The Year of the Comet

PART THREE

The summer began with a household catastrophe—the old stove, built by Grandfather Trofim, collapsed; he had not been a professional bricklayer, but he learned to build, to create out of nothing, and his stove had served for three decades, until it buckled under its own weight.

It was cold and damp in the house, Grandmother Mara tried lighting the stove a few times, but the rooms immediately filled with smoke coming through the cracks in the plaster; the village stove builder refused to repair it, he said it had to be taken down and a new one built.

Grandmother Mara was not prepared to do that; I think she secretly felt that the collapse of the stove was retribution for infidelity to his memory, since she was marrying the retired captain; the old submariner was told not to come to the dacha for now, and he obeyed without complaint; Grandmother ordered Father to find a temporary stove.

Rather shady characters, of an inscrutable age and who knew their way around money, gathered at the village marketplace, ready to procure what was not available and would simply not be found in the stores. Father bought a burzhuika cast-iron stove from them, paying an arm and a leg and overcoming his disdain for swindlers and cheats. He brought the stove home in a wheelbarrow, seeking approval for obtaining the hard-to-find item and his willingness to overlook his principles for the good of the family.

But Grandmother Mara burst into tears: she wanted the stove carted off, Father to go away, everybody to leave her alone.

Outrage, confusion, Father’s explanations—we understood that Grandmother Mara had spent her whole life trying to escape from the freestanding stoves that gobbled firewood and fit into the smallest barracks room—and now, completing an enormous historical circle, the burzhuika was back.

Grandmother Mara was so enervated by the sight of the stove wrapped in wax paper that without raising her voice, in a monotone, she started telling me what she discovered when she returned from wartime evacuation in the winter of 1943: her former room in Moscow was occupied by new people registered to live there; of the things she had left with relatives to hold, only the Great Soviet Encyclopedia survived. They had traded the rest for food for the winters of 1941 and 1942, but kept the encyclopedia, maybe because it garnered a paltry exchange rate.

That cold winter in a tiny cell right by the barracks door, which opened and closed five hundred times a day, letting out the warmth and letting in the crisp frosty air, in that tiny room where she lived without official permission, Grandmother Mara waited for nighttime, so that no one would see, to feed the cracked and corroded stove with volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, two volumes a night.

Things improved quickly, a package came from Grandfather Trofim, and she began receiving food parcels at work. But even decades later, she could not forgive her apostasy. She chose the volumes that did not have Lenin, Stalin, the Communist Party, the USSR, the RSFSR, Communism, or Bolsheviks—but even so, she said, she probably burned a volume that should not have been destroyed, on which everything depended. All our misfortunes come from that, Grandmother repeated, all our troubles! And there is worse to come!

Grandmother Mara told us how she and Grandfather Trofim traded alcohol for the GSE with some small town council, where the books had been sent for the local library, and where the set stood unopened. She and Grandfather didn’t need an encyclopedia but they were thinking about their future children, they wanted the GSE for them. And now the stove appeared before Grandmother as a testament to her ancient crime, an accusation of an unforgivable sin.

So that’s why there were missing volumes, I realized. My parents tried to console Grandmother Mara, saying, There are no troubles, no misfortunes, everything is fine—but I could tell they didn’t believe their own words and sensed changes on the horizon that were unlikely to be for the better.

The dacha areas were being rebuilt very quickly in those years to accommodate new arrivals; the empty lands and former fields gave rise to new lots, with six hundred square meters instead of the previous thousand. Forest borders were chopped down, roads and paths laid through the woods to the train station; the new residents settled in, and suddenly there were too many people, the forest ravines started filling with garbage, the excess of their existence. Previously, everyone knew everyone, the villagers and the dacha residents knew one another, the mushroom collectors knew the mushroomers, the fishermen the fishermen; and then in just a year or two the summer population doubled or tripled; and the appearance of a “stranger,” which used to elicit wariness and talk—Who’s that wandering around here?—became routine, but it transformed the atmosphere.

Feeling this change or perhaps alerted to the new times and the disintegration of the former order by nomadic and unsettled instincts, tramps began appearing.

From behind stoves, from seemingly abandoned cabins on the edge of villages, from a neighbor woman’s shed, from storage buildings, came the men hiding there, as if awakened from sleep.

For many long years they stayed put—living wherever they had washed up—under someone else’s roof, some did petty thieving, others drank, but all found a food source, leaned on something. Suddenly they seemed to have found willpower, intention, strength; they used to be ashamed of themselves, knowing their pathetic position in the strict village world, but now they were forming groups that quickly turned into gangs. They went out into the woods and found an abandoned forester’s hut or a child’s tent, which they furnished into a scary parody of living space: they dragged in cast-off couches and refrigerators, trashed television sets, and set up this trash around a bonfire covered by an awning or in a pit; they probably stared at the broken screen of the Rubin or Yunost TV, put leftover and stolen garden vegetables into the refrigerators, and tossed piles of clothing snatched from the line while the housewife wasn’t watching into listing cupboards.

A method of earning money appeared in the forest strongholds—stealing metal and robbing dachas; the tramps climbed over the barbed wire of the military airfield to unscrew things from planes and established an exchange with the guards. In the winter they found shelter or moved south or died of the cold, but the gangs reappeared in the spring, with new members, and the forest world grew stronger. The tramps looked down on the dacha owners, uselessly puttering in their gardens, the way in times of pestilence, starvation, and plague they must have looked at the people guarding their houses and fields.

Former convicts became tramp leaders, stupid girls were sent out to beg on their behalf, strange rumpled women walked around the villages and dachas casing the places for their friends. Of course, there weren’t many tramps, they couldn’t ruin the entire forest, and they weren’t seen in every yard, but they set something off, and rumors started in the villages, touching the dachas, too; rumors as musty as a bread box moldy from the inside, rumors that must have spent half a century under a bushel, crept into roach holes and spider corners and old women’s trunks with their burial underwear; mad, inarticulate, and portending disorder and trouble.

About army deserters hiding in the woods who killed two people last week in Pyatikhatka and burned down the house to hide their traces; about the Chernov daughter who took a shortcut to Stary Gorodok and saw two men harassing a dacha owner; about the coming revaluation of the currency, after which everyone would be impoverished; about how planes land every night at the airfield with coffins from Afghanistan and they burn the bodies in the furnace so that no one will know the real losses there—they really did switch the furnace from coal to oil, and the smoke it produced was different.

Grandmother Mara’s village women friends took grim pleasure in retelling what they heard, and in doing so took on the appearance of limping birds of prey. Their conversations revolved around coal, firewood, manure, salt, and sugar, and were interrupted by the next in a line of rumors, as if they could sense the approach, the return of something terrible and forgotten, and were happy that life was just, and that the present prosperity, albeit a relative one, was only temporary, and no one could escape their comeuppance.

The deserter theme was most frequent, the old women savored that city word in a special way, as if it were a lump of sugar to suck on while drinking tea, syllable by syllable; deserters, deserters, they repeated, and I think they meant every escapee, every tramp who went off into marginality, having abandoned their usual world order.

Or maybe they were remembering the war years, men hidden out of fear of arrest, memories of brothers or husbands who fled the front, secretly or with faked papers; cellars and distant farms, foxholes where deserters hid in the chaos of the retreat in 1941. There was a devil-may-care tone, as if they knew something no one else did, hidden in the crevasses of their wooden houses; echoes of ancient artillery thunder and astounding events were bursting inside them, demanding to be told.

Whenever an unknown man dressed in an old army jacket walked past the most distant village yards, looking at hanging laundry or a fowl that came out to drink from the big puddle, and maybe thinking about stealing something to sell for a drink, the old women knew by evening that a deserter had been seen by the Nefelyev place. Her friends brought their stories to Grandmother Mara for certification of authenticity, as if she were a notary, for her to say whether the man who looked greedily at the goose was a deserter or just some fellow; Grandmother Mara generously confirmed it—a deserter!—as if she understood the women’s need to live not ordinary lives but to be in final, terrible times, and she shared it completely.

Simultaneously with the deserter theme, another old story came up, and the children told it, but it originated with the grown-ups. The story was about a mother who had a daughter who banged her finger and her nail stayed blue from bruising for life. One day the daughter vanished—the circumstances were given variously—and the mother sought her in villages, train stations, and marketplaces; six months later at a faraway station she bought a meat pie from a platform vendor’s army-issue thermos and found her daughter’s blue fingernail in the filling.

The old women, who all seemed to be childless (either there were no children or they had moved far away), gabbed about the inconsolable mother, the vanished daughter, and the blue fingernail, as if it had happened yesterday, as if they had known both; it also seemed that they knew it was all lies, and they were sorry and wanted it to turn into truth.

The third theme, which came up on its own and roamed in and out of conversations, was rats; in fact, no one had encountered any rats, there were no rat infestations or stores of grain gobbled up. Once in a while people glimpsed one visiting the garbage pit. Yet there was the feeling that they were expecting rats. If you already had deserters and an inconsolable mother looking for her missing blue-nail girl, then rats were sure to follow; instead of harmless mice, sturdy rat teeth would soon be chewing away at the wooden supports of our houses. And that meant you had to look in the sheds for long-forgotten rat poison, set rat traps, and fill in holes in the floor with clay mixed with ground glass.

Grandmother Mara liked to recount how she killed a red rat with a shovel when it jumped at her from under the floor, and with each telling the rat grew bigger until it was the size of a dog. With the rapture of exaggeration, Grandmother Mara told them how smart rats were, how hard it is to poison them, how cats fear them, how the rat dismembered by the shovel lived on for a few seconds and stared at her with hatred. I got the feeling that they weren’t talking about animals, however smart, predatory, and dangerous in number and stubbornness, but about monsters that came from the beyond. I was amazed that Grandmother Mara and her friends had once seen these monsters, it wasn’t their imagination at work but knowledge. I couldn’t understand it, the source of this intense fear, but understood when I heard Grandmother Mara with her friend Grandmother Vera.

During the war, Vera worked as a switchman at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. In February or March 1941 a train arrived from Leningrad with evacuees, and rats poured out of the cars.

A train with flour stood on nearby tracks, and the rats streamed across the rails; the train was guarded, but some of the men with guns panicked. Vera grabbed a crowbar to chase the rats away from the grain, but then realized that these rats had eaten corpses on the streets of Leningrad—evacuees had told her about it—had survived by eating human flesh and had escaped the city in the trains with surviving humans.

Her enthusiasm vanished and she ran—from the rats and from the people with them in the train, in the same cars; one didn’t know who had the real power there: the weakened people or the strong rats. One of the guards had the sense to run to the engine. Still coupled, the driver moved the train with flour, the rats jumped and fell under the wheels trying to get at the flour, and then scattered, making for the platforms and the warehouses. Vera shuddered for years afterward at the sight of a rat in Moscow or in her village—Was it an ordinary one or a Leningrad man-eating rat?

I think the old women were expecting the progeny of those rats, or rather, they were willing them to come, predicting, luring them, as if they feared the looming disasters would not be bad enough. The old women put on their mended flowered dresses and shawls, met at the well or the mailboxes on the village street, and talked about exploding gas canisters, drowned fishermen, overturned buses. Their talk made the dacha area fascinatingly hostile, mysterious, open to the drafts of history, the winds from the past, its restless shadows. There will be famine, the old women said, you can’t even buy ordinary grain any more—and I recalled the submarine captain’s white locust flowers; we had one growing by our fence.

And finally, the old women got what they wanted: horrible news rolled through the dachas and surrounding villages; children were forbidden to play far from home or go alone into the woods, and soldiers patrolled the roads. They claimed to be catching deserters, but everyone knew that a maniac child killer had appeared in the region.

The maniac had a nickname—Mister; no one knew why it was the English word, but everyone said he called himself that. The bodies were found in places where you think the killer could not be unnoticed, and that increased the fear; it seemed that Mister was absolutely unrecognizable and therefore elusive; no one would suspect him of being a maniac, inhuman, the devil’s spawn.

My friends and I felt no fear at first; in a few days of playing and running around the idea came up, just for empty chatter and boasting: Why don’t we catch Mister?

Naturally, no one believed in it; but it was so exciting to imagine ourselves as brave and clever hunters, capable of doing what the police and soldiers could not. We talked ceaselessly about capturing Mister. We knew the area better than the adults, all the secret places, the dangerous corners; gradually, without a plan, we began acting like detectives, scrutinizing people, armed at all times with a penknife, nails, or metal electrodes sharpened on a brick.

None of this turned into a real search, and nobody actually wanted that; everyone wanted to amaze his friends with a story about how he found a mysterious boot print on the path by the fence and sat in ambush, we invented suspicious drifters allegedly seen in the field or by the pond; we all knew that these were just made-up stories, but we enjoyed competing in heroic lies with the knowledge that by unspoken consensus no one would be exposed.

But these fantasies did promote the idea that we could really try to catch Mister; each succeeding lie made the idea a bit more real.

The idea fermented like yeast, fed by the boredom of the longest, hottest summer days, the old women’s stories, the whispers of the adults, the rules, the faded raincoats of the patrols, young soldiers fatigued by the pointless length of their tours who sneaked off to bathe in the pond, closer to the still-white bodies of girls lounging on towels. Something was going to happen, we were all expecting it, and inside me the feeling grew slowly, slowly that I was distancing myself from my gang and that part of me was already taking the idea of finding Mister seriously.

I did not realize it yet, but the maniac murderer, elusive in the dacha area, had become a fact and phenomenon in my inner life. The rumors, the boys’ braggadocio, the details related by the villagers, were one layer—everything that is scary but does not affect you elicits interest; but there was another layer.

The dacha area changed with the appearance of Mister. I was drawn to the contrast between light and dark at the edge of a thick fir forest, the dry crackle of wires, the fragrance of peas in the field where you can open a pod and find tiny green pearls, sense their infancy, their softness that will turn to hardness. But I knew, whatever you did, whatever engrossed you, you were always either getting closer to Mister or moving away from him, and you never knew what was there, at the end of the forest path.

The world became a terrifying fairy tale realm, where nothing is random, where every object means something, says something, increases the danger that threatens the hero or mitigates it. My age kept me from feeling compassion for the ones who died in torment, and I accepted the appearance of Mister as what had been missing from my life.

Lazily discussing the latest “news” about Mister—who found which clues or traces—we played “knifesies” at the fire pit at the dacha dumping ground; what a strangely attractive game it is, you can play it a thousand times day after day and never tire of it. On the hard, ash-covered ground, you draw a circle with the knife blade and then divide it in half; two get into it and throw a knife onto the territory of the opponent; if it sticks, another line is drawn, and now you own three-fourths of the circle, and he has one-fourth; if it sticks again, your territory grows and his diminishes, but he still has room to stand. If your knife doesn’t stick, then the opponent throws, scuffing away the recent borders with his foot, scratching in new ones, and now it’s you and not him who balances on one foot.

Sometimes we’d play knifesies all day—there comes a time when frictions and unspoken injuries accumulate in a group of children; they were removed, channeled on the days we played many times against various opponents. The number of wins, the pressure and excitement of the game reset the relationships of seniority, first place going to the luckiest player.

I don’t know how other children played in other places, but for me knifesies was inseparable from the bonfire ground. The soil smelled of ashes and was cleansed by fire—as if something had been burned, destroyed completely; we smoothed the surface so that it could be cut by a knife like bread, still warm, transformed in the fire, having lost its memory of all previous borders, divisions, markings. Soil and metal, soil and knife were like paper and pen; “pen” was criminal slang for knife, and we played with a homemade knife that had a broad and thick blade, which stuck into the ground less reliably than a penknife. Konstantin Alexandrovich, my mother’s cousin, gave it to me secretly, telling me that a famous criminal had owned it and used it in self-defense when he was arrested; but I guessed that the knife had once belonged to the general, who grew up in workers’ barracks, and in giving it to me, he was remembering the boy from the lawless, thieving outskirts who’d had a greater chance of becoming a bandit than a policeman.

In my mind, knifesies belonged with books and films about the Civil War; with the Red Cavalry, machine gun carts, “in the distance by the river, bayonets flashed,” the psychological attacks by White officers, stars carved into backs, death in locomotive boilers. Not the invasion of the Germans, foreigners attacking from outside the circle, but the struggle of two implacable foes inside the disintegrating and simultaneously existing, “flickering” whole; knifesies was a Russian national game, somehow internalized and intimate.

So, we were throwing knives at the dumping ground beyond the dacha fence; I won, having pushed my opponent out of the circle, removed the line of his last holdings with the sole of my shoe, and was enjoying the ideal emptiness of the circle that belonged to me alone. At that moment, we heard a voice from the edge of the circle. “May I play?”

The day was coming to an end, swifts swooped low near the ground, scooping up mosquitoes; something was cooking in the sky’s kettle, towers of cumulous clouds rose higher and higher, deep blue on the bottom, colliding and devouring one another, the setting sun’s rays burst through the gaps in the clouds, the light was harsh, thick, and dangerous, as if a battle was looming on high. It was the time before evening when the shadow is so much longer than the object that it seems it will overbalance it; space consists of those shadows, everything is elongated, distorted, stretched on a rack; it was out of the intertwined shadows, the stifling pre-storm air, and the agitated darting of the swifts that Ivan appeared.

We had seen him before, from a distance, but we knew who he was and his name. He was about ten years older than we were and he visited the dacha area sometimes, for his grandfather had a house here, but he never made friends—he was always on his own.

I looked at Ivan and understood that we had a long, one-sided connection, originating from me. I had met him thirty or forty times, briefly, the meetings scattered, lost as insignificant among what seemed more meaningful and memorable encounters, impressions, discoveries. But they had accumulated in secret even from me, and suddenly, in a moment, they were all there, open; words spoken about Ivan by the grown-ups, our childish conversations—it all came together and filled the emptiness that appeared while I was on the boat cruise.

This must be the way a man who runs into a woman who lives nearby might automatically or with the whim of a voluptuary casually toss into a drawer of memory the rustle of her winter wool skirt clinging to her legs, the barely noticeable limp revealed by the wear on her right heel, the slight discomfort that arose when they met by the elevator with a mild hint of flirtation, and then he let her pass, thinking lazily, why bother? And then one day, opening that additional little drawer made for ornament rather than utility, he sees her, all of a sudden, revealed to him radiantly and tenderly, sees her and feels her as if he held her in his arms.

For three, no, four years I had noticed Ivan at the dachas, playing badminton or hide-and-seek as I went to the well; he went to the well, too, I had often seen the bench damp from the water that had slipped from his pails, and once I left the well bucket full, and Ivan, who came after me, carried that water home, and drank it, swallowed tea and soup made with it—water that I had collected, water that I raised from the icy depths by turning the handle, while the liquid reflected my phantasmagorically distorted face.

Our connection was forged long ago; and now all its component parts, all the links in the chain, all the moments isolated from the rest of time in which we were connected by the delayed and hidden work of my heart, were electrified, under tension; we recognized, we saw each other, and blazed with the triumphant and ruthless light of understanding—it’s him!

His figure was awkward; every adolescent goes through a time when his body behaves like a traitor, when everything you try to hide is callously revealed, the body’s stupidity, actually, its stupefaction; shyness, constraint, fear—everything is exposed, comes to light; the body is afraid to grow and change; the act of becoming a man is confounded.

The awkwardness of Ivan’s adolescent figure was different; there was something about him of a colt of magnificent breed, born to run, and the awkwardness was because his body grew faster than he could comfortably inhabit it, but would live in it tomorrow, and with great power.

He was tall, thin, blond; he stood out among our crew-cut boys with his long hair parted in the middle; he changed his hair later, but the first time I saw him I remembered him this way.

When I first saw this person, it seemed he hadn’t been there a second ago, had stepped through an invisible opening from another space, from a time of eternal summer; it was all in his hair, as if the locks of a beautiful woman at the peak of her youth had been transplanted onto a teenage boy. The wavy locks glowed like the sun, with golden sparks, threads, quick zigzag snakes; the youth’s gentle, slightly frightened beauty—Acteon looked like this when he saw his crazed borzoi hounds—was combined with an avalanche of hair, sensual, arousing the flesh.

We saw Ivan rarely, when he came to the dacha in his grandfather’s cream-colored Volga—his face behind the window, his profile against the backseat. Every boy’s dream was to ride in front, next to the driver, but Ivan rode in a car like an important person; a boss, a writer, in the back, by himself, alone with his thoughts, indolently looking out the window.

Ivan’s whole family lived differently from the neighbors, with aristocratic casualness they returned the intended function to things that had been warped by our lifestyle. No one had ever seen sacks of potatoes hauled in the cream-colored Volga, nor was the car ever crammed with passengers, as if Ivan’s family was not subject to the powers of life’s necessities, forcing people to clump together, huddle, fit into a prescribed space. Laundry never hung on a line in Ivan’s yard—inner secrets revealed—and the property was planted with twining plants that formed a living screen; only sometimes, walking past, could you see, through a gap in the foliage, Ivan reading a book in the garden.

You couldn’t say that the dacha kids liked or disliked Ivan. If he had been one of the gang, his behavior would have been considered a challenge, they would say he was being snotty and would take revenge—they would break the dacha windows or jump him and beat him up; but for the dacha youth Ivan did not exist, as if no one knew which language, which words to use to think about him.

Over the dacha summers, everyone observed him, everyone probably understood that Ivan was a kid like any other, then an adolescent, then a young man; not burdened by excessive physical strength, unlikely to stand up for himself in a fierce fight—we had learned about fighting from the local village lads who were not averse to brawling with bike chains and pieces of metal pipe. It seemed that a boy three or four years younger, who was used to scrapes, roughhousing, and clumsy cursing, could scare and beat up Ivan; but Ivan never landed in that kind of story.

Yes, there was something feminine about Ivan, but there is a necessary correction here: if boys sense something girly about a boy, they will inevitably make him miserable. But the femininity in Ivan was—and this was clearly felt—not a weakness or flaw, but just another side, inaccessible to others, of his strength, a plastic, flowing strength, the strength of a much greater emotional range than an ordinary person.

Ivan entered the circle; I bent down to draw a line dividing the circle in half with my knife and it looked as if I were bowing to him; he looked at me without surprise or mockery. But I felt an aching anger: I want to stab Ivan, kill him in this circle, on this slightly salty, ashy, velvety soil scorched by fire; this was no game at all. My friends watched with interest, they did not consider Ivan a serious competitor, and they were happy to watch someone their own age beat him.

We did rock-paper-scissors; I showed a fist and Ivan covered it with his hand; Ivan got to go first. I usually threw the knife to immediately cut the opponent’s side in half; then divide the remaining fourth; Ivan acted the same way. The knife we used had a secret—the handle was weighted, filled with lead; it had to fall absolutely vertically to stick into the ground, and that required practice. I hoped that Ivan would fail on his first throw; however, he threw it, very carelessly, without looking, as if he’d merely dropped it; the knife plunged into the dried soil and divided my part of the circle exactly in half.

Ivan erased the line just as unhurriedly and carelessly, increasing his space to three-quarters and reducing mine to one-fourth; he threw again, and each time I thought the knife wouldn’t stick. But no—it entered the earth smoothly and firmly. I experienced a strange excitement; I had never lost this easily and indisputably, but it wasn’t just the loss; as Ivan’s share swallowed up mine, my desire to run away or attack Ivan vanished. I wanted the game never to end, for the division of my piece of ground to continue to infinity, so that I would diminish before Ivan and that there would be another chance to grow smaller, give up yet another part.

The burning ground inside the circle was my life now, and Ivan was reshaping it, taking everything for himself; he was whole and I was becoming part of that whole. I seemed to know that Ivan, in humiliating me and herding me into a reduced sector of the circle, would later make up for it.

Ivan threw the knife the last time; there was no place for me to stand, and I left the circle, acknowledging his victory.

“Come over some time,” Ivan said. “Gate’s not locked. Or I’ll come over and pick you up. Well, so long.”

He turned and left as if he hadn’t just been playing; before me was the circle, still full of him, belonging to him; the knife stuck in the ground, casting a long evening shadow, like the marker on a sundial.

Ivan won me—from my own self. My pals could tell that I had not simply lost the game, I was happy to have lost, I wanted to be friends with Ivan.

They dubbed me Ivan’s girlfriend; I couldn’t go past our fence, they were waiting for me, hiding in the bushes, armed with rock-hard sour apples. I would creep up to the bushes and hear their conversations, which I’d but recently been a part of, and I bitterly missed the idiotic friskiness of speech, the hurrying, the gasping, the rush to talk, the constant exaggeration, the lies, the stupid boasting. The group was talking about Mister again, telling the same old stories, overgrown with outright falsehoods, while in my solitude I sensed that so many things had been rolled together into one clump: Ivan, Mister, my desire to show Ivan I wasn’t like my pathetic comrades, to show my comrades I was braver than them, that they could only make up stories and pick on someone ten against one; the desire to do something exceptional, to block a black car’s path, to prove to myself that I’d been right to turn away from Grandmother Tanya and the brown book; yes, yes, I thought, I’m like the son of the regiment, I will draw fire away from others; one dream hurried and pushed the next, and with the relief of a soldier weary of waiting for an attack, I sensed that soon I would take a step.

It was June, close to the solstice; the summer was dry, hot, and scorchingly sunny; it made the heavy fir forest beyond the dacha fence seem even blacker. Late evening and nighttime, when children are usually afraid, did not seem scary that summer; scary and horrible were the afternoons, when the streets were empty, hot haze shimmering above the asphalt, distorting and hiding perspective and the horizon; in the boiling jelly of that haze, the figures of passersby could suddenly appear very close, shimmering, inaccurate, flowing, and worrying; blessed was the cool of the evening, clearing the air and chasing away the ghosts of the day.

Those were the days when Konstantin Alexandrovich always visited the dacha. No use in hiding it—I was proud when his black Volga stopped at our gate, the numbers and letters on the license plate not random gibberish but a brief readable code, a sign of power and strength.

The general arrived at the moment the first cucumbers were ripening on the vine; Grandmother Mara brought them out on a plate, freshly washed, fragrant with the energizing, cooling scent of early morning and dew, which seemed to bring out the bumps on them. Konstantin Alexandrovich ate these first vegetables of the summer when they were still babies, thin-skinned, covered with a transparent and tender silvery fuzz. I honestly couldn’t understand what made the general so happy, why this ritual was repeated year after year.

Then the table was set in the garden, the gramophone was brought out, a square box with a windup handle and an orchid-like trumpet. Manufactured in 1900, the gramophone was older than everyone around it; you could study its history in its scratches, lumps of lacquer, and dents in the trumpet. They used records, heavy ones, one song on each, and the gramophone rasped out “La Cucaracha,” “La Cumparcita,” and melodies from Alexandrov’s comedies. No one remembered how the gramophone came into the family; I even thought that the family appeared because the gramophone was first; it was one of those long-lived objects that are unthinkable without a certain lifestyle, and if a gramophone shows up in someone’s life, it will unite a man and a woman, marry them, give them children and grandchildren, a dining table, and curtains.

The record spinning, the slowing of the viscous sound when the springs wound down—the gramophone was a machine for producing familial happiness, and I was happy to turn the handle that dozens of hands had touched before me.

This time the general arrived toward evening, when everyone had thought there was no point in expecting him that day—that often happened, when urgent business held up Konstantin Alexandrovich or canceled his visit.

Watching Konstantin Alexandrovich’s pleasure in washing up with well water, wiping his face with a linen towel that Grandmother Mara handed him, how he hung up his uniform jacket in the closet and came out in ordinary clothing, handily setting up the chairs, adjusting the tablecloth, carrying out the narrow faceted shot glasses between his fingers, and constantly looking around at the apple trees, the vegetable plots, the old house with flaking paint—I understood that the dacha was the closest thing to the lost world in which he was born. He was relaxed here, stopped being a general, returned to his postwar childhood, to the villages where soldiers settled; one lieutenant or captain joined the police as a patrolman, another became a bandit, and the boy grew up seeing both.

Later, just as the party was warming up, I was sent to bed. Usually, because of my attachment to Konstantin Alexandrovich, I was allowed to stay up to the end, but here, I noticed, the general glanced over at me to show it was time for me to go to sleep.

Mister!—the general knew something that he wanted to tell my parents.

I had the idea that if I could tell my friends what Konstantin Alexandrovich said, casually dropping his name, lying that he had told me personally, I would be able to get back in their favor, end their campaign against me, and become top dog: the reflection of Mister’s horrible fame would make everyone listen and obey.

I said good night. I was to sleep in the attic, because Konstantin Alexandrovich was here, and after waiting a few minutes, I opened the dormer window, the hinges of which I had oiled because I liked climbing out on the roof at night. I crawled on my belly to the drainpipe and sat above the garden party. While I crawled, I decided that I wouldn’t tell my pals about the general—let them sit in the bushes with apple cores—I would go to Ivan. Now I would have something to intrigue him and keep him. For some reason, I had no doubt that Ivan was interested in Mister.

“They’re not talking about this now,” the major general spoke softly. “Trying not to talk. We have just one witness, a boy, a friend of the first victim. The artist’s renderings are made from his description. They were together at Pioneer camp and sneaked out during quiet hour. Some people think the witness is a phony. He did see something, but much less than what he’s telling us. He gave a description of the man who led his friend into the woods, very detailed, without any discrepancies, he said the killer scared him, warned him not to tell the police anything or he’d come back for him. We’re hunting for the man described by the boy—height, hair color, a navy tattoo on his hand, something complex, and so on. And that nickname, Mister, allegedly he called himself that.

“It all seems true, but I’ve talked to that boy… I think he got scared and ran off before the killer even noticed there were two of them. Our witness saw nothing but a shadow, a silhouette. But he invented this Mister, told the camp counselors about him. He wanted the attention. Then the police and the prosecutors kept at him, and now the boy can’t admit that he lied. He knows he’ll be punished. He’s heard about giving false testimony. However, a lot of the investigators believe the boy. It’s easier to hunt for this Mister. Lots of distinguishing marks.”

“This doesn’t sound right,” Father interrupted. “Doesn’t he understand that he is putting other people in danger?”

The general did not respond. I had conflicting feelings. On one hand, I was embarrassed by my father’s question; didn’t he understand what power there was in that lie? And on the other hand, I was scared, because I could easily picture myself in the boy’s place and I knew I could have done the same thing, invented Mister.

“He must have a car,” said Konstantin Alexandrovich. “And a place where he does it all before tossing the remains in the woods. A garage or a cellar. Probably a cellar. And here’s one more thing,” he added. “He is attracted to boys of a very certain type. Aged ten or eleven, not shy, not spic-and-span with no physical flaws. Not mama’s boys, but boys who like to wander around on their own. The faces of all six boys are similar.” The general stopped. “Bold, clear. Even at that age, no one would say, ‘What a nice boy,’ rather ‘What a great guy.’ Something was going through my mind,” the general said and struck a match, tobacco smoke rose to my rooftop, “they reminded me of something. I finally remembered. It seems strange, but I keep thinking it. When I was a kid and we played war, you’d go into the woods, find an old hazel with thick, far-flung branches. You’d climb into the center and that’s where the thin new canes are, completely straight, as if they came from a different root than the clumsy branches. You cut down a switch like that, you can make a bow or an arrow, anything at all—it’s flexible, sturdy, springy, as if it has absorbed all the power from the ground. I look at photographs of those boys, and I think of the hazel tree. Maybe I’m just making it up, but I think he senses that quality in them. He sees it from afar. And he chooses them.”

I froze. Konstantin Alexandrovich was saying something he could not know. It was my secret: I cut hazel switches like that and hid them in the nettles outside the fence, they were my weapon against the confusing deep forest, filled with spider webs. With a cane like that, turned into a sword, I could enter deep into a grove with borrowed courage, knowing that it did not have power over me.

Konstantin Alexandrovich told them about increased checkpoints at all the suburban stations along our line; about military helicopters flying over the region; about soldiers combing the woods; about checking old files and solving dozens of crimes along the way; about undercover police pretending to be mushroom hunters, bathers, fishermen; about a group of immediate responders, ready to come instantly; about the fact that both the MCID—Moscow Criminal Investigations Department—brought in to help the local police, and the Minister of Internal Security himself were in charge of the case; and that the killer would be caught any minute, the ring was narrowing, he would definitely make a mistake and reveal himself.

My parents didn’t consider taking me back to the city to wait until the maniac was caught. No one even brought it up. Instead, they sat there, depressed, helpless, Mother wrung her hands, bringing them up into the air as if pleading to a cruel power for mercy.

I remembered where I had seen that movement before, those maternal pleas; I remembered the album of pictures from the Dresden gallery that my father brought back from the GDR and I leafed through secretly; a painting by Breughel the Elder, with snow, redbrick houses, dark sky, hounds, trees—and men in red on horseback, scattering throughout a village, dragging women by the hands, killing infants.

The mother and father in the painting also clasped their hands, fell on their knees by the stirrups, stared lifelessly in the direction of yellow patches of thawed snow, wept by the walls of houses. No one interfered, picked up pitchforks or scythes, the villagers showed not just docility but a primal readiness to accept the deepest suffering.

I might have wanted to leave the dacha, but my parents couldn’t break the usual rhythm of life, to act differently than they ever had, sharply and roughly—you couldn’t even consider that. The adults were worried by the threat to their child, but they looked at the neighbors, who also lived in dachas with children, and told themselves not to panic—as if submitting to the habit of bearing things and obeying the power of circumstances, awaiting their fate like the men and women in Breughel’s painting. The power was Mister, Mister-Coming-From-the-Woods, Mister-Taking-Away-Your-Children. Not a single resident of the dacha complex left, took away their children, they all lived as if hypnotized by a boa constrictor.

The more confidently Konstantin Alexandrovich talked about posts, helicopters, and special groups, the clearer it was that he was simply calming my parents. Despite the ban, I went into the woods, wandered around the area, not knowing why, just absorbing impressions that would later prompt me to act.

For example, when I picked strawberries on the sunny side of the railroad tracks, where freight cars were parked far from the station awaiting formation into new trains, I could sometimes sense the evil sticky smell of oil on the gravel, and how strangely predatory the berries looked, red and spattered with tiny hairs, how dark the water was in the pond, and how the forest reflected in it was also reflected in my gaze, not allowing me to see inside, as if all of nature was on the side of Mister.

Garage… Car… Cellar… Human remains… You couldn’t say that I didn’t believe the major general, but it seemed to me that there was something he was leaving out or didn’t understand. Mister had become an otherworldly creature for me, Konstantin Alexandrovich’s logical, clear statements about a flesh-and-blood man contradicted my ideas; I thought I could see farther and deeper than the old detective.

“The soldier patrols must have come across him,” Konstantin Alexandrovich said. “More than once. But he’s a simple good Soviet man. Can’t recognize him.”

“You mean he looks normal?” Father asked, stressing the word “normal.”

“Soviet, he looks Soviet,” the major general replied. “I have a theory. He must have something that makes people like him. And that shows he’s a responsible person, not in authority, but nearly so. An armband of the national volunteer force, a badge of the Green Patrol, an ID as a fisheries inspector, something like that. A socially involved person.”

A Soviet man, I thought. I didn’t even listen to the rest. A Soviet man. Mister. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t believe in a killer finding pleasure in torture. Of course, it didn’t fit my picture of the world, but there was something else, some backstory.

A Soviet man. Mister. Mister Soviet man.

Enlightenment came.

There were so many of them in children’s books—various “misters,” unremarkable fishermen, hunters, campers, soil scientists, nature photographers, herb collectors! Even the experienced eye of the border guard did not recognize them as violators of the border, spies, saboteurs, devils incarnate who crossed the no-man’s land in shoes that leave hoof prints, in order to kill, poison wells, set explosives, to sow evil that was as cruel as it was ultimately pointless, evil for evil’s sake, or to learn military secrets.

In the twilight hour, the time without shadows, he appeared, the werewolf, the perfect changeling, more Soviet than any Soviet man. Invulnerable, like a mirror, he strode across our country, absolutely “not one of us,” an invader from the world beyond who preached the destruction of the Soviet Union, living only for hatred of the USSR. He left death and destruction in his wake, fooled sentries, tricked peasants and city folk, everyone. The only thing he feared, as the books all taught me, was the gaze of a child. Only a child, an unsophisticated child, could recognize him.

That was why Mister killed children—they were a danger to him! With the military airfield nearby, everyone in the village knew the secret information that the regiment posted there was the first to be equipped with the latest MiG-29 fighters. “The regiment has achieved combat readiness,” my friends and I repeated variations on the words someone overheard at the station, repeating them like a spell. “The regiment has achieved combat readiness!” That’s why Mister was here, circling the airfield. And just like in the books, no one believes he’s a spy, they think he’s just a killer!

Could I tell the grown-ups my discovery? Why bother, the narrative required them not to believe me, not to pay heed to my warning.

I think this was the first time, with sadness and regret, that I realized the limited nature of Konstantin Alexandrovich’s power, which had once seemed boundless to me.

Konstantin Alexandrovich was a detective, he was in the MCID, but I sensed that he was helpless here. He was a policeman, he caught thieves, bandits, and killers—humans; what could he do about the elusive, otherworldly Mister? The police don’t chase spies, and if they do, they don’t catch them.

I was the grandson of Grandfather Mikhail, the secret agent, the grandson of Grandfather Trofim, the tank soldier; at last I could prove I was worthy of them. I joyfully sensed that I was on the right side, on solid ground.

I began thinking what weapon I would use against Mister.

Father kept a double-barreled shotgun in the attic; two or three times a year he would spread an oilcloth on the floor and take the gun apart and clean it. I was allowed to hold the oil, take out the dirty rag, and once, only once, to look into the barrels, separated from the butt; the two ideally round openings looked like the entrances into infinity.

Probably, I could have swiped the shotgun, but I sensed that it wouldn’t help in the hunt for Mister. Rather, if I took the gun, there would be no hunt—it would be like a flotation device, a life preserver, that would keep me from going deeper into the space where Mister was found.

In his desk drawer, Father had a German bayonet knife; Father found it when he was a boy in piles of military metal—smashed tanks, weapons, machines, platforms of armored trains, which were brought to the Hammer and Sickle Factory in Lefortovo to be melted down. Sometimes when Father was away, I secretly took it out, a patina covered darkened blade; but no other hand could be the master of this weapon, it would probably slip out of my grasp to be gripped by Mister’s fingers.

There was the Finnish knife, the one we used to play knifesies, a gift from Konstantin Alexandrovich my parents didn’t know about. But it couldn’t help me in my search for Mister or against Mister—like the German bayonet knife, it would take the side of the saboteur, the man with a thousand faces, who could pretend to be a soldier or a thief.

I was missing something, things weren’t coming together. Only a child could recognize Mister. He feared a child’s gaze.

I understood: I had to come out unarmed and recognize Mister—my death, its circumstances—someone was bound to remember where I went, someone would see me minutes before I met Mister, notice his car—would give the detectives a sign that would lead them to Mister, make me his last victim, which would destroy him, snatch him from the other world.

I quickly convinced myself that there was no other way; I was delighted by the correspondence of my plan with the Soviet faith in which I was brought up, which considered sacrifice the highest and noblest act.

Still mulling over my plan, I recalled how last year they were filming a movie near the tank trial field of an army camp in a neighboring village. They set up a scaffold made of old boards on the village square; the script called for the hanging of a partisan messenger.

The soldiers from the camp were used as extras, and dressed in German uniforms they surrounded the square; local residents were asked to wear old clothes—the ones without any were issued jackets, sheepskin coats, trousers, boots, and bast shoes. My friends and I went to watch them making a movie, but there was no film magic to be seen; however, we noticed something else: the soldiers and sergeants had very quickly gotten comfortable in German uniforms. I thought it was almost criminal to even put one on, I thought they would want to tear off the foreign uniforms before they dirtied their souls. But on the contrary, there seemed to be an evil temptation to try on “the enemy’s skin,” to be a fascist for a while.

They readily formed a perfect encirclement, they pushed people with the butts of their guns so naturally into the square, that it couldn’t be explained just by the desire to have some fun after the boredom of the barracks, by the taste of short-lived power. I imagined what it was like—to see things from inside a German—and suddenly understood the intoxicating freedom that came with the role. All the rules, all the symbols, everything that was specifically Soviet from clothing to words was supposed to elicit hatred, or a degree lower, scorn. Here was the opportunity to legally wipe their boots on the red flag—there was a scene like that, but they used a red rag rather than a flag—and that enflamed them: “protected” by the German uniform, the image of a Nazi who holds nothing dear, the soldiers probably would have burned down the village if the director told them to and forced people into the burning houses.

The locals, herded by the soldiers, also were transformed; suddenly, without the director, but by memory and instinct, the men started taking off their hats, revealing the heartbreaking nakedness of heads, the loneliness of each head before the noose. The bodies were pushed close together, and the heads seemed to be in the stratosphere, in rarified space, where the cold winds have a shade of a razor’s raven blueness; the gesture—taking off your hat, recognizing the unity of death, the unity of destiny—cut into my heart.

What happened next was no longer perceived as a film shoot, as something unreal, so I will not speak of acting and the suspension of disbelief.

The executioner’s henchmen, two Polizei, Nazi collaborators, dragged out the partisan messenger. He struggled, kicked, perhaps sensing that things had gotten out of hand, that what was unfolding was much older than an episode from the Great Patriotic War, something as powerful as rebellion, as a whirlpool—it was elemental.

The messenger was a boy, just a little older than I was—maybe thirteen or fourteen. An impulse passed through the crowd—not horror, not fear, not compassion, but the first wave of enchantment.

The director had made a good and bad choice in the actor. Fair-haired, with perfect features, they boy was too remarkable to be a messenger. There was no confusion, fear, or shyness about him, he was proud and bold and the first sentry he passed would notice him. But in another sense, it was a good choice: holding his hands behind his back, the Polizei tried to get the noose around the boy’s head, a boy born and brought up with reserves of goodness and belief in life.

The boy was sturdy, he would have grown into a tall, strong man—but his future was canceled by the execution. When they pulled his hair to get him to stretch his neck and stop resisting, suddenly, like a flood, like something observed secretly, his throat glowed with the tender light of vulnerability.

I don’t know if the others standing there saw what I did. I think that if they didn’t see it in such details of imagination, they sensed it for sure.

Thanks to that flash, that vision of the throat that would be lashed by the noose, the crowd and the victim joined in a familiar closeness, brothers and sisters, parents and children. That boy on the scaffold was so dear to each one that—with an inversion of feeling—he had to be, must be given up to the executioner.

The point of the no-longer just cinematic action, but of existence in general, was that the best had to die, the strongest and purest shoot had to be pruned, so that his death would enter each of the others as their own death, in which everything petty, egoistic, coming from nature, personality, and education will die so that you can be reborn.

The death of one hero gives birth to many his equal, greater than he was, that is the universal law, the only path for the creation of heroes. But the first one must die, and if he does not, the rest will die remaining just as they were without partaking of the seed of inspiring death.

This memory of the boy actor on the scaffold is what convinced me that my conception was correct. I didn’t wonder why the other children did not expose Mister with their deaths, I had a ready answer: not every child can reveal a spy or saboteur; he has to be, for example, the grandson of a watchman, a retired Red Army soldier, or the son of the head of an outpost; heir to their skills and then surpassing his elders. And who, if not I, the grandson of combatant grandfathers, was better for the role? Who had figured out who Mister was?

Of course, I hoped sometimes in my daydreaming that I would stay alive, that Mister would only wound me heavily—there were stories like that in my book, too. Or maybe not even heavily, just in the arm or leg, so I could talk and show where the spy had gone; but then I reproached myself for cowardice and enjoyed the anticipation of fame.

Then fear would come over me, animal fear at the thought that I was wrong about myself, that despite knowing the true nature of Mister, I was just like all the other children, and he would simply kill me the way he had his previous victims.

I needed an advisor, an arbitrator, who would relieve my doubts; Ivan, Ivan, he was the only one capable of understanding that Mister was not a sadistic killer but something more frightening; but if Ivan said that I was wrong and making things up, well then, I’d give up my idea, for after all I didn’t want to die. But if Ivan confirmed my supposition, then the very fact of his support and involvement would save me, give me a chance not to die, for Ivan also was not like everyone else, and maybe he knew something about Mister that I did not. Oh, this secret would make us closer than brothers, closer than friends, despite our ages!

Ivan, Ivan, Ivan!

The next day, as I wondered how to find out if Ivan was home, I walked down the dacha street toward his place. My friends had ceased their siege while the general’s car was in our yard and were in no hurry to resume; I ran into one along the way, and he said “Hi!” as if there was nothing wrong; tireless Grandmother Mara had already told all the neighbors that an MCID general was visiting us, as she did every summer. My friends, naturally, wanted the details.

I had no hostility toward them; I told them everything I had heard from the general, but in a way that would give them no clue about the real nature of Mister.

Ivan’s property was empty.

Back home, I started a casual conversation with Grandmother Mara about Ivan’s family. But my grandmother, who seemingly knew everyone, and everything about them, merely shrugged, almost angry with Ivan’s people for being so secretive. Ivan’s parents worked abroad, as economists or diplomats, they hadn’t been seen at the dachas for many years. His grandfather used to be a big shot in the KGB, but then fell into disgrace, demoted and pensioned off.

Grandmother told me this with a grimace, conveying that she disliked Ivan, disliked his family, disliked my new friendship; she tried to make sure I saw it. But I was thrilled: his grandfather in the KGB, his parents abroad—of course they weren’t economists, they were spies! And that meant I was right about Ivan: like me, he was an heir to intrigue, he would know many things; I was so sorry I had not asked Grandmother earlier, for now I understood Ivan’s aloofness, his reluctance to hang out with the dacha crowd; what a great surprise for him when he would learn that among the ordinary kids there was someone like him, his junior fellow traveler, his student!

Late in the evening I climbed out the window, down the apple tree, crept past the fences and the sleeping lazy dogs toward Ivan’s property and climbed up onto the fence.

A lamp was on on his veranda; it was big, spacious, glassed in on all sides, and Ivan sat in his armchair as if in an aquarium of dim yellow light. It was dark all around, midges flew at the light and bumped into the glass, and I climbed over the fence and stood in the middle of the darkness, unnoticeable by Ivan, even if he were to look in my direction.

Ivan was alone at the dacha; he was drinking fortified wine in a thick green glass, setting it down on a tablecloth of the same green; this was my first look at the interior, I had climbed onto the wood pile by now. It was strange for me, accustomed to our dacha and the fact that a dacha is built out of whatever is at hand, furnished with whatever God sends your way, to see the heavy antique furniture, the big mirror in an ornate frame, and paintings on the walls; we all made do with paper reproductions, while these were real canvases.

No longer aware of what I was doing, unable to resist, I came out of the darkness, walked along the paved path, trying not to step on a crack, stepped up to the porch and knocked, hiding behind the door, the only nontransparent part of the glass veranda.

“Hello,” Ivan said, opening the door. “At last you’ve decided. You were out there, behind that birch, right? I’ve gotten tired of waiting. Come in, come in. Have you ever tried fortified wine? Will you have some? You sneaked out, right? They wouldn’t let you out this late, your parents, yes, I understand. Come in.”

I was suddenly embarrassed by my old, patched trousers, torn T-shirt, and sweater frayed at the elbow, but I also knew that Ivan didn’t care about such things, he was totally indifferent. A sip of the wine, which I had never tried, left a sweet tingle on my tongue, tempting me to confide in him.

Afraid that I wouldn’t have the nerve, I started talking right away—about Mister, the general’s story, how I guessed who Mister really was and the child’s gaze he feared; about my intention to sacrifice my life for the sake of catching Mister, about Ivan who must be thinking about the killer, too.

Ivan listened in silence, sipping the wine.

Then he replied, as if weighing something. “I have to think about it. I was expecting something else. Go home now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder in farewell. I walked down the dead street, where someone had marked out a hop-scotch ground, in confusion: What had I just told Ivan? Would he get in the way of my efforts? But the dark night told me: no, he won’t, you’ll be too scared alone, it will remain just a dream and someone else will catch Mister. Ivan will help, Ivan won’t let you be scared. Without him you are weak, he is your strength, your desire, your courage!

The next morning a car honked at the gate; Ivan waved from a beige Volga, as though there had been no conversation the night before.

“Let’s go for a swim?” he said invitingly.

“A swim?” I repeated; it had never occurred to me that Ivan could go swimming. No one had ever seen him at the dacha pond where every adult and child spent time splashing in the water, sunbathed on old towels in the trampled grass, played cards, baked potatoes and caught fish and crayfish. I thought that his skinny body—he never wore shorts, T-shirts, or shirts with short sleeves—was too aristocratic to bear openness, his nature could not stand the democracy and casualness of water that turned everyone into similar amphibians, bringing them closer, while air separated them; bathers are amazingly similar, they form a subspecies of humanity, and the only way I could picture Ivan at the pond was in the role of a natural scientist studying that subspecies.

“Swimming,” Ivan replied. “Let’s go.”

“What if we get stopped?” I asked, embarrassed, even frightened by this swift new closeness with Ivan that had required nothing from me.

“I actually have a license,” Ivan said, opening the glove compartment, with his wallet inside. “Get in.”

We drove off; we drove past the pond, the nearby woods, the village, and the pea fields. Ivan drove smoothly, enjoying this unrushed “grown-up” style of driving, as if he were an old hand at it. The Volga passed a tractor, with kolkhoz women sitting in the hay in the trailer, returning from the field. Ivan slowed in the empty oncoming lane, and on my right a multiarmed, multifaced, tanned female creature floated by; the wind ruffled the dresses and kerchiefs, the fabrics were sweaty with labor; a young woman, using a burdock leaf as a visor against the sun, waved it like a hat, while another cupped her heavy breasts with a significant gesture. I was embarrassed, but as he drove in front of the tractor, Ivan gave a quick wink, as if to say all sorts of things can happen when you’re with me, he winked without salaciousness, enjoying the burdock leaf, the smile, and the lovely breasts.

We were driving to the Moskva River; the car dove into an old fir forest, the road led down into the valley, I knew this road, sometimes I came here with my parents by bicycle. But Ivan turned in a different direction, honked at the barrier, said something to the guard, and we drove inside the brick wall, where the same forest grew, but here it seemed darker and quieter, as if it were warning visitors. Another few hundred meters, two turns, and we came upon a brick castle in the English style, red and white with ornamental towers; people in bathrobes strolled along the paths, paying no attention to the Volga. I had never known this castle was in our neighborhood, it was my first time on the property closed to outsiders, and this was yet another miracle that occurred when you were with Ivan.

“The castle of Prince Kerbatov,” Ivan said, as if he were a personal friend of the prince and was about to introduce me. “If not for the walking corpses, this would be a perfect place.”

The place was beautiful; the fir grove gave way to a pine grove, hazel bushes ran down toward the river, and I could see patches of white sand through the grass, and it seemed that just stepping on the warm ground sprinkled with fragrant needles would release an invigorating sensation that mounted from your heels to your lower back. This was the slope of the valley, with hidden layers rising to the surface, natural springs, and the vegetation was thicker from the proximity to the river and its fertile fogs.

I recognized that the strollers were high-placed old men, perhaps generals, officials, men of power. Before, when I met them in the courtyard of the building on Sokol, I was afraid they would notice me, think it wrong that I was wandering on their sidewalks. I was used to the importance of their uniforms, their gray overcoats and hats, their right to barricade themselves behind barriers and fences, to live in special buildings, stroll in bathrobes down paths of an unknown castle, while their heavy uniforms and suits, ironed by servants, hung in the closets here.

But Ivan’s remark showed me a different picture: the old men were turned into ridiculous figures who did not suspect that their time was coming to an end. I was sure he had the right to talk that way—without adolescent irony, just as a person who knows.

Leaving the car, we went down to an empty wooden dock, where there were several rowboats without oars. Children and teenagers from local villages were swimming on the other bank, flickers of tanned bodies, shimmering splashes, and a fast current carried the swimmers down around the river bend. Here it was quiet, the nettles had a bitter and delicious tanginess, and the orange fins of tiny roach fish flickered amid the long shaggy water grasses.

Ivan had a white body; in the sunlight, against the rampant bright green grass, in the inflorescence of the clover, it seemed almost like marble. The sun, the rushing water, the splintered boards of the dock, the shouts and merriment on the far bank—all that was nobly alien to Ivan, and he squirmed in the sunlight, as if it burned.

Then he turned, and I saw the birthmark on his left shoulder blade. It was a delicate coffee and cream color; not a disfigurement of his skin, but a parchment seal, the form of which could have been an oak leaf, or a bat, or the paw print of an imaginary beast; it was noticeable, the size of half a hand.

Ivan’s mark spoke of his inner scale, the sign was beautiful, it attested somehow to Ivan’s already obvious specialness and superiority, a manifestation of higher powers.

Uncomfortable, I decided it was better to swim than to reveal my interest in his birthmark. I dove, swam to the middle of the river, and came back struggling against the current, while Ivan watched me from the dock, perhaps enjoying the simplicity of my joys—river, light, the bleak fish leaping near the surface in the translucent layer of sun spots.

I climbed out onto the dock; Ivan stretched, and then slipped into the water without a splash, as if he had been waiting for me to finish my swim and leave the river to him alone.

Downstream from the dock and closer to the middle of the river, a glacier boulder lay on the bottom. Above the surface there was a small gray roundness, like an elephant’s forehead, that looked harmless. But if you looked closer, you would see that the clear river water darkened behind the boulder—there was a powerful whirlpool there, pulling in the river streams, you could feel its hidden power from the shore.

Ivan swam toward that funnel. He did the crawl, then the butterfly, he was a fish then a bird taking off, and the current was carrying him to the boulder. Standing on the dock, I pictured the river to the very bottom, saw its depths, shallows, and snags, sand banks, and flinty rapids. I perceived the entire boulder—huge, the size of a railroad car, separating the river in two; the whirlpool had dug an enormous hole behind it, and the icy springs could burn muscles into spasm; no fish entered there.

The boulder was waiting in the river—for a weakened swimmer, a child risking to cross to the other bank, and I had time to wonder if it had once lain on the neighboring sandy cliff, if people made human sacrifices upon it.

I shouted to Ivan not to swim toward the boulder, but he did not hear me, his head appeared only for a second at a time, he must have been swimming with his eyes open, looking at the fish and grasses.

He swam headlong, fast, on a straight path. But now he crossed the outer circle of the whirlpool, his arms caught in a deadly chop, and his agile body started moving against his will, sucked into the deep.

Ivan dove, then surfaced, and started stroking harder, but the whirlpool slowly spun him around, and the strong swimmer became a trapped, floundering creature. Why had he swum in that direction? I thought, while I looked around for an oar; if there were boats tied up, there had to be oars, and I doubted they were far away. I found them under the dock, I pushed out a light plastic shell and rowed to Ivan. He was trying to reach the boulder, to climb on and catch his breath, but the rock pushed him back with a wave, filling his eyes and mouth with foam; Ivan stopped swimming, hoping the current would carry him out, but the whirlpool dragged him down.

The boat scraped against the stone, the vortex turned it around. Ivan, crazed by the struggle, waterlogged, still saw the shadow that blocked the sun and grabbed hold of the line I threw him. A few moments later, soaked, he was in the boat; his eyes held fear, anger, and joy. “You saved me,” he said with unexpected pleasure. “You saved me.”

I knew that I would never have dared to fight the whirlpool and regarded him as a hero who took on the water spirit in his den; who was Ivan, where did he come from, what did his spot mean, what was he doing among ordinary people?

Then we sat on the shore, and when he was rested, Ivan told me that he sometimes came here to fight the whirlpool and that he always survived. They must have released water from the dam upstream and the river had not calmed yet, supposed Ivan, and that’s why the whirlpool was more dangerous than usual; I examined him quietly, saw how his muscles were strained, the veins swollen, and I was in awe, as if I had created this body, pulled it out of nonexistence in a single motion.

I never did understand what happened that day. Was Ivan acting from beginning to end, pretending that the whirlpool was sucking him in and he could not swim out? Had he started off pretending only to have the water unexpectedly get the better of him? Or was he not pretending at all and had he actually underestimated the vortex?

“You know what the old generals call this rock?” Ivan asked unexpectedly. “Generalissimo. Some call it Iosif Vissarionovich. But mostly, Generalissimo. They’ve been coming here for decades, they know all each other’s war wounds here. The head of the sanatorium is also an old frontline soldier, this is their favorite place, their own little private club. No one remembers now who first called the stone Generalissimo. They bring the new ones over to meet it. Here’s the fresh spring, here’s the dock, here’s the pine allée, and here’s the Generalissimo. I saw them bring one over, an aviation major general, gray-haired, scarred…”

Ivan paused, finding the right words, and I thought back to the building on Sokol, the generals coming down the steps, the gray-haired pilot who pretended to be a plane for his grandson—could he be the one?

“A very serious old man, the locals are mostly flabby now, but this one seemed to be hewn from metal,” Ivan continued. “I thought he would laugh and say the geezers had gone gaga, too much rich food at the sanatorium has gone to their heads, the mineral water bubbles affected the brain and soon they would be naming the trees. But the pilot, and you could tell he had been shot down, his face cut by pieces of the windshield, stood there and then saluted. The old men nodded and swayed: he’s one of us, he is, and they led him to the main building and looked at one another as if their impotent little crowd might have drowned him, if he had not acknowledged the stone as the Generalissimo.”

Ivan stared at the rock that almost took his life, while I processed the meaning of his words, remembering the two boys who ran across the street in front of Stalin’s black car. Who was he, who was Ivan, if he could throw out this challenge to the Generalissimo and fight him? I had no doubt that the ancient boulder, deified by the old generals who gave it the name of the Supreme Commander, was in some sense today’s Stalin.

If I had been more attentive, I would have realized that Ivan had made up something in this story; after all, I did the same thing.

At school, where my teacher knew that my parents had traveled extensively around the country, I began making up journeys for myself: saying I had seen Mount Communism in the Pamir Range and had even gone up into its foothills, had been in the Ural River in the place where Chapayev had drowned, had visited Shushenskoe and gone inside the house where Lenin and Krupskaya had lived in exile.

I made up the first story because I was bored, and I based it on a few facts—they really had considered taking me to Pamir. But I realized that our strict teacher, who never allowed us to stray, was treating me as if I had made a pilgrimage to holy lands; I, a child, had become more significant and authoritative than the adult. I couldn’t resist continuing the fantasies that protected me from disciplinary zealousness and moved further and further from reality.

But I couldn’t ever imagine that Ivan was fibbing or lying. Why lie to me? Knowing my tendency to mislead, I felt it had been forced upon me: I didn’t completely believe my grandmothers and parents, I could feel that they were leaving a lot of things out, hiding things, and I had become wearily accustomed to my own lies of omission. But Ivan? Ivan had come to me as a messenger of truth, an outsider who certainly had no need for me not to know something or to believe in some allegedly redeeming deception.

Could I have guessed that Ivan used falsehood as a tool? The one who lies has power over whoever believes him; Ivan was not interested in deceit per se, as are fantasizers and fabulists like me. Deceit was a form of power, it created the power; out of false assumptions he cultivated real feelings, real attachments, and I think that was what thrilled him.

But this kind of reasoning was beyond my abilities.

“Last night I thought about what you told me,” Ivan suddenly said. “You’re right. Mister is really a spy or saboteur or they would have caught him a long time ago.”

After the battle with the Generalissimo, I was prepared for Ivan to give me clear marching orders on how to catch Mister; he continued slowly, still exhausted, “It’s your mission. Only yours. I can’t help you. I’ll only scare him off. Or he’ll kill me.” Ivan shut his eyes for a second, as if examining his exhausted body, and I lost my breath from the sincerity of his words, his confession of weakness.

“I would risk it anyway,” said Ivan, “but you’ll be better at it. And I’ll help however I can.”

Maybe I would have come to my senses, pretending that nothing had happened—even at the cost of breaking apart from Ivan—if not for a single detail, a circumstance that decided everything.

While talking to me, Ivan grew agitated, blood infused his usually pale face, and a thick crimson bead of blood slowly dripped from his left nostril. Ivan sensed my look before he tasted the salty viscous warmth over his lip, took out a handkerchief from the shirt lying on the dock, patted the blood, leaving a pink print on his skin, and as if forced to apologize for something improper, said, “Weak vessel.”

That phrase—weak vessel—decided it. While the blood dripped—a second, two seconds, an eternity—along his pale skin, I experienced physical lust for Ivan’s blood, saturated, overfilled with red. I was in love with a man whose body literally bled when he was agitated, I understood the flawed superiority of my body and my mission—to protect Ivan so that nothing would upset this higher being who elicited dizzying delight and anxious pity.

“Weak vessel.” Ivan’s body was a weak vessel, and I—as life had decided—became guardian of the vessel, that was the reason I was born into this world. I would catch Mister so that Ivan would be unharmed, so that he would not go on a hopeless hunt that would result in his death.

Day after day I stubbornly wandered around the empty areas near the dacha, trying not to be seen by anyone I knew and to be noticed by the terrible unknown Mister. The occasional people I came across showed me that everyone, almost everyone, had a secret life that can be discovered in the keyhole of a random moment, if you know how and want to see.

It started with a bicyclist, the village mailman, I recognized him eventually, but at first I just saw a man on a bike. He was riding through the wheat field, going uphill, he was bent over the handlebars and for a second I thought the pedals were being pushed by a headless body in dark trousers and a patched jacket. The headless corpse flickered, and once again there was a man riding toward me, but I felt a jolt of fear. The bicyclist came closer, and I grew even more frightened, not of him, but of his bicycle.

The bicycle looked like a ferocious torture machine—the spokes were spinning and they could tear off your finger if you stuck it in the wheel, the sharp teeth of the gears worked the chain that could break bones.

The scariest part for some reason were the nickel-plated handlebars, with a shiny bell with a metal “ear” attached to them like a well-fed snail. I thought that if the rider were to ring the bell at me, it would be the last loud sound I would hear in my life. The bicycle, its quiet tires making an unobtrusive trail… no one would consider tying the murder to a bicycle track, there were many trails on the road, plus it sounded silly—the killer got away on a bike. We were alone in the field, visible to all and to no one, because no one was watching, this was a convenient moment for villainy, the evil hour. The cyclist drove past, nodding at me, and only then did I realize it was the familiar mailman.

There were others. Early in the morning a man was carrying a large unframed mirror along the side of the highway. He was passing a dangerous curve where there were frequent accidents. Alders, impregnated with the roadside dust, grew in the ditch, and faded, worn wreaths hung on them; a monster that devoured people and cars must live in the messy den of the forest.

The mirror was too big to carry under his arm, and the man held it in front of him, with a newspaper folded in four to cushion his hands. This made the sharp edge of the broken mirror come sharply—literally—into focus. I was walking toward him, and toward myself, reflected in the mirror. On my side were the rotting alders, the ditch, never cleared of the debris of car accidents, and it was filled with broken headlights, crumbled windows, pieces of upholstery, rubber snakes of belts, clots of oil, spark plugs, leaking batteries. I walked and waited for my face to be changed through the opaque amalgam into one with warts, tight red nodules, like on aspen leaves, the face of a satyr, a forest spirit, as if from inside the reflection. I would become frozen, understanding everything, and turn off into the woods, while only the mirror would remain on the road, leaning against a clumsy alder and reflecting the dark undergrowth on the other side of the highway.

There was a mushroom hunter, an old man who wore a black raincoat in all weather, with a big, frayed basket and long kitchen knife, thinned by sharpening, turned into a thin steel probe, that could deftly slip through fear-stiffened muscles, squeezing under the ribs; its thin point, as narrow as a bird’s tongue, would find the most sacred and alive part in the darkness of your body and end life with a single touch. The old man wandered in the distant aspen forests, rummaging through the leaves with a stick, even though it was too early for the mushrooms that grow under aspens, and it seemed that he was seeking a meeting, a knot in the confused clump of small forest paths.

There was the store night watchman, who picked raspberries during the day and sold them at the train station before his work began. In the hot stifling air of the prickly berry patches, where you can only hear and see the mosquitoes and horseflies thickening the heat, the watchman moved noiselessly, pulling and shaking the raspberries from their branches into the can tied to his waist. Dressed in dark heavy clothing, so as not to feel the bites and thorns, he would appear unexpectedly from the breaks in the berry patch in his white hat, and the hat that hid his eyes, unnaturally, a sterile white, contrasted sharply with his big, spade-shaped hands covered in ichor berry stains.

The juice of the berries, which ripened in just two or three days in the humid heat, had eaten deep into his skin. Soiled hands dangling, the watchman stood resting in the empty intersection of forest passages by the red orienting pillar. The matte underside of leaves glowed on the smashed raspberry plants, and it seemed that just a minute earlier there had been a fight, an attempt to escape, breaking the bushes. The watchman stood, smoking and wiping his brow, but I could see that he wasn’t picking berries, that there was a body hidden under the branches farther back.

One day I went really deep into the woods, where my parents and I went only rarely, when the mushrooms appeared in fall on stumps and fallen trees; firs grew there, tall, heavy, far apart. They shaded the ground, not letting underbrush grow, moss spread beneath them, and in the space between the ground and their lower dry branches an invisible daytime twilight collected, fed by the endless decay of fallen needles.

The air was filled with the sour dampness of decay, with wood sorrel ranging among the fir roots. Yellow mushrooms, as wrinkled as brains, poked out of a rotten log; pale toadstools, a light greenish tinge around the cap, formed witches’ circles all around. I walked and I thought that my presence was awakening the witches’ circles, and they were expanding, like drops on water, and the old fir forest was expanding, opening a corridor for me, a path to the deepest part of the grove.

I saw something through the trees: a tramp’s hovel of boards and bitumen set up in an old tank bunker. I sensed that someone or something was inside; not necessarily a human or an animal, but perhaps an ax, knife, nail, or hammer pretending to be stolen, when in fact it had been used to smash someone’s skull.

But a thought came to me, like redemption, that the tramp’s hovel was made in a bunker where maybe a T-34 had stood, and that meant the place, even if defiled, could not be fully evil. Picturing the tank, camouflaged by branches after it had squashed the supple forest mud with its treads, I stepped inside.

From inside, the hovel was like the belly of a gigantic animal; thin tree roots, like blood vessels or feelers, hung from the ceiling; the walls reeked of rot and the dampness of the earth’s womb. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw plank beds by the wall, human nests of filthy rags, and the floor, ankle-deep in food scraps, bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts, and rotten cabbage leaves—the people who lived here must have stolen them from the store near the station. A tall thick block of wood held dozens of candle stubs with dead, tormented looking wicks, and burned matchsticks were scattered everywhere.

Was this where Mister was hiding? I suddenly got so scared that I ran home, imagining dying there, wounded, amid the putrefaction and mud; that disgusting death seemed so real that I dropped my intention of catching Mister. I thought that even Ivan, who had listened raptly to my stories of the headless mailman and the watchman with bloody hands and told me I was getting closer to my goal, that I had a good eye—he was now getting weary of the hunt, as if he thought he’d been mistaken in me, I was not the one to recognize Mister. It took a great effort to keep from going to Ivan and giving up the hunt; one more day, I told myself, just one more day, one more attempt, and then it’s over.

And so the next day, I walked along the highway; it was that hot afternoon hour when yards and roads are empty, and sleep, as viscous as the drool from an idiot’s mouth, a sleep without dreams or feelings, submerges the area into a warm, starchy pudding. People, dogs, birds, cats—everyone hid, moved into the shade, and only flies wandered like somnambulists along the plains of lunch tables, clambering up the porcelain or cut-glass temple of the sugar bowl, the porous boulders of bread crumbs, and avoiding the lakes of tubs with soaking dishes to be washed later, when the heat let up.

The smell of chewed chicken bones, soap, and burned butter fills kitchens and verandas, seeps into the rooms, and the flies, while people nap, slowly move their tiny feet over the bodies of the sleepers, approaching the eyelids, as if trying to peek behind their cover.

No one drove along the highway. There was a pause; for kilometers in both directions, from the station and from the village, there were no cars on the road, no sand trucks from the military quarry, no sedans or buses. The few who had intended to go somewhere, maybe to meet the first commuter train after the break, delayed, or chose another road, or decided to kill some time, stopping to chat with someone near the store closed for break time, and have a smoke.

That created a window of absence, ten or fifteen minutes lost from shared existence. The well-used highway was guaranteed to be unoccupied, as if it were the deepest corner of the forest.

I froze: so this was the time when Mister was active, he knew, he could sense these intervals like a ballet dancer, he “landed” only in them. He was like a locater that calculated the holes outside the field of vision of people busy with their own affairs, inaccessible to their hearing, and he dove from hole to hole, appearing between people, in the quiet intervals from one passerby to another. Only a random boy could come across him, a pathetic little fool who’d wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time, which is why his victims were found in places that seemed impossible to leave without being noticed. But no one ever saw Mister.

Then, as if through the veil of a landscape, the windshield of a parked car flashed from the bushes near the road.

A child’s eye is always focused on hiding places. An adult sees an unremarkable landscape, while a child will find a loop in the path, where the bushes could hide a standing person, a dark space between two low pines where you could lie down; that ability is the basis of hide-and-seek, the competition of who’s best at vanishing. I understood that the car owner had not picked this place accidentally, this descent from the highway was a hideaway that pedestrians and drivers would miss. I should have walked past, looking the other way, pretending not to have noticed the car. But I turned, I turned off the road, telling myself it was only curiosity about the Lada, which I could touch, look to see what was inside, imagine myself in the driver’s seat.

The banged-up gray Lada 9 with rusty fenders was dusty from the rural roads; a crumpled oilcloth jacket was tossed on the backseat. There was nothing else that gave a clue about the owner; but there was nothing scary, it was just a car.

Crooked lines were etched in the mud of the doors—it often drove into the woods and had been scratched by branches; it had rained last night, but there were no drips in the dust—it had been in a garage overnight; almost bald tires, sagging suspension—it was used frequently; the license plates were illegible, covered in front and in back with clay and grass, as if the car had been stuck and had to go back and forth, to work its way out, hitting dirt with both bumpers. An ordinary rural car, there were dozens of them by the station, changing owners frequently, worked on in garages or the kolkhoz tractor station.

But there was something else that I couldn’t catch, and I circled the car, peeking inside, under the car, sniffing. I realized what it was—the crushed grass where the car had driven was still trying to spring back into place, which meant it had driven here recently and the owner was nearby—hiding?

He came out of the woods, slipping sideways through the thick growth of rowan bushes at the edge. He was around twenty-five or thirty, dark-haired, thin, small-boned, not a man, despite his age; his face was narrow and elongated, rather anemic, as if it did not know strong passions. He probably wanted to look cool, fashionable, but he had a bad barber, the jeans, denim jacket, and sneakers were bought at the village outdoor market, where they sold fakes. These details—unfortunate haircut, clumsy clothing, an early stoop, a slight drag of one leg—formed a recognizable type. If I had met him at the station, I wouldn’t have given him a second look: this driver was simply, tastelessly unattractive, and I would have lost interest in him before remembering his features.

Walking to the car, he smiled uncertainly and waved at me, I pretended to be embarrassed but continued observing him attentively through half-closed eyes. As I looked closer, he reminded me of someone.

His softness and not complete adultness made me think he was a coach or gym teacher, people who are always around children. They like to touch, caress, hug, tickle with a blade of grass, they like to fake wrestle, they like sports, camping trips, making up competitions and games to keep up the constant running and scrambling of bare arms and legs. They are not attracted to children but to the strength that accompanies growth, which makes scratches heal by morning and quickly forgives yesterday’s hurt.

The guy who came out of the rowan grove could never be Mister. I knew a spy could wear any guise, and I would have believed any but this one. I had a counselor like this in Pioneer camp, who adored boys’ elbows and knees, skinny, sharp, and always scraped. He softened and applied plantain leaves to scratches, smeared them with green iodine, and before taking you to the doctor he examined swollen lymph nodes or glands himself—he was tempted by these illnesses of growth, their ugly manifestations, as if he sought the ugly duckling in each child, who was rejected, needing protection and patronage. The counselor had the same pathetic haircut, avoided the loud fat cook and her jokes about him, and often walked alone in the woods.

Mister a mailman, Mister a shepherd, Mister a forest ranger, Mister a rail watcher, Mister an electrician, Mister a tractor driver, Mister a hunter, Mister a mower, a hundred variants, a hundred faces, only not this harmless fellow who probably worked at the village school or the big Pioneer camp on the other side of the woods.

But why was I so anxious?

“What’s the matter, boy?” he asked, coming right up to me. “Are you all right?”

He probably did think that I had sunstroke or was sick from the heat.

I looked around in confusion; it was about a kilometer to the edge of the dacha settlement, no one would hear me scream even though it was quiet. We were surrounded by piles of garbage overgrown with nettles, this unattractive turnoff from the highway had become a garbage dump, and mushroom hunters and people out for a walk avoided this place; the only ones who came here were tramps and feral dogs, I saw a mutt with a low hanging belly gnawing at a plastic bag of scraps.

“You must be really scared and think I’m Mister.” The guy smiled, gave a short, good, kindly laugh, his eyes narrowed slightly, his cheeks lifted and filled with merriment, and light wrinkles ran to the corners of his eyes. “I’m not Mister, I breed horses, you know the farm across the lake? One of our horses, Diana, is sick. She loves berries, she can eat a bucket of raspberries.” He pushed his lips forward and stuck out his tongue, showing how a horse eats berries. “I don’t know the berry places around here. Maybe you do? I’ve been wandering around for an hour, the nettles are killing me. Do you know a berry place? Just point the way, if you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, help me out, and then I’ll show you the horses on the farm, take you for a ride.”

He’s not Mister, not Mister, not an evil otherworldly saboteur. But why was he lying about looking for a berry patch for the last hour, when just a few minutes ago I’d seen the recently bent grass straightening under the car?

He shook cobwebs from his plaid shirt, pulled out a pack of Opals, and offered me a cigarette.

“Smoke? I started at your age, too. Go on, don’t be shy, I know you don’t have your own yet.” He held out the cigarette. “You all smoke, I know.”

He was taking me for someone else. I had never smoked and didn’t want to, and who was “you all?”

I stepped back, my back up against the car.

“You were trying to get into the car, yeah? Wanted to steal something?” He spoke sympathetically, persuasively, not threateningly, not raising his voice, as if he would be happy to be proven wrong.

“Thank God it’s not Mister, not a killer, just a weirdo,” I thought, looking at his hand, pale, with small red ridges—from tight rubber gloves? Small black hairs, like animal fur, grew on the back of his hand and fingers, but his face was clear, he barely needed to shave.

“Wanted to go for a ride, yeah?” He leaned his arm on the car roof, as if he wanted to embrace me. “Wanted to go for a ride, but you can’t drive. Want me to teach you?”

Learn to drive, even just sit in the driver’s seat, that was my dream. Besides the drive with Ivan, which didn’t even seem real to me, I’d only ridden from the dacha four times with neighbors who agreed to drop off our heavy baskets of apples in their old Zhiguli, and twice with my parents in a taxi coming home late from a party.

The smell of the car, the blinking arrows, wheel, pedals, gear shift, mysteriously connected, that brief moment of delightful supremacy over pedestrians!

Once again, as I had felt at the wharf in Uglich, I realized that neither at school nor at home was there attention paid to my insignificant wishes; we all lived that way—some look to borrow a smoke, others dream secretly of a rare stamp or toy car, still others wander around in search of drink. And it’s not the cigarette, car, or bottle of beer that matters, but a small friendly sign from fate, the satisfaction of your expectation of kindness.

A random stranger says, “Would you like me to…” without even knowing how much you want it, to be shown how to drive, to be talked to as an equal for a few minutes, and then you can live, trusting the near future. He was a messenger with good news, this stranger from another life, where there are no limitations of childhood, sent to build confidence in growing children.

I was about to admit that I dreamed of driving, but the man interpreted my prolonged silence in his own way.

“Fine, if you don’t want to,” he said regretfully. Then he brought his face close to mine and looked into my eyes. “I left a tape recorder in the car, an expensive one, what have you done with it? I wanted to be nice about it, give you chance to confess. But you’re being stubborn. That’s not good. We’ll have to go to the police.” He took my arm. “They’ll figure it out. Get in the car.” He opened the back door. “Get in right now!”

I resisted, not letting him push me into the car, while my thoughts raced: Maybe it would be better to go to the precinct? They knew me, the local cop often came by when Konstantin Alexandrovich was visiting, it would be safe there.

“He must have a car,” I remembered the general’s words. “And a place where he does it all. A garage or cellar. Probably a cellar.”

He pushed me into the car, my face ground into his crumpled jacket on the seat, and I saw the badge pinned on the lapel: “Public Environmental Inspector,” dark green, shaped like a shield, with a golden hammer and sickle on the bottom.

“An armband of the national volunteer force, a badge of the Green Patrol, something like that. A socially involved person.” Once again I heard the general’s voice.

I finally understood. The evil was real, my fantasies about a saboteur were not.

The guy was leaning on me, pushing me against the seat, and I was kept from struggling and screaming by a profound regret: how could I have deceived myself, how could I have believed Ivan, who probably listened to my stories about searching for Mister with the relish of a person who had played an incredible, dangerous hoax!

It suddenly started to rain—a brief summer shower that forms in a few seconds, falling out of nothing, from weak clouds, as if an invisible cup had overflowed in the sky. Its gigantic drops spread in flight into a rainbow of vertical strokes, unfolding a radiant curtain, so thick that at twenty paces you can make out only silhouettes, and then the rain increases for two or three minutes, making noise, hiding all other sounds, and even the silhouettes will vanish beyond the veil of water. It weakens quickly, falls into silvery threads, and then vanishes completely, leaving the steaming ground—but the silhouettes will vanish with the rain, as if they had been created by the rain, as if no one had stood on the forest path.

“We won’t go to the police,” the “horse breeder” said. “I’ll punish you here myself, your little thief. Get out. You deserve to be whipped with a belt, don’t you?”

I got out without a word.

There was nothing but the flying drops, the rain that swallowed up space. I realized that behind that rain, inside that rain, he would kill me; sensitive to nature, he had been waiting for something like this—and he found the minutes of cover.

The world fell apart, I felt its tiniest particles, the raindrops, but I did not feel the whole; the rain glowed, the rain blazed, deepening the victim’s dreadfully triumphant joy, which would in seconds be replaced by horror, but for a second filled me entirely as if it were the most important thing in my life—I was brought to the altar of just retribution.

“Turn around,” came his voice from behind me, not angry but agitated, hoarse with his breathing that sounded like a dog’s. “I’ll tie you up. Behave. I have to get something from the trunk.”

He opened the trunk and reached below, to the well where the spare tire is kept. I might have tried to run, but I couldn’t even move a finger. I sensed that the pause in time the killer was using was coming to an end; far away a car appeared on a rise and in ten minutes it would drive past on the highway, its wipers removing the decreasing raindrops. The commuter train from Moscow was three stops away from ours, crammed with passengers, the store would be opening soon after the lunch break, everything would come back to life, move, fill with people. Perhaps the killer had never taken such a risk, but the quieting rain brought us together intimately, like lovers under a raincoat.

He came up from behind, put his hand on my shoulder and tickled my ribs with a knife; he turned me to face him, and put the tip of the thin, nickel-plated scalpel on my nose; my eyes focused on the shiny blade, it was blinding me.

“Fucking lousy weather!” Behind the “horse breeder,” so very close, unheard because of the rain, several men were cursing without anger, clambering over the garbage.

Mister cursed, too, as if he had never done so in public, pretending to be the well brought up examplar, and maybe he couldn’t even curse alone, because it came out feeble and pathetic.

He weakened instantly, becoming a child, the loud, brazen voices reminded him of something, and he lowered his hands. Four tramps came out of the garbage mound, young, hard-drinking, I think they were deserters from the army. He sobbed and exclaimed strangely, as if his liver or kidneys were moaning with pain.

The spell was broken, I shouldered him aside and ran through the nettles to the tramps, slipped, slashed my hand on a tin can, but jumped up and ran. The car door slammed, the engine started, and the car drove off through the brush…

I woke up on the plank beds of the hideout I had entered, thinking this was where Mister lived.

“Who are you, young fellow?” one of them asked. “Where do you live? What was that all about?”

“That was Mister,” I replied, barely able to get the words out.

“We just went out to find some tarp, we were getting soaked in here,” someone else muttered in the dark.

“You have to call the cops, boy,” the first said. “Let’s go, we’ll walk with you. But not a word about us, all right? Tell them you escaped on your own.”

They walked me to the fence of the dacha area, wrapped my hand in a dirty rag; the rain was long gone, the sun was shining, and the water from the bushes had washed their hands and faces; the deserters were even younger than they had seemed in the dugout, around eighteen, their first year in the army.

“Listen, bring us something to eat, huh?” the smallest one asked. “There’s nothing in the gardens yet. Please?”

I crept into the cellar behind the house, pulled out a half-full sack of potatoes, and dragged it back to the forest. The four of them grabbed the sack, said, “Be sure to call,” and ran off, sensing that the police would be combing through the woods soon.

Grandmother Mara was still napping in her room.

I went up to the attic, sat at the window, and gathered my wits to wake her up and confess everything.

Ivan. I thought about him. My thoughts were short and clear.

Only the deserters and I knew who the killer was. But the forest tramps would not go to the police. They would hide as far away as possible or maybe leave the area.

The “horse breeder” would also lie low, he had to understand that every policeman would know his description within an hour. He would run away, hide, stop killing. He would never imagine that I wouldn’t tell. The elusive Mister would continue to exist for everyone.

If Mister killed Ivan, caught him on a forest path, no one would be surprised.

I finished this thought and sensed a black liquid, a poison, slurping in my chest. Black, sticky, smelly, it came from my old offense against Grandmother Tanya, it had been inside me a long time. It all came spewing out, until the last spasm made me pass out.

I dreamed that Grandmother came and pulled me by the tongue, which unrolled endlessly like a telegraph’s perforated tape. She held me by the tip of my tongue, while I ran off, jumping over fences and railroad tracks, swimming across lakes, leaping over cities, trying to cut it off by putting it in the path of a slamming door or a hurtling express train, but the tongue wouldn’t tear, and Grandmother tugged, and I was thrown in the opposite direction through high grasses and forest branches, until I was back in the room and it all started again.

“Did you see the deserters?” Grandmother Mara asked.

“Yes,” I replied and only then realized that this was no dream but a sunny morning with Grandmother at the head of my bed.

“I knew it,” she said, shaking her head. “They stole our potatoes. And scared you to death, you were unconscious all day. Well, stay in bed, here’s some hot milk for you. We won’t tell your parents, or they’ll fuss at us.”

From the doorway, she said, “Your Ivan came by. If he comes again, shall I let him in?”

“Yes,” I replied.

I hadn’t readjusted to the world yet, the only thing I felt was my lightness, as if I had no body. The drapes, floor, ceiling, furniture, everything was scuffed, scraped, and dusty, but it all seemed new and amazingly clean. Had yesterday happened?

Hurried steps sounded outside the door. It was my pals, who burst in together, chattering and paying no attention to Grandmother Mara.

“They caught Mister!”

“The highway cop waved his baton at him, but he didn’t stop!”

“The cops chased him, stopped him, asked him why he kept going.”

“He said, I didn’t notice you wanted me to stop!”

“They started writing a ticket—”

“And the MCID cop with them said—”

“Search the car—”

“They found a scalpel under the seat—”

“And all kinds of things in his garage—”

“Mister was arrested!”

They couldn’t understand why I only lay back weakly in the pillows. The approaching hum of a car came through the window, and I raised myself up on my elbow—Ivan’s Volga was driving toward Moscow, he was at the wheel; as he passed our house, he didn’t even turn his head, and a sixth sense told me that he was leaving forever.

I had but a remnant of summer left, even though there were still six weeks before school. Ivan had vanished, Mister’s dangerous shadow was gone from the area, nothing flickered threateningly at the dark end of forest paths. I wandered aimlessly, retreading the routes I had taken in my search for Mister, but I felt nothing, just clocked up the kilometers, breathing dust and heat, watching indifferently as wheat, apples, and corn burgeoned.

Only one place suited my mood. Far from the dachas lay large swampy ponds surrounded by reeds. Huge catfish lived there, and to catch them, people used special hooks made by blacksmiths and smelly dead crows as bait. They shot the crows right there, on the edge of the field where a garbage heap had formed, as it often does, from a large hole where someone had dumped a truckload of construction rubbish. Over a few years the trash spread outward from the pit filled with eviscerated sofas and broken barrels.

I wanted to be at those ponds, walking along their swampy shores, risking falling into duckweed-covered ooze, trying to feel the edge, the edge of something in my life and destiny. The water hid big fish, blunt-headed killers I had seen swallow up ducks from the surface of the water.

July passed and two-thirds of August, the falling stars had finished their cascades, and the long rains and packing for the return to the city began; Grandmother Mara was picking which gladioli still in bud would go in my back-to-school bouquet for the teacher.

It was a particularly glum day, the rain pouring drearily, the puddles bubbling, and beyond the fog the express trains to Brest blared their horns. I went out on the porch and the first gust of wind from the north, scattering the clouds and clearing the sky, cooled my face. It was an autumn wind, the air was clearing, the fog heading into the distant woods, the puddles covered with tiny wavelets. I could see the heights of the heavens, marked by cirrus clouds frozen on the border of the stratosphere, and something cleared up inside me, too, and as if I had just noticed that my key was gone and there was a hole in my pocket, I recalled that the light had not been on in the second-floor window of the house opposite.

Before Ivan there was one person I had wanted to call my friend. He was a slightly younger boy who lived across the street. I could have, but did not call him a friend; we both sensed that we should not be friends; individually, each of us was accepted in the dacha groups, but if we had shown a mutual connection, we would have been ostracized.

Other children grew energetically and boldly, with no fear of the future, like greedy and agile shoots of a strong plant. We existed with uncertainty, feeling our way as if in constant pain and unable to heal, unable to feel the mind-numbing and unsubtle energy of a perfectly healthy person.

We knew, even though we never discussed it, that were we to go off and do what we wanted, drop soccer and tag and instead read books and share impressions, look for belemnite fossils among the railroad gravel, wander in silence around the dacha streets without looking for a branch of ripe plums hanging over a fence, or plant an oak or rowan tree in the far corner of the garden in honor of friendship and watch it grow—if we were to reveal our real wishes, we would be punished, our lives would be turned into a living hell over that silly tree, even if the horde of rude pals knew nothing about it, only sensed that we were sharing a secret, delicate and lofty.

So we spent many summer seasons side by side without becoming closer, and it was only in the twilight, when the streets were empty, I could see the light come on in my friend’s window—home after playing outside and a late dinner, he went up to his room. I watched sometimes, waiting to see if his curtains would move—that would mean that he was looking at my house, my window, illuminated by the night light, and pining over the impossibility of friendship.

They had a gazebo, covered in vines and tiny flowers, the only one in a neighborhood where people borrowed the village habit of setting tables out in the garden or on the open veranda, of which there were not many, either. They drank tea from thin porcelain cups in the gazebo, and after lunch, his grandfather sat there with a book; he was a doctor who always came when children were sick, gently refusing payment as soon as he came in, and gave the disease its Latin name, as if that would scare off the illness; Grandmother Mara disliked him because he used Latin, torn between the need to cure me and her hatred of foreign speech in her house, which underlined her illiteracy.

How promising the gazebo would have been had we become friends! How delightful to have to sit there, hidden by the vines!

I was inside the gazebo three or four times when his grandfather invited us to play there; we were embarrassed and hastily refused. He listened to my excuses suspiciously while I tried to retain a snapshot of the old lettuce-green paint, bristling with splinters, the smell of the vines, so that I could re-create it later in my mind: the gazebo in the middle of the garden, no kids, no adults—just the two of us and our conversations that never happened.

Once I grew close to Ivan and began my search for Mister, I practically forgot my pal from the house opposite; sometimes I promised myself to think about him tomorrow or the next day, to miss him the way I used to—but Ivan reigned inside me.

We met a few times playing games, and he looked at me meekly, as if to ask, Could I be third, could you introduce me to Ivan? But I was submerged in the dark spaces Mister inhabited and regarded my abandoned friend with the harsh determination to bid farewell to the past. And then he stopped falling into my field of vision, as if our time had ended.

There was no light in the window! With belated regret I rushed to their gate. I remembered the interior, the German sewing machine turned into a workbench, the small photographs, like openings in a birdhouse, in wide wooden frames on the walls, with microscopic people reduced by time; how could I not have noticed them, how could I not have understood that he was my brother, my fellow traveler, my twin!

His grandfather opened the gate and politely told me that his grandson had left for the city two days ago. The old man said his good-byes for a very long time, telling me how much he liked me, thanked me for my friendship with his grandson—and all the time I was dying of shame, because I thought he had guessed my treachery and was trying to console me. The old doctor would not let me go, he would stop for a second, watch the north wind tear wet leaves from the apple trees, and then repeat his words of farewell, as if he were parting with his past and his life and not with me.

In the morning their house was empty and boarded up. We all did that, leaving the dacha for the autumn and winter, but that day the boards crisscrossing the windows seemed to be shutting me out of the big room of summer, where I had left Ivan, Mister, Konstantin Alexandrovich, the mailman, the watchman picking raspberries, the mushroom collector, the passerby with the mirror… The north wind brought the cold, and Grandmother Mara, no longer blaming the burzhuika stove for its huge appetite, fed it happily and started packing bags and baskets with jams and pickles, while I thought that inside the packages was my memory, divided up into pieces and taken away.

I did not want to lose this, I wanted to stay in that terrible summer that meant as much as all my previous life; in my boots and raincoat and with a bag of food I headed for the dugout, where I hoped the deserters who had saved me would return; the patrols on the roads were long gone and the wanted posters for Mister had been turned to papier-mâché by the rains. How are they going to winter over here, I wondered. I’ll spend the winter with them, I’ll bring them grain in glass jars to protect it from mice, I’ll steal my father’s jacket…

The weight of the water had torn through their roof of slab and polyethylene, and the dugout was filled with a puddle in which a soaked mass of stolen clothing floated.

The summer was over, having stolen years of my life ahead, making them empty and almost unnecessary.