“Maximum—a fine or community service. But probably not even that. For them to charge us, they have to prove that we’re required by law to concern ourselves with the safety of the victims. That is, that we’re their guardians, or that we were the cause of a dangerous situation.”

  “How do you know all that?” Filya asked.

  “I studied law. They kicked me out third year. So don’t get your panties in a twist over this, buddy. Tell that cop of yours to get lost. Sure you won’t have some stroganina? I’ve got some vodka. We can raise a glass to the dead at the same time.”

  He winked at Filya, who nearly nodded. Nodding would have been so easy, so natural and pleasant, that Filya almost did it, but then he remembered Anna Rudolfovna falling down next to the bus, her mouth open in a soundless shriek, and the man in the orange vest trying to stick a cigarette in her face.

  “So why didn’t you stop?” Filya asked. “Why did you drive on by?”

  “Me?” The owner of the apartment and the tangerines shrugged. “I was loaded up. My Uazik was topped off—Snickers, different soda pops, gum. I didn’t have anywhere to put them. On my head or something? Even the cab was crammed full. And I was in a crazy hurry. I had to drop off the goods at the village. The insanity had already started in town, and I’ve got a buddy in Nizhny Bestyakh who had a whole shipment of heaters from last summer in a warehouse. I had to get them here fast. They sold like hotcakes the same night.”

  “And the kid?”

  “What kid?”

  “What happened to the kid?”

  “How should I know? I didn’t see any kid. Maybe he wasn’t in the car with them.”

  “He was. The three of them had left town.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” Filya sighed heavily. “I’m sure.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe somebody picked him up. Only, you know what I’d say? Your piece of paper with license plate numbers won’t cut it. You won’t find the kid that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they only wrote down the ones that didn’t stop—like you and me. And since we drove past, how could we know whether there was a kid there or not? No one’s going to tell you anything useful. Watch out—they’ll crack your skull for good measure.”

  Filya realized this unsinkable little man was right and said nothing in reply. He’d been so inspired yesterday and this morning, too, at his great and important deed, so much had he believed in this chance and the new meaning that had suddenly appeared in his life that now he was unbearably bitter. Filya listened to the apartment owner continue with his jokes, shook his head at his offers to drink, and was angry that all this was like water off a duck’s back for him. At the same time, he couldn’t shake the persistent and unpleasant feeling that he could see himself in this little man. His frivolous attitude toward life, his little sayings, his easy and even enchanting cynicism, and, most of all, the temptation right now to forget it all—all this was more than familiar to Filya, who’d consciously cultivated these qualities in himself, spent years cultivating them, but right now, in this tangerine-fragrant kitchen, he could barely hold back waves of revulsion.

  “Never you mind,” the trader bug, fussy once again, said, keeping up the press on him. “Mind you never! Ha! Let’s have a drink, why don’t we? Dunk the nice stroganina in here. Here’s some dip I’ve got left over from yesterday. Sure makes your mouth water. Well, it takes all kinds. Hey! It’s good for what ails you. No? Well, I will. Here’s to it, boys. God willing, this isn’t the last.”

  All this armor he’d managed to provide for himself notwithstanding, he needed Filya. This man was trying as hard as he could to pull him into his orbit, trying to get him to share what had happened, as if he’d forgotten or was still afraid to admit that they’d shared it for all time. Not eliciting the desired reaction from Filya, he shifted to the taciturn Tyoma sitting in his corner. Tyoma frowned at his familiarity, but still wouldn’t talk.

  “Why the sour puss?” the apartment’s owner asked. “Head hurt or something? We’ll fix that in a jiffy.”

  Tyoma pushed away the glass yet again, but the owner slipped around to his side of the table and grabbed the youth by the head.

  “Hey, let go of him,” Filya said.

  “No, no, I know how! I cure everyone’s headache this way.”

  The next second, the fussy little man who sold heaters and fruit squeezed Tyoma’s head the way strong-armed buyers at the market squeeze watermelons to test, waiting for them to crack. Tyoma cried out in surprise and intense pain, and gave the merchant a good shove, sending him flying back. Tripping over a half-open box of tangerines, he crashed to the floor and you could hear his fussy head hit the floorboards.

  “What if he dies there now?” Tyoma asked as Filya dragged him out of the entryway.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Filya said. “He was asking for it.”

  The right side of their car had a new long, deeply drawn furrow. Lying in the snow by the door was a piece of metal. Filya automatically turned toward the men crowding on the square by the trucks but then opened the door and pushed Tyoma inside.

  “It doesn’t matter. Sit.”

  Driving up to the address from Rita’s text and making out the number through the fog, which had thinned a little by then, Filya turned to Tyoma, who was glumly looking straight ahead into space.

  “You know, why don’t you sit here for now. Or else you’ll shove someone else by accident.”

  “Tell me,” Tyoma said heavily, “what does a person feel when he’s killed someone?”

  Filya snickered. “You didn’t kill him, so calm down. I barely saw any blood even. Just the least little bit.”

  “I’m not talking about myself.”

  “Then who?”

  “You.”

  Tyoma finally turned his head and looked Filya in the eye. Filya was silent for a second, then opened the door and, before jumping out of the car, breathed out clouds of steam that boiled up on his lips.

  “Why don’t you ask your parents? I wasn’t the one behind the wheel.”

  He climbed to the fifth floor very quickly. On the way here, Filya had managed to convince himself that Anna Rudolfovna had some news about her missing grandson, and this news absolutely had to be good because otherwise she wouldn’t have tried to find him through Danilov and Rita. Who needs to share bad news? More than likely she wanted to tell him something good.

  A little girl in a mouton coat opened the door, and he entered the apartment breathing hard and loud. Yesterday’s hangover had exacted its due. There was steam coming noticeably from Filya’s mouth. The temperature in the apartment was obviously within ten degrees of freezing.

  “Hello,” a vaguely familiar woman in a mink coat said as she rose to meet him from behind a table. “My name is Larisa Ignatievna. Anna Rudolfovna suggested how we might find you. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  There were three other people in the room—a man and two women. All wearing outerwear and fur caps. Filya shifted his gaze from them to Larisa Ignatievna, who was talking to him, and recognized in her that same head of psychiatry Anna Rudolfovna had been arguing with over sending patients across the river to a rural clinic.

  “Where is Anna Rudolfovna?” he asked, not understanding what was going on.

  “She . . . I guess she’s at home.”

  “At home? In what sense? Isn’t this her apartment?”

  “Oh, no,” Larisa Ignatievna said. “I used her name because you’re the fund.”

  “Fund?” Filya was understanding less and less. “What fund?”

  He stared at the woman in the mink coat. Some doctors he knew had once told him that psychiatrists sometimes lose their minds, and for a second he considered that possibility. The newly arisen circumstances in the city might well have activated strange and unpredictable processes dormant in that brunette head.

  “The philanthropic fund,” the woman in the coat said, holding his long gaze. “You brought Anna Rudolfovna the money. Two hundred thousand rubles for the funerals.”

  “Ah . . . That.”

  Filya exhaled, dropped to a chair, and started slapping his pockets. It was as if he suddenly needed to find something in them, but what exactly he hadn’t figured out yet.

  No, she wasn’t crazy. This woman knew what she wanted.

  “All famous people are philanthropic,” she went on in an understanding and even, for some reason, justificatory tone. “Chulpan Khamatova, for instance . . . the marvelous actress . . . Ingeborga Dapkunaite. Tatyana Drubich does fund-raising for hospices. And now you’ve decided to, too. Especially since you’re no stranger to our city. And we have such misfortune. You got up and running so quickly, as soon as you knew this misfortune was impending.”

  “I didn’t know,” Filya said.

  “Of course, of course. Nonetheless, it was quite wonderful. A good deed.”

  She suddenly held out her hand to him, the way bureaucrats and officials do, and he automatically held out his to her in response. Larisa Ignatievna grasped his palm, shook it energetically, as if congratulating him, and then started to laugh very artificially.

  Filya smiled stupidly in response, not knowing how to cut this awkward scene short, but from somewhere behind him, behind his back, the dark eyes of the man who’d been sitting on the couch, eyes filled with hope and fear, surfaced. Mumbling something, he handed Filya medical documents from a stack on the floor, and ultrasound pictures and EKGs started falling out. Not letting go of Filya’s hand, Larisa Ignatievna started bending down to pick them up, which meant Filya, too, had to bend his knees.

  Filya gathered—not right away but eventually—from the man’s mumbling and Larisa Ignatievna’s disjointed explanations while all three were collecting the scattered papers—that the man was married to her cousin, who was still sitting silently on the couch. His mother had been operated on the day before yesterday, and during the operation, because of the general emergency, there’d been a blackout. The woman didn’t die, but something in her was badly damaged, and now she had to be taken to the mainland to be treated and cut open again, and all this was very expensive.

  The man repeated the word “mainland”—which sounded slightly odd to Filya’s ear, as if they were all on an island here—and tugged his sleeve but unconsciously shifted his attention to the third woman. Evidently worried she might miss her chance, the woman got to her feet, clasped her hands to her chest, and hurriedly explained her difficulty from the far corner of the room. The man kept interrupting her, and she raised her voice, and Larisa Ignatievna tried to outshout both, explaining that this was her friend, that looters had burned down her dacha, and she needed some compensation. Then, as if she’d come unhinged, Larisa Ignatievna shouted at the girl in the mouton coat standing by the door to go run to the neighbor and tell her he’d come.

  These people were obviously frightened by everything that was happening, desperate in the extreme but, at the same time, full of such strength and zeal that they had overcome their shyness and embarrassment at having been carried off to this unfamiliar country and were prepared to behave worse than the boldest lout. These helpless people’s requests for money were no sweat to Filya. He was really disappointed in just one thing, that from this sudden bedlam with all its icy obviousness, only one thing had emerged: the child had not been found. It had been a complete waste of time rushing here.

  “Yes, yes, I’m a fund,” he said, taking money out of his pockets. “A fund. The genuine article. Reliable. Here you go.”

  He put everything he had with him on the table, everything left since his visit to the bank yesterday. So he wouldn’t be like the little man selling tangerines, wouldn’t feel any kinship to him, Filya was prepared to give away much more. But that was all he had.

  “Seven thousand five hundred?” Larisa Ignatievna turned to him after counting the money. “One ticket to Moscow costs more than thirty thousand.”

  When Filya jumped in the car, Tyoma wasn’t inside. He turned around, deciding the youth had fallen asleep on the backseat, but there was nobody there, either.

  “What the fuck!”

  Naturally, he couldn’t leave without Tyoma, although now he was in no great hurry. He realized this disappearance probably boded no good.

  In the fog, Tyoma was not immediately to be found. He was sitting on a playground, at the top of the slide, hunched over and pressing his hands to his ears. His down parka and shaggy cap were lying in the snow by the ladder.

  “I’m so sick of you,” Filya snapped, dragging him down.

  Tyoma clung to the railing, as if he were being dragged into a bottomless maelstrom. He started bellowing and jerking, and the whole rickety construction swayed, threatening to come crashing down on Filya, who was standing under it.

  “What are you? A cosmonaut?” Filya said, apropos of nothing. “You decided you wanted to go into outer space, damn it? I’ll show you outer space! Come here. Do you hear me? Let go!”

  While he was pulling the resisting Tyoma toward the car with all his might, Tyoma managed to bite him twice. The first bite was to the thick shoulder of his down parka, and all Filya noticed was the light rustle of Tyoma’s teeth over the thick rubberized fabric. But the second time, the youth twisted desperately in Filya’s arms, and the bite landed on Filya’s right cheek.

  Filya screamed from the unexpected pain and banged Tyoma’s head against the hood. For a moment, Tyoma stopped twisting. Throwing him onto the backseat, Filya ran for the things he’d left in the snow, and when he returned, Tyoma was sitting vertically, whining, his whole body shaking, as if he’d been plugged into a high-voltage power line.

  “Here,” Filya yelled, flinging his jacket and cap at him, and then slammed the door with a crash.

  In the car, he turned the rearview mirror toward himself. He could see the bite mark distinctly on his frozen right cheek.

  “Moron!”

  Filya looked at Tyoma in the rearview mirror. He was sitting still as a statue, with his jacket on his head.

  “I’ll fix you . . .”

  Jumping out of the car, Filya again opened the back door wide and in one jerk pulled Tyoma outside. Tyoma wasn’t resisting anymore. His jacket fell on the snow, but Filya paid it no attention.

  “You drive!” he hollered, pushing Tyoma behind the wheel. “You drive!”

  “I can’t,” Tyoma bleated.

  “You can, you freak! Drive us! People need help!”

  Filya slammed the door, stopped for a second by the bumper, caught Tyoma’s crazed look through the windshield, shook his fist, walked around the SUV, and collapsed in the passenger seat.

  “Move it, moron!”

  The car, its wheels having frozen flat to the snow, crunched heavily and pulled away from the building. The jacket was left lying in the middle of the road.

  Filya couldn’t get money at the first or the second bank they stopped at. The ATMs weren’t working in either establishment, and the tellers were besieged by such awful crowds that he had a very hard time even squeezing into the room. The third bank was just plain closed, but the people gathered near it told him they were promising to open up at any moment. The crowd, shifting uneasily from foot to foot and hopping in place, was covered by a gigantic cloud of the combined steam being exhaled by all these people put together, and for some reason Filya decided he couldn’t wait in the car; it would be warmer in that cloud.

  Looking back at the SUV to make sure Tyoma was sitting calmly at the wheel, Filya dove into the cloud, which hummed from all the conversations, and where he immediately ran into a piercing voice taut as a crystal string.

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” a young woman in a dirty gray down parka and a polar fox cap exhorted. “Don’t you even dare talk to me at all. You don’t understand anything. My mama died. She’s gone. But I’m Alena Frolova! I exist! I exist! Is that clear?”

  She continued insisting that she existed, stubbornly repeating her name, while Filya pushed on until he was stopped by someone’s shout.

  “Hey, people, you’re nuts! The kid’s got no clothes on! Send him to the car!”

  Filya craned his neck and spun around, but he couldn’t see anything over the backs and shaggy caps, so he turned around and moved in the opposite direction.

  “You can’t get back in line if you leave!”

  Someone shoved him in the shoulder, but he didn’t stop.

  “I wasn’t in line,” he muttered under his breath in a voice gripped by the cold. “I wasn’t.”

  Tyoma was sitting immobile at the wheel, gazing sullenly at the steam-making crowd. “What do they need money for now?” he asked.

  Filya put his shaking hands in front of the car’s life-giving heat vents and shrugged. “They probably want to fly away. Tickets are very expensive.”

  “Sheep.”

  When Filya told him they were going back to Danilov’s, Tyoma suddenly dug his heels in. He wanted to stay in his city apartment. This was evidently what he’d come up with while he was sitting in the warm car gazing at the crowd. He said he couldn’t stand to see Rita, or his parents, to say nothing of Danilov. “I’d rather freeze to death alone. I don’t care anymore.”

  Listening to his voice trembling on the verge of hysterics, Filya made one more effort to find a shred of sympathy or interest for the young creature’s bad nerves, but then he had to admit it was boring, and without saying anything he just punched Tyoma in the face. The punch caught him right in his motormouth, but since Filya was sitting to his side and couldn’t take a good swing due to the close quarters, it came out fairly crookedly and surprised Tyoma more than causing him any pain.