She may be made of plasticine.”

  He fell silent. Pavlik and Zinaida looked at him, obviously at a loss.

  “Well?” Filippov asked. “Powerful stuff?”

  “Is it erotic?” Pavlik conjectured.

  “Why?”

  “The rubber part’s like a sex shop ad.”

  “No.” Filippov shook his head. “When I learned it, we didn’t have sex shops yet. At theater school, I had to recite this all the time for speech class. I had trouble with my z’s and s’s. A minor defect. The teacher found the poem for me specially. There was more, but I don’t remember the rest.”

  “Your memory’s back?” Zinaida asked Filippov.

  “Partly.” He nodded. “Can we go? At the moment I’m not nauseated.”

  Before leaving the port settlement for the highway to town, shaggy Pavlik asked Filippov where he should take him. Naturally, he should have gone straight to his friend’s, prostrated himself before him, repented, blamed the French producers for everything, and most important, asked for his help. But he chickened out. The illusory joy that grips us at the news that the dentist can’t see us today was suggested in his instant reply: “A hotel. A decent one. I do seem to recall there were a couple of so-called hotels.”

  “No, no.” Pavlik laughed affectedly. “They took down those woodpiles a long time ago. A lot’s changed here in general. When was the last time you visited?”

  “Never. Stop. Which way are you going? Town’s not there.”

  The car jumped out onto the port road and turned not left but right—where there was a crossing to the other shore past the big hangars. Not once in his whole life had Filippov ever used this crossing, but he knew that in the summer a ferry operated there, and in the winter, cars crossed the river, now a road of ice.

  “I need to make a stop.” Pavlik turned around, and a plea for understanding shone in his eyes, like a dog’s. “If I go from town afterward, it’ll be way too far.”

  “Then let me out. I’ll take a taxi.”

  “That won’t work,” Pavlik said to Filippov as if he were a child. “All the Moscow flights have arrived, and the taxis have gone off. You won’t find anyone at the port.”

  “Then I’ll take a bus.”

  Pavlik actually burst out laughing at those words. This annoyed Zinaida so much that she demonstratively covered her ears with her hands.

  “A bus? You really haven’t been here in a long time. They aren’t heated. We’ve still got those Soviet-made Liazes going around town.”

  “The fleapits?”

  Pavlik turned around with a smile.

  “Ah, you remember what they used to be called.”

  Filippov snickered. “Certain things you don’t forget.”

  “I’m afraid that with your outfit, you’d get downtown frozen solid—like a halibut in the store, or a cod.”

  “On the other hand, it’s a sure thing I won’t rot.”

  Pavlik readily burst into laughter. Despite his wife’s sullen silence, he was obviously thrilled at the unexpected meeting with the hometown boy who was famous in Moscow and who’d turned out to be such a regular and entertaining guy.

  Filippov looked at the puny firs flashing by in the fog, at the faceless warehouses and commercial structures pressed up here and there to the frozen earth behind the airport, at the tedious territory, so alienated from ordinary human needs and plans, and at the gray sky, which breathed such limitless and definitive indifference that even Filippov, who rightly considered himself a champion in that discipline, felt a chill somewhere between his shoulder blades that took his breath away, like when he was a kid and such a nonentity that the older kids didn’t even bother to drive him out of the yard during their games. He looked at all this and tried not to listen to Pavlik’s chatter informing him of temperature records, prices for heaters, and some endless something else—something that lulled him, reconciled him to his arrival, and put him in a traveling mood. It was all good. He was riding in warmth, not wandering around in search of a taxi through the chilled station square. The cognac nearby, instilling confidence in the future, now sloshed unctuously in a flask. And his difficult meeting and conversation had been put off at least until tomorrow. It was all good.

  No, it was good I flew in, Filippov told himself. I was wrong to be tense. Tomorrow we’ll resolve everything and I’ll go straight home. And then to Paris. Fuck hearth and home.

  Still, something was wrong. He tried to fight off a sense of mounting, totally irrational alarm, but this feeling was lapping somewhere very nearby, washing up against the far-from-firm shore of his cognac happiness, and little by little Filippov began to have his doubts about riding with strangers who had offered to drop him off in town but were now taking him God knows where. His old friend, paranoia, suddenly decided to remind him of the number of dead bodies picked up on the town’s streets by police patrols weekly during Filippov’s youth.

  “Seven or eight,” he muttered—and Pavlik immediately cut his chatter short.

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It’s not far now. Don’t worry. We’ll get you there safe and sound—better than DHL.”

  Pavlik laughed gleefully at what he took for his own wit and then started badgering Filippov with stupid questions. He wondered why Filippov’s beard was singed, what his creative plans were, what was happening with the weather in Paris right now, and how much a ticket to the Lido cost. To suppress his idiotic fears, Filippov expressed interest, too, inquiring about how much good fish was in town, whether he could have reindeer boots made, and why workers with blowtorches were sitting three meters up on the heating main at the exit from the port. Pavlik shrugged and replied that you could see that all over town, but he didn’t know the reason.

  “Maybe some kind of precaution.”

  “All over town? When you’ve already got a blast of cold like this?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s just the time for precautions. Have you been to a burial lately?”

  “Whose?”

  Pavlik glanced over at Zinaida, who’d had time to enlighten her husband as to Filippov’s star status but hadn’t warned him about his eccentricities, and now, swallowed up by something extremely important to her, she wasn’t listening to their conversation at all and obviously had no plans to lend her husband a hand.

  “Doesn’t matter whose. Have you ever seen a dead man in a coffin?”

  “Sure, I have. What does a dead man have to do with this?”

  “What he has to do with is you tell him about prevention. So he doesn’t get too upset.”

  “Ah . . . So that’s what you’re getting at.” Pavlik nodded warily, pretending to understand his passenger’s metaphor. “That’s, sure, yeah . . . You’re right about that. Only I was talking about something a little different.”

  “We’re all talking about something a little different, my man. So that’s enough avoiding the subject. Hand over the cognac.”

  As they drove up to the river crossing, Filippov felt good again. The incredible thickness of gray wadding overhead even seemed to have thinned slightly, and a little bit of sun had broken through to them at the bottom, though it didn’t make it any brighter. On the river, the fog had obviously gotten blown off, and as soon as the car had bounced over a gigantic pothole and jumped out onto the ice, visibility increased significantly on all sides.

  “Hey, wait up,” Filippov said. “I thought we were only going as far as the crossing. You mean you think you’re going to the other side?”

  “Oh, it’s very close here,” Pavlik said in a rush. “We’ll dash across in the blink of an eye. And there it’s right on the shore.”

  “The blink of what eye? Where’s the shore? I don’t even see it.”

  “Yeah, well, once we go around the island here you’ll see it right away. Or after the second island. There could be fog there again, though.”

  “What islands? Where are you dragging me?”

  “We won’t be long at all. I promise.”

  Filippov recalled flying into his hometown twenty or so years before, returning from Vladivostok, and the huge Il-62’s tiny shadow floating for an eternity—or so it had seemed at the time—amid the assemblage of barges, steamers, and launches. If it had taken a long-distance airliner that long to cross this river, then how long was it going to take this silly SUV? Especially if you took into account all the hummocks, detours, and islands.

  “Let’s go back,” Filippov said. “You’re getting on my nerves. I have to get to the hotel. I have a meeting.”

  The part about the meeting was a lie, of course, but even that failed to make the slightest impression on Pavlik.

  “I can’t,” he said, and he stubbornly gripped the wheel. “Anyway, no one forced you to get in the car with us.”

  Filippov looked over at Zinaida, the very image of a tedious smartphone addict—temporarily and, evidently, very seriously unavailable.

  Filippov’s father, who served on a submarine in the early 1960s, would beleaguer him with stories about autonomous excursions and about how the sailors, who went out of their minds during their long transits, would turn around the films they’d long since learned by heart and run them backward. This obviously entertained the submariners, but Filippov, who was now experiencing very similar feelings, was in no mood for laughter. His own film was winding in reverse, and he looked mournfully on landscapes that had come back into his life, and his memory, readily and with mocking love, wiped away the ice of the present.

  Around him now, the water splashed and the summer breeze was noisy; the mosquitoes droned about their millennial hunger, the seagulls screamed like mad, and the sun should just have been about to peek over the water’s edge. Everything here was practically like at sea: the sun rose not from behind the forest or a hill, but from behind this border of water that would have sufficed for an average-size European sea. This river only pretended to be a river, as it disdainfully put up with being called. In fact, it was a sea, of course. A sea. It simply moved sideways, palpably and heavily displacing itself to the right, opening up to the eye a flat space, boundless in every direction, where islands, ships, and motorboats were drawn like blotches. But it lacked what in a normal person’s perception makes a river a river—it had no opposite bank, and you got the feeling that it wasn’t even necessary, that a river could go on living calmly with a single bank, that that was enough for it, that having two banks was for garden-variety rivers as long as this one was wide. This one was so majestic, so divinely wide, that it was a great honor for even one bank, and had it had just a little more unearthly arrogance, then it might have gotten along without any banks at all, not a single one—just water and sky.

  Filippov huddled, shifting his distraught glance from the horizon to the snow-scattered island slowly slipping out of his field of vision. Stretching toward him from the smoothed channel was a path drowning in deep snowdrifts. Why it was here and who had trampled it through, Filippov couldn’t imagine. For a second he considered what kind of life might go on here in the winter under these conditions, and that horrified him. If a mightiness so unlimited was not only halted but simply immobilized, shackled in many meters of icy armor for virtually half the year—which meant half one’s whole life—then the reason for this silent immobility had to be absolutely omnipotent. The river exercised complete sway here over space, but the cold unequivocally held sway over the river.

  “Here it is, the other bank.” Pavlik joyfully poked at the windshield. “You can see it over there. Look, look. I told you we’d get there fast. You shouldn’t have worried.”

  Filippov leaned forward and saw a dark strip of forest.

  “That’s another half hour away.”

  “What do you mean another half hour? The road’s about to get better. The winter road’s packed down harder from this end.”

  With a quick jump onto a small hillock, after which the channel stretched along the Lena’s native bank, the car dove back into thick fog. Firs on both sides of the road kept floating out of the fog like the masts of sunken ships. The blurry images out the window were powerfully reminiscent of a child’s magic lantern show, like the one at the very beginning of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Pavlik cheered up noticeably and started back in on his rigmarole. Now he was informing Filippov about the weather and the qualities of the local fog, and somehow, imperceptibly, he inched into foggy phenomena in general, including in culture. Filippov missed the moment when he made the leap to theater.

  “So you do agree?” Pavlik said heatedly, demanding that Filippov confirm what he, entranced by the matte scenes out the window, hadn’t even heard.

  “What? Agree with what?”

  “That Shakespeare couldn’t have written all those brilliant plays.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’? He was a half-educated actor and couldn’t even write properly. You do know that he didn’t leave a single clearly signed document, right? He signed them with a dot! Can you imagine? He put a dot below, or some scribbling.”

  “And what of it?”

  “What do you mean ‘what of it’? We’ve been misled.”

  “You don’t like his plays?”

  “No, I do. But he wasn’t the one who wrote them!”

  Filippov shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

  Pavlik actually gasped from indignation and turned his head helplessly, as if he wanted to look Filippov in the eye and understand why he was mocking him like that. “Are you serious?”

  “You’re like a fledgling in a nest now.” Filippov started to laugh. “You know, they’re always showing them on the Discovery Channel. All naked and repulsive. Their mama flies in with worms for them, and they turn their little heads just like that. Come on, open your beak.”

  The rest of the way, Pavlik maintained an injured silence.

  Getting out of the car at some tall gates, he didn’t even answer Filippov about how long he’d be gone and, naturally, didn’t leave him the flask.

  When situations like this arose—and they had rather frequently in his life—Filippov couldn’t help but remember his production based on Chekhov’s Seagull, in which all the parts had been played by disabled people: A paralyzed Arkadina was wheeled around in a chair, and Nina Zarechnaya had no arms. Filippov had dreamed of finding a Trigorin without a head at all, and that remained just a dream. But Treplev was played by a seventeen-year-old boy with a dyskinetic form of cerebral palsy. The illness had turned the youth into a mumbling and muttering being incapable of coordinating his own movements, but had left him such a handsome and clear mind that Filippov, interrupting the rehearsal, could wait indefinitely for a vivid, paradoxical, and always fresh image to be fashioned from his mumbling.

  When this boy once told him that the criterion for determining disability was above all social inadequacy, Filippov immediately was overjoyed, diagnosing himself for all to hear with what he immediately termed communicative disability. He declared that he was no longer accepting any accusations of boorishness and greediness, because he, too, had a disability, moreover a tier-one disability, naturally, and you weren’t supposed to insult the disabled.

  Punished now for something he didn’t believe he was guilty of in the slightest, Filippov mourned the flask and didn’t repent his behavior one little bit. In fact, he couldn’t have cared less about the problem of Shakespeare’s authorship, or debates about whether Anne Hathaway was his wife, or about the fact that the present-day Anne Hathaway had recently gone to a fashionable Hollywood party without underpants, or about the liberal opposition, which, although it did sit on Moscow’s boulevards fully clothed, on the other hand defiled it like a true gypsy camp. He was deeply indifferent to everything discussed with such heat and splutter on television and the Internet. Moreover, he was sincerely amazed at others’ lack of indifference. For him, in fact, it was a puzzle why, say, a woman’s pubis, perfectly nice, no doubt—that much he allowed—could produce such a sensation. After all, everyone upset by the young actress’s discomfiture—even if we take it on faith that this discomfiture wasn’t intentional—had no doubt had something to do with or at least seen this remarkable detail at least once in their life. Filippov didn’t get where the novelty in this was, and he was prepared to agree a thousand times with Macbeth—no matter who dreamed him up, by the way—that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  Sometimes it even seemed to him that this “idiot’s tale” had captivated the ordinary person to a significantly greater degree than the circumstances of his or her actual life. Practically everyone Filippov knew liked to talk about what in no way affected them personally. It was as if they’d erected a fortress wall around themselves—a Great Wall of China of inexhaustible nonsense. They’d barricaded themselves in the inner courtyard of their paltry and, as it doubtless seemed to them, insignificant lives. While leaving this clumsy but inevitable self-humiliation on their conscience, Filippov nonetheless pitied those ordinary people.

  He absolutely didn’t care whether Shakespeare did or didn’t write his plays. But the fact that he himself was now sitting in a car in the middle of the forest, gazing out at this fog and this cold—for some reason, that was important. Filippov still didn’t understand that reason, but in the fog he was already picking up on if not its outlines then at least its scale.

  When Pavlik’s figure materialized out of nothing, directly in front of the car, Filippov shuddered. Unaccustomed to the local tricks with distance, he wasn’t prepared for objects popping up out of the fog at no more than a few meters away. None of the usual methods for orienting yourself in space worked here in winter. Sounds, too, drowned helplessly in this gray cotton wool. It was much easier to determine who was around you—or who was getting close to you—by using your imagination than by trying to actually see anything.

  “Come with me.” Pavlik exhaled a furious cloud of steam as he opened the back door. “I can’t manage myself.”

  “Where are we going? Have you lost your mind or something?”