4.

Maksim listened to classical music on Orpheus Radio; Kiryukha called it Morpheus Radio. The conductors and presenters there still kept neutral, broadcasting from somewhere in a splendid age when the last wars had ended back in the days of the Nibelungs, and ever since, it seemed, the world had known nothing but bliss. Morpheus Radio didn’t even have a news segment, so as not to cause its cultured, no longer-young audience problems with sleep or digestion.

Cars squeezed out of the tunnel in taut streams, like mince forced through the holes of a grinder plate. The iron mincemeat settled slowly onto the concrete platter of the Third Ring Road. You’d think there’d been an exodus—so many people had left!—but the traffic jams hadn’t got any smaller. Moscow was impervious to decimation: it had been, it was, and it would be. Cut it down all you like—it would grow back anyway.

But in this particular case, simple arithmetic couldn’t explain a thing; this called for higher mathematics. Moscow was gridlocked because the satellites were on the blink. Because the navigator now showed nothing but Sheremetyevo everywhere, and you could rely, as in the distant days of your youth, only on your own knowledge of the city. The migrant taxi drivers, thrown off Yandex, got confused and lost, poking this way and that like robots whose Skynet had been switched off, and asking passengers to show them the way. And the traffic jams weren’t showing up yet. People had already unlearned how to live by memory, as they used to; they’d lost their grip on the ground, got used to the cloud, and their memories had atrophied from disuse. Now they had to relearn the past, since the future had been blocked—but it was a slow process.

Moscow sat in traffic, cursing Yandex. The anger had been building in everyone. It left a bitter taste in the mouth, like bile; someone had to be spat at. So they hated the navigator, the malfunctioning satellites. They preferred to treat the satellites as independent beings, as the final authority. But why were the satellites on the blink? What was the reason? That was where people tried not to think. Because that was where a chain of reasoning began that ended with handcuffs.

Morpheus Radio was playing Wagner.

Wagner… Interesting. Maybe they are hinting after all? Sending coded messages, winking at their own, ever so discreetly. They can’t exactly play Swan Lake, obviously—that would be too transparent—but Wagner…

Maksim looked everywhere for signs from like-minded people: a special, understanding glance, a skeptical smile for those in the know, a long handshake, like some secret Masonic ritual, “NO TO WAR” written in marker in an elevator, or an addition to the stencil-painted “WAIT” at a traffic light—handwritten in marker: “he will die.” Maksim knew there had to be lots of people around like him—people who, after more than three years of war, still hadn’t reconciled themselves to it, for whom it had become a habit but not a norm, and who were quietly acting as partisans like this, without expecting either to defeat the state’s Moloch in this doomed struggle, or even to do much to stop it from devouring people—that was beyond any one person’s power too—but simply to keep it out of their tiny patch of life for which they were responsible. To save themselves and their family, perhaps even some stranger they happened to meet.

Like in the late Soviet era, when every intellectual had a fig in his pocket: sure, a fig wasn’t a switchblade, but refusing to participate in anything totalitarian was already resistance, because totalitarianism without totality wasn’t totalitarianism—and wasn’t it people’s nonparticipation, after all, that brought down the Soviet Union? In honor of that fig in his pocket, Maksim called himself and people like him “the fig underground.” The stress was on the “I.”

Wagner had thundered to a close; Liszt was next. Then Chopin.

With a soundtrack like that, things were generally bearable. First, it was anachronistic, and that suited Maksim: everyone’s time had run up against trenches, minefields, drone kill zones, and ground to a halt anyway. Here, you listened, and it was as if you weren’t in Russia in 2025 but nowhere in particular, in your own private dimension. That was the first thing. Second: let the planet be jammed, let the public continuum of time go haywire, but you—you’re doing great, not wasting your own time, educating yourself; here’s Chopin, and here’s Schopenhauer. There was plenty to dig into in world culture; you could bury yourself in it up to your neck. And there was apparently nothing so terrible about all your plans going down the drain: life didn’t have to move only forward and upward; sometimes it was useful to go deeper, too.

On either side stood Chinese cars, sleek and futuristic-looking. On one side, a coquettish beauty was fixing her makeup, pursing her lips at the flipped-down mirror; on the other, a deliberately brutish man steered with one finger: tattooed biceps, a back bulging with muscle. Maksim wanted to introduce them to each other; they seemed made for one another.

European cars had dried up, and now you could import them only by crooked routes and at a steep markup, while Chinese cars were available everywhere without a wait and flaunted their prices; even Maksim found himself glancing at them despite himself. But only on the street, and only furtively; he never went into their showrooms, on principle. “Teapots,” as Maksim called them, had taken over Moscow after the war began, and to him they were its direct consequence. Russia had been excommunicated from the Western consumer church for its barbarism and cannibalism, German cars had been taken away—and the Chinese flooded the empty spaces. China had no intention of punishing Russia for its immorality; if anything, it seemed to reward it: Chinese knockoffs were not only within everyone’s reach, they also looked, beside the stubby European models, like visitors from the future. But it was a completely different future, alien, high-tech, and inhuman. Nothing like the one Maksim himself had once imagined and planned for.

So everyone who rejoiced in Chinese cars was, in his eyes, saluting on one side the Great Firewall, social credit scores, and the digital Gulag, and on the other the Russian Sonderweg, all that Khokhloma kitsch and homespun backwardness, the break with Europe—and, by extension, the war itself. Collaborators, enablers of totalitarianism, traitors to the dream of a European future for Russia, Maksim muttered.

Stuck in traffic, he always looked into the Chinese cars with what seemed like a disgusted curiosity, as if trying to identify the weaknesses and failings of their owners that had forced them into such a choice; but at the same time he couldn’t help admiring the dashboards, lifted straight out of science-fiction movies. And the car brands, with their illogical pronunciations (how, and why, was “Hongqi” supposed to be pronounced “Hongchi”? Still, Kiryukha had explained it; Maksim would never have guessed on his own), he learned and remembered, against his will.

Maksim himself still drove his Audi A6, which was beginning to shed its skin.

Maybe he was angry at them simply because their time had come and his was running out. Or maybe because their bet had paid off and he’d guessed wrong. Was that it? No, he wasn’t constructed in such a vulgar way, not that crudely. All that was there too, of course, if he was going to be completely honest with himself, but the earthly, self-interested part was maybe twenty percent, and the other eighty was existential and principled. Okay, thirty to seventy.

The seventy percent was sadness that the tectonic plates were drifting apart, that Eurasia was splitting, that Russia was returning to the Horde. And, above all, because it was giving itself to the Horde lustfully, evidently relieved to finally shrug off the tight, austere European dress, gloating over its disappointed Western guardians—and even blaming them for its own debauchery and riotousness, purely to mock them. As if to say: Look what your restrictions and prohibitions have driven us to: you’ve worn us out! And do you have any right to teach us, with your hypocrisy, your secret perversions? Wasn’t it you who lulled us with promises, then, once we were asleep, violated us in our enchanted dream, corrupted us! Corrupted us, sir!

Of course, there was nothing new about this. It was all part of the Russian tradition of presenting any sin of one’s own as an answer to someone else’s even worse sin, as an act of just retribution after which, supposedly, the story was over. And any consequences of that sin, even the most catastrophic, were to be assigned to another story altogether, unrelated to the previous one because it took place on a different turn of the spiral of historical development. But in practice—and precisely because of the unwillingness to trace cause and effect any further than what was convenient at that particular moment—in Russia the spiral was a spiral only in formal terms, in its movement along the t-axis; in essence, it was a ring. A concrete ring, filled to the brim with iron mincemeat.

Maksim wasn’t a reader or admirer of that eternal Russian folk tale that the people told themselves, where justice meant the victim turned into an executioner, first suffering with all their might and then taking their turn at the whip, laying it on hard; where humiliation and retribution were the tail and jaws of an ouroboros. But he refused to write off the people, and placed his hopes in enlightenment, which still hadn’t happened in Russia; so before losing faith in the people, one had to try this last remedy on them. Russia had missed the Enlightenment, Maksim used to say in arguments with his skeptical, eschatologically minded friends: it had replaced the Enlightenment with basic literacy campaigns. The people had been taught to read, but weren’t given the right books. You had to put the right books in people’s hands, then give them a quiz based on those books to make sure the material had sunk in.

So Maksim modestly considered his work a sector of the front line in the universal battle for people’s minds and souls. Specifically, he was fighting to make sure the lessons of the past were learned, executioners didn’t present themselves as victims, and Gondwana—the global, enlightened world—survived. He didn’t tell anyone this, being not so much modest as embarrassed to boast, but when alone with himself, that was still what he believed. Only now things were changing on the Western Front, and not for the better.

“They’ve fucked up Gondwana, the condoms,” Maksim muttered aloud. “What a Gondwana they’ve fucked up!”

Lost in these gloomy thoughts, he drove to his store. He parked in the courtyard, looked in the mirror, and suddenly saw there a man worn down by life, a stranger to himself, no longer resembling the passport photo that had seemed so recent. One year for every two.

He sighed. Got out.

“Hello, Maksim Pavlovich!” The security guard gave him a warm, familiar smile.

“Hi, Valer,” Maksim smiled back, holding out his hand.

Ulyana woke late, thanks to the full moon. Toward morning she’d dreamed something bad, and she should have disentangled herself from that dream sooner, but even in it she remembered that something even more terrifying awaited her outside—because it was real.

She pried her eyes open, came to, and lay there for a while.

She had to buy a ticket. For when? She opened the railway website and scrolled through the trains, not really thinking straight but growing more and more anxious. Travel by day or overnight? The simple choice made her hot, and she threw off the blanket. What was wrong with her? It was obvious: of course she had to get to Sasha as soon as possible, to see him. That was one thing. On the other hand, she had to get herself together; she couldn’t show up looking like a scarecrow, especially with news like this and proposals like hers. But there was something else… A black compass needle, stubbornly pointing, making her tremble, toward the direction Ulyana didn’t want to look. Which way?

She held the heavy phone in her hands, staring at the screen in a daze. She had to do something. There was something she had to do.

Call Sasha’s mother, that’s what.

Call and discuss the plans with her. Ask her advice, arrange to go together. Find out, at least—had he managed to reach her? What if he hadn’t? He remembered Ulyana’s number, but what about his home number? She had to tell his mother that Sasha was alive!

No, Ulyana doubted herself. There was no way he didn’t know his home number; and if anyone should have been the first person he called, it was his mother! Of course he called. He loved her—too much, even; he loved her, and he was afraid of her, too. When she forbade him to talk about marrying Ulyana, he folded. He chose his mother.

And what did that mean? It meant she was already in the know, since yesterday, and hadn’t bothered to call Ulyana or tell her anything. So even a miracle like this hadn’t softened her at all: she still rejected Ulyana, just as she always had. From the very beginning, Tatyana had decided to hate her, for no reason at all—just because Ulyana was older than her son, and because of her job. Not good enough for her little boy.

Why? For no reason. Because she was a bitch.

And yet, why hadn’t she told Ulyana? Why hadn’t she shared the news?

Was it just because she didn’t like her? No, there was something else going on.

Distrust. And what could she suspect Ulyana of? What could she expect her to do? Go to Moscow, insist on getting married. Ulyana had told her all of it honestly, to her face.

Sasha was still asleep, apparently. Ulyana texted him “Good morning,” sent him hearts, and told him she’d be coming to see him soon. The hearts were red, but not the color of blood. Thank goodness for emojis, Ulyana thought. They were easier to send than to fashion into words.

It was unbearable to lie around any longer. Ulyana sprang up and paced around her little apartment like a caged animal. She brushed her teeth until they bled; while cooking porridge, she scalded herself with steam and banged her little toe painfully against a corner. She grabbed her phone, checked it, put it down. She kept waiting for Tatyana to text or call, to tell her Sasha was alive. And all for nothing.

So she didn’t want to talk.

Well, suppose Ulyana called her first. Admitted she was going to Moscow to see Sasha, that they’d already arranged everything. What would she say? That she should sit tight and stop poking her nose where it didn’t belong. That everything had already been decided without her and for her, and she’d better not think of getting involved now. Sasha’s mother said it all so clearly, so distinctly in Ulyana’s head, in that nasal voice of hers, that Ulyana shuddered.

She went to the kitchen for candy. She really wanted something sweet. She’d never been like this before, but now it had come over her out of nowhere, like some kind of possession. She didn’t have the strength to resist. So Ulyana gave in and wolfed it down.

Come on, call her.

Call and tell her he’s been found, what a joy it is that he’s alive, that he’s in Moscow, at such-and-such a hospital; apologize for everything you said, accept her, acknowledge her, suggest going together. What would it cost you?

She didn’t call.

Ulyana had bitten off all her nails, and Sasha’s mother still refused to call; she didn’t want to accept Ulyana as her daughter-in-law. A bitch was a bitch. She didn’t call while Ulyana sat at the hairdresser’s, didn’t call while she picked out clothes for Moscow. Because she’d decided to shove Ulyana right out of the picture, dump her in a quarry like a dump truck unloading slag, and live in peace without her and her little baby.

If that’s how it is, Ulyana whispered, looking at herself in the mirror—now with her hair cut, beautiful and angry, angry because Sasha’s mother had deceived her—if that’s how it is, then I won’t call you either, and I won’t warn you that I’m going. Maybe you’re already on the train yourself, and I’ve wasted the whole day waiting for you to get ready, to come to your senses. I’ve just wasted time, given it to you.

She should have got up immediately and taken the first train, rushed there and beaten you to it. So you wouldn’t have time to pour into his ears what a slut I am, how mercenary, how unfaithful. Boys are taught from childhood to take their mothers at their word; a mother’s word is sacred and carries weight, doubting it is a sin. Just try to counter it with something—it can’t be countered. It outweighs anything you can name.

Ulyana texted Sasha again—to the number he’d called from. They replied that Sasha was with the doctor now, having an examination, but that he’d asked about her, when she was coming. Should she ask him about his mother now? She was tempted to write: Is your mom coming to see you? Or has she already arrived? Ulyana hesitated and hesitated—and then didn’t. Whatever happens, happens, she told herself. If he isn’t the one to bring up his mother first, then he doesn’t want to.

And down at the very bottom, a slippery little thought darted past, not even fully formed into words: if you’re not in a hurry to ask her to come, then I certainly won’t hurry you. I’m not going to remind you about her if you’ve forgotten her. There’s nothing underhanded about that; you have your own family with her, and I’ll have mine with you. It darted past and buried itself in the silt.

If she doesn’t know, then let her not know for now. She had to buy time. She had to buy time before Sasha’s mother. Because otherwise Tatyana Nikolayevna would just devour Ulyanka, and that would be that.

That was what she’d dreamed about, she seemed to remember. Tatyana had been in it. Ulyana couldn’t tell her anything, because she’d cancel everything, forbid everything, ruin everything. In the dream, she wouldn’t let Ulyana in to see Sasha, and she lied to her, saying that if Ulyana went in, Sasha would die. Lied, lied, lied. She just wanted to keep him for herself, so he would serve her until he dropped.

Ulyana opened the train listings again. The only decent one left was an evening train that arrived at six in the morning. She bought a compartment ticket; the difference from a platzkart ticket was small. She needed to get some sleep. She needed to show up to see Sasha ready for anything. She still had some money on her card; it should be enough for the trip if she stayed with Aunt Marina.

And then it was all or nothing.

It was up to Sasha to decide.

The first half of the day passed without incident—Maksim put together orders, begged for discounts on new titles, and did his best to fend off the crap publishers tacked on as a condition of getting their bestsellers. He stayed in his office, basically. But he didn’t overwork himself. Summer was dead season for bookstores; the main thing was to hold out until September first, when people came for notebooks, rulers, and erasers and, inevitably, picked up something else along with all that back-to-school stuff, some new Pelevin or whatever happened to be current that year.

Maksim went to lunch through the main entrance, straightened the displays by the cash registers, patted the trendy children’s books like a father, combed the intellectual fiction, adjusted the Nobel and Booker laureates, inspected the window and the displays—and was, on the whole, satisfied with everything. It all looked respectable. It all conveyed a certain message.

He went outside and took in the store from across the street. The Babylon Library sign and its Escher-inspired logo looked quite at home against the mirage-like glass city that had risen from the factory ruins. A little surreal—but no more surreal than any other fragment of Moscow.

This part of Moscow was utterly prewar, outside the war, an ordinary summer Moscow, lazy and blissful as a cat in the sun. Maksim sat on the terrace of a café in a neighboring courtyard, chewing salad, catching tufts of white fluff in his plate, reading nothing and watching nothing, preserving his appetite and his decent mood.

He didn’t want to dispel the magic with the neurosis and paranoia of the émigré media. As long as it seemed that not all was lost, there was a thrill in reading them. Maksim had once hoped for news they wouldn’t tell you on TV, hoped he’d be the first to spot the cracks in the regime’s clay feet. But gradually it became clear to him that the colossus would stand, that its feet were, alas, of some utterly unimaginable thickness. And so the likes of Meduza stopped feeding that secret hope. It had become a rabies shot, an obligation: fifty injections in the stomach—you had to get them, no question, but there wasn’t much pleasure in it.

Life had melted under the heat of war and taken shape, yes, ugly and cruel in places. And the likes of Meduza pushed all that cruelty and ugliness too far to the fore; Maksim understood why—because it had to, because no one else would write about any of it. But life now wasn’t made up of ugliness alone, and you couldn’t look only at ugliness without wanting to die. All in all, it was getting harder and harder for Maksim to open Meduza and the rest of them.

And Kiryukha would say to him, “Why do you read it all the time? You’re allergic to it, aren’t you?” And Maksim himself often wanted to do just that: not get a vaccine, but opiates; not read the news, but Proust, or Franzen, or Fowles, or Joyce—in a word, something with absolutely nothing to do with Russia, preferably something with little to do with reality at all. To rock on the bland waves of Radio Morpheus, like in a cradle. But because of Kiryukha’s situation, he couldn’t cut himself off from reality completely. Reality was treacherous and unstable, unreliable and unpredictable; there was no way to get through it on opiates. You always had to stay on guard: it was forever trying to drag in and swallow up the little wanderers.

Maksim opened Telegram and was about to message Kirill, but settled for a simple text:

“How are you? How was the interview?”

Kiryukha wasn’t answering, and Maksim had already begun to worry, his finger hovering over the call button, but then he pictured his son huffing with annoyance, saying there was no escape from parental overprotection anymore…

And another thing: Maksim tried very hard not to scare Kirill unless there was an urgent need. In other words, he was trying to raise an unspanked generation. He suppressed his own fear of the state as much as he could, and all the more so in his son. From the very beginning, he’d wanted to raise a free person for a free world. Who knew the free world would get flattened, too.

All right, nothing could have happened to him. It had only been half a day.

Or could it?

It was a pretty horrifying feeling, actually. Once, a comparison had slipped into his mind that Maksim wouldn’t allow himself to say aloud to Marina, or even voice to himself: it was like an oncological diagnosis. They give it to you—and that’s it, now you’ll live in death’s shadow. You’ll always feel a chill. And one day, soon or far off, they’ll remember you and crush you, too.

They’d set their sights on Kiryukha, their one wonderful son. He didn’t want to think about it himself, and he even forbade Maksim and Marina from thinking about it, but you couldn’t just forget something like that. He was in the shadow, and the whole family was there with him.

Chilly.

But he bore it and waited.

“Fine ) I’ll tell you”

And a warm wave, like when he was a child on the Black Sea, washed over Maksim. The ticklish, nasty cobweb lifted from his soul, and he could breathe more freely at once. He wanted to send his son some encouraging, approving emoji, but got lost among them; and while he was looking, he remembered that young people used stickers instead of emoji now. He decided that his desire to speak his son’s language was doomed and ridiculous all the same, like dyeing his gray hair so he’d look not like a grandpa but like a man of indeterminate age to twenty-year-old girls. No need for a gray-haired prick trying to tag along with the young. It’s pathetic. Youth despises anyone who curries favor with it.

But he still wrote: “Awesome!” He finished chewing, soaked up some sun, took his coffee in a paper cup out to the porch to savor with a cigarette, and went into the store.

And he saw through the window at once that something was wrong.

Galina was taking books off the shelves, glancing over her shoulder at someone every so often. At whom? Maksim drained his coffee and yanked the door open.

“Galina Igorevna, what’s going on here?”

The shelf had been thinned out, like a jaw with its teeth knocked out. A cardboard box stood at Galina’s feet, with books by Bykov and Ulitskaya, Zygaar and Sorokin stacked inside.

“A purge?” he joked.

“There’s, um…” Galina cautiously turned her gray head, pointing toward the back of the store. “Activists have come.”

“What activists?”

“With ribbons. St. George’s ribbons.”

“Okay. What do they want?”

“Well, they’re making a scene about us selling foreign agents,” she whispered.

Maksim nodded: understood. In a flash, everything the sea water had washed away came back, and a cold metal mesh cinched all his human innards tight again.

Bykov and Ulitskaya gazed up at him from the box like kittens being carried off to be drowned—looking up from the bottom of a bucket. So they’d come for them, too.

His store wasn’t central or a major player; in the war of worlds, it wasn’t taking part in the main battles, only the peripheral ones. But all the flagship bookstores had long since lowered their flags, and their management had lowered their trousers, too. Maksim’s little, proud shop, though it was beyond the Third Ring Road, had held out. Deputies, prosecutors, and TV hosts kept wandering into Dom Knigi on Novy Arbat or Moskva on Tverskaya, so they’d long ago dropped controversial authors to avoid provoking them, putting up displays about the SMO in prominent places instead. It was a kind of talisman for them. Maksim tried not to judge them for it, but he couldn’t help despising them a little.

There had been a precedent with Akunin, though. When Grigory Shalvovich was added to the list of terrorists and extremists, the publisher recalled all the print runs from the bookstores. Distribution simply called and said the delivery drivers would come and take everything away with the next shipment, even though it was perfectly clear that Akunin hadn’t justified any terrorism; he’d simply called things by their proper names and had, in fact, become the victim of a provocation, probably by the security services. Maksim had lost some respect for that publisher then—and, as it turned out, not without reason, because that was only the beginning with Akunin. After that they published a biography of Pasolini with pages blacked out, and all sorts of other crap. They could have resisted a little longer.

But never mind. The word “terrorism” was a spell from the dark arts, a kind of watchdog “Avada Kedavra”: it instantly killed the mind. But that was terrorism; this was foreign-agent status. They weren’t one and the same. The bastards were nibbling away at Maksim’s world, piece by piece, like King’s Langoliers. Soon there wouldn’t even be anywhere left to stand!

That was one thing: you weren’t going to argue with a publisher over its merchandise; that was their choice. But here it was Maksim’s choice, and it all depended on him personally. He couldn’t back down here, he told himself. This was the moment of truth.

“Put them back on the shelves,” he ordered. “I’ll handle this.”

He put on the carnival mask of a boss—furrowed his brows, twisted his mouth, took a few breaths to steady his pulse, and went to meet the activists. There were two of them, a man and a woman, with armbands like neighborhood patrolmen, and their faces were vile. The kind that cut in line.

“Good afternoon,” Maksim greeted them.

“Are you the director?” the man asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Let’s say I am.”

“You’re selling books by traitors to the motherland, Russophobes, and foreign agents.”

“My name’s Maksim,” he introduced himself. “And yours?”

“That doesn’t matter. We represent the Union of Patriotic Readers.”

“Well, you have names, don’t you?”

“You don’t need to know them. You listen here. You’ve even got Nevzorov! And Zygaar! We demand that you immediately remove all this trash from your stock.”

“You mean from your inventory?” Maksim suggested.

“You’re trading in the motherland!” the woman shrieked. “Aren’t you ashamed?!”

“You have one hour to get it all done!” the man announced.

This was pure Bulgakov, Maksim told himself silently. Shvonders 2.0 or 3.0, the latest version of the lumpenproletariat that hated the lice-ridden intelligentsia, another turn of the Russian Ouroboros, where everything was already farce—revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, the intelligentsia, and lice. Was he really going to take this seriously? Was he really going to play along with these buffoons?

“Listen,” he said politely, savoring the word “post-Shvonderism” in his mind like a mint candy. “It’s true that we’re a retail business. But we trade in books and stationery, not in the motherland. Our work is governed strictly by current legislation. There’s nothing in the law about traitors to the motherland or Russophobes; I read it this morning. It does say something about foreign agents. What does it say about foreign agents? That their books must be appropriately labeled, that they must be in opaque packaging, and that they can’t be sold without proof of age. We comply with all those requirements to the letter. But there’s not a word in there about foreign agents’ works being banned from sale. Now, they are prohibited from engaging in educational activities; we’re aware of that. But there’s nothing in the law about throwing fiction out of bookstores. Or burning it in the town square. At least, not yet,” he couldn’t resist adding.

Of course, they immediately heard the sneer in his voice and grew even more hostile.

“Take them down,” the man ordered. “Or we’ll come back with the prosecutor’s office. Let them sort it out!”

“Well, the prosecutor’s office should certainly know the law,” Maksim replied. “Come back. By all means, let them sort it out. But thank you very much for your vigilance.”

“Look at the people you’re sheltering here!” the woman hissed. “You’re sheltering people who are against Russia! Against the SMO! Kids come here for books, too! Are you one of them yourself?”

But she was hissing out of helpless rage, because she’d realized she couldn’t get her teeth into Maksim. He shouldn’t answer now; they were deliberately provoking him, hoping he’d say something the prosecutor’s office would love. Polite and unyielding. Stupidity and courage.

“Galina Igorevna, what are you standing there for?” Maksim said sternly to his employee. “Put the books back.”

“Maksim Pavlovich, well, maybe we should at least remove Nevzorov, just to be safe?” she whispered to him. “He really has gone completely nuts!”

“When you’re the owner, you can take him down. For now, I’m the one who decides here. Put them back.”

The door creaked and slammed. The two of them ran off. A victory, Maksim asked himself.

The station in Vologda was like a toy castle: pre-revolutionary, brick, low-rise, but with turrets—and the main turret had crenellations, with a little flag on top. It looked like one of those plastic sweet-filled gifts from the Kremlin New Year’s tree, just as red. When Ulyana was twelve, right at the very end of childhood, her mother had taken her to the tree in the Moscow Kremlin. She’d caught the last train into a fairy tale—and remembered every detail for the rest of her life. So in Ulyana’s mind, the station fused and blended with that plastic Kremlin treat, with the trip to the vast, snowless city decked all over in electric garlands, with the tense anticipation of a miracle in an endless queue, with the living Father Frost in his silver-and-blue caftan, and with the piercing sense that the most important thing in her entire past and future life was happening to her right then, that she was experiencing what every child in the world dreams of. The Vologda station became, in a way, an outpost of the Kremlin for her, all the more so because it too was made of brick and was red.

And now Ulyana was here again. The loudspeakers barked back and forth at one another, echoing themselves: they announced the trains brightly, indistinctly, in a staccato. The air smelled of that particular station smell, just as churches have their own particular smell—diesel-locomotive incense and the unction of railway sleepers. On the platform stood people preparing to part and people waiting to meet someone; embarrassed by one another, they went through their station rituals.

“The branded train… Number… One hundred twenty-six G… Sheksna… Service… Cherepovets to Moscow… Will depart… From track two… At twenty-one… Fifty-eight… I repeat…”

It was still light outside—the northern sun was loitering somewhere near the horizon like a bobber. Flat puddles lay across the asphalt, flooded with sunset red. A few young men in camouflage were smoking and laughing. It was the kind of laughter that made goose bumps race across your skin. Ulyana looked at them out of the corner of her eye and saw everything. They were people on their way to war.

A new, beautiful, gleaming train pulled in.

Its sides were light gray, with bright red letters spelling RZD. The station was fairy-tale, imperial, while the train had arrived from Moscow’s future to take Ulyana from Vologda, lagging behind the times, to a place where time ran ahead.

No one had come to see Ulyana off. It was too late for her mother to get back to her own place afterward, so she’d given her blessing over the phone. Well, all right, she went anyway.

The carriage was clean but uncomfortable: it hadn’t yet acquired a human touch, still an uninhabited machine. It was all-metal and smelled of nothing but metal; everything inside seemed so smart and polished, but in reality it was institutional.

Ulyana sat in her seat, opposite a gloomy old woman in a shawl. It was warm outside, but the old woman was chilly, huddling into her wrap. She immediately started laying out food for herself, without waiting for the train to pull away. Ulyana greeted her, stowed her bag under the seat, and checked her phone. No signal. The conductor hurried through the carriages, ordering those seeing passengers off to leave. The loudspeakers started droning again on the platform. An iron shudder ran through the train, and the station began to slide backward. The old woman crossed herself and whispered a prayer to God. Off they went, the posts flickering past. All kinds of ugly buildings popped into view, crowding the fairy-tale castle on every side. Then dachas and garages zipped past. Then the whole train rolled into a dark forest. The conductor brought tea in flimsy, thin cup holders, like the old ones but not like the old ones: made almost of foil, merely pretending to be silver. The old woman wolfed down hard-boiled eggs by herself, eggs that smelled of sulfur. Their yolks had turned completely blue.

They passed Gryazovets.

Ulyana sucked on the cookie that came with the tea and listened to herself. Nothing inside her quite formed itself into words, but if she’d asked herself honestly, Do I want to go there now or not?—for some reason she would have answered, No. So she didn’t ask herself any more questions. She sipped her tea and played Diamond Puzzle on her phone. Shiny glass beads filled the hollows in her head, in her chest. With something filling them, it was better; the emptiness didn’t suck so hard.

“How much farther to the dining car?”

Voices thundered through the carriage, boots scuffed along. Ulyana stayed glued to her phone; it had nothing to do with her, until it got really loud.

“Well, well! Good evening!”

Ulyana raised her head. Two soldiers were hanging in the aisle, peering into her compartment. They caught Ulyana’s eye and squeezed inside. One had dead eyes and was terrifying, with a neatly combed part in his fair hair. You could tell right away he was a total psycho. The other had a close-cropped buzz cut, swaggering, and clearly an idiot. The old woman immediately covered her food with her hand. But the soldiers weren’t after the old woman’s food. The swaggering dumbass swung around the handrail like a monkey on a branch and deftly landed beside Ulyana.

“You going to Moscow too?”

The dead-eyed one blocked the exit with his body.

“We are too. Coming back from leave.”

His rough green uniform was already touching her bare knee; he breathed beer and some other sour smell onto her. The old woman shrank back and turned pale. Ulyana moved away. She started looking out the window.

“Eight hours on the train! You’ll be bored all by yourself, come on, huh?”

“We don’t like being bored,” the dead-eyed one chimed in.

A third soldier, blond and broad-shouldered, who’d already walked past, came back and leaned over his comrade’s shoulder to peer into their compartment too—to see how it would all turn out, or maybe to join in. He liked what he saw. He pushed his way inside as well, nudged the old woman aside, grabbed an egg from her without asking, tapped it against the edge of the table, and began peeling it while surveying Ulyana like she was something to unpack. She could see it all from the corner of her eye, the way women do, without turning to look at them. With people like that, you have to be careful, like with stray dogs.

“If you’re shy in front of the old lady, come with us to the dining car, let’s have some fun! Why are you sitting there alone slobbering over cookies like a little orphan? You’re a good-looking one… We’ll feed you proper, get you a drink, you know…”

This was like having to walk a tightrope over a pit: refuse politely, so they’d have nothing to hold against her, but refuse firmly, so they wouldn’t have any opening to hope for more. Don’t fall to the right or the left. Kind of like dealing with a bunch of drunk thugs at night, only even more carefully. And don’t look them in the eye.

“No, thanks.”

“Why are you being so unfriendly?”

People walked past, some of them burly men, and looked into the compartment, but didn’t see anything wrong. The green uniforms had that effect on everyone; they created a blind spot around them. The soldiers were within their rights, and people in ordinary clothes were afraid to talk to them. Their uniforms smelled of trouble: smoke, iron, alcohol, a sick mind, death. Everyone could smell it, but no one wanted to stand up for Ulyana.

“What’s it gonna cost you, huh?” He grabbed her knee.

She jerked away.

Horror and paralysis. She had to do something, fast. She had to stand up for herself, since no one else wanted to. She turned her head and looked at the two of them the way she used to look at the local punks in the courtyard—like a fucking nutcase. Don’t mess with me.

“Because I’m not interested!” she replied. “Move along. Wherever you were going.”

The words flew out, and it was as if she’d been thrown from here, from the compartment, back down into that basement with Kristinka, on their last night at work. Ulyana again felt the familiar premonition of something irreparable. Helplessness tickled every tiny muscle from within; she no longer had the strength to keep her back straight. There she was on the tracks again, a train hurtling at her again, only this time it wouldn’t wreck her plans for the future—it would smash her whole life to pieces, flatten her on the rails. And there was nothing she could do, and no one would help.

The old woman started twitching, as if trying to leave, but she didn’t go and fell silent.

“Why you gotta get all uppity right away, babe?” the one who’d pressed up against her said, getting heated. “We’re here with the boys, in case you didn’t know, going off to fight. Defend the motherland, get it? From people like you… The Yanks’ll come and tear you apart like a dog shaking a hot-water bottle.”

They exchanged animated glances. Maybe they were imagining the Yanks tearing Ulyana apart? And getting worked up.

They were frightening, yes, but the war had made them frightening. The same war Sasha had gone off to. So they weren’t any scarier than Sasha, then. And why should she have to put up with them here at all, turn away, huddle up like that old woman, curl into a shell, when he was over there?! She boiled over.

“And don’t you worry about me,” Ulyana said to him angrily. “My man fought for me. You go find your own people to fight for. Somewhere else.”

Something changed in their faces at once. Until then they’d worn cruelty, ferocity, a desire to grab one last piece of life, and the knowledge of how to get their hands on it fast, before the train arrived—through the vodka haze, through the shameless, meat-scented frenzy. But now they stumbled. Their lust ebbed, and all their certainty broke. She’d spoiled their appetite. Only the cruelty remained, now joined by confusion and mistrust.

“Where did he fight, then, I wonder?” asked the neat one.

“Chasiv Yar. He was listed as MIA for a month, and they’ve only just found him. I’m going to see him in the hospital in Moscow.”

They exchanged glances. They knew the name—Chasiv Yar.

“And… how is he? Your guy?” the one beneath the beanie suddenly asked in an ordinary human voice, without the swagger, the booze, or the armor.

His leg was still pressed against her knee, but now it felt no more frightening or disgusting than brushing against a stranger’s leg on a bus. As if life had simply crushed some fellow passenger.

“They barely got him out.”

“Well… I see. All right, then… Good luck.”

The blockhead started to get up from his seat. The blond one, still chewing his egg, began gathering his things too. Only the terrifying one refused to give up.

“What hospital?” he kept pressing. “You know the address?”

“The Vishnevsky. The branch in the region.”

“What if we check?”

“Check. Lazarenko, Aleksandr Vitalyevich.”

Ulyana looked at them, brazenly meeting each man’s eyes. She’d lost all fear. She felt… an overwhelming sense of being right, and an overwhelming strength. A thousand-percent strength and a thousand-percent certainty she was right. Sasha had given her that certainty; he’d paid for it with blood, not money, and his blood was now a talisman for Ulyana. Thanks to Sasha, she was invulnerable.

“Come on, Zhenek. Enough. She’s one of ours.”

At last even that empty-eyed maniac let her go, though reluctantly, throwing Ulyana a final hungry look from the aisle—not the way a man looks at a woman, but the way a wolf looks at a sheep’s throat.

The blond one took his leave with a clownish bow:

“Lady! Thanks for the eggs!”

She crossed herself over him.

“Hope you all stay healthy,” she managed to say.

“Hell, I’d settle for not dying,” he smiled at her.

Ulyana simply nodded to them. They bumped into each other in the aisle, arguing over who’d go first, and then they were gone. Ulyana smiled triumphantly at the old woman—she couldn’t contain her pride. She’d taken all those guys’ bravado for herself. She felt like she was bursting. Every hair on her body was standing on end. An electric tension ran through her arms; it seemed she could pick up a light bulb with her fingers, a 220-volt one, and it would light up. She wanted to shout or sing, yell “fuck off” after them and slam the door.

It was an extraordinary feeling.

A feeling so powerful she’d ordered a ten-thousand-ton train to stop, and it had obediently come to a halt. She’d climbed into the driver’s cab, stood at the controls, pressed all the buttons, and the train had carried her wherever she needed to go. And if some bitch now stepped onto the tracks and started waving her arms to stop Ulyana, the thousands of tons of steel at whose head Ulyana now stood would sweep away that creature, and any other, while Ulyana felt nothing in the locomotive cab. A little jolt—and on she’d go.

“Are you hungry?” her neighbor asked kindly.

“Yeah.”

They sat down to drink tea. Maksim, who’d been hoping all day to get through what had happened without brandy, finally admitted to himself that he wouldn’t. He opened the bar, found the bottle he wanted by touch alone, and wrapped his fingers around its coolness. He poured himself a finger’s worth, sighed, and added a little more.

Marina watched him closely, asking nothing. Maksim took a sip, burned his mouth, and squeezed his eyes shut. It flowed down inside him, and one by one the clamps clicked open—in his throat, his esophagus, his solar plexus. He smiled and exhaled. He stopped giving a damn whether those activists came back or not. Somehow it would sort itself out. He’d done everything right, after all: he’d followed his conscience. And, come to think of it, the law too.

“Did Kiryuha say what time he’s coming home?”

“You know he doesn’t report to me. Besides, it’s summer… There’s always something open every day, all those parties…”

“Summer,” Maksim agreed.

“Let him have some fun.”

Marina said it so plaintively that Maksim surfaced from his own adventures of the day, which he’d been replaying and reworking in his head on repeat, and turned his attention to his wife. She’d been quiet through almost the whole dinner, leaving him to his thoughts; only now did he notice that she seemed a little glum. Tense, maybe?

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, ‘let him have some fun,’ Marina?”

“Huh? No… I just mean the same as for all of us—let him have some fun while he can.”

“You sure everything’s all right?”

“Yes.”

Maksim nodded. But there was something else left unsaid; he felt it now. It had been hanging there all evening, waiting.

“Any other news?”

“Well, I was just about to tell you… I only just found out. Would you mind if Ulyana stayed with us for a couple of days?”

“Ulyana?”

“My cousin’s daughter. Ira’s. Are you ever going to remember them?”

“The ones from Vologda, or what?”

“The ones from Vologda. The Tsarevs.”

“Sure, she can stay, of course. What’s the problem?” Maksim agreed. “When?”

“Tomorrow, actually. In the morning.”

“Whoa. Tomorrow already?”

“I only just found out myself. Something came up…” Marina hesitated.

“What came up?”

He furrowed his brow, thinking that he couldn’t for the life of him remember what Ira Tsareva looked like.

“She has a boyfriend… A fiancé. How do I put it… He was drafted. Sent to the war. To the front. And now he’s been wounded. He’s at the Vishnevsky hospital, in surgery. She’s going to see him.”

Marina fell silent and looked at her husband, searching his face.

Maksim began to understand why dinner had been so quiet: Marina had been thinking about how to bring this up.

“Wounded in the war?” he repeated stupidly. “You mean, actually over there?”

He nodded toward the dead television.

“Yes.”

Maksim shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. Nausea rose in him: the war had somehow crawled out of the switched-off television and seeped into their kitchen. The war he hated so much and feared so much. Because Marina had framed the conversation that way. And now it would be strange to go back on what he’d said. Maksim fell silent.

“She came to stay with us once, remember? Ulyasha. When she was a little girl.”

“Marina, you know how I…”

Maksim avoided anyone who supported the war as if they had the plague. At first, he’d argued fiercely with people like that, but then he’d realized there was no point trying to change their minds; and eventually he’d become afraid even to argue. Or maybe the second thing had been the cause, and the first the consequence. But this… What did Ulyasha have to do with it?

“And I feel the same way, of course. What are we even talking about… But what’s it got to do with her? She’s just a girl,” Marina said aloud.

Just a girl. Well, she’d fallen in love with a guy, and he’d been taken off to war. Taken, almost killed, lying wounded in Moscow, Maksim repeated silently to himself. Who was there to judge? Not her, certainly. Maybe feel sorry for her. The war rolls over people, and their delicate bones crack. He had to make himself do it now—overcome his fear of the war, his disgust with it, and the stupid, superstitious fear that he’d invite the war into his own home by inviting her, like a vampire.

“Just as family, Maksik? All right?”

“Yes. All right, yes. Of course.”

If it mattered to Marina… His niece. Well, all right, what could he do? All right… All right! She’d stay, then leave. She’d stay, then leave.