“Why?”

  “Well, you see . . . he’s creeping so tenaciously. Like a tank. He’s looking at me and going anyway. He knows I’m going to whack him, and he doesn’t stop. And right then I think, ‘Damn it, that’s me.’ He’s like me, see?”

  “No.”

  “Fine then, whack away. Take another half a thou for me. I don’t need food anymore.”

  Filippov and Petka’s friendship didn’t last long. Once, seriously drunk, Filippov dropped Petka’s box in a half-empty Metro car, and when two slick Chechens started beating him he claimed three times that the animal wasn’t his, thus disowning his friend and at the same time making it clear to himself that he was a coward.

  “Where are we going?” the taxi driver inquired in a friendly way, interrupting those hazy reminiscences.

  Filippov opened his eyes but didn’t turn his head.

  “Where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Why so crude?”

  “If you’re going to talk, I’ll take a different taxi.”

  On the plane he flopped down and passed out, basically at will. Sitting at the bar before boarding, Filippov had pictured how truly wonderful it would be if his hungover carcass got its own self to its destination, while he, meanwhile, kept sitting here at this bar, disembodied, staring at this glass of whiskey.

  He listened to a sad Tom Waits song and imagined himself the hero, underground, trying to convince his beloved to lie down on his grave and press her cheek to the spot where his heart used to be. Actually, Filippov was even sadder than the Tom Waits character, but without the heart. By way of compensation, Tom huskily promised the sky that even if it crashed to the earth, the birds would fall with it and they could all be caught.

  Pointless, Filippov thought in unison with the plaintive blues. They’d run away anyway. They’ve got strong legs.

  He tried to reach his cold, rigid arms up from beneath the ground to Tom Waits’s luscious beloved, but she was paying him no attention whatsoever. Being a wise and discerning necrophiliac, of the two corpses she preferred the raspy, romantic Tom.

  However, Filippov’s desire that his hungover body travel separately from him was fulfilled. After two hours of flight, his body got up from its seat and went to the lavatory, where it fainted and collapsed, lay there for about fifteen minutes without an owner, drooling out of the left corner of its mouth, and then stirred, grabbed on to the edge of the sink, struggled to its feet, and turned on the water.

  Outside, some impatient someone instantly picked up on his languid signs of life.

  “Are you going to be much longer? There’s a line here, by the way!”

  Back in his seat, Filippov sipped the grappa he’d providentially purchased at the airport and looked around as if confused about where he was. He even rose slightly, surveying the cabin.

  “Listen, where are we going?” he addressed his neighbor, who was wearing a pink tracksuit.

  She looked like a forty-year-old Britney Spears who’d gone to bookkeeping school, put on a chunk of weight, and never been in show business. In any case, the skin on her face said more about the sudden coming of spring—when the sun’s rays make the snow spongy and shiny—than about any painstaking care taken by makeup wizards. Her short and flirty “virgin’s haircut,” as Filippov privately defined it, consisted of hair that wasn’t the thickest in the world and was bleached to a liver yellow.

  Flattered by his attention, the surrogate pop princess took one earbud out and smiled.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I’m asking where we’re going.”

  The surrogate in pink looked slightly helpless. This was definitely not the question she’d been expecting to hear after two and a half hours of flight. She might well have been counting on something like “Do you like skiing?” or some other nonsense men usually use to start up a conversation.

  “Where are we going?” Filippov looked her in the face very seriously, apparently expecting an answer.

  The fortysomething princess’s pink brain sensed a trick and tensed. The traces of this tension became marked around her eyebrows. She was thinking.

  “What do you mean by ‘where’? To the North . . . To your hometown.”

  Now it was Filippov’s turn to tense.

  “My hometown? How do you know where I was born?”

  “You told me.”

  Filippov’s brow furrowed, too. He cleared his throat, wiped his forehead, and then gave his neighbor a suspicious stare.

  “When?”

  “At the airport. Before takeoff.”

  She took the earbud out of her other ear and fingered her phone, turning off the music.

  “You mean we know each other?” Filippov asked mistrustfully.

  “Well, yeah. I’m Zinaida, but you can call me Zina. You mean you don’t remember?”

  She looked at him in astonishment, trying to figure out whether he was joking or serious.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything at all. I just fainted in the lavatory. And I think I hit my head in there. I don’t even remember who I am.”

  Princess Zina stopped breathing. Her pink, peroxide life may have known dramatic events, but Filippov’s case was obviously the most awesome ever.

  “What do you mean you don’t remember?” she said at last. “Not at all?”

  “Not at all.” Filippov shrugged. “Who am I?”

  By this time the flight attendants had reached their row with the shabby, cumbersome cart, and the old woman actively dozing by the window started to show signs of life. She’d been dozing actively and even for show, because at the very beginning of the flight, when the plane was just taxiing, she’d forced Filippov to switch and take her seat on the aisle. Her anxious old-womanish conscience made her feel she had to play out the part she’d declared in the prologue, which consisted of her being very sick, so she even moaned, and the sole remedy for her doubtless incurable illness would be a window seat. She’d managed to crawl over the already seated pink Zinaida, then quickly took off her shoes and rolled her eyes like a martyr so she wouldn’t see this whole unjust and cruel world that was afflicting her. Actually, whenever the attendants started handing out anything, she came back to life through an incredible effort of will and detained them for a long time with her demand to be shown everything they had to offer. When she got what she wanted, she deftly peeled back the wrapping, crunched the cookie, and then put her empty glass on Zinaida’s lowered tray, raised her own so she could get more comfortable, and, with a meek moan, drifted off into the hospitable lap of suffering.

  Now, evidently, she was truly hungry, and Zinaida had to withstand a minor storm. The old woman fretted, jostled, and kept asking, afraid of missing something, and took a long time deciding between meat and fish, while poor Zinaida, who was impatient to fill Filippov, as if he were a suddenly emptied flash drive, passed unbearably hot Aeroflot food trays endlessly back and forth.

  In the intervals between these spasmodic transactions, when the old woman’s reflections on the attendants’ treachery and the frailty of all existence momentarily subsided, an overwrought Zinaida managed to bring Filippov up to speed.

  “You’re a famous director. Fashionable. Everyone knows you. You mean you really don’t remember?”

  “Yeah?” he said. “A theater director? Or film?”

  “Both. You just won some prize abroad. In Italy, I think.”

  “At the Venice festival?”

  “No. I think it was Rome.”

  “Ma’am.” The attendant, by now worn out from her second back-to-back transcontinental flight, interrupted their conversation. “Anything for you?”

  “Too bad,” Filippov went on. “I’d have liked it to be Venice. But where we’re flying . . . do they know me there, too?”

  “Naturally. There are legends told about you there. And every second person boasts about knowing you. No, listen, is it true you don’t remember anything?”

  At that moment the old woman finally reached her difficult decision and demanded they bring back the meat tray, which she’d managed to refuse twice just a minute before.

  “I’ve forgotten everything.” Filippov shook his head as he put the tray in the old woman’s reliable hands. “Do I have a family?”

  “No. Or rather, you did, but you’re divorced now, and that was your second marriage. The first fell apart almost immediately. You married too young.”

  “Children?”

  “One son. He’s living somewhere in Europe with your former—well, meaning your second—wife. She took him there to be with her new husband. There was a lot of talk about that in town.”

  “Yeah? What did people say?”

  Zinaida got flustered and focused on her tray wrapper.

  “Well . . . people said you beat her. I mean, used to beat her.”

  “Here, let me help.” Filippov took her tray and in a single practiced move pulled off the transparent film. “There you go.”

  “No, I mean it’s all gossip,” she went on. “Don’t take it too hard.”

  “Okay, I won’t. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. I don’t remember anyone. You want my dessert? I’m not going to eat it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Bon appétit.”

  They set to their meal and for a while silently chewed the overcooked stew and watery vegetables. A boy of about five, who was sitting across the aisle, was picking his nose and then licking his finger.

  “What else are people saying?” Filippov asked, lowering his dull plastic fork.

  “They’re saying you’re gay.”

  “Please call the attendant,” the old woman by the window demanded. “She gave me fish. I told them I wanted meat.”

  “Here, have mine,” Filippov offered. “Where should I cut it for you? I have a scrumptious filet.”

  The old woman looked him in the eye for a second and then started fiddling with her fish. Filippov turned his gaze to Zinaida.

  “Do you think the part about me being gay is true?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “You’re every bit a man, of course. But even you know it’s all so complicated these days. You can’t tell at first glance which guy’s gay and which one’s straight. You run into some pretty hilarious surprises. When I heard that about you, I didn’t believe it. But then they even started hinting in the papers. The tabloids, sure, but there were doubts anyway. There’s no smoke without fire.”

  “That’s logical. What else are people saying?”

  “That you’re a drunk and a drug addict. At one point there was a whole to-do about it, but that’s died down now.”

  They were quiet for a while, then Zinaida suddenly dove under her tray table and pulled out a white plastic bag labeled “Moscow Duty-Free.”

  “Do you recognize this?” She looked at Filippov triumphantly, showing him a white cup with coffee stains inside. But he just shook his head.

  “You gave it to me yourself.”

  “I did? What for?”

  “You stole it for me.”

  “So-o-o,” Filippov drawled. “Now we’re stealing, too.”

  “No, you did it for good reasons. You saw me hide a saucer at the bar, and you sat down with me and offered to steal the cup that went with it. You also told me stories about a café in Amsterdam and marijuana brownies. You mean you don’t remember anything at all?” She gave him a look of compassion.

  “Why did you hide the saucer?”

  “You already asked. There, in the airport.”

  “I don’t remember. Tell me again.”

  She sighed, embarrassed for some reason, and covered her foolish expression. “You’re going to laugh.”

  “No, I won’t. Where’s that coming from?”

  “You already did.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell me anyway. I’m curious.”

  She rolled her eyes, as if she really wanted to be candid but at the same time she was embarrassed by what were for her important feelings.

  “I wanted to take the saucer as a souvenir.”

  “A souvenir?” He grinned. “Of what? The bar?”

  “There, you see? That’s how you talked before.”

  “But I don’t remember anything. I must be getting senile. What do you want the saucer for?”

  “On the bottom it says Domodedovo Airport.”

  “And you decided to swipe it as a souvenir of the airport?”

  “Oh, no, of Moscow. I told you then that I was going home for good and they’d never let me go back to Moscow.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Oh, someone. Basically, it doesn’t matter. They won’t.”

  “Seems to me you’re a full-grown lady.”

  She laughed, emitting an odd sound as she did.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “No one who knows me calls me a ‘lady.’”

  Filippov listened to her laughter and once again caught that odd sound in it. “Hey, do that again.”

  “What?”

  “That thing you just did. Snort.”

  “I didn’t snort.”

  “So you say.”

  “I didn’t snort, I’m telling you.”

  “Uh-huh, you didn’t snort. So what’s this?”

  He imitated her laughter and gave a distinct snort at the end, pulling air through his nose.

  “See? That’s how you laugh.”

  Every once in a while Filippov truly did wish he could lose his memory. His life had been far from rough, but there was precious little of it he cared to recall. The list of what he would keep after a sudden and long-desired amnesia consisted of just a few items. In first place were the songs of Tom Waits, which he wanted to remember always. Then came a madly spinning bottle of vodka, glinting in the sun, launched high in the air by his best friend, who, unlike that bottle, was definitely a candidate for amnesia; and the face of his two-year-old son covered with a rough, almost-green crust from his endless allergies, his tears vanishing instantly in the deep, dry cracks on his cheek, as if they were hillsides, not cheeks, and as if he were a small, sad volcano, not a child, and his slopes were covered with cooled lava. Filippov would also retain his memory of the tubby, carefree woman in enormous black pants and a cheap flowered top who one day jumped out in front of him from the Metro like a puffy Beelzebub, put on earphones, nodded, and started rapping: “Call me your girl, then kiss me, kiss me.” She formulated her demands in a strong, confident voice and obviously knew perfectly well what to expect from life. That, then, was all Filippov cared to remember. All the rest he easily could forget.

  His dream of being permanently rid of useless and tiresome ballast had more than once put him in a playful mood, and then he simply feigned memory loss. But even while desperately playing the fool in front of army commanders, college professors, or all-powerful producers from the federal television channels, he was always a little sad that he, in fact, remembered everything. These gags never had any particular purpose. Rather, they reflected his melancholy over what might have been. This time, though, Filippov wanted to vulgarly extract advantage from his favorite, virtually original ploy. This wasn’t about Zinaida, whom he’d met quite accidentally at Domodedovo, or even the fact that he’d genuinely fainted on the plane. No, this was about why he was flying to his hometown.

  Filippov was ashamed. Everything connected with this feeling had gone out of his life so long ago, and so thoroughly, that now he had absolutely no idea how to behave, how people who are ashamed do behave, so he worried like a virgin on the eve of a tryst with an experienced woman. Ahead lay something new, something big he could only guess at, and now he was awaiting this new thing with curiosity and uncertainty, as if he actually wanted this encounter. Shame exhilarated him, excited him, and drove out his usual depression and boredom. Filippov was ashamed at what he was getting ready to say to probably the last person who remained close to him—the last person he hadn’t managed to turn against him yet. He’d never been ashamed of his antics, but right now he was feeling shame for being the kind of person who had the gall not only to commit unequivocal betrayal but also having done so, to show up at his victim’s doorstep with a shameless request for help.

  Two days ago, in Paris, he’d signed papers to direct a show dreamed up by his old friend and partner from his hometown, a well-known theatrical designer who had done a lot to see that this oddball director from the provinces, who no one needed, not only gained success in Moscow but was in demand in Europe as well. Without his friend’s surprising, often genuinely fantastic ideas, doubtless nothing would have come of Filippov, and they never would have let him through any Moscow stage door. In literally a couple of years, the sudden and fresh duo had vanquished the most important theatrical venues, attracting attention with their invariably full houses and scandalous reviews, and the director’s equally scandalous behavior. This time, though, the French only wanted Filippov; they had their own designer.

  Naturally, he didn’t have to sign the contract, but the offer was so good, and Paris in the fall so alluring, and even his agent hinted that after Paris a Broadway option would probably open up for him, that Filippov, who was too chicken to lose all this, ultimately had to sign the papers. That’s what he told himself: I had to. As if he had in fact had no choice. Now he was flying to the North, to his hometown, first to be the one to explain to his friend that he’d “had no choice,” and, second, to get the sketches he desperately needed for the show, in which his friend, as far as he knew, had already formulated all the basic ideas that would more than likely be decisive for the show’s success.

  Basically, it would be a lot easier to resort to good old amnesia and play out this game with his friend following the tried-and-true scheme, pretending he’d forgotten everything, and in the process somehow improvising, maneuvering, to get a hold of the sketches. But right then, as if on purpose, Zinaida turned up, and Filippov hadn’t held his ground. In track and field, as far as he could remember, this was called a false start. He’d also had the vulgar urge to know what people were saying about him back home. Having left that Northern deep freeze of a city more than ten years before, he’d never once gone back and so didn’t know what the attitude toward him there was. Up until this moment, he just hadn’t given a damn. On Filippov’s list of what to consign to oblivion, this place came in at number one.