The square of the yard was white and still, the snow slow, theatrical; the night had deposited an unreal, metallic taste in Alexander’s mouth—or perhaps it was the taste of blood. He felt unreal himself, as if everyone were an actor reciting poorly written, forced lines, going through stiff, predictable motions. The light of the streetlamp flaring along the blade of a knife—his friend’s knife, formerly his own, he realized with an internal half-chuckle, half-sob—seemed to belong to the same unlikely, artificial play, as did another explosion of pain somewhere and the cascade of dazzling white stars in the blackness of his head and the muddled sight of the two men falling upon the third, the man with the knife, his friend, he reminded himself through the pain that would not stop but was spreading with slowly widening concentric circles. Then there was the cold against his cheek, snow, he guessed dimly, and cries and steps above him, something smashing into his side, a shoe maybe, a beautiful athletic shoe with silver arrows along the sides, he saw through his closing eyelids, through the steady rotation of the world, through the fading, the fading, the fading of things. And then there was nothing—only the darkness, the crystal of the universe glinting on its pin black and small, shrunken, and the old man sitting in the kitchen, sipping hot tea, with cautious lips puckered in an attitude of gentle blowing, from a glass set in a lovely silver glass holder, talking as he did one autumn day, during one of Alexander’s last visits.
“So, then, Viktor Pyetrovich,” Alexander asks, “what do you suppose happens to us when we die? After, I mean?”
“I read something once in a clever book,” the old man says between sips. “Maybe each of us gets whatever he believed in. A dead Hindu spends his eternity among a pantheon of blue-faced gods squirming with hundreds of arms and trumpeting through elephant trunks. A dead Muslim strolls in a rose garden fondling almond-eyed maidens and reciting poetry. A dead Christian floats amidst clouds filled with angels making music as Saint Peter strides past shaking his keys. And whoever believes there will be nothing after death gets precisely that—nothing. A small room full of spiders.”
“But what do you believe, Viktor Pyetrovich?”
Viktor Pyetrovich smiles. “I’m hoping to arrange a fulfilling afterlife for myself. Another cup?” And as Alexander watches a stream of hot, steaming liquid splash into his glass, he suddenly thinks, What if my afterlife is only more of the same, this city I can never escape, the shoddy apartment blocks, the sharing of bottles in the dismal little parks, the lines, the winter, the dreary snow, the nausea in the mornings, the trains always departing without me, the eternal wait for something, anything, to happen—and then, horrified, sends a silent plea to whatever heavenly scribe might be up there in pearly-curly paradise jotting down prayers with a swan’s feather in some gigantic compendium of life, No, no, please don’t write that down, I don’t really believe that, it was only a stray thought—but already Viktor Pyetrovich begins to thin out, to turn transparent, the glass, the tea growing darker, merging with the darkness all around him, and as he opens his eyes, he sees a square of black sky, the spilled sugar of stars, naked branches moving above him, stirring the air like spoons in a cup, the round coin of the moon, the kind one needs to make a call from a booth, unless the telephone’s broken, and the snow, and the yard—and he sits up with a moaning, frightened whisper, “Oh, no.”
His body aches, and his hand comes away wet from his face. His nose is quite possibly broken, and maybe a rib or two. His fear abates a little; he feels too sore to be dead. There is an old man crouching before him, but he is not Viktor Pyetrovich. Alexander frowns at him, then recognizes the uncombed beard, the grieving eyes, the ancient man from the line.
“I thought you were arrested,” he says, and tries to stand up, and sits back down.
“So I was,” says the ancient man kindly. “Not the first time, nor the last, I reckon. They can never hold me for long.”
“Am I dead?” Alexander asks, just in case.
“Nothing wrong with you except a few scratches,” the man replies. “They ran away when I came upon them. Your friend’s badly hurt, though. A knife wound. Help should be here soon.”
And only now Alexander notices the man, his friend, Nikolai, lying on the snow, and he manages to pull himself together, and crawl toward him, and touch his forehead, which feels clammy, cold; and there is the knife, his old knife, which he picks up and holds for a moment, its familiar weight in his hand, then tosses it away into a snowdrift; and the snow around him, he sees, is red, bright red, a vivid, beautiful red, the color of fire, the color of a sunrise over the eastern sea. Other men appear then, and help Alexander up, and take Nikolai away, and Alexander comes with them, his head is humming, he too must be checked out, he can ride with the stretcher, they tell him. The ambulance is waiting on the corner, and as he limps toward it, he remembers something, and feels the back pocket of his pants. It is as he expected.
When they drive along the familiar street, he looks out through a small, dim window in the back door.
The kiosk is boarded shut, the pavement empty.
PART SIX
CHRISTMAS
1
ONCE ANNA HAD GONE TO BED, Sergei paced the unlit hallway, up and down, up and down, lying in wait for Sasha’s return, determined to speak with him about the ticket. When his vigil began to tire him, he went to the boy’s room, switched on the bleak overhead light. A clock on the desk shifted shadowy hands over an indiscernible face; he had to bend closely to read it. It was just past two; Sasha was running later than usual. He waited a little longer, then turned off the lamp, lowered himself heavily onto his son’s bed, and closed his eyes briefly, opening them minutes later to a stretched sheet of graying light—a window, he realized in another moment, a predawn window in his son’s room, to which his son still had not returned.
He rose. His back was sore. Crows were rending the air apart with hoarse cries. The clock, brighter now, as if time during the day were different in color from time at night, announced seven-thirty in the morning. He looked at it in consternation, with an undercurrent of worry, then sat in the chair, drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk. A thin stack of pages was lying on its surface, covered with Sasha’s sloppy handwriting—some lecture notes, no doubt, he thought absently as he let his eyes drift over the words.
People will remember you, of course, because you’ve attained immortality. It must feel strange, knowing you will live forever. For myself, I don’t care about being remembered as much as I care about my own memories. My biggest fear is living to be my parents’ age and discovering that I have none.
Startled, Sergei hesitated for a moment, then flipped to the beginning, read the opening lines.
Igor Fyodorovich, you may think I’m a regular concertgoer come to admire your music. I am not. I don’t know anything about music.
His hands unsteady now, he riffled through the stack, a sentence here, a paragraph there, then shoved the pages away, and for a long, long time sat staring into space, at the city rising from the murkiness outside the window like a photograph in the process of being developed, morning lifting it by its corner with a pair of gigantic pincers, shaking the shadows off. And as the light slowly ripened in the sky, there welled inside him a tightness, a knot, and he thought, here, in this city, which he once, not long ago, believed so entirely devoid of surprises, on the city’s dim outskirts, where centuries before wolves had roamed through snowed-in villages and where now grim apartment buildings grew along meandering, ill-lit streets, in an apartment in one of these buildings, in the three rooms of the apartment, three people lived alongside him, had lived alongside him for decades—his wife, his son, and his mother-in-law, whom he once, not long ago, believed he knew so well he was bored by them—and yet he now felt a terrible, heartbreaking certainty that he had somehow missed them completely, overlooked something vital about them, and by doing so, wasted years of possible happiness.