But Filya had let go of all these diplomatic options, and so now, with a heavy heart, he gazed at the trembling left, which, according to Vitalik, was just plain slaughter.

  “Wait.” Filya was trying to gain a little time. “Come on, let’s talk like human beings. You can talk like a human being, right?”

  “Yes.” Vitalik exhaled, his extremity, which had already acquired a rather formidable fist, not ceasing to tremble, though.

  “Well, you see . . . ultimately we’re all human beings. We like chocolate, ice cream, and dogs. We’re moved at the sight of the sunset or when we hear a child’s laughter, and all these other marvelous little things. Those are what make us human beings. I mean, ultimately normal, understanding, and even pleasant human beings. But . . . what if I don’t want to be a human being? Don’t want to like all these lovable things? What if I want to be a monster? What’s wrong with that? There are so many monsters among us, and at the same time we’re a great country. Are you going to argue that we’re not great? You could say the same thing about America, and Europe, too. Even tiny Norway has its monsters.”

  Filya fell silent, staring at Vitalik and waiting for his reaction. Vitalik didn’t answer right away, but his fist lost its confident outline.

  “What are you talking about, anyway?” he said.

  “I’ll explain in just a second,” Filya said, hastening to build on his success. “You see, for a long time I was sure I didn’t fear my own death. I mean, even now I’m sure, but sometimes, you know, you find something that makes you uneasy. After all, even General Krakhotkin backed out. So much for being a freethinker and an atheist. He pulled his stepdaughter’s hair three times before he died. Believe me, that was out of fear, not just malice. I’m not even an atheist. True, I’m not entirely sure what I am, but I don’t think it’s an atheist. For example, I believe in you. And not only you but all of you, in general.” Filya gestured toward the firelit figures clustering in front of the truck radiator.

  “In who? Us?” Once again, Vitalik started snuffling ominously, but Filya was going great guns and wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

  “In devils,” he said firmly and even rather merrily. “You thought I wouldn’t guess?”

  Vitalik snickered, then pulled off his cap, scratched his head, and took a deep breath. “Damn it, what am I going to do with you? I have to get back to work. I don’t know about leaving you here alone like this. You might do something odd.”

  “Can you put in a little word for me?”

  “What little word?”

  “Well, that there’s this little man here, and he agrees.”

  “Agrees to what?”

  “Everything,” Filya said. “Playing for the other side. Any collaboration whatsoever. I’m ready right now. You realize I’m totally wasted. I don’t understand a thing. You live and think there’s some meaning to all this—it’s even fun at first—but then everything gradually starts getting murky. This original sin, this senselessness, and in the end, death.”

  “Yeah, buddy, you really got put through the wringer. You didn’t take any pills before the vodka, did you? Were they giving you anything at the hospital?”

  “No, I’m serious. Talk it over with whoever fixes things there. I’d switch over. Happy to. I could even be of use. See, I understand there’s an evil principle inside a man. Not only don’t you have to tempt him, he’ll commit evil gladly. And this has nothing at all to do with silly Eve taking the apple from the serpent but with the fact that man feels like it—evil, I mean. The more, the merrier. Because basically all the rest is meaningless. Money doesn’t make you happy, success is bait for one-celled animals, and love is impossible, because each person tries to get the upper hand to be sure of being the one people like more. Life is meaningless. All motivations are just candy wrappers, the wrapping paper from cheap irises, and they sell us this bill of goods as if we were Papuans to get us to dance at their ritual bonfires. You know, I feel like I’ve been gulled, taken for quite a ride with this topic. As to life . . . as to living—it’s great. It seems to me that thinking about death doesn’t have to mean being gloomy. It has much more to do with trying to avoid deceit, which I’ve had more than my fair share of. I just don’t have the strength to stand it. Life should be . . . not beautiful.” Filya sobbed, gasping from the vague melancholy that had descended on him. “Say the word. I’m begging you.”

  How exactly Filya imagined this “switch,” in what form, and who Vitalik should “say the word” to—all that, whether from the vodka or agitation, was a little foggy in his mind, but the main thing Filya felt at that moment was that he was utterly sincere. For the first time in a long time, he had spoken directly, seriously, and frankly about what had long lain like a monumental weight on his heart.

  “Will you help?” he said.

  He looked hopefully at a stunned Vitalik, who, obviously not knowing how to react and not understanding half of what he’d been told, was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and making quiet poom-poom noises with his lips. That went on for thirty seconds probably, until a racket started up outside. Somewhat calmer, Filya turned toward the side window to see two more devils dragging a big dark animal by a rope toward the fire. The animal was resisting, and from time to time the devils kicked him meanly, and then he yelped piercingly, his resistance weakening as he skidded against his will closer and closer to the fire.

  “What’s that?” Filya said.

  Vitalik leaned across him, looked closely into the blaze-torn darkness, and burst out laughing.

  “Ah! That’s the guys. They caught a mutt. It’s been running around here all day. They sat down by the fire for dinner, and it dragged off our chicken. I told them they should have eaten in the truck, but they said they didn’t all fit. They’re mad now. It’s going to go badly for the dog.”

  Filya groped at the ancient door handle, which was covered with a piece of quilt, turned it with a creak, and fell onto the snow.

  “Where are you going?” Vitalik shouted after him.

  But there was no stopping Filya now. Scrambling to his feet and chasing down the devils dragging the dog, he leapt from behind onto the one holding the rope, grabbed on to his coat, and toppled with him into the slush melting from the flames. The second devil froze for a second, but in the next, rushed to his comrade’s aid. Filya felt a firm kick to the shoulder, but the quilted jacket Vitalik had given him softened the blow. Reaching for the hand holding the rope, he ripped it away and the devil let the dog go. Filya rose up a little, and his whole body shuddered from the second kick, this time to his gut, as he tugged on the rope.

  “Run!” he exhaled along with the cloud of steam and the smoke that was already stinging his eyes.

  The mutt evidently recognized Filya. Instantly evaluating the change in situation, it rushed toward the devil getting ready to kick a third time and knocked him off his feet by leaping onto his chest.

  “Stop,” Vitalik yelled, running up from behind.

  The mutt started breathing harshly and heavily and, before Filya could straighten up, dragged him into the darkness.

  “Run,” Filya repeated sweetly, and not letting go of the rope, sailed after the dog, away from the heating mains flaming in the night.

  Running through a frozen city, with the temperature a good forty below, where they have suddenly and for no known reason turned off the heat and electricity for a certain period, is best done in the company of a large dog, in which case you don’t feel like an aimless grain of sand in the ocean. You’re not a nonentity, a banality, a cliché in a boring conversation. On the contrary, you’re cheerful and aware. You’re proudly hurtling toward where destiny calls, and even if you’re as tiny as a grain of sand, you’re still free to dream. Those of you who don’t find these kinds of comparisons grating might compare yourself to a spermatozoon. You’re the manifestation of pure will. You’re not just running; you’re soaring above the city, like the bride in the Chagall painting, and your intended, who has taken on the guise of a big old mutt, keeps pulling you on, there, below, pawing the ground diligently. Soon you should be flying over your old school, the street that leads to the river, the monument in the shape of a T-34 tank, where in the summer everyone went to pee—you’re flying toward where the most important thing happened, prepared to plunge into sweet memories—when you distinguish someone’s steps behind you. You pick up speed and slip over the city a little bit faster, but the steps are obviously not lagging behind. Whoever’s pursuing you isn’t running anymore but truly racing, and you sadly guess your wonderful flight is about to be cut short. You don’t feel like being beaten up by angry devils thwarted in their dreams of boxing, and you start going all out, so fast that your mutt can’t keep up with you, gradually giving up, breathing heavily, becoming a burden. Nonetheless, you don’t let go of the rope. You’ll never abandon a friend again. You’d rather die, so you slow your pace, turn around, and proudly await your inevitable fate.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Vitalik the devil, who has finally run you down, says wheezily, transforming before your eyes into your very own Demon of the Void. “Who lit a fire under you? Who do you think I am? Usain Bolt or something?”

  Recognizing his tedious alter ego, Filya for the first time was happy to see him. Filya’s beating had been put off, and as a result of all his recent transactions he was the proud owner of a warm cap and a thick quilted jacket, which, apparently, no one was planning to take away.

  Filya, still gasping, could barely talk. “You couldn’t shout?”

  “You try to shout that far.”

  The demon bent forward and stood there, like a runner after the finish line, one hand resting on his knee, the other pressed up against his right side, as if something were jabbing him there. He was breathing even harder than Filya.

  “You think it’s easy running after you in all this?”

  The demon was wearing his enormous sheepskin coat, a silver fox cap with earflaps, and white felt army boots.

  “Where’d you get the threads?” Filya asked, catching his breath.

  “You have to know where to look.”

  “Give me your boots?”

  “You ran off.”

  “I could freeze my feet off. My soles are already splitting.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Punk.”

  “I’m no punk. I’m a demon. And you’re a moron. Get out of my way. You could get run over.”

  Past them in the murky gloom, shining their fog lights, crawled innumerable Uaziks, Land Cruisers, and Nivas. Filya hadn’t noticed them before, just as he hadn’t noticed that he was running along the shoulder of the road rather than on the sidewalk.

  “Where are they all going?”

  “Out of town.” The demon finally straightened up. “They have dachas. Stoves and stacks of firewood. They’re thinking they’ll sit this out.”

  Filya opened his mouth wide to get rid of the icy crust pinching the lower half of his face. He tried to get his finger under it but realized it was useless.

  “Did Peter go, too?”

  “Who’s Peter?”

  “My friend. I’m on my way to see him.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe so. What would keep him in the city? The apartment radiators are going to start bursting soon. Does he have a wife and kids?”

  Without answering, Filya climbed the snowdrift separating the thoroughfare from the pedestrian walkway. Sinking up to his knees in the deep snow, he still pulled the mutt, which readily leapt in and got stuck, too. The snow, which had gotten under Filya’s trousers, didn’t bother him one bit. His feet were already so numb he didn’t feel anything. After floundering in the snowdrift for a couple of seconds, he climbed out onto the sidewalk, tugged on the mutt’s rope, and stubbornly continued onward.

  “Hey, wait up!” the demon exclaimed. “What if he’s not home? Maybe it would be better if we went back.”

  Filya didn’t stop.

  “Damn!” the demon said. “I’m coming with you!”

  He sailed over the snowdrift with demonic ease, caught up to Filya, fell into step with him, and was silent for a few minutes. They were walking hurriedly down the drift-heaped dark street, past a row of dead streetlamps. Time and again, the cars crawling past them on the right would catch the frozen streetlamps in their headlights and also the rare, bedraggled bushes so crushed by the frost that not everyone would guess that these poor things were bushes. The buildings looming up to the left of the road were more guessed-at in the opaque fog; only flickering matte spots at various heights spoke to the fact that these were apartment buildings and there were still people inside them.

  “Listen, you were so cool with them,” the demon, who was bored in the cold and silence, said, striking up a conversation at last.

  “With who?” Filya pushed out, convulsively clutching the earflaps of the donated cap at his throat.

  He found talking difficult. His lips no longer obeyed him, due to the thick icing of his beard, his mouth barely opened, and the words themselves—due to the chilled air’s special resilience—took so much effort to push out it was like trying to speak with his face pressed up against a big piece of jellied meat. The Demon of the Void couldn’t have cared less about these obstacles, though. He thirsted for company.

  “Who?” the demon said. “The repairmen, that’s who. The ones you took the dog from. As for switching sides, you gave them a pretty nasty shove. By the way, what side did you have in mind? In which direction?”

  Filya didn’t answer, furiously stamping his stiffened soles on the sidewalk.

  “Are you interested for real? Or just asking for fun? Because if you’re for real, you’re asking the wrong people. I could make inquiries. I have some connections. But you have to decide concretely, not on impulse. You had that impulse, after all, didn’t you? Yeah? A change of heart?”

  Filya didn’t say anything.

  “I wonder why that is.” The demon wouldn’t let it go. “Your life seems to have worked out. Enough money, easy work, traipsing abroad back and forth. How do you put it? ‘It would be wrong to complain’? That’s it exactly. Wrong. You, you beast, have lost all shame.”

  “Get lost,” Filya growled.

  “Me get lost? Are you sure I’m dragging around after you because I want to? Maybe you’re the one giving me no peace. You’re the one who’s been searching for me everywhere. You’re afraid to take a step without me. You sense the void in you, and you dream of filling it. That’s why you invented me.”

  “I didn’t invent you,” Filya rasped.

  “Yeah, sure you didn’t.” The demon laughed jeeringly. “That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re bullshit, you jerk, and those guys by the heating main were right to say you’re crazy. Time to stick you in the psycho ward if you didn’t invent me. You’re dangerous to those around you, especially dogs. See? You’re doing in the second one right now. Look, it’s done for.”

  Filya turned around and saw that the mutt he’d been dragging along by the rope could barely move its paws. Filya hadn’t noticed, overcome by the mission of reaching his goal. He had kept striding forward stubbornly, practically dragging it behind him.

  “You’re going to strangle a dog again,” the demon said. “Murderer.”

  Filya went over to the mutt, which immediately lay down on the icy sidewalk. He leaned over it and tugged its paw. The mutt raised its head, grinned, and, exhaling a cloud of steam, licked his hand.

  “Let’s go,” Filya muttered. “You’ll freeze.”

  The dog tried to get up, but its legs wouldn’t hold it.

  “Two–zero in your favor.” The demon grinned behind him. “Basically, you should move on to larger animals. Given your record, dogs are on the small side. Time to be wiping out horses. That seems more respectable. Then you can move on to elephants.”

  Not answering him, Filya bent even lower, picked up the heavily breathing mutt, and lifted him off the sidewalk.

  “Oh,” the demon drawled. “Concern for one’s neighbor. What a wonderful, what a marvelous deed. Are you aware that Mother Teresa’s being accused of dubious political ties and money laundering? Lay off maybe? What’s the point in starting? No one’s going to thank you anyway.”

  Filya grabbed on to the dog even harder so it wouldn’t slip out of his stiff, recalcitrant arms, took one step, then another, and realized he couldn’t carry the mutt for long. His hands, now out of his pockets, were burning up. He hadn’t felt his feet in about ten minutes. Moving them was getting harder and harder. His knees were refusing to bend, so he walked as if he were on stilts. The mutt in his arms noticeably complicated this pathetic semblance of walking.

  “Ditch it,” the demon said, trying to persuade him. “It’s not your dog. That one gave it up for real more than a year ago. I guarantee you.”

  Filippov had the quickly mounting feeling that he was walking steeply uphill rather than across an even horizontal surface, and with every step the ascent got harder and harder. The dog, probably no more than thirty-five kilos, was weighing down his numb arms more and more, as if pig iron were being injected into it by the second and soon it would weigh nearly a ton. Filya started being thrown from side to side, and several times the Demon of the Void had to prop him up so he and his burden wouldn’t collapse into the snowdrift along the shoulder.

  Not quite aware of where he was or how far he had to go, Filya was desperately attempting to make out in the fog, which was pierced by the headlights, at least some signs of familiar places. But not only was the city using its usual winter camouflage against him, it had also changed maliciously and cardinally in the years Filippov had tried to forget it. Where his instincts told him there should be a couple of wooden two-story buildings, where the drama theater dorm used to be, a boundless wasteland now gaped, and the site of the kindergarten built in Stalin’s day had been taken over by a multistory apartment building lit by anxious lights. There were also new intersections that this street simply couldn’t have had before. Running parallel, right at the city limits, there was a branch of the river a couple of kilometers long—even Filya couldn’t have been mistaken about that—so the descents now leading in that direction made no sense. They should have run into a fairly broad channel, but they did not, and this confused him badly.