“In ten minutes our plane will begin its descent. Please return your chairs to their upright position, replace your tray tables, and fasten your seat belts.”

  Filippov opened his eyes and glanced at Zinaida. She was looking at the back of the old woman, who was glued to the window, evidently wanting to view the limitless fields of clouds not only with her eyes but also with her shoulders and chest.

  “Our estimated arrival time is twelve o’clock,” the voice on the loudspeaker continued. “Local time now is eleven twenty. Temperature in the city, forty-one degrees below zero.”

  “How much? How much?” someone behind him drawled.

  “I’ll be damned,” another voice piped up. “In October!”

  Filippov didn’t remember for sure what the temperature was supposed to be in his hometown in late October, but he definitely knew it wasn’t forty below. That was more like December weather. Basically, all these cold snaps surfaced as fairly abstract memories—like childish insults or someone else’s dream, and not even the dream itself but how people tell it. Getting mixed up and reliving it, they try to convey what unconsciously disturbed them nearly to tears, but they can’t, and everything they say is totally boring—not scary—lifeless and stupid. Words can’t convey what comes to us beyond words, what grasps and enslaves us in total silence. That was more or less how Filippov remembered the cold.

  Over all those intervening years, his body had lost any memory of freezing weather. His surface no longer sensed the chill physically, the way it used to. His skin didn’t remember the cold’s pressure; it forgot its weight, resilience, solidity, and resistance. Softened by Moscow, Paris, and Geneva winters, Filippov’s surface had a hard time remembering how much effort it took just to move down the street as his body cut through a cold as thick as jelly.

  Looking at the back of Zinaida, who was holding out hope looking at the old woman’s back, Filippov—totally involuntarily and unexpectedly—plunged into his distant past. Disdainfully sorting through the images and memories crawling out of every airplane crack, he even shook his head slightly, as if to shake them off. Up until this moment, he’d been absolutely certain they’d left him forever, drifted down and withered like last year’s nasty leaves champing underfoot in the March mess. But now just the mention of true cold instantly roused that whole tedious scum, which stuck to Filippov, asserting its rights and demanding his tedious love for the past and his attention.

  Looking at Zinaida’s pink back, he suddenly saw his fifteen-year-old self trailing off to school in the wintry morning darkness and the impenetrable fog that blanketed the town for several months, like fiberglass, as soon as the thermometer dropped below forty below. His cheap leatherette gym bag, stiff from the cold, kept slipping off his shoulder, trying to fall off, and it wasn’t easy to right, because fifteen-year-old Filippov was wearing a huge sheepskin army coat, sewn, or rather, constructed, for a sturdy fighter, and puny Filippov could barely move in this construction, kicking its wide hem, as stiff as plywood, out of boredom. In this construction, his own arms felt like prosthetics. Or manipulators in a deep-water bathyscaphe. Not so easy to use.

  The coat had been obtained by his father, who had pull at some warehouse, so Filippov couldn’t reject the army monster. His father was proud to be a man and a provider, too, like everyone else, and once he’d had a drink after work he told endless stories about what a clever, useful, and irreplaceable guy he was. Filippov was trailing down his miserable little street past a row of two-story barracks, or rather, past a row of bulky shadows that resembled these barracks, because in the darkness and fog you could only guess what you were walking past. His bag finally slipped off, but he wasn’t paying attention and dragged it behind himself over the bluish snow, its top layer hard as concrete, listening to his notebooks rattle around inside in their oilcloth covers, which were as hard as cold rocks. He was trailing along forty minutes before classes started because the principal had forced the teachers to hold political information sessions in the upper classes, and today it was Filippov’s turn to inform his sullen, underslept classmates about the theses of the latest plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, about the growth in the Communist Party’s leading and guiding role in the life of Soviet society, about the inseparability of the party’s authority and the state, about the unity of mind and will of the party and people, and also about fulfilling their international duty as Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. Why he was leading such an inhuman life, Filippov at age fifteen doesn’t know.

  “We’re like cattle,” Elza mumbled from another, neighboring memory.

  How she had come to be in the local theater, Filippov didn’t remember. Maybe from Moscow, but maybe from Leningrad. In any case, she behaved in such a way that all the other actors automatically hated her. They didn’t like being provincial cattle, the offal of the acting profession, demons of the lowest sort. Actually, they even hated themselves and, by inertia, all humanity. The reasons for this hatred were different in each case, but the result was always the same. Hatred was their greatest love.

  Swaddled in unimaginable shawls that no one here in the North wore, Elza emerged from the fog and, by some miracle, recognized Filippov in his rimy cocoon, perishing from hatred. She came up to him and they stood there motionless, like two cosmonauts who have left their spaceship for reasons unknown.

  “We’re like cattle,” Elza muttered, leaning her head toward him so he could hear and pulling away from her face the part of her scarf she was breathing into and which had frozen in a damp whitish crust right up to her sad eyes.

  In this memory, Filippov was twenty-five. He was already a widower and was buying his own clothes. In the winter, he looked more like a wandering monument. He wore two pairs of trousers, a thick sweater, a short black fur-lined coat, reindeer boots, a muskrat hat, and huge beaver gauntlets. These absolutely unbending, titanic mittens were stuck into his coat pockets permanently, and they poked out of them, like an odd stuffed animal whose ears have slipped—obviously because of the cold—to the region of his waist. In the winter, the entire male population of the city was dressed this way, each one absolutely satisfied that he was as good as anyone else.

  The short sheepskin and fur coats started to cede their unshakable position after Gorbachev’s perestroika, when missionaries started coming here. The diamond territory lured them more powerfully than the heavenly kingdom, and all these spiritual Swedish-Mormon born-agains had the best time they could in the former Soviet North. They wailed to the electric guitar in the movie house, danced in the furniture store, and sobbed with a microphone in their hands, rocking and calling out: “Your coming, Jesus!” After their lively sermons, no one in town particularly went for the Mormon thing, but this did bring an end to the hegemony of fur-lined cloth coats. The missionaries arrived wearing imported, brightly colored down parkas, which was obviously the missionaries’ true mission. The crude local Mormonophobes laughed at them and assured them that, like fleas, they would freeze in their “cute little jackets,” but for the young Filippov, these shining brand-name raiments were a genuine and practically religious revelation. At twenty-five he set his sights ecstatically on a red down parka, and now nothing in the world could stop him on this lofty path. Thus came the end, in his life, to the era of universal black cloth. His break with his hometown was now inevitable.

  In addition, he no longer could bear to go to his young wife’s grave.

  “Buckle up, please.”

  Filippov raised his head and looked at the attendant leaning toward him. The tips of her neckerchief poked out from under her blouse like pretty, stubborn horns.

  “And please put that away.” She shifted her gaze to the bottle of grappa in his hand.

  “Will you show me your ears?” Filippov was looking at the shiny dark hair framing the narrow white plane of her face.

  “What for?”

  “It’s important to me what kind of ears are listening to me—pretty or not.”

  “Put the bottle away.”

  “I can’t. For me, drunkenness is the ultimate form of sincerity. There aren’t any others left.”

  “Drinking alcoholic beverages purchased elsewhere on board is prohibited.”

  “Can I buy it from you?”

  “Not now. We’re landing in twenty minutes.”

  “Too bad. Want a sip?”

  The flight attendant stood up straight and continued on, turning her head from side to side, as if she were following a tennis match. Or decisively rejecting what no man had ever summoned the nerve to ask her out loud.

  “Stop,” Filippov shouted after her. “I have a question.”

  “I’m listening,” she said in a weary voice, returning to his seat.

  “You should talk to the pilot. We seem to be flying slowly. And in the totally wrong direction, I think. I don’t recognize the route. Look out the window yourself.”

  At these words, pink Zinaida giggled and the attendant silently turned and continued her unhurried movement through the cabin. Schoolboy jokes from forty-year-old jerks had bored her a long time ago.

  Filippov sipped from the bottle, stuck it in the seat pocket, buckled up, and closed his eyes again, trying not to miss a single familiarly scorching moment. The grappa warmed his throat, then his esophagus, and finally shone in his stomach.

  “You are so great,” Filippov mumbled as he plunged into his ice-armored past. “You’re my beauty.”

  His father’s sheepskin coat had made him the biggest laughingstock in school. The girls in his class and the classes below loved to make fun of him. When he wandered home after classes wearing that fur coat, they peeked out of the small windows of their two-story barracks, sometimes even clambering onto the sill, hurrying before he passed by, their skinny knees knocking, poking out from under their house robes, shouting at him gaily: “Filya-Filya! The town dump feels ya!”

  In that coat he looked like another Filya, the restive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who in the late Soviet period fled his pedestal out of grief and roamed aimlessly through the frozen city in search of the revolution’s other warriors, who were equally lost.

  Among the teasing girls from the windows was one who later—literally three years later—became Filippov’s wife.

  “Smell it?” he would say to her, gasping from exhaustion and happiness after their first secret attempts at love. “Smell that? It smells different. It didn’t used to be like that.”

  He sniffed his armpits, then she did it, and both laughed at the unfamiliar smell, at Filya’s clumsy new trustingness, and at the fact that they had to hide while her lonely mother was sitting in the kitchen, having gotten up in the middle of the night for some reason.

  “Idiot,” Nina said, “you left your coat in the hall.”

  They choked with laughter, while the light from the front hall fell incriminatingly through the frosted glass onto their thick crumpled blanket.

  Basically, being together was fun. Getting ready to go to a dance at a different school, she could now boldly put on thick woolen leggings, because Filya devotedly carried them around all evening in his bag while she bounced around to her favorite group, Ottawan, and howled like a banshee with her hands up. In principle, of course, everyone there was screaming, but the other girls, before screaming and bouncing, ran to the ladies’ room and spent a long time pinching their thighs, which were red from the cold. In a strange school, there was nowhere to put your ugly long pants, so young girls wearing pants over thin stockings raced there from all over town like Olympic athletes amped up from doping. It was good if the head teacher or PE instructor at that school didn’t force them to wait long on the front steps. When it’s minus fifty outside and gets dark at three in the afternoon, when people at bus stops rush the bus just to make out the route number, when fur cocoons roam the streets in the dark and fog and in this silence each person is a submarine unto himself, when champagne forgotten an extra half hour on a balcony on New Year’s explodes the thick bottle into tiny shards—in short, when ordinary winter comes in the North, Ottawan good times at a different school came at a very high price.

  The fun didn’t last long. A year after the wedding, Nina died. Filippov forgave no one, quit school, became a cynic, and got a job as fire warden at the local theater. At that point, the country was drunk on glasnost. Everyone was talking about everything, and there were virtually no more secrets, so Filippov had to crawl into the deepest darkest corner he could find. The provincial theater, infested with quiet no-talents and kind scroungers, could not have suited him better.

  The massive elderly janitor, a woman, who Filippov had to work nights with, once expressed her unambiguous attitude toward the resident Melpomene. After drinking half the bottle of vodka she’d laid in for her shift, she headed for the toilet. Since tsars don’t take the long way around, she decided not to go around the stage, and even that route she cut short. When he made his rounds, Filippov discovered her right on the dimly lit stage. The janitor, like a triumphant actor being given a benefit performance, was squatting in the very center of the turntable and babbling triumphantly in the dark. Filippov didn’t know what to think. He himself despised the whole local troupe by then, so he absolutely did not condemn the art-weary lady, but a month later she was found frozen to death on the outskirts of town, and he gave some serious thought to the theater’s mystique. At the time, he had yet to consider the cold’s unusual qualities.

  An intrigued Filippov hastened to the municipal library, where he came across Friedrich Nietzsche’s book on the birth of tragedy. Filippov gulped it down, contemplating the theater of antiquity and his own tragic lot, and in the reading room got to know the dark-haired but blue-eyed Inga, who was writing her thesis on Old Slavonic pronouns and bore a striking resemblance to Isabelle Adjani, whom Filippov adored from a black-and-white booklet, Artists of the French Cinema. Due to his lack of funds, the booklet had been stolen from the bookstore. In the photographs, Isabelle had barely turned eighteen.

  In the booklet’s photos, Filippov the young widower morbidly sought out the signs of another life foreign to him, and only these minor details—the glove on the table, the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray next to the white cup, the scattering of daisies on the mildly distraught Isabelle’s dress, the little dog in her arms—only they allowed him to believe in that world, that it was material, and that somewhere right now there was a Paris, where there were allées lined with plane trees and a river that didn’t freeze three meters thick and where no one jostled you in a long, mean line as you checked your icy mitten for your vodka coupon, hunched over from the cold in an enormous sheepskin coat. In principle, the flights of Soviet spaceships that the TV show Time repeated over and over during the days of his childhood and youth were much more real to him than a dog’s leash in the hands of eighteen-year-old Isabelle Adjani, which he suspected involved some kind of trick.

  Of the French film star and her unusual resemblance to her, Inga herself knew nothing, and for the most part she couldn’t have cared less. Nothing in the world could have made her agree to remain in anyone’s shadow. This young she-wolf wielded her otherworldly beauty at her own sole discretion. To Filippov’s question of why she’d given herself to him after their first meeting, Inga replied without thinking, “You look French.” Where she came up with that and what image she had in her head of a Frenchman remained a puzzle, but this assertion of hers flattered Filippov and also linked him to the black-and-white Isabelle Adjani not only because of Inga’s capricious beauty but also because of the suddenly acquired “French” status she’d bestowed upon him so unexpectedly and generously.

  After Nina’s death, Filippov hadn’t wanted to live, either. At the funeral, he pushed aside his family and classmates standing at the grave, leapt in, and demanded that they scatter earth on him, too. They refused, dragged him out of the cool, shallow pit, and brought him around as best they could. Within a few months, he had ceased to regret this. Apparently, he had a lot to learn about life, and it was too soon to leave without learning it. Inga, the tragic muse sent down to him, did not simply surprise him—she stunned him with her attitude toward love, sex, and the human being’s biological nature. Filippov was puzzled and disoriented. Taken aback. Evidently, this is what saved him. Her unbridled might, straight out of antiquity, shook him like a rag doll, and he awoke to life once again.

  Because sex was nothing more than sport, Inga changed partners the way a sprinter changes lanes at the stadium. For a couple of weeks, she’d run down one lane and then switch to another, the only difference being that the abandoned running lanes couldn’t plague her with their whining and broken hearts and lay peacefully right where someone’s hand had drawn them. In this sense, ideal sex for Inga probably would have been a superquickie with a real running track.

  One way or another, Filippov spent the two weeks given to him in diligent and delightful labors that distracted him from his sullen hatred for the world. For reasons of her own, which were obscure and therefore all the more alluring, Inga called these labors “riding.” She also called them Figure Sex School.

  They would “go for a ride” in all kinds of places. For Filippov, the most vivid experience was “riding” in the library’s listening room. The municipal library was justly proud of its huge collection of classical music, and a secluded room with soundproofing and a door that locked from the inside had been set aside there for normal people. No one could have imagined how well all this not just suited but seemed created for the obsessed Inga. The “ride” began to Beethoven, reached its culmination with Wagner, and concluded with a Boccherini minuet. Never before could Filippov have imagined anything more powerful and, at the same time, elegant. Apparently, it was there, gasping slightly, that she’d told him, “Yours is as stiff as a cliff. No, a lighthouse.”