Meanwhile, for some reason, she had a husband and daughter. When the child met Filippov, this taciturn four-year-old was supposed to call him Papa, which Filippov absolutely did not understand, but Inga lived by her own rules. If his mama was “riding” with someone at a given moment, that meant the rider was her papa. French and Papa—that’s how it had to be. Obviously, she was shielding the child from bad thoughts about the fact that Mama might get into this with some strange man.

  When she got bored, she suggested a three-way ride. She engaged her ugliest friend for the purpose and, as additional reserve, a friend of Filippov’s. Since the other girl barely counted as a person, in Inga’s understanding, it was his friend who played number three. He tried to demand a better part, but the blue-eyed brunette had firm rules about her girlfriends. In the end, her three-way consisted of unlucky Max and the other girl occupying the next bed, and Inga making biting jokes under the wheezing Filippov about how his friend obviously wasn’t a cliff at all and definitely no lighthouse. Max was a modest clock tower that always told the same time.

  “Five thirty,” Inga laughed underneath Filippov, but her laugh didn’t throw him off. The novelty of her attitude toward life just astonished him.

  At the time, he hadn’t read Aristophanes or Apuleius yet.

  Actually, the contrast between utterly innocent Botticellian beauty and total depravity didn’t torment the young Filippov for very long. Exactly two weeks after reading Nietzsche on classical theater, he took Inga home, where he made an unforgivable mistake. All this time she’d never once taken off her bra in front of him, saying the mood was wrong or there wasn’t enough time, as if taking off her bra took half an hour. But this time Filippov showed some grit—and barely managed to conceal his disappointment looking at her sad, swinging tits.

  “You know,” he said, being a young and honest aesthete, “I like your face more than your body.”

  A few days later, as sad as those tits, Filippov lay in bed with the ugly girlfriend, who glanced at the next bed and whispered to him hotly, “Will you marry me if I get knocked up?”

  By that point, the pain from Nina’s death was almost a thing of the past.

  Right before touching down, the plane swayed and pink Zinaida clutched Filippov’s shoulder, bringing him back to the dimly lit cabin. Addled by the quickly downed grappa and unexpectedly vivid memories, he didn’t even manage to say anything sarcastic after the passengers’ friendly applause upon landing, which usually annoyed him. He just rose silently from his seat and stood there meekly in the aisle, waiting for them to bring over the stairs.

  A minute later everyone else was standing as well. What power makes people jump to their feet after landing, knowing they won’t be let off the plane right away, remained a great mystery for Filippov. As he had long since noticed in his perpetual flights, nationality and citizenship played no role in this whatsoever. Americans, Europeans, Asians—virtually everyone liked to jostle in the aisle. Moreover, pulling on their coats and jackets, they worked their elbows so energetically that if you flew fairly frequently, you could well master the basic moves of martial arts. Even if you couldn’t elegantly dodge the next blow, you could at least quietly give as good as you got.

  This time, the passengers were clothing themselves in thick down parkas. Filippov could have sworn that at Domodedovo, at check-in, no one had had bulky winter clothing with them, but no sooner had the plane slowed down on the tarmac when literally everyone was holding a down parka, and some, snuffling, had already pulled on tall reindeer boots decorated with colorful beads. No fur-lined cloth coats were to be found, by the way, so the missionaries in the nineties had not come in vain. Filippov managed to be happy for his countrymen, but right then the kids started waking up. Considering the number of warm things they’d naturally forgotten about on the “mainland,” which now had to be pulled onto them fairly quickly, a faint wail rose in the cabin. Filippov’s grappa had run out, so he could do nothing to muffle the cacophony. Actually, he didn’t have to do anything; the kid nearby got a good crack from his own dear mama. Exhausted by the sleepless night, the seven-hour flight, her rug rat’s endless whining, her husband’s absence, and the drastic change of time zones, she wasn’t about to stand on ceremony.

  “Just try yelling again,” she clarified through clenched teeth, jerking the ties of his muskrat cap a little lower than his instantly silent but still menacingly half-open mouth.

  Filippov experienced a tremendous warmth for her. If she’d squeezed through the crowd in the cabin and quickly done the same thing with the other vile squallers, he would have been boundlessly grateful to her, but she’d had enough with her own.

  “Just you try kicking,” she told him ominously, bringing her straight index finger, as long as a tank barrel, up to his frightened face.

  The youngster decided not to tempt fate. Blinking, he maintained a patient silence while she sealed off his crying hole with a huge fluffy scarf. She pulled it around to the back of the kid’s head, and, to make quite sure, she stuck a white kerchief under the scarf. Evidently, she wanted to seal his mouth very securely.

  Now just try to shout, Filippov thought gleefully. You can just slobber there. He seemed to have forgotten why the locals covered their face with a scarf.

  Meanwhile, the scarf-winding epidemic spread through the cabin. Scarves, shawls, and kerchiefs twirled in the air, whistling like cowboys’ lassos. The people’s faces that had suddenly become dear vanished under this woolen arsenal so fast that Filippov, despite his aged misanthropy, couldn’t help but feel the sting of loneliness. Wool was eating people up, leaving nothing but shapeless dolls in the aisle.

  Filippov himself had nothing but his laces to wind around himself. He felt like an orphan in his stupid Dirk Bikkembergs coat, in the midst of this wool bacchanalia. He didn’t have a fur cap, either. The old woman who’d been sitting next to him and who now had mysteriously ended up several meters closer to the exit looked around, winked at him, and twisted her fur hand at her fur temple. She was evidently implying that Filippov had been too nonchalant for his own good with his Dirk Bikkembergs.

  The next moment all this swaddled realm heaved a sigh, stirred faintly, and, like a festive but silent Chinese dragon, crept toward the exit. As it went, the dragon shed on the emptied seats its crumpled newspapers, plastic cups, magazines, napkins, and other trash, which at that moment suddenly became sweetly nostalgic to Filippov because it all linked him to Moscow, his life, another world—not to what was whirling in an impenetrable fog outside the gray windows, awaiting him distastefully on the frozen staircase. By an effort of what in normal people passes for will, Filippov suppressed the desire squeaking piteously inside him to stay where he was. The plane would have to return to Moscow without him.

  The exhausted, smiling attendants pressed up against the cockpit door. From the open hatch, the cold insolently grabbed them by their pretty knees in their thin stockings, but they stubbornly bundled up in their fur-trimmed parka hoods and nodded at the creeping dragon and smiled, smiled, smiled. The pilots, who had hidden their smiles somewhere in back, were waiting for this all to be over and so were trying not to move a muscle where they were. Filippov pictured them standing quietly on the other side, their palms pressed to the steel-clad door, to make it at least a little warmer for the girls.

  “Thank you very much,” he said, smiling vulgarly as he approached the flight attendants. “It was perfectly marvelous.”

  “Good-bye,” the one Filippov had asked to show her ears responded on autopilot. “Thank you for flying with us.”

  Uttering this absolutely impersonally, in the next moment she recognized Filippov and livened up and managed to scowl, but the sight of his thin coat with a joke for a collar and nothing covering his balding pate evoked first surprise in her and after that pity. Filippov noted this sympathy flashing across her pretty face, and he lashed out.

  “I’m being met.” He winked. “Come with me? I’ll give you a diamond.”

  The expensive coat on Filippov said a lot. It was clear that a jerk flying from Moscow in threads like his wasn’t about to kick the bucket at a bus stop; he was probably being met by a big car as hot and steamy as a bathhouse. Any human feelings that might have been in the attendant’s eyes were extinguished, and in the voice of a Matrix autochthon she said a warm good-bye to the next passenger.

  When he’d taken a step out on the stairs, Filippov realized in a fraction of a second just how out of touch with reality he’d become in the last few years. Naturally, he knew he wasn’t going to go straight from the plane to the jet bridge in the fashion of standard European flights, but he was still counting on at least some kind of transport. Before, as far as he remembered, the passengers were met right there by a long rundown bus that then spent a long time looping around the concrete, flinging the arrivals from side to side. People leaned awkwardly and held on tight to poles and their suitcases; they swore and scoffed, but they did nonetheless ride. Now, having hopped the awful half-meter gap between the plane and the shaky stairs, Filippov looked mournfully at the file of passengers stretching through the icy fog, trailing across the airfield to the terminal.

  As he went down the metal steps, which rang alarmingly from the cold, Filippov covered his mouth with his hand to avoid taking in a full breath of icy air. He still remembered what that could lead to in weather like this. Thousands of diamond needles bit into his bald spot, cheeks, and forehead as he trailed behind the others. Clenched like a crooked little worm, he listened to his own breathing, which in the absolute silence now seemed to belong not to him but to the raspy, unintelligible, and infinitely lonely Darth Vader.

  Harsh, Filippov thought disjointedly. Totally harsh.

  He kept his head down as he walked, but he still made out another three large planes on the airfield. Next to each, passengers were crowding and hopping in place, languishing from cold and impatience, being allowed on the stairs only one at a time. After showing their boarding passes to the swaddled figure at the foot of the stairs, they hastily clambered on board. Filippov, for some reason, kept turning around to look at them, slipping on the iced-over concrete and tripping, unable to rid himself of the sensation that he was seeing this for the last time and that once they all flew away there would be no way out for anyone.

  This is how he understood what a terrified soul must feel, more or less, at being delivered to Purgatory in full view of those favorites for whom Saint Peter had already opened wide the pearly gates.

  “Tell me, is someone meeting you?” Zinaida had caught up to Filippov and latched on to his arm.

  From the window of the enormous SUV, which looked newly purchased and in which Zinaida’s husband had come to meet her, everything looked exactly as of old. The square in front of the station hadn’t changed one bit in the last ten years. Hunched recognizably over the entrance from the port highway were smokestacks wrapped in fiberglass. Naturally, Filippov remembered that the entire city was covered in a metal web of heating mains, but the sight of them was still a shock. There weren’t even any wires in the Paris sky, but here, along every street, and here and there over pedestrians’ heads, stretched kilometers of very sturdy pipes. From time to time, fiberglass was wound around the heating mains, where it hung in ugly shreds, swaying in the fog and wind. In his youth, this had reminded Filippov of Gothic novels, where there’s always something nasty hanging and swaying in dimly lit, gloomy, and damp vaulted dungeons.

  The indigenous cars busily cloaked themselves in clouds of exhaust fumes out in front of the airport, which had seen its share of sad northern views. The various Uaziks, like pushy, nimble riffraff, had old quilts stretched across their hoods, wintertime-style. Their side windows sported the squares of modeling clay Filippov had forgotten about a long time ago. Actually, he wasn’t sure the drivers used modeling. It may well have been some kind of putty. In the winter, for scientific reasons unknown to Filippov, these squares were the only unfrosted spot on the car windows, and those ensconced inside proudly gazed through them at the pedestrians suffering minus fifty.

  In the fog, vague silhouettes of new arrivals and the people meeting them scurried across the open space between the airport terminal and a small barracks-like structure. Filippov vaguely remembered that this barracks served as baggage claim. Why the bags and suitcases couldn’t be handed out in the warm terminal remained a mystery. Actually, questions like that didn’t occur to the hardy locals. They just scurried through the cold there and back, hauling their luggage, wrapped for extra security in blue plastic wrap. The heavier the luggage, the faster they warmed up.

  Looking at these strong and unpretentious people, their Uaziks, their heating mains, and their life, Filippov thought he might throw up. This wasn’t just a reaction to his hometown. The grappa had worn off, and his fussy system was demanding additional fuel. In vain hope, Filippov swiveled his head, but there was no alcohol in this stranger’s car. Then he cracked the door open, hunched from the cold, and leaned over the dwindling asphalt covered with oil spots and patches of gray ice. His body convulsed, sobbed piteously, and then moaned, but he vomited up exactly zero. The fog instantly thickened into the Demon of the Void.

  “I’m coming to get you,” the demon jeered. “Fill me up. I’m sick to my stomach.”

  Filippov took a deep breath and looked up at the gray sky, as if hoping to find the rabbit hole he’d fallen down into this Wonderland.

  “You shouldn’t have opened the door,” said the figure of Zina’s husband as it materialized directly in front of him out of the fog carrying an enormous suitcase. “I don’t care how stewed or baked you are. This is a Land Cruiser, not a Studebaker.”

  “Very funny,” Filippov said, politely praising his unfunny joke.

  Actually, in order to justify himself in his own eyes, he felt like immediately adding something insulting, but he didn’t have the strength left for nastiness. He leaned back in his seat and slammed the door. The next moment, Zinaida dove out of the fog next to her husband. She was carrying skis. She’d started to say something quickly and angrily, but her husband wasn’t listening. He walked around the car, opened the tailgate, put the suitcase inside, and said to Zinaida, “Let’s not do this now.” Then he slammed the door and started arranging the skis on the roof. Filippov listened to the racket, his own nausea, and Zinaida’s grating voice. Something had upset her. Something had happened while he was sitting in their car admiring his long-abandoned hometown.

  “What’s her name?” Zinaida asked irritably, getting into the front seat and slamming the door hard.

  “Listen”—her husband sighed—“I just traded in the car. Why do you have to do this?”

  “Pavlik, spare me about the car,” she wailed. “I’m not feeling so good as is. You still haven’t answered me, by the way, where you got the money for it. So enough of the smooth talk. What’s her name?”

  Pavlik turned around to Filippov guiltily and pulled his shaggy cap off his head, revealing an equally shaggy head of hair. In principle, it made no sense, given that state of affairs, why he needed a cap at all. Pavlik’s hair stood almost straight up like the brilliant Doc Brown from Zemeckis’s movie at the moment the time machine gets fired up. Maybe he was just afraid of his wife. In any case, being nearly bald at his forty-two years, Filippov did envy him a little.

  “Let’s just talk about this at home,” Pavlik said softly. “Why do this in front of a stranger?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” Filippov chimed in. “I like this kind of stuff. Only let’s stop by somewhere first. I need a drink. Otherwise, I might get sick and soil your floor mats.”

  Pavlik pulled a nice leather-sided flask out of the inside pocket of his down parka and held it out.

  “Rabbit out of the hat?” Filippov asked.

  “No, Hennessy.”

  “Not bad, either.”

  Filippov screwed off the top, and for a few seconds total silence fell over the car. Zinaida had clicked shut all her inner locks and was looking blankly through the windshield at the tedious fog. Pavlik was lost in his own thoughts, too. Taking small sips, like an old and very calculating vampire, Filippov sucked down some cognac. The smell of Hennessy gradually filled the inside of the Land Cruiser.

  “As for ‘Studebekker,’ by the way,” Pavlik said, “I can tell you that’s the wrong pronunciation. Actually it’s supposed to be ‘Studebaker.’ Catch the difference? ‘Baker,’ like in Baker Street. The London street where Sherlock Holmes lived. But here we say ‘Studebekker.’ That’s just how it happened historically. But it’s wrong. And by the way, that was the American truck that served as the chassis for lots of our Katyusha rockets during the Great Patriotic War. Not everyone knows that. Have you ever given their cabs a close look? You can tell right away. A Studebaker has these characteristic—”

  “Hey, man, want me to recite you a poem about your wife?” Filippov said as he twisted the cap back onto the cognac. “Just keep the flask close at hand.”

  “Sure. Did you write it yourself?”

  “No, it’s a folk poem.”

  Zinaida surfaced from her stupor and turned around in her seat. Her face now looked nothing like that happy, simple-hearted blob making googly eyes at Filippov on the plane. Now she was inwardly collected and apparently ready to give someone hell. She definitely didn’t look like someone who cared one bit that she had a glamorous Moscow celebrity riding in her car.

  Filippov struck a pose suggested by a couple of swallows of alcohol and, humming a little, started to declaim:

  “Rubber Zina, rubber Zina,

  I saw her in a magazine,

  I met her on a mezzanine,

  I dropped her on her little bean,

  And now she’s muddy, not so clean.

  Rubber Zina, rubber Zina,

  She didn’t bounce, which seems to mean,