“What’s up, Mom?” Rita said, not understanding her long silence. “It’s bullshit. I just knocked my elbow.”

  “I’ve gotten old,” Inga said in a small voice.

  Rita puffed out her cheeks and shook her head helplessly. “Here we go again, damn it. I keep telling you not to think that way. I’ve had enough of you turning the universe into what it’s not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Tyoma has this book about Buddhism where it says that we bring on our own problems when we think about them too much. We make the universe a negative.”

  “You mean I’m going to stop getting old if I don’t think about it?”

  “Mom, what’s wrong with you?” Rita frowned. “You know what I mean. Why don’t you help put this Band-Aid on?”

  “No, I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand.” Inga fell silent for a second, examining her daughter. “Why did you put that sweater on again? How many times do I have to repeat that it’s too tight? The investigator couldn’t take his eyes off your chest.”

  “That’s not true,” Rita said, eventually patching up her wounded elbow herself. “He was drawing.”

  “Some drawing.”

  “Mama, enough already.” Rita fixed her sleeve and gave Inga a stern look.

  “I don’t say this because of myself,” Inga replied quickly. “Don’t worry about that. I only say it because of Danilov. Do you think he’s going to be very happy if people are going to be looking at you like that right in his own home?” As she said “like that,” she bugged out her eyes, let her mouth hang open like an idiot, leaned forward, and stared at her daughter’s chest. “You should wear your things looser. So you don’t draw stares.”

  “Mama, I’m sick of you and your Danilov,” Rita said irritably. “I’m being serious. You have the most incredible fantasies.”

  “They’re not fantasies.”

  “Yeah? Who had her chest done as soon as she joined his company?”

  Inga held her hand out in front of her helplessly. “Rita, stop it.”

  “Fine then,” her daughter said. “I do know how you lit him up in your youth. There are legends about it in town. There’s an entire mythology around you.”

  “Rita, don’t you dare talk to me like that!”

  “Fine. Then tell me where my papa is.”

  Inga didn’t say anything, and they both stood there silently, looking into each other’s eyes, until Tolik walked into the kitchen.

  His professional instinct, gleaned over the years from any manifestation of fear, hatred, irritation, or other waste matter from a human soul driven into the corner, immediately told him that he had landed in his favorite situation. Shivers ran familiarly down his back, but Tolik controlled himself and showed restraint. He very much wanted to butt in, to saddle these fillies who had been badly shaken by something and exploit their conflict in his own interests, but his instinct told him that it was better to stick to the plan.

  Walking past Rita and glancing at her breasts so beautifully swathed by her sweater, he opened the refrigerator proprietarily, thought for a second or two, and took out a plate of sliced ham.

  “Anybody hungry? For some reason, I’m starving.”

  Stuffing his mouth, he bellowed to show how good it was, then winked at Rita and held out the plate to her.

  “Have some? Come on, don’t be shy.”

  Rita looked at him silently, obviously having no intention of reacting to him. The investigator dropped the plate on the counter next to the stove. It clattered loudly.

  “Ooh,” he said with respect. “Granite.” Tolik tapped the stone surface. “Solid.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” Rita said at last.

  “Sure, lots. It’s just that the ham’s delicious. Are you trying to get rid of me or something?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  He took a piece of crumpled paper out of his pocket and held it out to Rita. She didn’t even stir.

  “Take it. Take it,” the investigator said. “You were the one who wanted to spend time with your Filippov.”

  Rita warily held out her hand and took the paper from him. “What’s this?” she said.

  “An address. Take him there right now. He wants you to.”

  “Now what!” Inga was immediately outraged. “Danilov said it’s dangerous there!”

  Tolik grinned and took one more piece of ham from the plate. “Danilov was exaggerating. He’s taking on a lot, as usual.”

  On the drive into town, the road surface turned dreadful. The car ran more or less smoothly down the highway, but as soon as the first houses appeared the car started shuddering as if it were racing over a washboard. Apparently, this didn’t upset Rita. She didn’t even try to drive around the ruts, so Filya clutched the handle overhead. He was now wearing all local clothing. In Danilov’s storerooms they’d found a nice new down parka, reindeer boots that fit, and warm snow pants.

  To the right, an absolutely lifeless and flat landscape unfurled as if out of a high-budget sci-fi movie about planets frozen in ice armor. On the left, the little houses of outlying poverty ran by like a row of mice. Crooked fences, snowdrifted roofs, listing gray sheds—this definitely wasn’t the city yet. Here in the sticks huddled those the city didn’t want to let in. Those because of whom it had disdainfully drawn its streets, squares, and avenues—to be sure not to touch all this suburban want by accident, not to be infected by it, not to pick up something shameful.

  Closer to the center of town, the streets got more decent, but Filippov was having a hard time getting his bearings in the new landscape. A few places he couldn’t recognize at all. Where pathetic wooden housing—complete with private yards, sidewalks of rotten boards, and decrepit outhouses opposite every building—had previously clung together there were now faceless fortress walls surrounding labyrinths of five-story apartment buildings. In addition, from time to time, architectural installations he’d never seen before that imitated in glass and concrete the traditional Northern yurt flashed by. As far as he remembered, this kind of summer residence was called an urasa. But in Soviet times it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to build one in stone.

  Everything around was not just covered in snow but bundled in it with the same painstakingness and unfailing care any mother would demonstrate in swaddling her own infant. The snow layer that had swallowed the city was reaching archaeological proportions. Ancient Herculaneum buried under a layer of ash, and long-suffering Pompeii—that’s what one might compare the city to that Filippov was now viewing out the car window. It wasn’t even normal snow but some kind of special shaggy variety. Absolutely everything was shaggy and gray—the buildings, the pillars, the streetlamps, the street signs. Only a local could identify the trees in the eccentric stalagmites running along the thoroughfare. Power lines hung heavily overhead like giant coral threads. The barbed, tousled gratings along the sidewalks were cast from liquid air, not iron.

  All this colossal hoarfrost, which could be compared in intensity only with tropical vegetation, was an alternative, nonbiological life-form. Crystals of solidified cold adhered in billions of colonies to any surface in the city the moment the thermometer dropped past forty below, colonies that led an independent and seemingly intelligent life. In their stormy growth and multiplication, one could read not simply spontaneous expansion, not only a primitive seizure of living space—no, they were obviously keeping to a precise plan. The cold here could think, and this ocean of thinking cold very obviously wanted something, expected something, was preparing for something.

  Riding in a small warm car in the middle of an icy tumult capable in just a few minutes of dispatching a living creature to eternity was awful and fun at the same time. Filya glanced at Rita, who had not made a peep so far. Spying on her imperceptibly for a minute or two, he concluded that the cold bothered her only in the everyday sense. He discovered no trace of anything transcendent in her sullen gaze. He finally decided to break the silence.

  “Why were you so anxious to see me? What did you want?”

  Rita surfaced from some obviously not very pleasant thoughts and glanced at him.

  “Take me to Moscow,” she said after a second’s pause.

  “Moscow?” Filya repeated after her. “I’m not going to Moscow now. I’m going to Paris.”

  “Then take me to Paris.”

  “Where is this coming from?” He snickered and let go of the overhead strap. Now, in the center of town, the car barely shook.

  “I’m your daughter.” Rita raised her eyebrows. “You should take care of me.”

  Filya shook his head.

  “If you’re my daughter, then I’m definitely not taking you.”

  “Why?”

  “What the hell am I going to do with a daughter there? If you were just a young woman, I probably could take you. Because young women are interesting. You can make love to them. But that’s not a go with a daughter. No, I’m not that bad yet.”

  “Well, then I’m not your daughter. You can just take me away from here. Or else I’m going to kill someone.”

  Filippov didn’t respond. The exaltation of youth had bored him for a long time. Outbursts like this spoke to the primitive reaction of someone who has become aware for the first time that life has turned its fat ugly butt to her. The novelty of discoveries like this upset only those not yet accustomed to those drooping outlines and offended by them because they’d, foolishly, been expecting something else. Naïveté didn’t touch Filippov one bit. He sincerely found it to be the sign of an undeveloped personality.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Everything. You are my daughter, after all.”

  Rita squinted a little, fell silent, and looked at him. “You mean you believe I’m your daughter?”

  Filya shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t really care. If you don’t want to talk about yourself, talk about Danilov. He’s even more interesting.”

  Without taking her eyes off the road, Rita brought Filippov up to speed on the position Danilov occupied in the city, a position that allowed him to take a whole group of his friends out of the emergency zone and settle them in his suburban home.

  “And on what planet am I his friend?” Filya said.

  “None. You were just lying around unconscious by the artist’s building when we drove by for him.”

  “Who decided to pick me up?”

  “Do you care? I thought you didn’t give a damn about anything.”

  “Well, in principle, I don’t. Although . . . Give me your phone for a minute. Is there a signal in town?”

  “Now there is,” she said, handing over the phone.

  Putting his own SIM card in Rita’s phone, Filya checked incoming messages and found information about a major transfer into his bank account.

  “What?” Rita asked, seeing the smile on his face. “Good news?”

  “The French paid the advance. Now I’m definitely going to Paris. But most of all, I’m getting the hell out of here. Do we have far to go?”

  “No, here we are,” Rita replied, stopping the car beside a five-story prefab apartment building that had emerged from the fog.

  “Fine. You wait right here for me,” Filya said, opening the door. “I’ll be exactly ten minutes. And then straight to the airport.”

  Slamming the door, he quickly headed for the entrance but then slowed down, stopped, and suddenly rushed back.

  “Tell me, was there a dog with me when you found me?” he asked, peering into the car again. “Big, like this. Looked like a German shepherd.”

  Rita shook her head. “No, no dog.”

  “I see. All right, I’ll be quick.”

  He came back a minute later. Sullen, he took his seat.

  “Take me to the hospital,” he growled. “The provincial.”

  “Who are you looking for?” Rita finally asked.

  “I said the hospital!” he hollered. “Now she’s asking questions, too.”

  Greatly offended, Rita intentionally rode through all the ruts before managing to find a parking place on the fenced-off territory of the provincial hospital—where the morgue was located, right by the gates. But then Filippov unexpectedly demanded to be taken to the nearest bank. He told Rita he suddenly knew what he needed money for, but the impulse to leave this strangely familiar place was dictated by something else. Filya wouldn’t admit the real reason. So as not to rile him again, Rita didn’t ask any questions.

  The bank was pandemonium. Standing in line for the ATM and listening—whether he wanted to or not—to other people’s agitated conversations, Filya learned that people were withdrawing cash all over town. No one could tell how long the heating outages would last or what they might lead to, so everyone rushed first thing to rescue their savings. In any difficult or confused moment, a Northerner is used to relying on himself alone, and first and foremost this meant keeping what’s yours at home. The majority here well remembered the ’98 default and knew exactly how much the state and its banks spat on all those tiresome little people crowding in lines like this the moment something major and frightening happened.

  In the lobby where the ATMs were installed, the first swallows of mounting panic had already flitted by. Filya could almost physically feel them rushing noiselessly above the crowd, a wing touching one and then another. A short, solid guy in a black down parka with a hood trimmed in silver fox was assuring someone standing a little ahead of him, and who couldn’t be seen because of his enormous hood, that some banks had stopped issuing cash. Filya couldn’t see the speaker’s face, but his voice, even though the guy was trying not to speak too loudly, radiated fear. Tension hovered over their heads and got denser the closer they got to the ATMs, and the front door kept opening, letting in well-wrapped, rimy people, if they’d come on foot, and unbuttoned ones if they’d come by car, but all were identically tense.

  The lobby filled up quickly, so Filya was soon standing pressed between the wall and a large woman with a shaggy full-length dog-fur coat. Because the woman had come to the bank alone and had no one with whom to share the rumors that were filling her to bursting, she started telling Filya that a directive had supposedly already come from Moscow restricting flights, for the purpose of conserving fuel, and that soon it would be totally impossible to fly out of the city. She also told him about a mysterious bunker with an autonomous furnace where the city’s elite would be saved when heat stopped being delivered to residential buildings. An elderly Yakut man, pressed up to Filya on the other side, objected about the bunker, citing the permafrost, in which it was even hard to dig a grave, but the woman in the dog-fur coat replied that given today’s technologies, even this was possible, just not for ordinary people.

  “Because no one needs you and me,” she told the old man heatedly over Filya’s head, which he was trying to lean away as much as possible. “They’re going to let us kick the bucket here like dogs. In my apartment last night, it was five above.”

  “Oh, come off it,” a disbelieving voice rang out from somewhere on the right. “Where’s that?”

  “On New Port Road, that’s where,” the woman responded in a ringing voice. “You mean it’s warmer where you are?”

  “Well, yes. It’s holding at fifteen degrees.”

  “And where do you live?”

  “Peter Alexeyev Street.”

  “Well! That’s practically downtown!” Something akin to contempt rang in the woman’s voice.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “What do you mean what’s the difference? You have nothing but bosses there!”

  “Oh, come off it!”

  The woman in the fur coat leaned toward Filya and demanded a report from him. “What’s your temperature at home?”

  He looked at her silently, twisting his singed lips, and a moment later she switched over to the rest of the line.

  “Who lives where, and what’s your temperature?” she shouted, throwing her head back.

  “Poyarkov Street, twelve!” came an answer from somewhere to the left.

  “Ordzhonikidze, fourteen!” another voice sounded.

  “Khabarov, seventeen degrees!”

  “Oh! Let’s all go to Khabarov!” someone in the far corner hollered in a wickedly cheerful voice, and the whole line seemed to sigh and stir, and all of a sudden to smile one big, still tentative, smile.

  Up until that moment, everyone stuffed into the frozen lobby had probably been connected by nothing but fear, and if there was something other than fear that brought them all closer in a strange and contradictory way, then it was the understanding that each was going to be on his own when it came to saving himself. They were here together and, at the same time, deeply divided, and this awful sensation made them feel absolutely as morbidly vulnerable and defenseless as a child left in the forest at night.

  Now they listened to the nonsense two tipsy dunces in the far corner were carrying on with and laughed at their silly stories, and all this nonsense not only drove away their fear, acting like the protective spell of local shamans, it united them in a completely different way, and for a while each person in this lobby now was certain that everything would work out. Or that if it didn’t, then it didn’t much matter.

  When he and Rita drove back to the hospital and parked by the morgue, Filya realized why, an hour before, this place had seemed familiar: this was where he and Nina’s parents had collected her body. Since then, nothing at all had changed. The same faceless building was surrounded by the same faceless wall. As before, this gray concrete facelessness held nothing tragic, nothing beyond-the-grave, nothing terrible. The dilapidated green door certainly didn’t lead to the kingdom of Hades. Filya remembered that behind it lay only an equally boring and equally dilapidated corridor. The dead here weren’t people; what was dead here was life itself, which had retreated, losing all individuality, becoming a cliché, turning into this corridor, this door, and these gray bricks. Life had been wiped away, the way a school eraser rubs a line off a piece of drawing paper, leaving behind only smears and messy crumbs that could be swept or blown away. Filya always remembered that in this nondescript and utterly unfrightening place they gave you not the person but his zero. It wasn’t even what was left of him. It was what he had never been. What had never been in him. They issued you a fake. As if the person had already boarded the train and left, while you for some reason were being issued a life-size copy on the deserted platform, a fairly ugly puppet. A souvenir, sort of, or something else. And the people who saw the train off left the station with these puppets and suddenly asked themselves, And we need this awful scarecrow in order to do what? But no one had an answer. Because the real someone they’d loved was gone.