“Very bad wine,” he told Rita and Tyoma when he followed them into the pitch-dark entryway. “Real rotgut. Like ‘Vera Mikhailovna’ in her distant childhood.”

  “What Vera Mikhailovna?” Rita asked, shining her cell-phone display on Filippov’s deadly white face.

  “What was popularly known as vermouth. Except it wasn’t.”

  “Let’s get going.” Tyoma pulled him by the sleeve. “My battery’s running low. Anyway, it’s probably warmer in the apartment.”

  It was really cold in the entryway. Not like outside, certainly, but the steam was pouring from Filya’s mouth. He inhaled noisily, sniffed, rubbed his newly strange face with his stiff hands, glanced at Rita walking behind him and lighting the way for him with her phone, made a joke of tapping his frozen-hard sneakers like hooves, and from time to time bumped into enormous crates, which were crowding the entryway. At the same time, his directing reflexes automatically coerced his brain. Imagining—against his will—this pathetic procession as an onlooker, he saw either an anthill in cross-section in whose cramped passage three insects were now crawling with their little lamps, or a twisting dead-end burrow where rabbits were rustling, or the obstruction of a bottomless mine shaft where miners bereft of all hope were trying to break through to the exit, and these images made him feel more and more dreary, desperate, and angry.

  “Are you telling me people still store their potatoes like this?” he muttered through his teeth after ramming into an ammo case with a hell of a giant lock and now intentionally kicking it.

  “Of course,” Rita replied, passing in front of him. “Where are they supposed to store them?”

  “Right,” Filya growled. “Don’t go to the store. Listen, is this going to take much longer? Or are you waiting for me to break my leg?”

  “Two more floors,” Tyoma replied as he kept going up.

  Rita followed him, but Filippov didn’t budge. Waiting for the phones’ pale glow to stop trembling past the railing of the next flight of stairs, he dropped to the floor and fell quiet between two potato crates. The smell of rotted damp earth calmed him. His fear retreated, and Filya pressed his cheek luxuriously to the rough side of the left-hand crate. The boards were unplaned, and he had this crazy urge to rub his face against them and grate his dark, incomprehensible fear to mush. I’m not going anywhere, he thought sweetly, then immediately hissed in pain. In addition to the abrasions, he clearly felt two or three splinters stuck in his cheek.

  Above, Rita’s felt soles slapped softly and quickly. Filya leapt to his feet and stood close to the crate, making indecent doggy movements.

  “What are you doing?” Rita asked in amazement when she aimed her phone at him.

  “Dominating.” He turned toward her. “I’m the dominant male. These freaks have to know their place.”

  “What freaks?” The astonishment in her voice had reached its upper limit.

  “The crates. If you knew what they’ve done to me. I’ve hated them since I was a kid.”

  “Cool, cool.” Tyoma started to laugh, leaning over the railing above and shining his phone on Filippov, too. “Rehearsing a new show?”

  “No. I’m searching for the meaning of life.”

  “Let’s go. There’s got to be more of it up top.”

  Ten seconds later they stopped by a flickering, leatherette-covered door, and Tyoma rang the bell.

  “Shine a light on the lock,” Rita said.

  Putting away her phone, she jangled her keys, and for a few seconds in the stairwell there was almost total silence, which Filya alone broke. Whether it was because he felt like he was suffocating, or out of fear, Filippov was taking in cold air and exhaling it intently, with great noise and effort, the way you do at a doctor’s appointment when the icy stethoscope is pressed to your chest and you’re asked to take a deep breath. Filya was wheezing like an excited French bulldog. Rita was fiddling with the door and getting more and more irritated. Tyoma held his phone over her shoulder until the display went out and their whole silent threesome was plunged into the total darkness of the grave.

  “Damn it,” Tyoma said softly.

  “What’s going on?” Rita burst out, banging on the door with her hand. “Mom! Open the door, Mama!”

  In the darkness, something clanged, there was a gust of long-awaited warmth, and in the opening before them yet another human figure appeared. Like Rita and Tyoma before this, the figure was holding a flickering phone instead of a flashlight.

  “What took you so long?” Rita said, walking past the figure into the apartment. “I must have been fiddling with that lock for half an hour.”

  “How am I supposed to know who’s doing the fiddling?” the figure said. “You were all so quiet.”

  She shone her phone on Filippov and Tyoma, still not suggesting that they come in.

  “The lights went out about forty minutes ago,” she said. “I’m afraid alone.”

  “The power’s out all over town,” Rita said, somewhere way back in the apartment. “Do you plan on standing there long?”

  Rita’s beauty could get Filya pretty worked up. If in the hotel—with full light still, but in interiors of somnolence—he’d thought he’d been abducted by some totally unearthly beauty, then here, he had enough trembling light from a pair of candles to scope out how matters in fact stood. Rita’s beauty was more assumed than it existed physically. It shone from her; it was intended but didn’t declare itself directly. It seemed her beauty didn’t want to foist itself on anyone, as happens with proud but shy people who can’t make up their mind or who find it beneath themselves to take part in the general merriment but also don’t leave altogether, staying close by, haughty and reserved, as if telling everyone around them, “I’m here, and I’m someone to be reckoned with.”

  No, it wasn’t about her outward appearance. In photographs where the authentic inner person is absent and only its shell is registered, or, even worse, the photographer’s fantasy, she probably looked quite ordinary. Just a face, just a smile, her hair like hundreds and hundreds of others have. But when all this was set in motion, in steady, vital pulsation, in change, in constant development, in sliding, in the continuous, unbroken tango she led her life in, her features filled with the vivid meaning of the being who lived inside her and had simply not reconciled itself to this just a face, just a smile, and hair like hundreds and hundreds of others have.

  Apparently in the hotel, Filya had instantly and unerringly caught the breadth of precisely this inner being and not the sum of her ordinary nose, ordinary eyebrows, in no way remarkable mouth, and heavyish chin.

  You can’t fool us, he thought proudly, delighting in his unfailing professional instinct. We see everything.

  Actually, he couldn’t rule out the idea that he simply had to explain to himself why he’d agreed to leave the hotel at the first summons of a young woman of such ordinary appearance. No matter what, his self-image must never suffer.

  Something as nontrivial as his near stupor, however, didn’t threaten this self-image in the least. Filya couldn’t care less that upon entering a stranger’s apartment he once again nearly passed out. If it hadn’t been for Tyoma’s quick reaction, he would have gladly stretched out in the big, cold entry and let strangers worry about his carefree drunk body.

  Tyoma, who was standing on the apartment threshold behind him, grabbed Filya by the shoulders, put his arms around him the way a parachute instructor does with a first-time jumper, and dragged him through the endless entry into Hades. In the kitchen, they put Filippov on the small sofa in the corner, like linen ready for the laundry—with care, but a little distractedly—and went on with their lives, which Filya began to observe with interest, trying not to give away his viable status. Actually, deep down, he guessed he wouldn’t be able to give it away even if he wanted.

  In the kitchen, unlike the entry and, evidently, all the other rooms, it was warm. All four burners on the gas stove shone with a pale fire. The humming oven was open, and heat streamed out of it and through the kitchen in magical waves. From time to time, Tyoma would move close to a burner, lean over it, and warm his hands next to the oven, as if he hadn’t come here in a warm and comfortable SUV but in that solidly frozen bus that the desperate crowd had taken by storm at the stop. Obviously, something else was eating him up. Rita was repeatedly touching the cooled and inexplicably ringing and clicking radiator, checking to see whether it was giving off heat, as if it might have started during those thirty seconds when she wasn’t touching it.

  Besides the gas in the kitchen, there were also a couple of candles burning, which allowed an attentive but at that moment not very lively Filippov to delve further into the secret of Rita’s beauty. That was truly what he had on his mind, this beauty. It’s what Rita herself, Tyoma, their friends probably, and in general, any observer who held his gaze on this young woman would have had in mind, except, by all accounts, her mother.

  “Beauty, Filya, is like a nuclear weapon,” Inga, with her amazing resemblance to the French film star, had once told him. “The whole time you’ve got this urge to drink, right? Hard to believe, but the temptation is probably just like what those guys have with an atom bomb. There’s this crazy urge to throw it at somebody. All the time.”

  Filippov had recognized her the moment they carried him into the kitchen. Recognized her but decided to act as if he didn’t for now. He became a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon.

  Inga had changed, naturally. Even a turtleneck sweater and a thick top with a flirty hood inappropriate for her age couldn’t hide what there had been no trace of before. Where twenty or so years ago a pair of listless nipples had swayed sadly, a real unreal chest now rose up. All the rest had been subjected to time’s natural editing. Actually, plastic surgery had made its corrections in areas other than her bust. The captivating features of Isabelle Adjani still peeked through the Botoxing and face-lifts, reminding him of the eternally beautiful and what never was. But ultimately, after all these years, there was only a glimpse of those features now in Isabelle herself.

  As Filya recalled the last film of hers he’d seen, he came to the conclusion that Inga had been lucky. In the role of a stupefied teacher, Isabelle had mostly reminded him of the fluffy owl from the Russian cartoon about Winnie-the-Pooh, whereas Inga could still very simply pass for an attractive Piglet—a little older and with a big chest, but nonetheless the same Piglet who’d hit Winnie precisely in his fluffy backside instead of the balloon. For what purpose this cartoon piglet had lured Filya into her kitchen was unclear. But it soon became clear that Inga had taken no part in his abduction.

  “Mama, I’ll tell him everything myself,” he heard Rita’s voice say. “Why drag this out? Let him answer for his actions.”

  “Rita, I’ve told you a hundred times already, he’s not your father. Why did you drag him here at all?”

  Now I’m in for it, Filippov thought. A daughter out of thin air.

  “What makes you think he’s not my father?” The girl’s voice kept ringing.

  “Rita, have you lost your marbles? Tyoma, take him back to the hotel.”

  “Inga Vladimirovna,” he said, “you can’t even imagine what’s going on outside. It’s bedlam.”

  “So? Because of some panic, this lush is supposed to lounge around my kitchen?”

  I’m not lounging. I’m lying here politely and neatly, Filippov thought, not in the least offended by “lush.”

  Inga walked over to him and sniffed disdainfully, as if his sins would give off a physical stink.

  “I read on the Internet that last year he tried to marry a dog in Las Vegas. He even dragged it to a priest.”

  Filya summoned all his strength to keep from melting into a happy smile.

  “For PR, probably,” Tyoma said. “Maybe that was when he put on the show about the dog. Chestnut or something. Anyway, it’s an awesome idea.”

  “Why PR necessarily?” Rita interjected, also walking over to Filippov and leaning over him. “A person can just love animals a lot.”

  “Yeah?” Inga said. “And marry them?”

  Easily, Filya thought.

  Back then, in Vegas, he’d wanted to fix his karma. About six weeks before that, he’d accidentally strangled a dog during one of his shows, and after that everything had gone down the tubes. A promising project fell apart, an utterly reliable investor skipped out on him, rehearsals stopped gelling, and, most of all, out of nowhere, his member started bending. During an erection, this caused him genuine pain, and Filya started avoiding his muse of the day. The young woman decided they were getting rid of her, and in revenge she slept with his erstwhile and, naturally, triumphant investor, making a video of their sex and putting a clip on the Internet. That was when Filippov rushed to Vegas, to clear his head, if he could, and patch up his downtrodden status as predator. To make things worse, it started hurting down there not only during an erection.

  The accidentally hanged mutt, who died because Filippov had made a mistake and given the order to raise a lowered grating with the animal tied to it, he would scarcely have remembered if not for the Indian fakir sitting on the sidewalk at the casino entrance. Bewitched by his fantastic turban, Filya squatted in front of him, complained about his life, and then offered him some bourbon from a paper bag. After that, they crawled from one hotel bar to another until morning, winding up somewhere on the outskirts of town among faceless little houses that looked like shoe boxes.

  Closer to the desert, overhung by a sun as hungover as they were, it turned out that the fakir was not so much from India as he was Moldova, but at the same time was still quite adept at tweaking out karmic subtleties. Switching to Russian altogether, he explained that somewhere Filya’d done some badass shit and he had to perform a rite of cleansing immediately. Filippov tensed and remembered the show about the Marquis de Sade and the mutt that had died because of what he’d done. In the capacity of a humorous and, in one critic’s opinion, witty counterpoint, the unfortunate mutt had portrayed a Hachiko waiting patiently for his master, “personifying an array of banal and predictable qualities the mere mention of which in our review would be a clumsy attempt to create an unforgivably crass trend.”

  The dog had been tied to an ornate grating so it wouldn’t run away during the show, and it sat for two hours straight in the middle of the stage, yawning loudly from time to time at the actresses’ bared bodies, which endlessly amused the big-city audience, tempted and slightly bored by sadism’s cunning ways. When the grating went up and the dog, yelping, started to strangle, the viewers livened up and Filya, sensing success, wouldn’t allow the assistant director to lower the mechanism until the very end, so the mutt hung four meters up for nearly half an hour. Had this been a poodle or a relatively small terrier, all would have ended well for the dog, too, but it was as big as a large German shepherd, and under that weight the noose around its neck pulled quite tight. For the first ten minutes the dog was still twisting, desperately beating the stale air above the stage with its paws, and in this time Filippov managed to drive out from behind the scenes two assistants who were in tears and begging him to spare the dog. But then the dog quieted down, and in the now tensely attentive hall there reigned a solemn—later Filya would call it “Wagnerian”—silence broken only by the stormy ovation. After the show, journalists said that the mutt was all right, that it had been taught that trick especially, but it was a one-off, a performance never to be repeated.

  Restoring the karmic chain of events in the process of his purifying binge in Vegas, Filya decided not to put off the problem of his spoiled karma for later. There, on the outskirts of town, he picked up a pretty mangy stray, dragged it to a wedding chapel where you could register a marriage even sitting in your car at a special drive-through window, like at a McDonald’s, and told the priest he wanted to marry the dog. According to the intention he’d shared with the Moldovan fakir, this should have concluded the dog theme in his life by restoring the ruptured balance and calming the karmic turbulence. Invited as the sole guest to the wedding ceremony was his journalist friend, who’d woken up by then and who Filya, who hated to travel alone, had paid, out of friendship, for his ticket from Moscow and his stay in a five-star hotel. As a sign of gratitude, the journalist was prepared to be sincerely enthusiastic about his escapades and to post to his Twitter feed about their adventures together in golden Las Vegas. Ultimately, the priest turned out to be hardheaded and heartless, but the tweets and photos of Filippov hugging the balding mutt in front of the chapel made their way onto the Internet, and the fakir reassured Filya, saying that even intentions were enough for karma, just so they came from a pure heart.

  Recalling this story now, Filippov unconsciously touched his member and sighed, much relieved. This fellow had been quite all right for more than a year. Without taking his hand out of his coat pocket, he gave it another little harder poke with his finger, just to be sure—and it was as if his old sensations of pain had never been. Filya tried to perform his pocket manipulations in such a way that no one would notice his rousing state, but judging from his abductors’ tense voices, he was the farthest thing from their minds. At that moment the stub of one candle snuffed out, and on the ceiling, directly above Filya, like in the first scene of Macbeth, three gigantic, monstrous shadows swayed. Filya’s old love, who had surfaced from the past, her unattractive attractive daughter, and the completely irrelevant boy Tyoma clustered oddly around their last remaining candle, forgetting about their sloshed trophy from the big city.