“Come with me,” Filya said, opening the door and jumping out of the car. “I don’t know anything here.”

  “As if I did,” Rita replied, opening the door on her side.

  They left the car by the morgue and headed for the main building. Then they hurriedly walked past a couple of dozen cars that had jammed the lot in front of the huge building and the entry to the steep emergency-room ramp. One of the ambulances was trying to go up that ramp, but the way was blocked and none of the drivers was paying the slightest attention to its siren’s wail. Coming toward Filippov and Rita in a continuous stream were people collecting their family members, carefully leading them by the arm, solicitously supporting them on the slippery steps, seating them in cars, trying to drive off, getting completely stuck, and starting to honk nervously, joining the general automotive rumpus.

  Taking Rita by the hand, Filya pulled her along. Cursing, commiseration, and complaints in Russian and Yakut came flying at them from all directions. This bilingualism underscored even more the chaos and isolation that reigned here. Everyone wanted the same thing, but no one wanted to understand anyone else. Everyone thought the others had ganged up against them, that the others were their enemies, and that the best thing would be to repulse everyone else preemptively.

  “Demons,” Filya muttered, gasping from the cold and pushing his way inside the hospital. “Devils of Babylon.”

  In the corridor right by the entrance, next to the constantly slamming door, a teenager with his head shaved bare smoked, squatting. Ruffled like a sick little bird, he shielded the cigarette in his palm and exhaled the smoke at his feet. Under his unbuttoned army peacoat, which was much too big on him, all you could see was a striped T-shirt, track pants, and enormous torn scuffs. The clouds of steam that kept bursting into the hospital corridor from the street didn’t bother him in the least. The people entering and exiting rushed past, ignoring him, while he was absorbed with watching the smoke from his cigarette mix with the steam. The nurse wearing a down parka over her white robe who was shouting at him didn’t bother him, either. To all her complaints he responded distractedly that he was going to smoke where he wanted, that he had no one to pick him up, that he was from another town and it wasn’t his fault that after he was released from reform school they’d brought him here.

  “I’m real sick, lady. Don’t yell. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go now.”

  “They told me Anna Rudolfovna was supposed to be here,” Filya intervened in this one-sided cross fire. “Where can I find her?”

  The nurse stepped aside, letting pass to the exit an entire family that had clustered around a large, heavy woman who looked like she was from the Caucasus and who was moaning, her eyes rolling back, at every step.

  “She won’t be here today. Something bad happened.”

  “Yes, I know.” Filya nodded. “But they told me she’d come in. Her neighbor said so.”

  “Go to the doctors’ lounge, then. Maybe somebody there has some idea.”

  Filya and Rita moved down the corridor, while the teen behind them kept muttering, still not agreeing to put out his cigarette. “You have anarchy here, just like reform school. Nothing makes sense. Where’s everyone gone? In the adult zone, there was order. Everything precise, everything according to the rules. The guys used to tell me, the ones whose fathers were doing time.”

  From the doctors’ lounge they were sent to Neurology, but there, too, there was no Anna Rudolfovna to be found. An elderly nurse with brightly painted lips said nervously that she’d seen her in the procedures room on another floor, but outsiders were forbidden entry there. “You wait here. I’ll tell them you’ve come to see her.”

  Standing in the already cool corridor, down which the patients’ innumerable relatives were scurrying with plates, cans, and blankets, Rita and Filya swiveled their heads senselessly from side to side until right next to them, at the very entrance to the already half-empty and ravaged ward, a woman suddenly started shouting.

  She was sitting on a bed by the door, firmly clutching her nickel-plated bed frame, as if she were afraid they would take her away by force. Standing around her were her distraught kin—her children, apparently, and even grandchildren. Not wiping the tears running down her face, she was saying she didn’t want to go home, that she was a burden to everyone there, that they’d insulted her by letting her know that.

  “I’ll stay here. I like it here,” she kept repeating, pressing up to the bed frame as if it were her sole kindred being. “I don’t need anything.”

  Her children stamped in place mournfully, trying to object, but the woman only shook her head, refusing to relinquish her grip on the bed.

  So it continued until a small Yakut grandfather whose family was also gathering in the next ward stopped by the door. Obviously, these two had had a chance to become friends. He immediately headed for the weeping woman, sat down beside her on the bed, and started talking to her quietly. The woman wiped her tears, nodded to him, and even laughed a bit, pointing to her children, as if she were suddenly embarrassed by the fuss and her part in it, as if she wanted to tell the old man that, look, she had a family, too. Filya tried to catch their conversation, but what happened after that he never found out.

  The nurse with the brightly painted lips came up to him and Rita and said nervously that Anna Rudolfovna was in Psychiatry.

  “The patients there are being evacuated to a suburban hospital, where they still have stove heating. Anna Rudolfovna is helping.”

  On the way, while they were walking down the various corridors and passageways between buildings, Rita was silent for a long time, until they entered the Psychiatric Department.

  “What do we need this Anna Rudolfovna for?” she asked.

  Filya wouldn’t say.

  In the spacious and stone-cold foyer next to the office of the department head, a dozen patients were sitting on chairs, stools, and wheelchairs, without a single relative by their side. Apparently, the rest had already been picked up, but no one needed these: a few desiccated old men and women with an identical absent gaze and identically sunken mouths and tufts of hair; two or three mentally disabled people of indeterminate age, who were surprisingly large; and a very skinny woman who sat solemnly in her wheelchair as if it were a throne.

  Someone had already pulled motley outerwear onto them, obviously not their own, and now in all these padded jackets, old sheepskin coats, and ungainly overcoats they looked like a group of extras ready to go on the set of a new Jos Stelling film. One of the men had an orange construction worker’s vest fastened over his shabby fur coat, for extra warmth.

  “WTF,” Rita said quietly.

  “Life takes on many guises, daughter dear,” Filya replied without any pathos whatsoever. “Get used to its multiplicity.”

  The sounds of heated debate flew out the office door, which was ajar. Filya glanced in, but the two women inside, who were standing in tense poses beside a large table, gave him just a cursory glance. One of them—short, with cropped red hair, a wrinkled face, and a hook nose—was talking in such a low and creaky voice she created the impression of a tree, not a human being. Her calm, intelligent eyes were riveted on an extremely agitated brunette whose entire furious outburst, all her fervor and anger, kept crashing lightly against something infinitely large and heavy that was in those eyes and the weary, smoked-out voice.

  “It cannot be done without direct instruction from the ministry!” The brunette was practically shouting. “I’m going to have to answer for them. I’m in charge of the department!”

  “And I’m shutting it down,” the redhead rasped. “At least until the emergency is lifted.”

  “Anna Rudolfovna! How can you not understand? You’ve had something bad happen to you yourself!”

  A shudder passed over the redhead’s face. “What does that have to do with this? That’s not important now.”

  “How can it not be important? They have to cross the river, too, and after that it’s another two hours. Our Pazik is running on a wing and a prayer. They’ll all freeze to death if anything happens to the bus. The slightest breakdown, Anna Rudolfovna! Any malfunction!”

  “Larisa Ignatievna, go home.”

  “This is my office! I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Go. I’m taking responsibility for their travel.”

  The brunette looked at her boss as if she wanted to kill her. She just didn’t know how.

  “I’m removing you from management,” Anna Rudolfovna said. “Another minute and I’ll fire you altogether.”

  “That’s all right,” the brunette said after a second’s pause. “You think the phones aren’t working anymore? You think I have no one to call at the ministry?”

  “I don’t think anything. Go.”

  The dismissed supervisor wrapped her mink coat around herself in a huff and rushed toward the office door. Filya barely managed to get out of her way to let her pass.

  “Did you want something?” the redhead asked him as she dropped on a chair and pulled out her cigarettes from the pocket of her worn sheepskin coat.

  “I brought the money.”

  “The money?” She lit a cigarette and rubbed her forehead in a sudden pensiveness. “What money?” Still, judging from her intonation and her remote glance, she had asked the question mechanically. She had absolutely no interest in Filya or what he had to say. More than likely, she didn’t even realize he was talking about money. At that moment, Filya would have had as much luck talking to her about elephants or submarines. Words had no meaning whatsoever for her right then. They were just sounds devoid of content, paper cups without water. And Filya knew that the reason for this was not the tumult in the hospital.

  Redheaded Anna Rudolfovna only looked alive. By force of will, or the opposite—at the expense of total repression—she looked to be reacting perfectly appropriately to external signals and stimuli. But, in fact, she wasn’t here, and the previous conversation had been conducted only by her trained shell. She herself was in the eye of a hurricane—not where the storm and merciless devastation were but where there was absolute calm. Literally a few meters from Filya a ferocious storm raged, shredding everything that fell in its path, but at the very center there was undisturbed silence, and the eye of whoever ended up there fixed uncomprehendingly on the wild chaos and devastation, which seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with him personally.

  “Your relatives died on the river yesterday.”

  “I’m aware,” Anna Rudolfovna said, looking at her smoking cigarette. “Can you find me an ashtray?”

  “No.”

  “Then go.”

  “This money is from a philanthropic fund,” he said, holding out two thick packets.

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  Filya glanced at Rita, as if she might help him in some way.

  “Arrange the funeral,” he said. “Here.” He walked over to the desk and put the packets in front of Anna Rudolfovna. “There’s two hundred thousand here.”

  She looked at the money for a second and then looked up at him. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Yes.” Filya nodded. “Right now, yes. I’m certain.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m from Moscow.”

  She thought about his answer and shrugged. “I think you’re a fool.”

  “I agree. In principle, that’s not even up for discussion. You know, in fact, I very much . . .”

  Filya wanted to say he sympathized and that he himself had lost people close to him so he knew what it was like. But behind Rita, who was still standing in the doorway, a low, visceral wail suddenly went up that made her stagger into the office, trip over Filya’s foot, and nearly fall.

  “Senya,” Anna Rudolfovna cried out in a hoarse voice. Her hand holding the smoking cigarette struck the desk, sending ashes flying in all directions over the glass surface.

  Coming from the foyer were a melancholy lowing, soft swearing, and strange scratching noises, as if a bag of cement were being dragged over a stone floor from one wall to the other.

  “Senya,” Anna Rudolfovna repeated as she walked out of the office. “I just asked you to get them into the bus. What have you been doing?”

  A short, scrawny Yakut man wearing an old khaki down parka was dragging the man in the construction worker’s vest across the floor by the arm. The man in orange was fighting him off, moaning, rustling his vest, breaking away, and trying to crawl off, but the persistent Yakut man would immediately catch up to him and drag him toward the exit again.

  To Anna Rudolfovna’s angry questions the upset Senya replied that he was hurrying as much as he could, but “the damned psychos” just didn’t want to get on the bus. He spoke quickly, in his indignation mixing up his Russian words and decorating them fancifully with a Yakut accent.

  Meanwhile, all the mentally disabled people had gathered around their brother, who’d been thrown to the floor and who obviously had no intention of getting up; they shifted from foot to foot, mutely sympathizing with one of their own. The old people remained indifferent to it all, their mouths open, as if they were all airing out their long uninhabitable inner rooms. The thin woman sitting solemnly in her wheelchair, on the contrary, was showing lively interest in what was going on, smiling and nodding royally as if she were giving her queenly acquiescence to all this.

  Filya’s experienced eye read the staging, instantly determined the center of the composition, and then walked up to the woman sitting in the wheelchair and rolled her toward the exit. The mentally disabled patients immediately calmed down and trailed after him. The old people were also set in motion. Rita could almost hear their bones creaking as they started coming to life, rising, one after the other, and setting their sights on the course laid for them. It looked like the inexplicably desiccated stone giants on Easter Island had suddenly come to life and were moving toward the sea. Filya heard their unhurried shuffling behind him and slowed down.

  Outside, next to the bus, Anna Rudolfovna walked up to him.

  “No, you’re not a fool after all,” she said hoarsely, lighting up again and holding the collar of her sheepskin coat at her throat with her free hand. “You’re the second person I’ve ever met who understands them so well.”

  “Thank you,” Filippov replied, observing Senya seating the old people, who were swaying in the icy wind, on the bus. “Who was the first?”

  “My grandson. Antoshka.”

  She uttered his name and fell silent, as if listening to something, took a couple of quick drags on her cigarette, and then continued.

  “Once last year, I left him in my office and he ran off. Half an hour later they found him on the ward.” She nodded in the direction of the man in the construction worker’s vest, who was smiling broadly at her and Filya and flapping his arms as if he wanted to fly. “You know what they were doing?”

  Filya shook his head.

  “Memorizing poems. Antoshka was reciting what he’d learned in kindergarten so far. Pushkin, I think. And they were repeating after him. They all were having a very good time.”

  “Excellent story,” Filya said, already starting to freeze. “Say hello to your Antoshka.”

  Anna Rudolfovna looked at him oddly and shook her head.

  “I guess you are a fool after all.”

  “Why?” He stopped hopping up and down.

  “Because he was in that car. He froze yesterday with his parents on the river. With my son and his bride. You brought me the money for his funeral yourself. How can I say hello to him?”

  Saying this, she gasped and swayed. Her hand with the smoking cigarette still tried to reach her mouth, but her mouth wasn’t opening for the cigarette anymore. Anna Rudolfovna’s lips twisted convulsively, her head started leaning back, and Filya realized the hurricane’s epicenter had shifted. The unfortunate woman had been caught up by the furious whirlwind that up until now had been spinning without touching her. For a rather long time she’d been able to avoid it by entering the area where everything was still fluid and not quite defined—where everything was inexact, where everything was still in the category of “maybe.” Now, though, she was in its full sway. Recalling her grandson, allowing the thought of him in and speaking of his death for herself, she had precisely formulated her own grief, and because of this, it took on firm and understandable outlines. It became an unavoidable fact—and finally reached her.

  Anna Rudolfovna leaned forward as if she were going to be sick and then abruptly straightened up and began arching back. Her head struck the bus with a loud boom. The mentally disabled people crowded around Senya affably turned toward the sound. Filya grabbed the unnaturally stretched-out woman, and her wide-open mouth ended up a few centimeters from his face. A scream had not yet been torn from this twisted mouth, but the body in Filya’s arms was spasming in powerful convulsions, anticipating the scream, paving its way.