Filippov clutched his coat collar to protect himself at least a little from the wave of burning cold that struck him.

  “You’re the one in a hurry. Let’s go. I’ll give you my cap.” Pavlik pulled off the shaggy construction with one hand while pulling on his hood with the other. “Be quick about it. You’re the one holding us up.”

  All the nasty presentiments that had gripped Filippov as they drove away from the airport rushed back like a nest of riled snakes. Pavlik’s shaggy cap didn’t help one bit.

  Jumping out of the car, he tromped hurriedly over the thin but firm crust of his sneaker soles, which stiffened instantly in the cold, but he couldn’t catch up to Pavlik, who was waiting for him beside a big house whose unfinished porch gaped like the wide-open abdominal incision of an unfortunate patient on an operating table.

  “Follow me.” Pavlik waved to him. “This way, this way.”

  He disappeared around the corner of the building, and Filippov beat a path after him feeling doomed. His hands, which he’d hidden from the cold in his pathetic pockets, were being pressed down by a cast-iron vise, his feet slid apart, and his breath seized up so harshly it didn’t remind him of air at all. Filippov got the definite sensation that he was breathing sparkly diamond needles that were poking into his warm, soft, defenseless lungs. Squeaking like a trapped hare at these strange attempts at breathing, and tripping a few times over construction materials frozen into the path, he wended his way to a huge metal container filled nearly to the top with construction detritus. Pavlik was pulling the container by the edge hard, trying to move it for some reason. “Help me!”

  Before Filippov could even contemplate what this was fraught with, he latched his frost-twisted claws onto the metal edge. In the next split second he was pierced by a blow that those condemned to the electric chair never have time to tell anyone about. Like Buddha under the Bodhi tree, he saw the truth and at last gained a full picture of the essence of human suffering.

  “Why don’t you have gloves?” Pavlik shouted in his ear. “Try the other side! Push from there. Push with your shoulder!”

  Filippov got unstuck from the container and hobbled over to where he’d been ordered. Leaning into the metal surface, he obediently began pushing the gigantic garbage bin, but his sneakers kept slipping ridiculously, and he slid to the concrete-hard snow. Since his hands were back in his pockets, he fell awkwardly, hitting his head with a booming thump. The shaggy cap came in pretty handy for the blow.

  “Come on,” Pavlik shouted from somewhere behind the steely sky. “On my count. One! One!”

  Filippov’s shoulder felt the container shuddering from Pavlik’s vain efforts and barely refrained from maniacal laughter. Sprawled out on the frozen earth beside the metal giant and having absolutely no idea what it needed to be pushed anywhere for, he pictured the scene as a bystander would, and realized he’d never seen anything funnier in his life. Without removing his hands from his pockets, he tried to get back on his feet, but he fell again, banging himself this time, too, and started laughing now in full voice.

  “What’s with you?” Pavlik said, appearing from behind the container and squatting beside him. “Why are you lying there?”

  “I . . . I . . .” Filippov was choking with laughter. “I’m tired. I stretched out for a nap.”

  “You shouldn’t lie down. Get up right now.”

  “Shouldn’t you go fuck yourself? Why’d you drag me here, anyway?”

  “Get up, I’m telling you!” Pavlik pulled on Filippov’s coat as hard as he could, and Filippov finally got back on his feet.

  “I have to get into the building,” Pavlik went on. “See the little balcony on the third floor? I have to move the container under it, and I’ll crawl up there.”

  Filippov leaned his head back and looked at the unfinished, railingless balcony.

  “Not through the door?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “That means no one’s home. We’ve dragged ourselves here for nothing.”

  “I have to make sure. They wouldn’t have left. I brought them the money.”

  “You’ll come again.”

  “I have to make sure no one’s here. They’ll ask me.”

  Filippov turned his head and noticed some big boxes heaped up by the fence.

  “Maybe those over there will work.” He jerked his head. “We can put one on top of another, and you can climb up.”

  A couple of minutes later, Pavlik had disappeared behind the balcony door and Filippov had wandered around the building toward the porch. He went up the steps and kicked the door. The lock clicked, and the door opened.

  “Come on in,” Pavlik said, letting him in. “It’s a lot warmer here. I’ll look on the third floor, too. I haven’t checked all the rooms there.”

  “You think they’re hiding from you?”

  “No, but they may just be sleeping it off. Construction workers. You know how that goes.”

  When they got back to the car, Filippov demanded the flask from Pavlik and didn’t take it from his burning lips until “beads of happiness” welled up in his eyes. That’s what he called the tears that came on after strong drink, when alcohol was drunk not by the shot, in one go, but poured into the system in a nice steady stream—like fuel going into the tank at a gas station.

  “I don’t understand,” Pavlik muttered, fussing with his phone. “No one’s home. Now there’s no one else I can call. What is this? Danilov told me for sure he’d be waiting.”

  “Listen, let’s go.” Filippov finally tore himself away from the flask. “Or else I’ll drink and drink—and I’m not eating anything. That’s bad for you. I need some kind of chow, otherwise it’s trouble.”

  As they drove back out onto the ice, a distraught Pavlik lost control of the steering and the car nearly hit a huge block of snow pressed like concrete.

  “Hey,” Filippov shouted, grabbing the handle over the door. “Let’s be a little more careful, my man. You might accidentally kill me.”

  Looking at the vast white field, he once again felt as if he were on a plane cutting through and hovering motionlessly above a solid shroud of clouds. He didn’t think he was claustrophobic, but occasionally in those moments he got a heavy feeling not unlike what he’d felt at the first funeral he’d attended. It happened exactly a year before his Nina died. Standing by the coffin of his classmate, who had drowned in this same river, Filippov couldn’t find the strength to look through the window in the lid at face level. The body had spent nearly a week under the water, so it was buried in a soldered metal box, the kind they were bringing home dead boys in from Afghanistan. His classmate’s name was Slavka, and he himself had only just returned from the army, having steadfastly withstood adversities he didn’t even want to tell anyone about. Slavka died trying to save children caught in a strong current. The huge metal coffin had been brought for him from the enlistment office, where Slavka’s father was the top official. Filippov had loved Slavka for his directness, for his powerful and utterly invincible naïveté, for his belief in the good, and that was why, even though in those days Filippov was already sure of the meaninglessness of life, he still couldn’t look through the window’s thick glass.

  “Look, over there, next to the island—it’s a car.” Zinaida pointed vaguely forward.

  Filippov leaned over and saw a cherry-red Zhiguli with tinted windows. For some reason the car was stopped not on the smooth channel but slightly to the side of the winter road, as if the driver had been on his way to the island but got stuck in impassable snow.

  “I wonder what took him that way?” Filippov said.

  “Maybe something happened?” Zinaida suggested.

  “Vodka happened,” Pavlik muttered. “They booze up and race around in their jalopies. Here’s where they ran off the road.”

  He pointed to the side of the road where a fairly tall snow parapet had been smashed through by the Zhiguli flying off.

  “By the way, are you aware that among the native population their system lacks the enzyme responsible for digesting alcohol?” Pavlik went on while Filippov kept his head turned, not taking his eyes off the orphaned car floating by out the window. “That’s why they get drunk so fast, you see. The Cossacks who came here in the seventeenth century quickly realized all this, and an epidemic began of getting the locals drunk.”

  “Stop,” Filippov yelled, pulling on Pavlik’s hood so hard that for a second he even let go of the wheel. “Brake!”

  Someone was running out from the snowbound Zhiguli, toward them, lifting his knees high. He was holding a tire iron. Waving the iron, he was shouting something, but they couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  Surprised, Pavlik, who had managed to stop the car, immediately put it in gear and leaned on the gas.

  “Stop! Where are you going?” Filippov dug his fingers into Pavlik’s jacket, but this time Pavlik deftly freed himself by jerking forward, bent over. “Have you lost your mind? What if they need help?”

  “What if it’s not help they want? What if they drove that way so we’d go out onto the ice? I can’t stop. I’ve got a lot of money on me, and anything can happen around here. It’s better you not know.”

  “Have you been watching too many Westerns or something?”

  “People drive this way all the time. They’ll help him.”

  Filippov turned around and for a long time looked at the man, who had finally climbed out onto the road, hurled his iron after them, and was shouting and shouting something and just wouldn’t stop.

  Twenty minutes later they drove back past the airport and hopped onto the road to town. By way of compensation for the long detour and less than delightful experiences, Filippov demanded Pavlik’s flask, which sent his mood on the upswing. Actually, after the fifth or even sixth foray at the other man’s Hennessy, he unexpectedly soured on it. Leaning back in his seat while deftly maintaining the look of an animated being, he rode totally prostrate past the port’s five-story apartment buildings, past the port school, and past the port’s House of Culture. It was here, shortly before her death, that his young—like him, barely more than school-age—wife liked to shake a leg. Filippov, who was then in his third year at the teachers college, made several attempts to horn in on her convoy, but he never did gain admission. Nina went to this House of Culture for folk dancing by herself. Red slippers, pinned blond braids, and sarafans whirled around there, but not for him.

  Who they did whirl for Filippov didn’t learn right away.

  The guys who lived by the port had historically been considered much cooler than everyone else. Their precious Montanas and Wranglers fit as if they’d been poured into them, because they’d been bought not in public restrooms and underground passages during fitful forays to Moscow but in actual brand-name stores in the Baltics and Warsaw Pact countries, where their otherworldly fathers had flown as crew commanders, copilots, navigators, and flight engineers. In the early 1980s, Toto Cutugno started singing for these ineffably otherworldly fellows way before the townies. After high school they didn’t go to the local literacy project, which for some unknown reason was called the “teachers college,” but flew off in big handsome planes to the Riga Institute for Civil Aviation Engineers, from which very, very few returned to the North, and those who did basked in the rays of feminine adoration, dropping words they’d picked up in Latvia, like “paldies,” “Jūrmala,” “Dzintari,” “beating the crap out of Balts,” and so on down the list. Compared to the insipid local boys, they looked like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, even if you took into account the fact that not a single local girl had ever heard of that film.

  Apart from the obvious Aeroflot eroticism, which rested not least of all on the elegant flight uniform—raglan leather jackets, gold chevrons, stripes, wings, and the other attributes of these modern and traditionally mischievous cupids—the flyboys occupied a special status in town strictly by virtue of geography. The only way to get from here to the mainland hassle-free was by air. Due to the permafrost, which was constantly afloat in summer, the railroad remained science fiction. Highway transportation was made extremely difficult by the abominable roads and the total distance between places. Naturally, heavy barges came and went when navigation opened, delivering to the city vital cargo, but who wants to feed the mosquitoes on a great Siberian river for weeks the way they did in the nineteenth century? In the cold, you could leave town by car over the winter road that any body of water turned into as early as autumn, but the epic distances and colossal risks easily killed any desire for follies like that. Even children knew that when it’s fifty degrees below in the taiga and the engine dies, you first have to set the spare and then the other tires on fire. While all this business is burning, someone might drive by. The warmth lasts about an hour and a half. If no one’s come by then, that means you’re SOL. Especially since you don’t have wheels anymore.

  So people loved their flyboys here. An awful lot really did depend on them. They garnered salaries inferior only perhaps to heating engineers. The people who worked at the heating plants had no competition.

  Considering all these circumstances, you had to admit that young, nervous Filippov, eaten up like cheese into one big hole by endless self-doubt, had zero chance against flight engineer Venechka. Where that guy had popped out of remained a mystery for a while, but soon after, well-wishers whispered that dance-rich Nina had met him at the Falcon, the cult—not that people said that then—Young Pioneer camp. This early erotic educational institution, which lived for the intense but brief Northern summer, accepted boys from port families and girls wishing to part with their innocence. The more innocent pubescents stamped dejectedly around the Pioneer campfire as “Signalers,” “Beacons,” and “Geologists,” while the proud scions of Aeroflot’s falcons got themselves such a hullabaloo going at camp that come fall the teachers’ councils in the city’s schools weren’t just counting their chickens. Moreover, for afternoon snack at Falcon they were given enormous bunches of grapes. The main fruit in the North in those days was the potato, but for their pampered children the flyboys could simply arrange a vitamin flight from Fergana.

  Nina got into Falcon without any pull whatsoever. Having among her relatives not even one worthless aviator, she suggested to the camp director creating a colorful and original—as people put it at the time—dance collective, and the director made it happen. So that summer Nina had herself some fun, big-time. She had only a year until her graduation exams, and she had to prepare properly for that unbearably boring period of her life. After that, she knew, there would be no time for trifles like sex. Studying is a schoolkid’s main job.

  But Venechka the falcon circled over the young’uns every summer. Or rather, preyed, as some of Filippov’s friends later described their attendance at receptions in European embassies. The main objective during these receptions was to grab as much as you could. Not so much to eat as to taste, sample, stick your finger in everything. And so it was that Venechka, instead of a summer vacation, when all the other aviators and their entire families climbed on board and winged their way south somewhere, cut his circles around the weakened little fools, easily getting everything he wanted from them. De jure, he was listed as a phys ed instructor at the camp; de facto, he worked like a tomcat for his cream. By light of day, he handed out shabby ping-pong paddles to the unnecessary and uninteresting lads; by night, he prowled under the windows of the camp counselors and purred about something eternal in his cozy phys ed cubby.

  In this sense, men fall into two main camps—canine and tomcat. The behavior of sexually mature cats with an eye to life differs strikingly from the rules of the chase in the dog world. While mutts band together to politely follow the lady of their heart and patiently await signs of sympathy on her part, tomcats couldn’t care less about their beloved’s feelings. They wear down the herd, chase a very frightened young female up a tree or into some dark corner, and after that, do their damnedest to get in her good graces. Flight engineer Venechka undoubtedly fell into the feline camp.

  It was way too late when Filippov—or rather, at the time, just plain Filya—learned about his young wife’s past exploits. Naturally, Nina hadn’t planned on continuing these summer “visits,” but after graduating and getting married, she suddenly felt like a grown-up, and the behavior she had previously justified by her lack of experience, virginal languor, and general eagerness to live now found justification in her eyes as an indispensable attribute of a married lady’s life. Anyway, that’s how they talked about it in the French films Filya—whose aestheticism and arrogance could be so tedious—was always watching. With the French, women were constantly cheating on their husbands, and they didn’t suffer from it one bit; in the end they could just take a gun and knock off a tiresome lover, or husband. Whichever. Those kinds of twists and turns intrigued Nina, but even under the influence of all those films she wouldn’t have sought out Venechka herself. Venechka fell on her like snow on her head in the wings of the municipal Pioneer Palace, where for old times’ sake Nina was still performing with the children at the New Year’s parties. He squeezed her damp hand and immediately suggested they put on a dance together at the port House of Culture. It soon became clear he was no more interested in choreography than he had been in phys ed.

  And they were off.

  Very soon after, Filya started being pestered by strange phone calls. If he picked up, no one said anything. Whoever was at the other end of the line was silent in anticipation of him getting sick of repeating his stupid and helpless “hello.” After a minute or two, Nina would always call a girlfriend, or her mother, or someone else, and agree to meet, but Filya wasn’t in the least suspicious. He was so wrapped up in himself, his future, and his assured destiny that he thought these calls were a coincidence that for some reason were getting more frequent but were no less silly.

  One time an unknown male voice set up a meeting with him, promising him significantly to impart something important, but Filya didn’t attach any great importance to it. Or rather, he did, but in a completely different sense. In those early and fairly awkward years, he was deeply convinced that everything that happened to him was related only to his future greatness, and if someone mysterious wanted to talk to him, then that very mysteriousness was directly related to nothing other than his, Filya’s, chosenness. The voice warned him to show up alone; Filya would recognize him because he’d be holding an English-language Rolling Stone.