market is rising, a general talks about restoring peace. The Russian equivalent of CNN and the wonder of these endlessly repeated news items: Madame Putin once more urging women to choose a personal dressmaker, the Greeks yet again handing over the relics of Saint Andrei, and the two female rock singers complaining about the excessive prudery of British audiences… And when, switching to another channel, Shutov hits upon the same erotic film, the position of the bodies creates the illusion that their coupling has been going on uninterrupted for many hours. The commercial for canned cat food. A biker hastens to wash his “dull and tired” hair with nourishing shampoo. A car hurtles toward the sun: “To be on time, when every second counts!” An executioner snips the Saint Petersburg mayor’s tie. An obese young black man in an American sitcom has two slightly idiotic young white men in stitches. In a Baltic state a parade of former SS men. A shaving cream commercial…

Shutov eats in front of the television (the wine is good, even for a “choosy” Frenchman) and he feels almost happy. Relaxed, at least, thanks to the absurdities flooding the screen. The secret he sought to fathom is simple: Russia has just caught up with the global game of role-playing, its antics, its codes. And the tercentenary celebrations only sharpen this impetus toward the great world spectacular: forty-five heads of state stuffed with our caviar, glutted with our vodka, bored with our Tchaikovsky. Bill Gates and his riches? Better to admire our own millionaires, who have achieved this status in just a few years!

The two presenters who were earlier commenting on the animal fads of the new rich appear on the screen again. They are talking now about the vacations these tycoons treat themselves to: a pleasure yacht three hundred feet long, with a helicopter and a pocket submarine on board and a gold-plated swimming pool, which, during parties for friends, is filled with champagne. The reporters disagree over the make and the year… Another click and an old streetcar can be seen crossing the starving city during the war.

Shutov’s laughter subsides into a relieved sigh. No point in cudgeling one’s brains, just accept the world carnival, which the Russians have now joined. All aboard! The merry-go-round revolves and only prehistoric creatures like him still care about the previous century. Nostalgists dreaming of evening mists over the Baltic Sea, while the global merry-go-round, as it gathers speed, hurls them away to bite the dust amid the nettles far from the carnival.

From the old man’s bedroom comes a dull coughing, then the rustle of a page. Shutov glances in through the half-open door, remembers about the chamber pot, is it time already? Go and say good night to him? Spend a moment beside him? This human presence, at once mute and filled with grave sense, makes him ill at ease.

“It’s because we’re from the same era…” An unattractive notion, Shutov tries to qualify it. No, it’s more than that, this old man is a whole era on his own. According to Yana’s account, the life whose shadow lies huddled beneath the green blanket can easily be imagined. In his youth this man sang in one of the choirs that often went to the front to support the soldiers. Trenches on a plain swept by snow, a stage put together from ammunition boxes, singers, concealing their shivering, who would laugh, perform a medley of classics. After that… What could have become of him? The same as everyone else: with Leningrad under siege, able-bodied men found themselves out on those icy plains. Then the years of a slow advance on Berlin, which, if Yana is to be believed, was where he ended his war. And then what? Rebuilding the country, marriage, children, work, routine, old age… A banal life. But also an extraordinary one. This same man, as a youth, in a city that Hitler planned to turn into a vast desert. Two and a half years of siege, more than a million victims, which is to say a small township wiped out every day. Bitterly harsh winters, death lying in wait in the dark labyrinths of the streets, an ice megalopolis without bread, without heat, without transport. Apartments populated by corpses. Incessant bombing. And theaters continuing to put on performances, people going to them after working fourteen hours in arms factories… In the old days at school they used to learn the history of that city bled white, which stood its ground.

The old man coughs in his bedroom, then the scrape of a cup can be heard as he sets it down on his bedside table. What is one to think of his life? Shutov fails to silence conflicting voices within himself. A heroic life? Yes, but also one quite stupidly sacrificed. Fine, doubtless, in its self-denial. And absurd because the country for which he fought no longer exists. Tomorrow this old man will find himself in some humdrum provincial poorhouse in the company of forsaken invalids, surrounded by nurses who steal everything there is in the home to be stolen. What a glorious end!

Another rustle of a page. Shutov feels a prickle of anger. In his youth he saw too much of this fatalistic Russian resignation. Yes, tomorrow the old man will be thrown out, but this does not stop him clinging to his cup of cold tea, his book with its yellowed pages. They promised him paradise on earth, they ruined the best years of his life, they made him live in this dump as crowded as a commuter train. He did not flinch. He simply lost the use of his legs and his tongue. So as not to be tempted to protest, no doubt. They pay him a monthly pension equal to the tip Yana’s friends leave the waiter in a nightclub. He does not even grumble. He reads. Makes no demands, uncomplaining, uncritical of the new life that will spring up out of his remains. Yes, this life Shutov can see on television: gold-painted performers prancing about in front of the forty-five heads of state when they go off to dine in the Throne Room… But is he aware of this life? Perhaps, if he could see it, might he not emit one of those protracted cries mute people are capable of, a mixture of indignation and pain? Yes, he must see it!

Shutov acts without leaving himself time to think. Unplugs the television, pushes it toward the old man’s bedroom, nudges open the door with his shoulder, places the set at the foot of the bed, plugs it in again. And settles down a little way off, so as to observe the reactions of this strange viewer.

The man does not seem to be particularly surprised. He removes his glasses and focuses a severely tranquil gaze on Shutov, which mellows into indifference. His big hand covers the book he has just closed. His eyes stare at the screen without hostility but also without curiosity.

Shutov begins channel hopping. The old man’s face appears just as neutral as at the start. Nicholas II’s English great-nephew arrives in Saint Petersburg, the Greek priests process with their relics, two lesbian rock singers complain of the English being too prudish, Berlusconi sings his duet with Pavarotti, a Russian oligarch buys himself six chalets in the Alps… No particular expression appears on that old face, with its sunken eye sockets, its massive straight nose. “He must be deaf…,” Shutov says to himself, but the eyes staring at the screen are those of someone who hears and understands.

The surrealist folly of the spectacle ought to bring grimaces to this old mask focused on the television. First comes a beautiful greyhound, with all the curvature of its pedigree, which its master, to amuse his guests, regales with a dish of caviar. No, the features of the mask are impassive. To keep the clouds away during the celebrations the town hall spent a million dollars… The mask remains rigid. Chancellor Schröder, arm in arm with Putin, inaugurates the Amber Room at the Peterhof Palace, in the township once razed to the ground by the Nazis. Shutov peers to see if the mask will show any bitterness, any trace of rancor. Nothing. “Women,” says Madame Putin, “should go to a personal dressmaker for their wardrobe.” An ancient streetcar that carried the dead during the blockade of Leningrad… The old man’s gaze sharpens, as if he can see beyond what is visible to today’s viewers.

Shots of the carnival. An erotic film. CNN: Bush landing by helicopter. A program devoted to the tercentenary, a survivor of the blockade recalls the daily ration: a hundred and twenty-five grams of bread. An Orthodox priest relates how, in the darkest days of the siege, a procession passed around the city three times, carrying the icon of Our Lady of Kazan, and Leningrad did not fall…

The mask acquires a faint line of severity. Shutov seems to be entering into communication with the silent man.

A football match. The cruise ship Silver Whisper, with its nine presidential suites. Two female rock singers perched on top of one another. At the Mariinsky Theatre the soprano Renée Fleming is singing Tatyana in Eugene Onegin…

The mask wavers and at once closes up again, retreats into its solitude. The show goes on. The ladies in crinolines pass through the galleries at the Hermitage. Fireworks at the Peterhof. Putin shakes Paul McCartney’s hand after a performance in Moscow on Red Square. “Your songs, Paul, have always been a breath of freedom for us…”

Absurdity has reached its limits, thinks Shutov. He again hits upon the program about the lives of the new rich and no longer takes the trouble to switch channels. The two presenters are visiting a model house on an estate under construction close to Saint Petersburg. “High security,” “luxury homes,” “top-quality materials”… Language evocative of this grotesque social climbing, higher, ever higher, toward the best place in the sun.

Shutov begins to doze off. This paradise from which simple mortals are excluded is less outrageous than dogs lapping up caviar. Villas crammed with electronics, but, after all, the rich have to live somewhere. Each dwelling will have a name, there will be an “Excelsior,” a “Capitol”… The two presenters emerge from “Buckingham” and set about describing the beauties of gardens in the English style… “And in the greenhouses, you’ll be harvesting pineapples and guavas…”

“That’s exactly the place where we were fighting to the death. For the motherland, as we used to say in those days…”

Shutov gives a start, the remark is too unusual to have come from the mouth of one of the presenters. Besides, they are still singing the praises of the gardens. He looks at the old man. The same mask, the same calm eyes. Suddenly his lips move: “Yes, there. That river, the Lukhta. They had to cross it under heavy fire…”

Shutov is speechless, turning over in his mind what he has just heard: “We were fighting… for the motherland.” The words came out with no rhetorical flourish, there was even an ironic hesitation, acknowledging the naïveté of the time-honored expression. But that last remark, which he saw forming on the old man’s lips, was neutral, the name of a river, a topographical fact. Shutov clears his throat and speaks as if he were the one recovering the power of speech: “Forgive me… I… I thought… Well, in fact, they told me you couldn’t…” The old man turns his head, changes his position to look at Shutov. “Yes, they told me that you were… That you had lost… er… the power of speech.”

The old man smiles.

“You can see that’s not so.”

“But, then, why… have you never spoken to anyone?”

“Spoken about what?”

“I don’t know… Life… Yes, this new life.”

And this, too!

On the screen a kennel can be seen adjoining the model house, the presenter is explaining about the air-conditioning system, as a large white greyhound rubs against his leg.

“Well, what’s to be said about it? Everything’s clear these days.”

He falls silent and Shutov is gripped by an irrational fear: what if the old man should relapse into terminal mutism! The program shows workmen felling a tree: the shrill whine of the trunk being sawn, the crash of the branches.

“Yes. That’s where we were fighting. And with no help from any icons either… Let me introduce myself. The name’s Volsky, Georgy Lvovich.”