# The Fourth Hypostasis (A novel-hagiography)

Василий Яковлевич Пучеглазов

ANNOTATION The novel is about the Russian "generation of realization", and its hero becomes a professional philosopher capable of realizing himself and the time. The form of the novel is the hero's journey to the mountains and then his ascent to the summit, during which the seven periods of his life are reviving in the returns of his sleep, from the tempestuous "rocker's" youth in the late sixties up to his leaving to nowhere in the beginning of the nineties, and in these recollections, the life of the seven friends of his youth is passing in different ways before him. Each period has its own meaningful content of realization, which is given artistically, without turning into philosophy proper, and the hero realizes not only the spiritual state of himself and the world around him, but also the "germinating of God" in his soul, for just to meet with God he goes to the unknown summit, spiritually--over the course of his life, physically--over the duration of the endless day of the novel. The hero is a man of the Renaissance type, and the life of the spirit is combined in him with the active bodily life, so that his self-knowledge presents him with many surprises in the sphere of love as well.

Copyright2023 Vasily Poutcheglazov (Василий Пучеглазов)


ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vasily Poutcheglazov (Василий Пучеглазов) I am a Russian writer (Russian not only by birth); born August 2, 1949 in the family of a theater managing director in USSR. I have a medical higher education, and before my artistic career, I was a surgeon by profession and served as a medical officer in the Navy. Since 1976 I have been a professional writer and playwright, and also a stage director of theater and variety. In the Soviet Union and in the Russian Federation, I have four big novels published as books and a dozen of plays staged in various dramatic and musical theaters, partly by me as a stage-director, not to mention my other publications and my other scenic productions, as well as my permanent literary work in poetry and my other four Russian novels and four English ones or the other plays of my dramaturgy. Considering that as an artist, I ever deemed absolute freedom as an indispensable condition of creation, I ever existed rather autonomously in the culture of both USSR and the Russian Federation, providing my freedom during 35 years with the help of my theatrical professions, in which I was quite successful. Having no acceptable literary context in the domestic culture, for over half of a century, I had been creating such a context in my own independent literature encompassing all the literary genres; that's why my collected works is titled "Universe" or "Russian Context", and I call myself just a "Russian writer", and not "soviet" nor "post-soviet" one.

As I am a citizen of Israel from the end of the last century and have a good command of Hebrew, since 2012, I live in Israel (due to family circumstances).


PREFACE This novel could have been considered historic, however, The Fourth Hypostasis was originally written in Russian, moreover, it was begun by me in summer 1991 in the Soviet Union and completed in December 1992 already in the Russian Federation, that is, I had been writing this novel at the moment of the collapse of USSR as my third big novel about the "golden thirty years" of the soviet socialism in the post-Stalin period. Why after another thirty years, I decided to write the English version of the novel, although it defied translation due to the extremely Russian character of its language, and I had in fact to write it anew so as to create its English adequacy, having replaced all my poems in it, apart from anything else? Because the aforementioned socialism was the first people's democracy in the European Mediterranean civilization, which originated in Antiquity, given that the Russian civilization was its integral part with the same Renaissance man and his freedoms in the center, while the Russian culture from the end of the 18th century was none other than the last Renaissance in sequence of several European ones. For the first time in history, such Renaissance men created their state of "People's Democracy", and for the first time, after all the horrors of the first half of its existence, this state attained the nationwide level of culture and the worldwide scope of the general thirst for knowledge among the soviet people in its second half, though the natural development of the civil society in the soviet system gradually invalidated the decaying dictatorship of the communistic impostors, and this incompatibility eventually wrecked the artificial mendacious system from within. Since my hero, a professional philosopher, is realizing all that during his life, the disappearing soviet Atlantis is resurrecting in his recollections in order to remain as the "eternal present" of the novel containing all the insoluble conflicts and problems of the Renaissance essence of the soviet society, albeit after the breakup of the Russian-Soviet civilization together with its culture and the Russian philosophy continuing in the soviet country, despite the unsuccessful attempt of the Bolshevist regime to substitute the communistic ideology for the free cognition of the then Russian thinkers. To my mind, this Atlantis deserves to be seen as it is in reality by English-speaking readers, too, for it is the former peak and culmination of the whole Western European civilization, especially as the breakthrough in literature that came about in my novels in Russian in 1985-1992 was only biding its time since then to be re-created in such a global language as English, whereas the post-soviet Russian Federation had nothing in common with the two centuries of the Russian Renaissance, and it was no accident that I had been writing the English version of the novel in the similar historic situation in 2021-2023 years, that is, at the moment of the next collapse of this state.

As an artist and thinker, I am convinced that the Russian civilization has to leave some comprehensive symbol summing up the experience of those two centuries, including its soviet period, and that the Russian literature has to reach the highest level of its spiritual aspiration in some artistic completion of its great beginnings. I believe that the reaching of such a height has come to fruition in this novel written anew in the other language in the other epoch in the other country.

Vasily Poutcheglazov


THE FOURTH HYPOSTASIS

A novel-hagiography

by

Vasily Poutcheglazov


"Human being is memory here..."

Bez (Russia, the end of the 2nd millennium AD)


I

To live he no longer wanted--he wanted to drink.

The dazzling white snows of the distant rocky peaks icily shone in the effulgence of the southern August sky melting from the midday heat.

Amidst the withering dusty set yellowness of maize fields, on the hot road asphalt smelling of fuel oil, in the heavy sultriness over the plain and in the suffocating exhaust fumes of the roaring engines of the automobile metal rushing by, the mountains seemed to breathe the temple coolness and self-immersion, promising the peace and consolation for which he had cut off all his forty-year past more than three hours ago and toward which he was advancing since then, by airliner at first and then by the delaying local bus, thither to the wild mountain gorges up to the last highest point of the bus route and further to one of the proud ice-covered summits, whither he would have to be ascending on foot as long as he would have the strength to go and either to climb the very top or slide off some nameless precipice of this mountainous country not yet defiled with health resorts and climbing base camps. Because he was going to those mountains not as a tourist, but to die most likely, and, of course, he needed neither a company nor any chance witnesses of his maybe absurd finale.

In essence, all his life was rather absurd, and today its outward successfulness and seeming purposefulness did not deceive him any more: there was not a grain of sense in it by now, while without sense, such a thinker by vocation and professional philosophical credo as him had nothing to live for; in the life devoid of sense, he was gradually losing the very desire to live--to continue his usual masterful acting for the public in which he was actively engaged from his young days, saving himself with such external artifices from the inner emptiness arising sometimes in his soul and from the strange feeling of the awareness of some failure growing keener in the course of time and calling in question all the ways of realization that were passed by him and appeared to have no prospects as well as his own life, quite successful in other aspects; being deprived of sense--not general and not abstract, but even if derivative, yet individual sense of his human existence and of his presence in the flesh on this planet--all the rest of it that once formed as his objective reality was becoming unbearably tedious, onerous, and absolutely unnecessary.

This sweltering, excessively noisy and colorful, foothill decorative framing of his inner insensibility seemed unnecessary to him, too, just as his athletic body, slightly perspired under his light safari shirt, that had not grown more infirm in the least even by the age of maturity and that was not at all liable to the acquired ailments of his coevals overindulging in the joys of life; and although in order to get rid of his present senselessness, he should have probably followed their example and plunged into the same exclusively practical affairs-problems and "relaxation at leisure", today he was alien to their "normal pastime" and unable to mask his alienation as before. Every adaptability had its limits, whereas all he did from childhood was adjust himself to contemporaneity which became more and more foreign to him, and he tried in vain to find some suitable form there for his initial incompleteness and all-embracing versatility, finding, naturally, only masquerade likenesses of son, friend, beloved or husband, of student, scholar, lecturer, father or brave sportsman in the changes of his masks and achieving a certain involuntary originality at best that was barely expressing his genuine self (or, perhaps, lack of any self, as he assumed again and again, making sure of the falsity of his next disguise).

No, no, that's enough! In his incarnations, he performed virtually all available roles, and at times he was carried away by them up to self-renunciation, almost selflessly fusing with the character being represented by him in the temporary disappearance of both the histrionic distance and any need for himself real and unadapted, however, every substitution eventually revealed itself in all its bare unattractive commonness and the absurdity of its generally accepted widespread affectation and spuriousness; and these discoveries of his true individuality and of the clandestine inscrutable space of his soul, these "suddenly", unexpected as the inspirations of his mental insights, little by little constituted the invisible stairs of his spiritual ascent, time after time leading him from the past into the new dimensions of his freedom, where his spirit was outgrowing persistently by degrees the everyday restrictive shell of his new role, until it turned out that the stairs (apparently, according to some perverted logic of his independently elemental development absolutely not reckoning with the dictates of any "objective reality") led neither up nor down, but into his present emptiness; and had he stopped on one of the steps of it, he could have either lived his gay life of playboy to the full or endured his destiny of toiler and blatherer or held sway over someone and grumbled peevishly at the willful people or vegetated in philistinism, wasting thus the rest of his earthly existence, but after he had allowed this potential infinity (the notorious "existence" that had come into use as a popular term from the middle of the twentieth century thanks to the existentialism borrowing it from the philosopher Kierkegaard, the Danish perspicacious opponent of Hegel the Great, who coined this term) to unfold itself from an primevally-cosmic inchoate germ to the, alas, meaningless grandiosity of his concrete fate, he had come neither to himself nor to the world, but to the vacuum of the global boredom that had engulfed all his former meanings and feelings, where he was suspended in mid-air ever since as an impartial detached observer and where humankind, taken as a whole and in its private ordinary manifestations, could cause nothing but a feeling of disgust in his indifferent consciousness.

"As for such overly great ones, by the by," he thought, wiping the fine beads of sweat off his clean-shaven face with his handkerchief. "It was Hegel who liked to repeat that the way is everything. The way is everything--indeed..."

Here he was forced to interrupt his self-reflection. Having puffed a cloud of hot dust at him, the local decrepit bus pulled up at his signboard bus stop at last. This repulsively-yellow shabby rattletrap with its small square windows painted white in the upper half from the sun was supposed to be the vehicle of his travel for some hours and to convey him to a tiny settlement with some immediately forgotten guttural name in those distant unknown mountains.

Although he was the only one who was getting on the bus here through the single door, the stuffy narrow passenger compartment was already crowded, and after he spotted a vacant seat only in the back row in close proximity to the heated motor, he went with his gym bag down the aisle, stepping over some sacks, string bags, backpacks, and big wicker baskets by which his way was encumbered, and choking with the summer strong smells of sweaty clothes, hot rubber, nitro paint, onion-garlic, and flower-scented cheap eau-de-Cologne mixed with the reek of tobacco and home hooch and thickly flavored with the insipidity of the sandy dust settling outside the panes and the pungent stink of the leaking petrol in addition. Notwithstanding that the windows were wide open, such stench was creating an extremely heavy atmosphere for the intellectual unaccustomed to these rural odors; and if it were not for the light warm draught that began to fan over his face when the bus started, he would have been sitting as before, his nose buried in his handkerchief, and he could hardly have continued his joyless thoughts shortly after the bus had set off.

Unhurriedly carrying him away towards the intended denouement, the bus was running across the plain--now past the palings of the slender trunks of Lombardy poplars scarcely casting a shadow and the low pale green walls of the corn stalks with dry leaves peeling off like tatters of parchment now among the vast fields of wheat gilded by the sun and looking trimmed behind the dispersed roadside blueness of cornflowers interspersed with the grass-pink squares of undersized clover--passing by the clusters of one-storey brick houses roofed with slate and the white wattle-and-daub huts surrounded by the orchards, the crowns of which were strewn with the amber of tangerines, juicy peaches, apricots, pears, cherry-plum and quinces and the branches of which were bending under the weight of big red apples, ripe purple plums and shiny burgundy cherries, in the enclosure of various fences defending the small holdings of these modest estates from encroachment on their rights of private property--leaving behind the wooden shacks of country general stores, the plywood boards of advertisement of films in village movie theaters, the long buildings of dairy farms with cattle-pens, the large yards for tractors and combines, the barns and granaries, pig sties and sheep-folds, and the other agricultural erections and little dingy workshops. On the outside some folk were working or sitting on benches near the gates and wickets or loitering about in the glaring sun, but being jolted on his hard seat, he gazed blankly both at those tableaux vivants gliding by and at the solitary clumps of the walnut trees that flaunted their spherical crowns in the middle of the plain ("Only that which grows freely takes its own form," he was formulating in passing), not hearing the untranslatable talk of his fellow-travellers, the black-haired swarthy women wearing colored or black headscarves and worn-out dark dresses and the hook-nosed men with weather-beaten tanned faces in grey or black jackets and faded shirts, among whom he was a stranger, entirely immersed in thinking about the way of his life approaching the end and in summing up his disastrous experience, though he did not intend his final conclusions for anyone, and now they were useless to himself.

The hot draught of headwind was blowing in through the windows on both sides, creating the illusion of an airing in the stuffed belly of the bus; he settled his legs on his shoulder gym bag standing before him, and he could always wet his parched throat with the water from the plastic flask taken by him for the road; so his last journey was relatively comfortable; but, nevertheless, his previous sleeplessness lasting several days and his tiredness accumulated over many years told on his being awake, that's why, when the heat, jolting and preceding emotions finally overpowered him, he began to nod off.

"The way is everything," he was repeating, already sinking into sleep. "But what is the result? The result is equal to naught... From naught to naught--that's all the way... And all the philosophy, too... And all the life... And the universe... From naught to naught... The way is everything, and naught is everything: the way is in the realization, while naught is in the potentiality... And so it's going circle after circle, eternity after eternity: naught--way--naught, naught--way--naught... In essence, isn't all that the same?.."

The fathomless timeless cosmos of soundless slumber closed round him, and his life, as though being pieced together from the countless mosaic fragments of his memory, suddenly resurrected in him and returned in all its stereoscopic fullness and physical tangibility, beginning anew immediately with his youth, with the first glimmers of his genuine consciousness which unintentionally skipped his childhood, so significant, so eventful, and so rich in impressions, but too chaotic, incoherent, and unintelligible; and he again began to live it, so that his life would have passed for the last time before his sober mind's eye today, again leading him on his path of destiny travelled by him then and building the concluding ephemeral panorama of his realization and of his movement towards clarity with overcoming myths, illusions and fallacies, the result of which was his present total loneliness.

The blissful weightlessness of dream embraced him for a moment, and having vanished from this world of the early nineties, he found himself in his past...

*

His knees clad in the taut soft leather of rocker black skin-tight leggings were squeezing the trembling warm metal hips of the red Jawa slightly snarling under him; pressing the leather tough saddle with his tensed buttocks, he rested the impenetrable thick soles of his lace-up military boots against the fluted footpegs, and a black leather jacket with zippers fitted snuggly to his athletic torso; his strong face was covered with a transparent visor, whereas his shaven skull was protected with a glossy black helmet with white zigzags drawn on it, and his hands in spiked gloves firmly held the heated motorcycle by the handgrips of the steel nickel-plated horns of the handlebar.

Like an imperious rider of cast equestrian statue, straddled a furious man-made beast, he was the stopped speed itself and audacity-intrepidity-bellicosity-pitilessness personified, as he just was undoubtedly at eighteen, in June of that crucial year when the student riots, broken out in Paris, triggered the anti-bourgeois unrest raging all over Europe, on the eve of either his joining the ranks of the peaceful soviet students or--as an inevitable alternative--the conscription for two years and his compulsory military service in the barracks of the valiant Red army, where, to tell the truth, he had no desire to go.

But the forthcoming entrance exams were to begin two months later, while during the year of his post-school adult loafing without a specific occupation and of his occasional earnings for an independent life from repairing tape recorders, radio receivers and other household appliances, he had learned by heart what he should have had to know, for with his memory and innate intellectual faculties, he never had problems with studying; so now he could quite afford to "unwind" and ride in their high-speed town gang along the Black Sea coast, especially as neither distance nor other hindrances and obstacles could stop such a motorized close-knit team: wherever they appeared, they behaved like masters everywhere, and they knew how to stand up for their rights, considering that each of them was a hard nut to crack and a dab hand at fisticuffs, given that they respected not only box but also karate, since in the city they frequently practiced in night battles now with brainless louts from the outskirts now with the pestering militiamen, who were wont to catch them one at a time and bludgeon the restive youth so as to knock some sense into their heads on behalf of the law-abiding citizens demanding that these "suicides" should stop their motorcycle racing on the deserted avenues of the capital by nights and cease disturbing the sleep of the honest toilers after the day's accomplishments at the workplace.

As soon as he read the directions of roads on the blue traffic sign, the heartrending howl of many motors with removed mufflers overtook him, and he immediately disappeared in the midst of an impatiently snorting horse herd of the growling Jawa motorcycles with high handlebars and glittering crash bars and with bright advertising stickers on their plastic windshields. Those steel stallions were likewise straddled by the cohort of the dashing helmetheaded equestrians encased in leather panoplies and jean sacking that were bandying exclamations with one another in the roaring of their tamed wild beasts blocking the highway, with folded tarpaulin tents, stuffed bags, and cans of gasoline, lashed to the croups of luggage racks. However, they weren't going to call a halt here, and after making out what was their right road, so to speak, they abruptly rolled the throttle grips toward them all at once--"Who will be first?"--and with a deafening screeching howl and a hoarse roar of freeing, their powerful machines darted forward and rushed along the wide thoroughfare, stretching into a tearing column and bypassing the slow-moving trucks and refrigerators or pressing the frightened motorcars to the side of the road while they, from the excess of boyish foolhardiness, every now and then tried to outdistance each other at breakneck speed, flying by the rival in the extremely risky closeness.

Their first respite was toward evening in an old-fashioned restaurant with a colonnade at the entrance and the white Kremlin tulle curtains, which was situated at the fork in the road, where the other highway branched off from the motorway to some town. Having moved the tables together and laid out their eye-catching helmets with lightnings, dragons, skulls and stars on the banisters above the motorcycles lined up below, they settled down on the cool veranda, devouring the served meat with an enviable appetite of hungry predators and washing it down with cold mineral water on the occasion of a long motorcycle race. They hadn't taken the urban damsels on their trip, because there were quite enough cuties for every taste on the sea, and was it worth carrying such a burdensome load and such unnecessary worries from God knows where; therefore, their men's dinner was going on in silence, without women's chatter and to the accompaniment of the twittering birds reluctantly arguing in the foliage of a giant poplar, and to the crunch of gristles on the strong fangs with the gurgling of the fizzy liquid pouring into the young throats; besides, from the half-empty adjoining hall with the blades of the big ventilators lazily spinning under the ceiling, they could hear the drunken voices of some local aborigines who were boozing in wait for the evening arrival of the orchestra near the low stage with the indispensable piano in profile and a drum kit upstage.

While sipping coffee after the meal, they lit up cigarettes and lounged in their hard armchairs with wooden arms, enjoying the short rest before their final spurt to the no-man's wild beach which they had staked out last summer, for, judging by their calculations, they were supposed to reach it before nightfall, unless their engines let them down or the traffic inspectors picked on them. The waiter had brought the bill and evaporated somewhere, and there was still plenty of time ahead for the felicity of satiety and coolness; so they did not hurry to crawl out into the sun, dragging out these rare minutes and exchanging thoughtful remarks about the technical condition of tires, springs and internal combustion engines, whereas their recognized leader and treasurer Chris was mechanically fanning out the banknotes, allocated to the waiter, again gathering them into a skinny bunch of money by the caressing gesture of an inveterate sharper.

It was customary in their circle to Americanize names so as to make them sounding laconic and sharp, like a flick of the whip: "Bez", "Bob", "Sam", "Yul", "Pete", "Jack", or to dub someone in a similar way, corresponding to the dominant of his personality. Chris, for example, was shaven-headed, cold-blooded and taciturn, like the hero of the famous Hollywood Western "The Magnificent Seven", while he was called "Hor", alias "Horus", the ancient Egyptian falcon-headed god of the sky, because of his interest in Hellenism with the outstanding Roman poet Horace Flaccus figuring, in particular, in the Latin poetry.

"Hullo guys!" he heard behind his back and, half-turning, saw a bumpkin of heavyweight build in his thirties, who had barged in the veranda from the restaurant hall, red in the face from the vodka drunk by him. His nylon white holiday shirt with rolled-up sleeves was dark with sweat stains under his armpits and on his protruding belly; his loosened tie with a peacock's eye rakishly hung askew; his blue eyes swollen with the fat of his early obesity were staring at them with complacent obtuseness. In short, the one who stood before them was a typical "prole" depicted in the dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell that was forbidden, yet going the rounds in the samizdat despite the prohibition. By now, this type was sodden with drink, and his intoxication made him aggressively pedagogical, wherefore he was eager, apparently, to teach a lesson to the overly exotic youngsters and, accordingly, to get a sock on the nose in response.

"Hey you rookies! Why don't you answer the sergeant's greeting?" asked this soviet loud-mouthed specimen, too familiar to them from their previous clashes, not receiving an immediate rebuff.

"Do you think, shitters, if you've dressed up as fascists, you can put on airs in restaurants?" The warlike rowdy flied into a rage at once and continued, interlarding his indignant speech with traditional obscene copulas. "Who turns to you, man or who?"

"Or who," grinned Chris sitting at the far end of the table. "You hegemon of the revolution better go to your lawful bottle to swill your vodka and don't ask for trouble."

But it looked as if the "hegemon" had difficulty in grasping the situation that was fraught with real complications.

"I greeted you pups, and why I don't hear anything?" exclaimed the local bullyboy demanding discipline and insisting on aggravating this situation. "Too proud to be polite?"

"What, Chris," said Bez, lean but sinewy and quick-tempered, pressing his cigarette in a weighty cut glass ashtray, "it's rather time to greet him, I think."

"What a country!" sighed their sarcastic lanky teaser Jul. "Wherever you spit, you always hit some snout!"

"You baldy!" the insistent adherent of mutual respect suddenly concretized his claims. "Are you dumb or what?"

And for no apparent reason, he slapped the bald lad fatherly on the pate with his sweaty clammy palm.

"Hor," inquired the always calm sturdy chap Sam, a boxer, a techie and an ace stuntman with steel nerves, who was able to fly from the springboard on a racing motorcycle over several cars or to ride, balancing, on the parapets of the embankment. "Maybe you'll allow me to bang this yokel on the noddle?"

"I'll handle it myself," he politely declined the offered assistance, without reacting to the boorish familiarity. "I bet I'll fell him at a blow."

"I wager a pack of cigarettes Camel," Sam held out his hand. "His mug is large-scale enough, so be accurate."

"Agreed!" he shook the outstretched hand.

"Then you're an arbitrator. Okay?" he asked a brawny guy in a leather homemade vest on the naked body sitting next to him, their guitarist and jazzman, conspicuous by the red stubble of a trimmed crest from forehead to crown.

Having straightened like a released spring, he suddenly leapt to his feet from the armchair and swung round to stand before the local Neanderthal in all the splendor of his black and white ammunition; but after casting a glance at the sweaty hulk puffing alcohol fumes and causeless hatred, he understood that a punch on such a heavy square jaw might prove too ineffective for a real knockout, meanwhile his blow had to be as single and decisive as a blow in a dangerous unequal fight, when he ought to have put out of action the first opponent without fail, in order to grapple with the others afterwards; however, before witnesses, he couldn't afford to cripple this stupid drunk bull, and many tried techniques of striking blows at the known weak points were, alas, inadmissible.

"Tell me, baldy," too gregarious a lover of revelry and drunken brawls uttered merrily, seeing some brat, puny enough in comparison with him, at arm's length from his huge fist. "Who is it?"

And this merrymaker poked his sausage forefinger at a round badge with the image of a smiling young man with a droopy moustache and a mop of hair.

There was written "John Lennon" on the badge, yet in English, whereas the uncouth brawler could hardly speak any language but his smutty vernacular; and having professionally sized up the trajectory of his blow, he stepped a little back to the table.

"Friedrich Nietzsche," he answered. "The first thesis: Mankind does not advance."

"What?" his feeble-minded interlocutor didn't catch his meaning.

"Quotation," he explained. "Philosophical heritage."

"By the by, Pete," without looking back, he addressed the pretty youth with a small black mustache and the same mop of hair in a spotted camouflage jacket of ranger. "Do you remember that scrap on the dance floor in the park? It's my best one..."

As if toppling on the table, he leant back and delivered a long oblique blow of his left foot. His heavy boot slammed into the defiantly jutting chin that was just within his reach, and, for a wonder, he hit the mark: having given a snort and flung up his mighty arms, the stunned unlucky initiator of an unrealized fray collapsed flat on his back right into the open door behind him with a distinct knock of his head against the parquet of the hall, and the sudden swift fall of his bulky unconscious body caused the common amazement of the local habitués peacefully eating their hot peppery kharcho and cold kvass okroshka with horseradish and sour cream in the pause between drinks.

The same instant, Sam, who had lost the bet, threw his armchair away and burst into the hall after the fallen boozer, where he occupied the exit to the veranda like a famous Spartan and advised the carousing company taken aback to carry out the body, while the far-sighted Chris loudly stopped the comrades-in-arms that already jumped to their feet to rush into battle and recommended them "not to break the furniture".

"Well, guys, it's time for us to vamoose," Chris reasonably determined the exacerbation of the situation, laying the due payment for the consumed dishes under his glass lest the wind would blow away the banknotes.

"Chef!" their chieftain whistled commandingly for the waiter through the large window of the hall. "Take your money here!"

Then, leading by example, Chris leapt over the rail with his helmet in his hand to his faithful steel steed, for at present, they had no time to pick a scuffle; and following the leader, all the rest started snatching their helmets and leaping into the yard one after another, whooping and yelling at parting.

"Sam, I won!" he shouted, laughing, from the banister to his friend covering their withdrawal, and making off from the hospitable restaurant, he saw how, with an accurate straight jab, Sam floored some infuriated clodhopper and sent him flying onto the bawling "support group" huddling between the tables before the door.

Sam, as usual, was the last to leave. Landed near his destrier, already in the helmet that he had pulled on his head on the go, he led his motorcycle by the handgrips at a run toward the leather-metal throng waiting for him with the roaring engines, whereat all the rocker's brotherhood burst into Indian victorious screams; and when Sam started up the engine and jumped into the saddle of his racing mustang like a daredevil cowboy, their motorized band ripped off to the exit from the small dusty yard after him under fire of the bottles flying at them from the veranda and spurted at full speed on the smooth asphalt of the main highway with a jubilant shrill shriek and hooting--to new fortuitousness, to new skirmishes, to new victories, which their reckless audacious youth was so rich in....

*

They reached the shore late in the evening (it was almost night in the south).

After their motorcycles had rolled down the gentle sandy slope overgrown with camel thorn bushes, first of all, by the light of headlights, they dug four sliding duralumin poles into the pebbles and pulled an awning on the poles for their equipment and other luggage, and only then did they hastily set up two tents and pitch a tolerable camp until tomorrow, having scared away some solitary couples seeking a secluded spot here for more confidential intercourse, whose incipient closeness was desecrated by the appearance of such vandals and by their inappropriate activity in creating a bivouac on the wild beach.

Before going to bed, they took a short dip in the oily gleaming coolness of the night sea, the sluggish waves of which were lapping against the dark concrete blocks sunk for protecting the coast, and squelching, hissing among small boulders while rolling back; and when they washed off the dust and sweat of their travel, they celebrated the timely arrival with a joint smoke break, and jointly lay down in the tents to sleep off after the long journey. Today they raced since early morning, and that was rather too much even for their endurance: their legs were buckling; their eyes were closing in spite of their heroic efforts; someone's resolutely begun phrase was ending incoherently with slurring, fading together with a glow-worm of the smoldering cigarette going out and turning into grey ash.

Needless to say that they missed the sunrise and stirred only when their tents under the scorching sun began to gradually become tarpaulin ovens. Their snoring company started muttering discontentedly, grumbling and turning from side to side in the stuffy heat of such a blast furnace, and he, unable to bear this torture any longer in his leather outfit, awoke and sat up, staring stupidly at his inseparable friend Jack, who was already sitting, scratching the blond close-cropped head. Jack and he were tarred with the same brush, as they say, and he knew that, in addition to the "baptism of fire" with a broken leg, his pal experienced three more serious road accidents, but it did not faze him and he did not let up, honorably upholding the reputation of "psycho" which passers-by often threw in his wake when his roaring motorcycle was tearing along past them.

Since they needed "water procedures" urgently, they disrobed in the blink of an eye, and a couple of minutes later, he and Jack, vociferating a kind of spontaneous potpourri from the repertoire of the "Beatles" and loudly smacking their palms on the sea surface, were splashing near the concrete piles and making so much noise that all their sleepy friends, roused by the early heat and the inviting sounds of bathing, also got out of the both tents on all fours. And soon after the sea near the shore was literarily swarming with their muscular young bodies, and all of them warmed up on an empty stomach instead of morning exercises by chasing each other with loud laughter in the water seething from their boisterous romp and by wrestling for drowning the caught comrade at the depth; in short, they heartily indulged in the clamorous pugnacious amusements of cheerful young newts until, having gulped enough of the troubled salty surf, they sprawled in the shallow water to discuss their plan of action for this day.

True, the plan was very simple: to sunbathe, swimming and diving to their heart's content, and to see the sights of the "local civilization" in pauses; while towards evening, it wouldn't hurt to go for a stroll along the high road past many sanatoriums, holiday homes, and resort boarding houses, where, mooching about and pining in the unforgivable loneliness in the still of walkways and in the emptiness of dance verandas, various female persons starved of affection and sympathy were ready to swim in shoals into their greedy masculine hands and tacitly solicited their interrogatively peremptory "How about a walk?", whereafter, without postponing intimacy until tomorrow and without wasting time on long courtship, they could begin to supplement the Don Juan list of their love triumphs in their honest fraternal competition; but after they breakfasted modestly with canned food from their "dry ration", some of them got down to tinkering with their motorcycles, and some set to shifting the tents closer to the slope, so that it would not be very hot in them at least early in the day, meantime the trinity of the most indefatigable with plastic jerrycans went in quest of fresh water and something edible for the whole caboodle.

In a word, their first day at the seaside promised to be unremarkable and therefore especially delightful and long-awaited, consisting exclusively of the lisping plashing of the calmed picturesquely-ultramarine vastness and of the rustling and crunching of hot shingle under their bare soles, including both the smells of the sun-baked tarpaulin and machine oil from the disassembled motorcycle units spread out on some rags under the awning blending with the spicy fragrance the nightshade shrubbery fencing the beach and the muffled crooning from a transistor and the chirping nearby in the bushes alternating with the passing comments of the concentrated holidaymakers playing cards in the shade afar in their foppish brightly colored swimming trunks and with invariable cigarettes in their teeth; and in a day like this, their thoughts revolved likewise mainly around the senses of smell and touch and around their purely bodily instinctive perceptions, such as the skin of the back scorched by the floating heavenly shining or the ticklingly weightless embrace of the gradual immersing into the surface transparency of the sea and deeper into the greenish haziness and chillness of the sunless bottom layer or the hard smooth pebbles moist with sweat under the stomach and the drowsy feeling of the languorously prostrated naked body that did not need either the past or the future and that knew only this one endless instant of merging with the environment and of the thoughtless animal entirety of its own existence in the world; however, he pulled his panama hat with a sun visor over his nose and, whiling away the time, opened the homemade typewritten brochure in oilskin cover, which he had clandestinely acquired at the preliminary course of the faculty of philosophy, the selected aphorisms of Friedrich Nietzsche whom he had mentioned in the restaurant.

It was not the first time he leafed through these somewhat arbitrary excerpts from the multivolume works of the half-insane--and then completely crack-brained--creator of "The Gay Science" and "The Will to Power", who ranted at the end of the previous century and whose philosophical fantasies he had not yet read; and again he was astounded by the incredible coincidence of his present thoughts, impulsive as outbursts, with the effusively apt formulas of the distraught German professor, because he recognized each poetically heretical postulate, which seemed to be formerly discovered by him without any theoretical prompting, in his systemless upsurges of inspiration and in his fragmentary rebelliously categorical views, as well as he again and again recognized himself in the hero of the new post-Christian myth being created by the pathos of the Dionysian exaltation (or it was rather the resurrection of the very old myth, but that was by no means changing its gist and irrefutable rightness).

By nature, he was indeed just this highest type of "strong personality" and this triumphant demonical "genius" not accepting any herd instinct, one of the superhuman caste of artists and aristocrats of the spirit and one of the rulers that were destined, from ancient times to the present, to subordinate the others and dominate, remaining free; he was ready to subscribe without reserve to all the extreme conclusions of the ardent individualist hating the faceless hordes of mass civilization inundating the planet, no matter who and how applied those conclusions in the local apocalypses of the recent half-century history; he quite agreed with the philosopher that "slavery belongs to the essence of a culture" (in its decorous guises of different kind, but this always belongs to that) and that life strives to reach the maximum "feeling of power" and is actually "will to power" as such, for power really was as many-faced as life, and here, in the incessant struggle of the natural and artificial selection, he had willy-nilly to assert himself at the expense of others and not to permit other people to assert themselves at his expense; he couldn't but admit that "belief means not wanting to know what is true", and he, exclaiming together with the prophesying harbinger of the resurgent pagan cults, "if I am not more than the law I am the vilest of all men", also wanted to clear his elementally primordial self of everything enslaving him, to wit, of all the stratifications of the "social" dictating to him what he should be and how to live and of all the hypocritical official public morality devouring every obvious uniqueness and strength by the multitude of organized nonentities and extolling the virtuous mediocrity of a "small man" who was so horrible in his prolificacy and adaptability to anything and such a fierce executioner in his malicious vengeance on the powerless titans, deprived of whip and authority; with his defiantly shocking conduct and sacrilegious escapades, he alike was scraping off all the slavish reverence-worship-beliefs-priorities-predilections foisted on him, and just as this madman, with his blasphemous overthrowing of all prohibitions, he was liberating his natural foundation, not suppressed nor coerced by anything, from the taboos and dogmas of the collective impersonal consciousness, which tried to equate him, gifted-insatiable-recalcitrant, with a ruminant herd of "the masses" prospering in the niches allotted to them and at the feeding troughs of totalitarianism and not noticing that the best of the best were being crushed nearby and that they themselves were trampling down someone in their philistine servility.

Naturally, they weren't men of the same breed, and as to him, he was casting his "moral skin" like the "sloughing god" of the thinker so consonant with him in order to become free, even if as a conqueror-"triumphant monster"-beast of prey, and to reveal his true nature not conforming to the decorum of the deceitful, vile and cowardly "overwhelming majority", so that his separate unmanageable individuality could develop to its full mighty potential beyond all social constraints and paltry dependencies on the crowd and on all its derivatives, namely cupidity, vainglory, domination or well-being and homeliness, official position and such like, hostile to the self-willed indomitable temper of his versatile Renaissance personality and to the attacking audacious style of his rebellious plucky adolescence.

The only thing that embarrassed him was the literalness of the similarity, for this oracle of innate barbarism, who praised the freedom of power and the beauty of chosenness, foretold his present views verbatim; which was partly accounted for, of course, by the resemblance of the mass culture as the background and by the concept of "eternal recurrence" (if in principle such a recurrence was assumed in eternity, then why he could not assume the same recurrence in some period of time), but anyway, it was introducing the dubiousness of some "secondariness" and of some programmedness deciphered by somebody into the uniqueness of his innermost "ego", and therefore, albeit at the subconscious level, it still nullified his absolute freedom, dooming him, in essence, for conniving at the savage beast that was caged in his soul. Consequently, the answer was turning into the question--of the provenance of either the difference or the resemblance which were thus two sides of one coin, whereas the glorification of soldiery as a prototype of the ruling brotherhood of "chosen ones" was arousing his justified suspicion of an elementary substitution of the herd for a pack, because, unlike his sickly forerunner "unfit for combatant service", he was not enthused by the imminent probability of his militarizing in the real army this autumn.

A certain flaw inhered, perhaps, in the theory or, maybe, in him, however, it was just the aforementioned recognizability that began to irritate him for some time. Since that comparatively merciful epoch on the eve of the 20th century, some of those fevered predictions had come true and materialized after all, yet the cohesion of self-appointed rulers and chieftains turned out to be the cohesion of the dull mob; and translating them into reality, this rabble was exterminating the human material superfluous for them through the systems of organized terror and suppression of dissent, certain functional activities in which were in fact a surrogate of the greatness of this populace, as well as their battlefield and their sphere of freedom. Rebelling and denying, Nietzsche involuntarily blessed the choice between slave and ruler, which his life often offered him, thereby binding him wholly and forever to their inseparability, while he, to tell the truth, preferred something third that was confined neither to submission nor to commanding only and that might deliver him from his participation in any mutual responsibility and humiliation.

"Hey, dude, you're burning!" he heard the voice of his bosom friend above him, and immediately the sea water scooped up by a diving mask spilled out over his hot back. "What have you been so into?"

Jack, who only just came out of the sea, threw his wet flippers on the pebbles and, having snorted, stretched out near, his head on slippery green rubber.

"Philosophy," he responded depreciatingly. "Scope of reason."

"Better dope," Jack joked. "And material one. In your place I would crawl under the awning before the skin peeled off."

Nevertheless, he was pretty roasted in the sun, as it became clear during the lunch meal in the "Cheburechnaya" discovered by their landing party: it felt like his shoulders were on fire, and the shirt, for all its lightness, was rubbing irritatingly against the sensitive burning skin, while his itchy back was reminding him of an overheated frying pan; but the crispy chebureki, golden with melted butter, flowing on fractures with the juice of a lump of minced beef stewed inside, together with their half-liter faceted mugs full of the frothy cold dark beer from the damp huge barrel standing in the corner behind the buffet counter, where, in front of the feasting audience, the local hairy stocky bartender with an impressive crimson nose was hammering a wooden spigot into its wooden bottom and screwing the vertical metal tube with a tap into the hole of the paunchy beer vessel filled to capacity, which they rolled up hither by joint efforts--in short, all this bountiful feast with dozens of sizzling chebureki towering on the plates and with an effervescent spurt gushing from the beer tap into the weighty glass mugs--distracted him very soon from his philosophizing and from the consequences of his "sun-baths", considering that they gormandized with gusto and without haste, having a sufficiency of not yet splurged cash; and in their gluttony, they had stuffed themselves with such delicacies until absolute immobility, so after their repast, having bought up grape Lady Finger in some side road stall on the way back, they relished it while lying under the bushes, plucking its elongated translucently-emerald berries and bringing the grapes to their mouths with truly patrician satiety.

*

And in the evening, when drawing lots before the introductory tour of the local dance floors, he drew out a short match, which meant that he was to remain today in the camp to guard the territory occupied by them; that's why, when the molten disk of the sun plunged at last beyond the horizon and he hung his wet swimming trunks on the slope of the tent, he, having poured half a scent-bottle of lotion on his back excoriated by the merciless sunrays, was sitting in his jeans shorts at the pile of dry branches and planks picked up on the shore, chopping firewood for his night fire with the knife bayonet of Yul who was provident in combat weapons.

His burnt skin slightly smarted; the annoying midges were adhering to his bare legs and swarming alarmedly over a wisp of smoke rising from the flaming dampish wood chips; the deserted sea spreading before him gradually darkened, shimmering with the last reflections of the firmament cooling down and fading in the encircling darkness, and the pale contours of the waning moon appeared among the frosty rash of unattainable distant stars that stood out on the cloudlessness being eroded by the bottomlessness of the cosmos; the chirring of steppe crickets and the melodious chirping of restless birds in the bush behind were being woven into the passionate recitative of a saxophone in the transistor languishing from the voluptuousness of New Orleans blues; and enveloped by the languorous music of radio waves enclasping the Earth Ball as if in a love embrace, he--as an immeasurably small lonely grain of sand of this rotating viviparous ball--as a thinking cell of this planetary flesh flying through the frighteningly nearing space exploding with star fire--watched the barely noticeable smooth transformation of daytime aquamarine into evening ultraviolet, breathing in the algal freshness of the rhythmically lapping foamy surf and again reflecting on the fanatical obsession with the primordial dilemma of violence and obedience alienating him from the notorious genius of nihilism, and though it was explaining and justifying both his eternal desire for superiority and the assertive demonstrativeness of his self-affirmation, yet seemed insufficient in a sense to him even now and did not express him as a whole with his independent solitude, without any need in somebody in such endless minutes, when neither strength, nor craving for leadership, nor impertinence, nor defensive cruelty had any meaning, and he was happy not victoriously and not companionably, but somehow otherwise, entirely dissolved, alone with himself genuine, that is, alone with nature and with the universe that were not reflected but rather slightly revealed in him mysteriously and unknowably like the starry abyss of heaven yawning above him or like this unexpectedly ancient landscape of the shore being washed by the soft watercolor twilight and extending to the distant rocky promontory which grew more and more indistinguishable and wild in the night enveloping it.

The crackling of the brushwood writhing in the timid fire and the measured gentle plashes of the lunar phosphorescent waves mingling with the muffled orgiastic howls of virtuoso jazz improvisation exultantly soaring skywards over the expanses of land and ocean bewitched him so magically that he, frozen for an unending instant in a sensitively hearkening drowse by the fire on a piece of snag and lulled by this infinite happiness filling him, all but jumped up from the sound of someone's footsteps nearby, to which his body responded with an explosive reaction sooner than his consciousness.

Still blinded by the whimsical fiery wriggling of the trembling tongues slipping out from under the chips and brushwood, he averted his gaze, letting his eyes adjust to the not very deep darkness, and was about to shine a flashlight into the distance, but the flashlight proved unnecessary, since before he determined who was hanging about there in his possessions, that "someone" was already standing behind the fire opposite and turned out to be a dark-haired boyish-looking damsel in frayed jeans shorts like his and in a leather vest with steel rivets like Bob's one. In her beach attire, the girl resembled their urban hippie girlfriends, but the silverish luster of her hair in the counterlighting of the moon above the sea that seemed to have disgorged this woman from its slightly swaying abyss and the fanciful flickering of flame illumining her sharp-nosed face and streaming over the jet-black surface of her short waistcoat and over her swarthy stomach and thin legs were transforming her so enchantingly, while the setting, in which she had appeared from the darkness, predisposed him so irresistibly to this kind of enchantment, that his former clever thoughts immediately vanished, and having come to himself, he stared dumbfounded at this mysterious beauty in a crown of the moonlight and in a halo of the fire fluttering at the feet of the nymph only just arisen out of the deep.

"Hello," this unearthly creature quoth amicably in a hoarse smoker's voice. "Where did you spring from?"

"From there, from afar," he waved his hand vaguely. "We have our base camp here. Are you a local?"

"Yeah, fisherwoman," she cracked a joke. "From the barge."

"You don't look so," he called her fishery in question, supporting the playing. "In appearance, you're rather a goldfish."

"Dried goldfish," she added self-critically. "Thanks for your compliment. Can I cadge a fag from you?"

"Do you smoke?" he got horrified quizzically, taking out the crumpled pack of cigarettes.

"Like a chimney. And I drink, besides. Vodka, by full glasses. I am awfully depraved."

After pulling a cigarette out of his pack, she leaned over to the fire to get a light and sat down cross-legged on the pebbles in Turkish style, flaunting her tanned thighs with the absolute unconstraint of the mistress of the situation.

"So where do you abide, you didn't say," he asked again when she settled cozily opposite.

"At the camping-site," she inhaled the cigarette. "It is behind the cape, you can't see from here."

"With your parents?"

"No, with my husband," she announced seriously.

"So you're married? And why are you strolling alone then?"

"I'm bored with him," she curled her lip in a winsome grimace. "I'm an adult already, and I stroll where I like."

"Surely you aren't afraid?"

"Of whom afraid?"

"Of me, for instance. What if you're to my taste, and I shan't let you go."

"I'm not leaving yet," she narrowed the slits of her hypnotically gleaming screwed eyes, and two fiery reflections of the flared flame blazed up in her pupils. "How soon will your friends be back?"

"Not soon, I think," he answered. And a sudden discharge of the mutual high-tension current of some familiar affinity and understanding ran instantaneously between them in the uniting electric field of instinct and fused them at once by the attraction of their unendurable animal desire demanding the immediate satisfying. "The question is whether we need the friends."

"I mean the same." She breathed a stream of tobacco smoke as thin as a snake's tongue through her narrow lips. "It's better when you and I are alone."

"That depends," he grinned, having remembered their sexual rookeries in the capital with some of the wanton hussies who were humping all together. "I'm joking, of course."

"Well, I understood," she appreciated his remark, quite knowledgeable about what he hinted at.

"I hope your husband won't seek you," he nodded in the direction of the cape separating them hitherto, strengthening his resolve to take her without delay and no matter how--by persuasions or by storm--for the chief thing was that she wanted him to take her.

"What if he will?"

"Then I'll kill him. And you'll become a widow."

"This is my only dream," she confessed, obviously teasing him and provoking to move from words and subtexts to practical actions. "By the way, where were you shaven off so? In the bullpen?"

"Almost," he parried in a flash. "In Kolyma, beyond the Arctic Circle. The overseers clipped my forelock there to make me more terrible."

"I'm scared already." She studied him intently through the haze quivering over the fire. "The shape of your skull is beautiful; you're probably smart."

"Very," he decided not to be too modest. "But I have many beautiful gizmos, not my skull only."

"Really?" The distance separating them disappeared altogether, and the tension reached that point and that unbearable degree of attraction when it was simply impermissible to hold back from risking and mounting an assault regardless of obstacles, however infeasible his attempt might seem. "What exactly?"

He stood up resolutely, and the light from below sculpturally outlined that part of his anatomy bursting to be released which he and she implied.

"Want to admire it?" he felt the zipper of the shorts with his fingers.

"Come on, come on," she encouraged.

"Well, then demonstration performances," he muttered and abruptly unzipped his fly.

The shorts obligingly slid off him, and thereby having cut off his escape route, he appeared before this casual Aphrodite in all the athletic perfection of his eighteen-year-old flesh and with all the formidable power of the chief field-gun ready for battle.

"How about that?" he asked, slightly hoarse from his own impudence.

"Not bad," she approved barely audible, her unblinking cat's eyes riveted to the object mostly interesting her among the merits of his physique, and threw the cigarette hindering her into the fire.

"Come here," he called her, taking a step out of the illuminated circle into the darkness to someone's inflatable mattress that was drying near the tent. "Come to me."

And obeying his call, she, pulling off her waistcoat, got up slowly like a somnambulist and went skirting the fire to her man--to her lord and her eternal accomplice in the happy convulsions of the amorous obfuscations of reason. Incidentally, she dropped her shortened jeans, and stepped over these fetters hobbling her ankles, so that the black native silhouette of her naked body obscured the flame of the fire.

Silently, he put his palms on her moist thighs and pulled her tightly to his body in the first imperious embrace, having felt her wholly--from her sharp hard knees and her bony hips to her yieldingly-crumpled undeveloped breasts and her dry lips, greedily pressed to his mouth, in which she impatiently stuck her tongue. The shiny silver trumpet of the blues composition had choked with the heartrending rapture of its muted forte, and the intoxicating lily-of-the-valley scent of her perfume sluiced his brain with sweet drunken tempestuousness, whereupon they, hugging one another as before, collapsed on the resiliently spring bed of rubber mattress in order to grapple with each other already a second later, tossing about in their inexhaustibly-inventive, almost acrobatic duet of mutual possession, now beating time in accordance with the trumpet ecstasy, now outstripping the desperate jazz orgasms, for his partner fully compensated for her excessive scragginess by her simply frantic activity, whereas he, naturally, couldn't yield to this nymphomaniac growling with voluptuousness and biting and scratching him, and he was squeezing her so that her ribs crackled and forcing her to spin under him like a wriggling adder so as to "reach her navel" (by the expression of Pete who was a big authority on the questions of Eros), until, with a groaning howl of the culmination, she was falling enervated, weakening her grip in the blissful panting of her short saturation; so soon the unfortunate mattress was again wet and soaked with the sweat pouring from them and with the secretions accompanying conception, though they did not think, of course, about conception in the heat of passion.

"Maybe we'll get acquainted?" he offered her politely in one of respites. "Call me Hor."

"I'm Rita," she said, puffing and licking sweat from her lips. "You're a real stud, I'd say."

He immediately proved the latter once more, despite the fact that they indulged in excesses for a sufficiently long time, and he rather got little tired, showing what he was capable of, while she probably lay too long here with an unfamiliar young man far from her camping.

"Hor, I must go," she was the first to ask for mercy, still unable to overcome her post-love weakness; and in corroboration of her matured determination to leave him at last, she slightly stirred her leg lying on his chest.

"Go please," he allegedly agreed; but he had to consolidate the victory, and a new portion of solid proofs had already accumulated by now, while his truest friend was again cocked for fusillade.

"Let's finish... One for the road..."

She only sighed in response, having expressed with this heavy drawn-out sigh all the irreconcilability of her struggle between duty and lust; and submitting to circumstances beyond her control, she obediently wrapped her bent legs around his small of the back, accepting his final "approaching to the bombing target" as an inevitability to be reckoned with.

Employing the widely-used euphemism of the Renaissance novellas, the naked blade had gone into the glamorous sheath; her thin body shuddered in a weak languorous convulsion of reciprocal excitement; and the next second, his consciousness seemed to get split in two: as one half of it, he still remained himself, victoriously squeezing this spread-eagled woman who was wearily giving herself to him, but by the other half of his being he ceased to be himself and became this woman swimming under the weight of the masculine flesh hugging her overbearingly in the dizzy exhaustion of her thoughtless replete carnality. As this woman, he was sensing how the strained sprout of the desired burden penetrating into her was filling her body from inside with voluptuous tickling like a moving piston, and how the stalk of a sunbeam pulsating in her womb was piercing her with burning warm waves push after push; and he, halved and doubled at once, was swinging joyfully in the quickening pulsation of this unexpected consonance, and their merging was like returning to something pre-human and pre-animal, to some forgotten inseparable whole, where their present polarity originated, and where they were both no more than an asexual embryo of their future contradictoriness and insurmountable difference; so that the tempestuous apotheosis of the "eruption of the geyser" and the "opening of the sluices", which was concluding their copulation with the unrestrained furious rhythm of his onslaught and with her sacrificial pre-peak cries as well as with the profuse perspiration of the culminating "docking" that was finally reached by them, having broken off the strange sensation, had imprinted this return forever in his again detached consciousness.

"Are you happy?" he whispered to his slightly twitching prey hovering in the beaming bliss of her incorporeal fatigue.

"I got a real buzz," she slurred, barely uttering the words of her gratitude. "I shan't stand up--my legs sort of give out..."

However, after lying a little, she recovered herself, nevertheless, and sat up upon the mattress befouled by them. Then, having moved the shorts with her heel to her, she, sitting, began to pull them on.

"Maybe, you want to take a dip?" he proposed tactfully.

"No, we have a shower," she refused. "You've worn me to a frazzle, it must be said."

"Do you object?"

"Contrariwise," she smiled in the darkness, and the embers of the nearly extinguished fire flashed with fugitive sparks in the narrowed eyes of the sea nymph he had tamed.

"Have you at least a ciggy, stashed away for me?" she asked him reproachfully, putting her hands into the armholes of her vest.

"Smoke all," he gave her his whole pack generously. "You've deserved."

"Wow, thankies!" exclaimed she rising. "How long are you going to stay here?"

"So if anything, you are in the camping?"

"Uh-huh, in it. But I shall appear myself, don't worry."

Having lit a cigarette, she cast a parting lascivious glance at his young white body lying on the mattress, and went shambling along across the night beach back to the promontory, stroking her still wet stomach, whereas he, as soon as she left, hurried to the sea with the soiled mattress to wash away the traces of this unforeseen debauchery; and by the arrival of the first party of his friends, he was already sitting innocently by the fire that had been fanned anew and listening with satisfaction to the sough of the sea and to the rock and roll of the inimitable Elvis Presley raging in the transistor.

Since their leading connoisseur of the "fair sex" and women's vagaries, Pete, returned from his successful "picking up chicks" late at night, when the hunters less fortunate and not so thorough in acquaintances were already in the tents, and the common exchange of impressions was temporarily interrupted by the healthy profound sleep and mighty snoring of all the valorous cohort that had fully enjoyed the day of good rest, he got the opportunity to consult with this specialist only in the morning, in the course of their long distance swimming race to open sea, whither the most amphibious of them swam up, and where these swimmers rested lying on their backs upon the water surface, slightly rocking on the small waves among the glittering flecks of sunlight.

He stole to his serenely dozing comrade and sprinkled water on the mustached physiognomy exposed to the sun scorching from the early morning.

"Hor, I'll drown you," Pete threatened good-humoredly and turned over on his belly to spit out the salt water.

"You can, I know," he said, standing upright weightlessly suspended in the blue depth and stirring his legs beside this consummate handsome chap from an intelligent--or even professorial--family.

"Yet can you explain such a funny phenomenon?" he continued. "Perhaps it ever happened to you."

"Be so kind as to word your question more intelligibly, sir..." Pete suddenly plunged and, as his head again emerged above the surface, imperturbably finished the phrase. "What do you mean, venerable colleague?"

"The point is that I had one rendezvous recently," he began his true story. "In short, I chanced to hook a goldfish here."

"Yesterday evening?" Pete was astounded. "How did you contrive?"

"Elementarily. The butterfly had fluttered to the light from her camping."

"And what? I hope she is enrolled in your harem?"

"Naturally. I was simply obliged."

"My congratulations. So what's a problem?"

"Phenomenon, as I said. The problem is that I had felt her as myself at some moment," he expounded the crux of the matter. "Or rather, I was feeling myself as her inwardly--as if I was her and myself at the same time... Maybe you know what it is? Mark you, the contact was first-class, and I never experienced anything like this."

"Apparently, you coincided with her in biorhythms." Pete let out a thoughtful gurgle and started turning over various memorable intimate details of his wide experience in his mind, not recollecting even remote likeness to such an episode in his own practice. "Or, for example, you have some homosexual complex. Hidden, of course..."

"No, it's not that." He shouldn't have been offended at Pete, whose kith and kin were said to be solely doctors-diagnosticians. "That is no deviation, don't impute blueness to me."

"Yes, yes, that's just so, including aggressiveness," the inquisitive Pete slayed him with amateurish Freudianism. "A symptom of repressed fear of male violence. That is, in other words, the covert desire for such violence."

"Look who's talking!" he returned the ball to Pete. "In your opinion, strength springs from fear of strength?"

"As a rule," Pete could not but needle his bellicose friend. "Well then, let's swim back. Who will be faster..."

And having pushed each other away, they started a race to the shore, vying with the whole pack of the other ambitious swimmers that had joined them at once, for they struggled uncompromisingly for supremacy on every convenient occasion; that's why out of the waters of the Black Sea they were coming, as they say, having exhausted all the "energy reserves" to shivering and goose-flesh, some on their hands and knees and some like turtles; and on the shore, to his surprise, he saw his night visitor, who loitered in the circle of his friends near the cold ashes of the yesterday's fire, ogling them, and wore this time the green bikini hardly covering the necessary piquant points of her body under her unbuttoned short beach dressing-gown.

The chocolate tan made her scragginess almost inconspicuous, and her face was shaded by the brim of her yellow boater, but in close proximity and in daylight, his married Rita did not look too inspiring: firstly, she was over thirty, as evidenced by both the light crow's feet at the corners of her screwed eyes and the sharp nasolabial folds on sides of her thin lips, not to speak of the slightly withered skin of her tanned neck; secondly, in the manners of this scrawny tootsie, one could easily guess the habitual vulgarity of an experienced trouble-free fuckstress, which repelled him for some reason in such adult respectable dames and which was completely depreciating the victory he won the day before.

"You make the girl wait!" Yul, who was noticing everything, did not fail to reproach him derisively, descending towards him with the swimming fins and spearfishing gun.

"Where you dug up such a granny?" Yul added in an undertone. "She's overtly asking for a gangbang, so it's real to run train on her."

"It's out of the question," he snapped mercilessly. "We don't need regimental wives."

After that he went up to his "granny", who was flirting actively with Bez slightly perplexed by her soliciting, and silently took her elbow.

"At last you're here!" his acquaintance exclaimed with ostentatious gladness, ignoring the alienation of the "young generation" obviously indisposed to admit her to their company.

"I'm already acquainted with all the boys," she kept on twittering, devouring with her lascivious eyes her noisily breathing athlete covered with the scatterings of glistening drops rolling down from his muscular body.

"I'm happy," he grunted hostilely. "Let's stroll a little."

"You know what, dearie," he said brusquely after having led her far away from the camp. "Don't appear here anymore."

"How so?" she asked, flabbergasted at his unceremonious ultimatum. "What the heck?"

"Go to your husband, baby, strengthen your family ties," he glanced sternly into her coarsened evil face. "And don't come here."

"Where I want to come, there I'll come," she yanked out her elbow.

Now she angered him, and, having seized her by the arm, he dragged the unsuccessfully resisting wrangler towards her camping, explaining her on the go that the love between them is over, so she vainly hopes to obtain anything else, and that, although he usually does not touch weak and defenseless women, but he can make an exception for her if she doesn't leave him in peace.

"In short, don't importune me and them," he stopped.

"Why?" she infuriatedly threw open the laps of her beach dressing-gown, standing with arms akimbo and exhibiting herself so as to let him behold her tanned flesh in all its irresistible approachability.

"Because I forbid you. You don't suit some standards."

"Yesterday, I was suiting to you," she squinted unequivocally at his wet swimming trunks.

"At night all cats are gray..." That would be too much for him to disgrace himself because of her and serve as a target for ridicule. "It's better to part amicably and without problems."

"You're big but foolish," she dropped contemptuously. "In skirts you understand nothing, I see."

"In skirts I don't want to understand anything at all," he told her straight out. "In such as you, at least."

Whereat his outraged concubine showered abuse on him from head to foot in the choice swear-words from the bottom of her heart, and, having prophesied both his forthcoming belated regrets for their lost ideal alliance and a great number of misfortunes invoked by her on his head, including God's retribution, left with utter resentment the idiot, who rejected "such a rare keif", probably to go in quest of "sexy boys" like him; whereas he, whistling carelessly, returned to the guys that had been watching their parting. They greeted him, naturally, by a barrage of caustic questions about the "grandmother's dowry" and "a wide profile of overage maidens", friendly advising their lucky beggar to persuade his nimble moppet to adopt him together with all their male team and establish a schedule of their round-the-clock "Oedipus incest", which was undoubtedly invented by the depraved polymath Pete.

"I love contrasts," he declared defiantly in response. "Don't I have the right to canoodle even with mommy for a change?"

"You have!" the young cynics burst into guffawing in chorus, implying, of course, the only form of intercourse with the chosen "female" which was worthy of a real adventurer, and with that, in essence, their bantering was ended, for, as they knew, he did not allow anyone to jest at him with impunity.

*

In the evening their gang of swashbucklers raced on their ten motorcycles with roaring engines along the winding mountain highway, rounding the hairpin bends of the precipitous approaches to the sea. In a formidable column, they were flying by some glass cafes of public catering, or dark-green hedges of trimmed boxwood, or the fences and arches of boarding houses and sanatoriums with avenues of cypresses--streaking past the steeps overgrown with blackberry thickets, lianas and hazel and past the houses, orchards and flower beds of the settlements that were ascending the mountain and running down to the beaches, where the shaggy dogs were throwing themselves under the wheels with frenzied barking and the holiday-makers trudging home from the sea were glancing back at the motorized column--and skirting the clayey rocky layered slopes with ledges of paleontological shell rock that rose on the left hand, on the other side of the road, alternating with the stony screes washed out by downpours, over which the hard grass was bristling among the faded dryness of immortelles and prickly thistles--or scaring away both ducks and chickens scampering off in panic and the pedestrians bouncing back to the side of the road or to the railing of bridges and disappearing in the lime dust raised by their swift caravan; and the names of all kinds of health resorts and pioneer camps, hamlets and drying mountain rivers with its bared pebble shoals flashed by them until Chris heading the column turned off the road to the arch of some rest-home, where their purring picturesque dragons steered a course in single file to a circle of capacious dance floor surrounded by benches and crowned with an old-fashioned shell stage for the jazz-band that played here in the evenings.

It was not dark yet, and the dance floor was almost empty, excepting a plump dumpy drummer arranging his drums on the stage and the five specimens of the opposite sex pining on the benches, but all were pretty moth-eaten, nothing worthwhile; the rest were either catching the last rays of the sun in the common solarium on the roof of the central building or preening before dance in their small rooms smelling of perfumes and creams. Therefore, having set their Javas together nearby, they were beguiling the time each in his own way: Chris, having assembled a set of four gamesters, was dealing cards on the shady grassplot under the plane trees; Bez was scribbling something word after word in his pocket notebook (apparently, new verses dawned upon him, as it frequently happened to their poetaster); Pete, viewing the "chicks" arriving from everywhere, was flaunting without his camouflage jacket on the saddle of his motorcycle, having put forward his narrow-nosed cowboy hoof for effect on the handlebar and hung a tiny gilded cross on a chain over his white T-shirt; Sam indifferently dozed on the grass, while Jack was loading himself from the bottle with the warm port wine brought to intoxicate the gals that they were going to hook up at the dance; Bob sharing his supply with Yul, having mixed the crumbled tobacco from a cigarette with the "weed" that he always had in stock, was stuffing the empty tissue paper of the cardboard tube with the mixture, "packing the joint", which they were about to "blast" and smoke, as usual, to its very "roach" by turns, because the pot smoking was more to their taste than alcoholic libations; whereas he occupied the bench by the fence and again thought absentmindedly about the mystery that had been slightly revealed to him and about the exasperating discrepancy in his consciousness between his spontaneous views predicted by Nietzsche and his own unknown "self" opposing the final choice and surely being the cause of his yesterday's super-sensitivity and inexplicable doubling.

Something in his soul sounded untunedly discordant, and he more than once found the same jarring dissonance in some popularly replicated and utterly threadbare ideas which was caught up and used in practice by not any artistic "geniuses" deserving to profess them (taking into account that the victorious barbarity was wont to chop those gifted heads off first of all), but by various creative unfortunates and power-hungry mediocrity; some undoubted falsity of this "baring of instincts" was grating more and more painfully on his ears, prompting him to be digging up the source of his pain, that is, a certain initial internal contradiction which gave rise to both his revolt and the doomed eloquent mutiny of the denier of world philistinism, who had been slipping then into the ecstatic collapse of his madness; so he again meticulously fingered the verbal beads of thoughts strung on his resonantly quivering "soul strings".

"They revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience..." he stopped in the middle of a sentence, having stumbled upon a previously missed mutually exclusive phrase "innocence of conscience". "But conscience is awareness of guilt, so beast-of-prey cannot have any conscience."

And then he realized that, strictly speaking, reversion as such was impossible and that the passionate craving for the "natural" was especially unnatural, leading him to the primitive spontaneity of this "natural", while for every developed and already spiritualized consciousness, this would not have been the genuine desired liberation and the release of his nature from the fetters and chains of social taboos enslaving it, quite the contrary, he would have been deliberately narrowing his nature to its former savagery and to the ferocious unbridledness of a gloatingly jeering rapist and murderer, which was in stark contrast to the refined image of a puny Prussian intellectual cultivating a romantically imaginary spiritually cultured artistic homunculus prettified with the Renaissance virtues and valor; thus it was no accident that in his tries to correlate these two hostile hypostases of humanism, he was forced to erect two absolutely separate levels in the personality being constructed by him, at one of which he was a "free artist" and convivial fellow full of joie de vivre, and at the other--for "strangers" and for the "crowd"--a cruel invader and ruthless chieftain-ringleader.

The basic reason of duality most likely consisted just in the "strangers": the beast was necessary to protect the genius in the surrounding multitude of aggressively impudent plebeian meanness encroaching in its stifling tyrannical obtrusiveness even on the mystery of mysteries-on his soul-and swampily seeping from everywhere into the uniqueness of his individuality until his ego got entirely swamped and dissolved in stereotypes and triteness; but the paradox of self-defense was that the existence of "strangers" presupposed the existence of "ourselves" and entailed a new tribal community uniting if not by blood then by elitism, by belonging to the superior race, and subordinating him by the very inevitability of opposing himself to "strangers", consequently, likening him, albeit in another number series, but again to a unit of the series and reducing his spirit to the necessary--to the all-consuming will to power. In this division of the human race, the defense was actually an offensive, and that seemed to complete the division of his "self", alienating what was unnecessary for the confrontation of "ourselves" and "strangers" and ruling out the superfluous level which hindered the warlike supercilious march through life and included certain ridiculous conscientious prohibitions, the compassion to misery, the sympathy for man, nature and cosmos, and the insights into the essence of some new--not merciful and not punishing--God, who was accessible only to such a higher humanized reason.

In a word, there was no freedom on this way, for, alas, it was not a genius who ruled in the Nietzschean tandem, but a narrow-minded armed thug--not a superman, whose aristocratic beauty he admired in the similar titans of spirituality, but rather a subhuman knowing nothing but brainless power--a monster of aggression lurking atavistically in everyone up to a certain time and instantly baring the bloodthirsty fangs of his muzzle if you teased him a bit and let him out of the abyss of subconsciousness to give him full scope for his activities; hence the romantic barbarian of the archaic age so impressing the heretic-philosopher that aspired to overthrow the obsolete Christian worship was turning out to be nothing more than compensation for his own lack of vital force in reaching that fullness of being in the selfless creating of myth which the unaccommodating creator never experienced in the total regulation of his reality. Unfortunately, there was no synthesis either, and the fair-haired phantom of an artist-potentate was disintegrating into two antagonistic personalities: as far as he was becoming a beast so he was ceasing to be a genius, and as far as he was becoming a chieftain so he was ceasing to be himself; so the external choice between the notorious "ourselves" and "strangers" was moving into his own self, forcing him to give preference to either the freedom of arbitrariness "by the right of the strongest" or the freedom of spiritual independence, since the third "superhuman" option was, to put it bluntly, the alluring illusion that had bewitched their century.

In the meantime, the dance floor gradually got more lively: the loudspeakers of the shell stage buzzed with the cacophonous tuning of the instruments and with the sound check of the plugged microphones; the mirror ball at the intersection of wires above the center of the flagged floor was already spinning against the background of the dark blue evening sky in the rays of two searchlights, and the reflecting coruscating light was sliding spottedly over the holiday-makers gathering near the benches. Some of his friends-hunters, looking out for noteworthy candidatures, mingled with the crowd huddling on the periphery of the circle; red-haired Bob, leaning on the edge of the stage with his elbows, tried to find out the repertoire of his colleagues-jazz players; Yul being in high spirits after his "grass" was amusing a bevy of giggling timorous girls; Pete, singled out a "lady-love" for himself, rolled up to a bosomy blonde and began to whisper subtle compliments in her ear; even Chris's gambling company had almost dispersed, and Jack hid the bottle of his "plonk"; only their skald and rhapsode Bez, too carried away, kept writing something in his jotter, and Sam, sprawled on the grass, was laying with his mighty paws under his head and studying the star map appearing on the darkening firmament.

It was time to take part in the general amusement; and when the small complement of the dancing-band struck up the opening chords of its program, he whistled for Jack, who was tipsy in due degree, inviting his friend to break up a couple of yielding pussies waiting for partners, in order that they could take them later for a drive to a modest night picnic in the bosom of nature--to drink some wine and, as his straightforward pal put it, "to bonk a little". And soon Jack, heated with the hammering rhythm of the twist, shouting the lyrics of the sounding hits, was capering before a leggy minx in jeans, squatting down with his feet wide apart and his knees moved together so as to lean backward and touch the stone floor with the back of the head, despite the risk of dislocating his knee joint injured in the last "breakdown"; whereas he, after accompanying one damsel to the door of her building and making sure that with her, so to speak, "fiasco", since she pleaded the headache, was slightly embracing some snub-nosed gal in a light chintz sarafan which still smelt of suitcase.

While dancing he was bit by bit pressing her closer to his chest, pandering to her tastes by means of small talk about poetry as such and particularly about her contemporary loud-mouthed idols with their sincerely-obsequious politically-loyal doggerel which did not enrapture him for some reason, unlike the "romantics" again fooled by self-sacrifice, and which he willy-nilly knew by heart as the popular youth folklore he heard everywhere.

However, his dancing-partner categorically opposed his attempt to put his palm confidentially on her bare back between the short wings of the sarafan.

"This is too sweaty," she shrank from him. "And uncomfortable."

"Why so?" he cooed insinuatingly, not letting her go.

"Because I already have someone."

"Who is he?"

"Man," she shrugged her winged shoulders with displeasure. "I shall depart soon, so it is vain endeavors."

"Do you think-vain?" he did not believe her, swaying with her in the imitation of dance befitting their superficial acquaintance. "After all, today you are still here."

"Today is enough for you?"

"Quite enough."

"That is, you need me only for one day?"

"Who knows." He did not get his hand away, for, as a rule, all his "cuties" in dancing would at first balk, playing hard to get, as it was accepted, so, perhaps, this skittish filly would eventually cease jibbing and allow him to talk her into a ride to the beach. "You can elope with me from here if your man is so possessive."

"You hasten," she censured his unconstraint. "And don't hear the others."

"Tell me something pleasant, then I'll hear," he grinned. "I don't like when dames rebuff my wooing."

"Maybe I don't like when partners pester me with advances," she got angry, pulling back.

"Again a flop," he thought, reluctantly relaxing his grip. "Only sex-starved grannies are running after me."

"If you fear your man," he could not give up, nonetheless, "show him to me, and I'll teach him a lesson of good manners."

"I doubt it," his stubborn interlocutor looked skeptically into his eyes.

"I don't. So let's ride?"

"With you? I am not nutty."

"It's a pity." And yet he could not agree to acknowledge defeat in any circumstances. The invulnerable chastity of such haughty chicks-"touch-me-not" always infuriated him, because it looked as if he was begging for something from them, while they would flick him dismissively on the nose, sort of giving to understand that he was not worthy of them and that they were blossoming not for him. "You would learn what is life at least."

"I see you're a zealot of enlightening," she dropped, and by her ironic flick, their polemic ended.

The orchestra that was bashing out the bravura final of the twist suddenly shut up, and she, taking advantage of a break in dancing, wriggled out of his arms and went independently, the high steel heels of her white pumps slightly clattering against the flagged floor, through the dispersing crowd of the pairs inflamed with dance.

The shapely legs of this filly that had kicked him were simply a feast for the eyes; besides, she treated him rather disrespectfully, obviously underestimating the degree of danger in her incautious play with his amour-propre; and how could he let her slip away just like that.

"Milady," having caught up with her at the ring of benches, he touched the girl on the shoulder of her sarafan. "We did not finish the talk."

"Oh my God," she flinched, casting a fleeting glance over her shoulder. "It is again you."

"Yea, it's me, and what?" he felt mortally insulted. "Aren't you glad to see me?"

"I don't understand what you want," she pronounced with the specific "pedagogical" intonation, hateful to him, which she had adopted, in all probability, already in the first classes like the other impregnably virtuous exemplary schoolgirls.

"You," he frankly defined the ultimate goal of his pretentions with a disarming grin.

"That's all?" she poured out all her murderous irony on him. " By the by, as regards my man. You seemed to ask me to show him to you."

"Nick," she turned to the sinewy guy that was standing in the dark behind the bench, whose neat haircut and suspiciously military bearing were betraying an officer in a civilian cowboy shirt. "Tell him to cease sticking to me."

"It's not good to pursue unfamiliar girls, young man," the guy fulfilled her request, and judging by his voice, he was somewhat older than he looked in the delusive sliding of a round dance of mirror spots. "Observe the decencies."

"Wonderful," he said with a sneer, foretasting a scuffle. "Who is this that advises me from there?"

"Whoever is here, better to take the advice," answered his judicious rival.

Now, at last, he had a chance to retaliate for her disregard in accordance with the precept "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" and to take the opportunity, at the same time, to vent his ill-humor on somebody, as his mood was spoiled since the morning.

"We are also philosophers?" he exclaimed in amazement, pulling his spiked fingerless combat gloves on his hands. "In the world of wise thoughts, as they say."

"I hope you're not going to fight?" asked the careless culprit of the impending skirmish, alarmed by his preliminary manipulations.

"What fight? No, no, I am a peace campaigner--until its final eradication," he repudiated the very supposition of his truculence mockingly, zipping his leather jacket. "If anyone deserves to be pummeled, it is you, my snub-nosed."

"I was wrong about you, young man," officer Nick expressed sorrow for such a reprehensible conduct, continuing, figuratively speaking, to kick against the pricks. "A real gentleman never permits himself to beat women."

"Really?" he flung his sarcasm defiantly in the face of this emphatically polite mentor of youth. "Nobody taught me that."

"Not too late," the guy in the blue cowboy shirt comforted him.

"Then let's go?" he offered cheerfully, and, like a kangaroo, leapt from the spot over the bench.

"Oops," he summed up, having landed. "Maybe we shall exchange our knowledge?"

"Maybe it's not worth it?" Nick inquired, having seemed not to notice his leap. "There will be no fight anyway."

"All the better. Please," he clownishly presented the empty lawn under the plane trees to guy on his open palm. "There we shall verify your hypothesis."

"Well, Nicolas," he began facetiously after he and Nick passed together onto the lawn and stopped under the canopy of the tousled crowns shading the heavenly lurid glow. "What have you to say in your defense?"

The combative excitement of the forthcoming tussle had already filled his trained strong body with the explosive savage strength, and his muscles were tensed in the prevision of many automatically-accurate crushing blows; however, his unshakable adversary being within striking distance did not evince the slightest anxiety. It was not that such imperturbability got on his nerves, but adding oil to the fire, it was provoking him to the immediate attack.

"As far as I understand," said the guy, "you're seeking a girl for the evening, no matter who is she, while I shall probably marry her."

"Let's marry together," he interjected. "But I am first."

"Why be so rude?" the newly-minted candidate for the role of fiancé rebuked him fatherly, not flared up even after his smutty statement.

"I'm looking for trouble," he answered cheekily, clenching his fists and aiming at the outline of the dark figure. "I'm used to living by reflexes."

"That's bad," the undaunted righteous educator reproached the churlish young aggressor. "You should live by mind."

"I'll take it into consideration," he thanked the equable adviser and dealt him a smashing swing from the right into the center of the facial oval.

Yet, strangely enough, he missed the mark: despite the lightning speed of the blow, his fist whistled past, and he got open for a moment, whereupon, preempting the counter punch, he delivered a short hook from the left straight on the ear, but again slogged the emptiness and, by inertia, stepped sideways, to which he automatically reacted by a kick of his boot at the groin of the guy.

At the same second, he flopped down on his back with his hooves up, and the uninjured stickler for reasonableness went on with his recommendations.

"Bravo," Nick praised him ironically. "You could be a little more accurate, but tactically it is quite acceptable. You should try boxing by a series, to shoot to kill, in fine, with such excellent reflexes."

"I'll try," he promised ominously, rising from the ground. "I'll beat you to a pulp."

"I wouldn't be so sure, young man--"

Here the guy had to interrupt his edification, since the fists of his incensed sparring-partner started thrashing violently and unceasingly, and the quick kicks of street fight--at the shin or at the foot--with the heel or with the knee-complemented his clobbering that was deadly enough even without leg blows and yet absolutely ineffectual, because all the boxing and karate was either bumping into the blocking defense, or getting bogged down in the swift outstripping dodges, or flying into the emptiness of the elusive dives.

Enraged with this invulnerability of the enemy, he was beating both by series and by single blows with fists, and feet, and elbows, applying all the proved hooligan set of holds and tricks, until, after his unsuccessful attempt to strike a blow of his boot on the liver, he found himself on the grass in the same shameful pose upside down and finally twigged that his swoops were useless and ridiculous, for he clearly ran into a seasoned "pro" who, if desired, could easily give him a bashing, playing with such a biting puppy solely at the own insistence of the doggy.

"I think that's enough?" the winner of their unequal battle asked condescendingly after having taught the over-confident youngster an object lesson of skill and remained unharmed. "Brute strength is not everything, as I said."

"Well, I'll screw her anyhow, your fiancée!" he all but blurted out in revenge for his humiliating helplessness, but when he imagined vividly what would happen if he managed to make this polite hand-to-hand combat specialist lose his balance, and what new educational humiliation his rash ribaldry would be fraught with, he gritted his teeth and said nothing in order to avoid getting a real walloping from the invincible rival.

"No injuries, I hope?" the guy ascertained. "Then I'll go, for she's worrying there."

"I'll kill him," he thought, consumed with hatred, rising to his feet in gloomy silence like a beaten dog. "If to bash his skull in with a brick from behind, no techniques will save him."

He did not have occasion to implement his plan of blood revenge, though.

There was some noisy commotion in the crowd at the dance floor, and then, suddenly, there came a horrible animal scream outvoicing the common din and hubbub of the thronging dancers, as if somebody was being cut alive there; and as soon as they both rushed thither, the light over the dance floor switched on, and the holiday-makers, forgotten their dancing, went stampeding through the gaps between the benches, jostling one another and hurrying to run off from the scene of some incident that had frightened them to death.

Having burst into the empty concrete circle after the guy pushing their way through the running people, he immediately saw his comrades bunched together by the stage and a group of the "locals" in white shirts ready for battle opposite them, near the benches, while before the group, a disheveled village bully with his smashed bloody nose was brandishing a huge hunting knife.

"I'll gut you!" this wiry black-haired ruffian was roaring furiously. "Don't approach!"

The latter was addressed to the slowly approaching Sam, but the most unexpected was Jack sitting on the floor, as white as his blond hair, who was pressing his stomach with the two palms, not answering Chris that was asking him about something.

"Throw your knife," hefty Sam was exhorting the frenzied native in a low voice, and the expression on his scowling face boded no good for the "locals". "Throw, or else you'll regret it."

"I'll cut you, cut you," the "son of the mountains", mad with indignation, was repeating with a Caucasian accent, sticking out the blade of the folding machete in his bloody fist. "As your albino, so you... And all of you, too, all..."

Meanwhile the brothers-rockers grasped at last that someone had stabbed their friend in the belly with such a sharpened piece of iron for an innocent, in essence, punch on the nose and were already deploying their combat square, winding the belt with a cast buckle on the fist or taking out a gauntlet with metal plates, whereas the village team in the walking-out uniform of pioneer camp--white top, black bottom--was coming forward threateningly towards them, each with what he had, having the small numerical superiority. A fierce fray was about to break out at any moment, which afforded him ample opportunity to compensate for moral damage, in particular to knock down this possessed stabber for a start, considering that his object was entirely focused on Sam, inexorable like fate.

"Stop it!" a peremptory order sounded curtly in the silence arisen for a second, and Nickolas, having oriented himself in the situation, covered the distance to the wiry bawler with a knife in two quick steps and came to be, one might say, at the epicenter of the conflict.

"Back!" the guy commanded Sam in passing.

Then he thrust his hand out as if at random and touched the wrist of the hand of the furious southerner which was lengthened with the large blade.

But from his fleeting touch, this slaying palm, hardened with agricultural work, suddenly jerked up somehow by itself, so that the arm was dislocated in the wrist and in the elbow; the knife flitted out of the unclenched fist and jingled against the floor flag-stones; while the blustering owner of the cold steel, who was late both in reacting and in protesting, choked with his shout and went limp from an imperceptible jab in his solar plexus, obediently subsiding on his knees before the guy.

"Enough, lads." The guy stepped on the fallen knife and slightly pushed the powerless body of the screamer to the mates. "I won't allow massacre."

Apparently the local loutish "lads" knew who was Nick, and this time no usual wrangling nor vague promises to "meet" ensued, yet they could not leave first, therefore, after neutralizing the most dangerous troublemaker, the professional peacemaker turned to Sam.

"You'd think of saving your friend instead of this foolish stuff," he remarked dryly to Sam and bossily moved apart the semicircle of the rockers standing behind.

"Where he's jabbed you?" bending to the wounded, the guy asked Jack and raised the black T-shirt soaked in blood with a reddened foppish skull in the center. "Give me a handkerchief."

Someone shoved a handkerchief in his hand, and the guy hastily tamponed with it a bleeding narrow incision of the abdominal wall under the ribs on the right which was spilling out new and new portions of blood when breathing.

"We must drive him urgently to the hospital, I'll show where it," he briefly dictated the evacuation program to Chris. "The wound is grave."

"On the horse!" Chris barked out, lifting Jack under the armpits from the ground. "Bez, help me to carry him... Bob, sit with Jack to Hor and hold him fast... Sam, end this! We'll visit them later..."

After a few minutes, they were already driving out from under the arch of the gate, following Chris's Java onto the road, and he felt Jack's face buried in his leather jacket behind his back, hearing the muttering about the "fucking sod" that has "to pay for it".

Keeping the rear wheel of the head Java in the lighting of the headlight, his motorcycle was gathering speed with a turbojet roar; the night highway was leading him smoothly along the bends of the illuminated asphalt band past the overhanging dark cliffs and the gaps filled with the impenetrable darkness, the creeks and bays of which seemed to flow into the moonlit silvery sea appearing within view in the distance; and soon, having rushed as a swift cavalcade through the village looking deserted, their first aid procession, loudly signaling, drove up to the two-story house of the village hospital.

While Chris and Nickolas were demanding the appearance of the hospital staff awakened by knocking at the door and by the hooting of the motorcycle horns, he and Bob unloaded the unconscious Jack and, with the help of Sam, carried their wounded pal to the reception room, from where, true, they were expelled by a fat paramedic displeased with their invasion; that's why their plenipotentiary had a talk and conducted negotiations without them, being absent with the mysterious stranger Nick for about half an hour; so during this time he inspected the street nearby and found a rustic well, covered with two wooden shutters from above but not locked, from which he scooped some water with his polyethylene flask to wash the sticky saddle of his Java and his leather trousers smeared with the blood, poured out of Jack's wound.

Surprising though it may seem, he did not feel pity for Jack, although Jack was his constant sidekick in all his sorties and funs in recent months; he did not even want to empathize with Jack at all, on the contrary, from the very moment he had run onto the stone arena of the dance floor after his defeat on the lawn and looked for the first time from the side at the serried ranks of young gladiators equally being in readiness for battle, he was rather in a state of incomprehensible alienation: some difference in white and black outfits only emphasized the striking resemblance of the two warring groups with their similar conceit, ambitious fanfaronade, and claims to mandatory supremacy; and this sameness, this identity of both behavior and positions, pricked him unpleasantly with a guess about the absolute ordinariness and banality of such a primitive way of self-affirmation--without the slightest signs of intelligence or talent and without anything that was not bodily, because such a way needed nothing "superfluous" but muscles, aggressiveness, and the skill to cripple the others, not letting them to cripple himself; while the best friend Jack was in effect the living embodiment of this method and valued his own or someone else's life much less than the heat of frequent causeless fights or the excitement of the deliberately aggravated risk, which had resulted now in the present bloody surprise, as, to all appearances, Jack was destined to get deservedly either from above, or in conformity with the astrological arrangement of stars and planets, or most likely owing to his brashness and quick temper.

"What's up there?" he asked Chris who had gone out onto the low porch under the slate awning. "How long he is to be incarcerated?"

"Utter uncertainty," Chris shrugged, shoving Jack's small things into his pockets. "The surgeon is allegedly preparing to act, but whether they will operate or not is the question."

"That is, we'll pass the night hereabouts?" Yul enquired from the saddle, feeling exhilarated after smoking his "grass".

"Not necessary. We'll set a sentry for the night and change the guard in the morning," replied Chris, who served his two years in army, unlike the others. "Are there volunteers for the night shift?"

"Well, I may stay here," said he. (Anyway, he would like to be alone at present.) "Why should we all waste the evening?"

"You're absolutely right," he was supported by Pete, who arranged with the popsy that had taken the bait of his dancing flirtation to meet by the gate, and who therefore was afraid of being late. "Chris, catch your headgear!"

"Okay, take over the watch," Chris agreed and caught the helmet thrown to him by Pete. "I've lent the doctor some dosh, and if something happens, he will inform you. By the way, who has the fourth blood group?"

"No one has," summing up the silent exchange of glances, Sam answered gloomily in the name of all. Sam was obviously tormented by his unsatisfied fair desire to beat the living daylights out of that fellow with the knife. "Is it for Jack?"

"It would be needful, in principle." Chris pulled on his helmet and gazed thoughtfully at the fantastic machines, frozen at the entrance in artistic disorder and slightly gleaming in the yellow faint lighting of a lonely bulb, which looked, with the varnish of their roundish petrol tanks and armor-clad windshields, like a squadron of knightly steeds or like a swarm of some unusual horned beetles that had crawled here to gain something, and that were saddled by the large-headed warriors in black panoply; but here the hospital door slammed again, and the guy named Nickolas, who had succored them, appeared on the porch.

"Slackers," the guy sighed, probably concluding his bickering with the sluggish medics. "Maybe, you'll give me a lift to my bungalow? Or it isn't on your way?"

"Never mind," assured Chris respectfully. "Sit up behind me."

"Hey, dude, leave me the flask," he hailed Bez already rolling back the motorcycle. "Or else I'll die of thirst."

"Perhaps I should be on duty with you?" Bez offered compassionately, handing him the wet flask with the well coldness still plashing inside.

"Thank you, but no," he generously rejected such a heroic self-sacrifice, for Bez loved to sleep, claiming that he can sometimes compose the same "sonorous stanzas" in his sleep, too. "I shan't be bored, though you may spare me a few cigarettes, if you like."

The engines again started purring, snorting and discordantly growling, bursting with roaring; the disorderly scattering beetles bristled with the steel whiskers of their handlebars in the darkness; the beams of the flashing headlights, crisscrossing, chaotically lashed the whitewashed wall of the hospital for a couple of minutes; and after that his again carefree comrades jumped up agilely onto the saddles and dashed away, shouting cheerfully, like some howling missiles launched from here into the narrowing vista of the quiet unlit street to the highway, having left behind only the dispersing haze of the swirling dust, the exhaust fumes, and the scarlet fireflies of their non-extinguished cigarettes thrown in a hurry. As to him, he settled down alone under the stars on the ground with his legs stretched out, leaning back against the hard wheel of his motorcycle, and again got to thinking about the same topics, listening to the gradually ceasing barking of watchdogs, to the sleepy quacking of ducks and geese in the yards, and at times to the long deep mooing of a cow ruminating hay somewhere nearby.

Yes, of course, all this was internally interlinked--both Nietzsche that was being studied by him not for the first time, and his yesterday's sex with some floozy, turned up just at the right moment, and his present indifference to his friend, knifed at the dances; all this was forming into the inexorable logic of his own refutation and into the proof of his naive fallacy: just as the philosopher whom he preferred, he was not an integrated personality of the unflappable unfaltering superman that was equally capable of being genius and villain, moreover he could not be, because such a contrived symbiosis never existed in reality, seeing that not only two different approaches to a person were colliding in such a phantom but two different times, two stages of self-awareness, and two mutually hostile origins of such a desired personality indubitably containing "everything human", yet building every integrity by expunging the alien parts. It comes out thus that wholeness in his present meant polarization and the singling out--growing--cultivation of the necessary properties and requisite values, that is, it was either the result of purposeful processing from outside, or a sign of primitiveness and cave uncouthness; whereas if a person already felt the other like himself and his artistic bi-unity and fullness of genius were getting the upper hand in his soul, then the lesser entirety in the capacity of a predator and chieftain was losing its former attraction for him, inasmuch as his coming choice was now not between the polarity of the chief and the slave, but between his original elementally free nature of the artist and someone made by external circumstances--someone determined by the desires and wills of the others, whom he had to curb, subjugate, and overbear--someone who did not know about the genuine independence and freedom among the individuals blindly struggling for survival and power.

And when the untamed beast was waking up in the artist after all, then his artistry was acquiring the same beastly physiological inferiority and narrowness; though, probably, in their pure form, a predator and a genius did not exist too often, and they got along very well in some, in Nietzsche for example, almost without mixing and almost without interfering with each other, until an inadvertent--like the one that he had experienced on the beach--sense of interpenetration in unexpected spiritual compatibility was revealing to them the whole abyss of what they had committed as soulless triumphers in the ambitious scantiness of their spirituality and all the infinity of their missed creative freedom, for their free creation was in no way possible without freedom from slavery and power, equally rigidly regulating both the soul and the spirit. Which, however, hardly concerned the subjects who were sufficiently completed by nature and congenitally closed for everything alien, such as thick-headed Jack or those local blockheads, but there was neither artistry nor Nietzschean duality as such in them.

True, in the main thing--in the global phenomenon of their common time found by him in himself as well--the philosopher was undoubtedly right: in this planetary cauldron overflowing with the people, the soul needed protection first of all from them, and the "superman" constructed in synthesizing the triumphant creaturehood and the divinity of talent was partly such a protection, just as the morality was partly its salvation in the Deluge of human biomass, where it was simply physically impossible to perceive everyone in a row properly humanly, viz. individually and sympathetically, and where you yourself were also being perceived as something bodily-external and statistical or not being perceived at all; but both the leader, and the aggressor, and the victor were no less dependent and gregarious forms of existence than any mass herd, and so every rabid rebellion was turning into the new spiritual barracks supported, as a rule, by everyday martinets, while the "innocent conscience" was transforming actually into the conscienceless arbitrariness of an unbridled cad reigning everywhere.

Besides, the rooted incompatibility he discovered was gaping now in his own soul, and he himself was a kind of that self-creating whole which rejected this salvaging complex of bestial chieftainship toppled from the pedestal; therefore, together with the past in himself, he denied all his current likenesses, including Jack, who seemed to be something alien to him now; and similarly, he, the thinker, was alien now to their gang whose brotherhood was compelling him to remain the former tough guy complying with the standards of the notion of "a real man", whereas he was revolting in his soul against any compliance: he did not intend to turn into a merciless criminal or an unprincipled power-hungry dictator--he could and wanted to become not a part, but himself as a whole--and his alienation was showing more convincingly than all theoretical arguments and conclusions that for him the old question of sense was put extremely acutely, "all or nothing", since without having chosen, he wouldn't have achieved anything and would have burnt his soul with the incessant insoluble enmity of these multidirectional aspirations.

His choice was predetermined--the will to power, which was being extolled by the abased hurt greatness, by the high-handed militants, and by the grasping rogues, meant the will to freedom for him, while the freedom was interpreted by him as the absence of coercion--and, puffing away at the next cigarette, he watched how, crawling out from behind the mountain ridge that was hunching over the village, the dirty gray turbidity was spreading across the sky above the cypress black candles and obscuring the evanescing constellations, and how this murky mistiness was wreathing along the edge like the gypseous lumpy stucco molding, surrounding the waning moon, and how the ragged translucently milky jellyfishes, merging, were sealing the gap that was shining in the womb of the cloud, plunging the surroundings into the pitch darkness and the stuffy soundlessness pressing on the ears.

Then the cloud, the cypresses, and the mountains disappeared, whereupon his thoughts interlaced into the mirage of a frighteningly echoing deserted labyrinth, and he, wingless, swam as if flying along the endless underground corridor with mossy walls to the monster waiting for him in the bowels of the earth, whose distant roar was shaking the low vaults of the labyrinth. The stones oozing out of the cracks yawning above him would hit him more and more frequently; his flight gradually accelerated; and he, strayed in the interlacing of this empty dead-end infinity, was about to turn the corner and either fly out to liberty--to the sun, to the outside sounds and the space not constrained by the ceiling--or fly as a helpless midge into that opened fanged stinking maw, when the monster roared thunderously very close, a wet cold stone suddenly slapped into his face, and he woke up.

*

It was dawning, and the thunder still rumbled in the scowling stormy sky completely overcast with gray clouds. His face was indeed wet, and several drops of the beginning rain had refreshingly besprinkled the skin of his shaved head. A thunderstorm might break any minute, and he should have found some shelter from the rain; but the door of the hospital entrance unexpectedly opened, or, more precisely, swung open from a kick, and on the porch he saw that surly fat paramedic with the crumpled puffy face of a seedy operetta comedian and in a relatively white surgical gown on the hairless doughy body, who was dragging a loaded stretcher covered with a sheet, discontentedly cursing this "dog's job".

Whilst the paramedic and the sleepy aunt, also in a surgical gown and slippers, who was carrying the heavy stretcher at the legs of the person being dragged out, were squeezing through the door, he got up, limbering up his stiff legs, and went to the porch to inquire about Jack, although, judging by the sullen face of the paramedic, at such an early hour he was not in the mood to converse with anyone, especially on abstract topics.

"Good morning," he greeted the fat man straining under the weight of the stretcher, who overcame the four worn steps at last.

"What do you want?" the puffing and sweating paramedic grumbled not very benevolently.

"We'd brought a boy at night," he explained. "He got stabbed at the dances. Is he better?"

"He never will be better," said the paramedic, backing from the porch step by step so as to let the clumsy hospital orderly descend the stairs. "It is just he whom we carry out."

"It is Jack?" he was taken aback.

"How can I know who is he, Jack or not Jack," the disgruntled bearer muttered. "You had brought him, and he had passed away. And now we must lug him to the morgue before the rain begins, or else he'll be stinking in the ward in such a muggy weather."

"But how is it..." he stopped in confusion by the stretcher. "But we agreed..."

"Death doesn't ask us," the paramedic-moralizer observed, glowering at him. "And if you are his friend, then go replace the woman, her hands already fall off from this heaviness."

He silently grasped the rubber handles instead of the aunt, and together with the paramedic they carried the covered body to the wooden temporary house at the backyard of the hospital. The swearing fat man tinkered with the lock for some time, and he, standing motionlessly at the stretcher that was set on the gravel, dully watched the rare big drops fall from the skies onto the corpse and on his head, dotting the whiteness of sheet with dark spots; and when they dragged the stretcher into the dissection-room of the morgue smelling of formalin and decay to the central table with a slab of marble crumb and a thin hose stretched from the sink tap, the paramedic pulled the hospital sheet off the corpse and began to fold it.

Without the black streak of clotted blood on the wound and the suffering posthumous grin, Jack would have looked like a statue of yellowish marble, only his hands were tied on his chest, like a praying one, and it was not so easy to lay Jack on the table, because for some reason he weighed much more than usual, and his previously tough muscular body was lifelessly limp and icy cold on contact.

"Drat!" the paramedic suddenly exclaimed, already going to turn off the light, and again turned on the lonely bulb above the table with Jack's body. "I forgot to write his data!"

"Good, look at him a few minutes and bid farewell to your comrade, and I'll be back instantly with his medical history," the paramedic justified his negligence and hastened with the folded sheet to the hospital for information about the deceased.

The fine rain was dripping on the plank roof; the distant thunder, having crushingly cracked the nutshell of the electrified atmosphere, was rumbling, dying away as rolling peals; while he, alone with the corpse, gazed stupefied at the naked stranger on the table, who inspired disgust and nauseating fear in him.

"And that's all," some scraps of unnecessary blasphemous and absurd thoughts were arising incoherently in his mind as desultory flashes. "This is the only remainder. With this he was chewing something, with this he was beating someone, with this he was poking somewhere--and what now? What is he? And such is all life? All life is in this? Yes, he was satisfied: he was guzzling and boozing, he was fucking and fighting to his heart's content--but what's further? Where's the result? One stab of knife--and it is a blank space, and nothing but meat, and I am no more... Because it is me--I am exactly the same!--If I were killed it would be the same thing! But then what for? What was I born for then? To be living? To be simply living, like the flora and fauna, for the very process of living, and then to disappear without leaving a trace like them? But I'm different, I'm not him, I don't want to live so! That is, I want both so and otherwise, only with some meaning and somehow differently... But how? If I am to be such, too, someday, then how? Given that I may die, too, at any second..."

From the satanic martyred sneer of Jack baring his teeth mockingly, he felt such a horror and such a pity for himself, still alive, but doomed, sooner or later, to die and lose everything distinguishing him from the dead man lying in front of him, that he hurriedly stepped back towards the open door to the fresh air to be farther from death--from his ordinary commonplace powerlessness to cope with its eternal mystery so terrible for human being--and ran into the returning paramedic.

"Looked enough at him?" the livened healer asked, placing a quarter of a sheet of paper covered with writing on the corpse's leg and taking out a stub of chemical pencil. "Let's mark him as it's necessary."

Having wet the pencil with saliva, the paramedic began to trace out ink scribbles diligently on Jack's thigh.

"Wait by the by," remembered the paramedic. "When are you going to take him? And his things as well."

"His relatives should take him," he replied, overcoming the nausea. "We'll notify them."

"He'll go fetid in our climate," the circumspect medic remarked, again wetting the pencil with saliva. "He'll make a lot of trouble for us here."

"Can I go?" he interposed.

"Yes, good riddance. You could help me with the stretcher, of course..."

But, without listening to the end, he came out of the morgue in the rain that already got heavier and laved his flaming brain, yet not cooled it at all, despite the chilly dampness of the early morning; in the swelling duskiness of clouds above the sea, a branchy streak of lightning bloomed blindingly and collapsed with a booming deafening rumble; and, putting his palms up under the heavenly drops, he moved to his motorcycle, washing the hands that touched the deceased and not knowing yet with what exactly his icily empty soul would respond to this collision with the irreparable, only indomitably compressing his parched lips, fastening the zipper of his fighting jacket, as if before a battle.

He mounted his warhorse with wet saddle and the safety helmet hanging on the handlebars, started up the engine, and set off slowly like in a funeral procession, on the dust slightly dampened by the increasing rain towards the highway past the roadside burdocks with the gray dusty drops that were rolling off their cyclopean leaves. With the aloofness of a stranger, he viewed the painted picket fences and wickets with numbers; the lilac and pink mallows that plastered the tubular rods of stems with their strange flower bowls, rising above the fences; the branches of figs with the ovaries of green fruits overhanging the muddy duckweed of a ditch covered with emerald mould; the cobbled courtyards of private estates and the mansions towering among the one-story modest neighbors with their mansards and the stone staircases decorated in Empire style by the pot-bellied cement skittles supporting the railings; until the village street with the hospital crossed another, leading to the sea, whither he turned by the bared tree with peeling dry bark that was dropping its hard glossy leaves the size of a palm of hand on the road towards a fiery flash of lightning which had lashed across the sky and an explosion of thunder betokening the downpour.

"Alien... Alien..." he was reiterating the word floundering in the malarial chaos of his consciousness as a melting tiny piece of ice, and this all-explanatory word applied equally to the dead Jack lying there on the table in the fetid shack of morgue, and to himself; meanwhile, his hand, as if to spite everything, continued to twist the throttle, more and more speeding up the motorcycle.

As a furious tornado of a swift water bubble cleaving the wall of storm, he tore along to the accompaniment of the bolts of lightning ramifying over the sea and of the unceasing cannonade of the multi-stage thunderclaps hammering the mountains, on the foaming asphalt inundated by the streams that gushed from everywhere, and the heartrending howl of his motor was ripping the wild hoarse roar of the raging tropical thunderstorm pouring the blinding pressure of the sheer water avalanche over him and whipping his face with the currents of rain. The more violently the storm was blustering, the more foolhardy he was while bypassing, almost blindly, the rushing trucks and buses rare in the morning, dangerously, without reducing speed, laying the motorcycle on its side on turns, and the more riskily--downhill--he was flying across the narrow bridges, frenziedly splashing the water flooding the asphalt, over the swollen muddily seething rivers; whereas from above, the lime mud torrents, merging, were running down the mountain slopes to his wheels, and the shrill exhaust blare of his Java breaking all records was trailing behind him along the winding route as a fading sound wake.

The thunderstorm was raging around with all its might, and the speed, as always, was saving him from any thoughts, so only when the downpour somewhat abated did he also temper his ardor a little and reduce speed from a hundred and above to acceptable eighty per hour--and, it must be said, he did it very timely.

Behind the bend of the road, near a closed shashlik-house, there was a canary-yellow patrol motorcycle without a sidecar standing under a white metal umbrella tent, and a stumpy fat-bottomed road inspector in a white uniform peaked cap with a red band, in a white shirt with short sleeves, and in the gray riding-breeches with the polished high-boots sat on the saddle with his short boar legs dangling, like an Amazon, waiting till the rain was over and killing the time here before his usual daily catching of those incautious drivers who were to pay him off, thanks to his vigilance. Such a foppish racer wet through appeared just in time, and having lifted his black-and-white striped baton lazily, the enforcer of traffic rules beckoned this early bird with imperious casualness; therefore, he deviated from his set course, crossing the highway obliquely, and slowed down at the umbrella sheltering militia patrol.

"What?" he asked, resting his foot on the ground, and passed his hand over his forehead, wiping away the rainwater.

"Why isn't the head covered?" the traffic cop categorically did not like his independent tone.

"I'm not in the army yet," murmured he.

"Enough bickering," the stern shorty in uniform pursed his plump lips. " Do as you're bidden and put on what you must."

He took off his helmet full of water from the handlebars and, having splashed out the contents on his head, defiantly clapped it on.

"And fasten the strap," the junior sergeant who got bored alone with himself decided to take him down a peg. "As tight as possible."

"They always need someone else for self-affirmation," he suddenly realized the essence of his own alienation, carrying out this order as well. "They aren't able to be something without someone else, that's why they need power, strength, and gregariousness in their herd instinct. They themselves--as they are--are nothing, and they become something only by overpowering and subordinating, only in someone else, otherwise self-assertion is not given to them. Whereas to me it's given, and that's what I differ in..."

"Fastened it? Good," the cop continued, playing with the baton and visibly beginning to enjoy this military drilling. "Besides, you owe a fine."

The cop paused pointedly, and since the usual question "For what?" did not ensued, explained, amusing himself, with an official mien: "For speeding--one, for driving without a helmet--two, for an altercation with the authorities--three."

"Not too much?" he asked rudely.

"I follow protocol to a T," the representative of the "authorities" chuckled, even not suspecting how close was the fined traffic violator to smash in the smug fat face of such "authorities". "Come on, slicker, fork out for replenishing the public purse."

"And what is due to me for resistance?" he looked expressively into the watery small eyes.

"For this you will land in slammer," the cop threatened jokingly, not believing in the seriousness of his intentions, apparently.

"Then try to catch me," he said and suddenly pushed off with his foot from the yellow Izh rested against the metal post of the umbrella tent, twisting the right handlebar grip backward.

With a deafening roar, his Java peeled out from under the umbrella on one rear wheel and dashed through the pelting rain along the white dividing line, disregarding both all road rules and the hysterical whistles behind the rider's back.

"You'll get your feet wet now," he leered, glancing back at the relatively straight section of the highway and seeing in the distance the rushing yellow Izh that had just emerged from behind a ledge of rocks.

Having rounded the rocky slope with the white bollards opposite on the brink of precipice steeply falling into the deep hollow overgrown with wild dogwood and barberry, he sharply turned his Java round and, muttering, "I'll check your psyche", directed it straight towards the appeared motorcycle.

This time, the "psyche" let his pursuer down. When the traffic cop saw a crazy suicide in black leather hurtling to ram, he unexpectedly tore at full throttle, and the two roaring machines met at full speed on the bend of this dangerous turn, like two butting enraged bulls--although both of them, trying to avoid their inevitable head-on collision, made an attempt to "hold the horses" at the last moment and to swerve, it was too late.

Turning the handlebars, he nearly laid his Java on the wet asphalt and heard the sharp screech of its steel crash bars that struck against the flinty stones of the scree; but at once, his motorcycle barely touched the motorcycle brushing past, and he felt the saddle jerking out from under him and the rear wheel skidding to the right, while he was being thrown away to the left towards the steep slope. He was falling, and before him, as though in slow-motion replay, the other fall was occurring, and as then, on the beach, he seemed to feel this fall from within, for at this brief moment of the crash that he accidentally caused, he was not only himself who was flying by the force of inertia to the roadside into a puddle, but also the other man who was vainly struggling on the slippery bitumen with the irresistibly rearing and overturning heavy machine hurling him forward over the handlebars onto the concrete bollards.

"Damn!" a death lightning flashed in his brain, and thunder burst inside his head.

Having struck against a concrete bollard, the cracked skull of the fallen man exploded with splattering blood, and the body with the broken neck flew head over heels into the precipice, while the sliding Izh swept away a part of the road fence and tumbled down after its rider with its petrol tank that blazed up from the impact.

Meantime he, spinning like a high-speed top after his Java rapidly moving further on its side along the highway, began to rise skywards into the air over the flooded asphalt with the wet white peaked cap and over the hollow where the burning wreckage rolled, and suddenly soared over the mountains, green behind the sheet of rain, and over the boisterous Black Sea being lashed by the thunderstorm. In surprise, he closed his eyes--and opened them already in the noisy heated bus which was driving him away along some completely different road to some completely different mountains.

II

He was, too, completely different today from himself in that pre-university summer, at the beginning of the path traversed by now: instead of overcoming, comprehending and extreme loads, he wanted silence and loneliness, so as not to participate in all this tragifarce called "human life"; he wanted deliverance from his current self which was not needed by anyone and felt no need for anyone; and at present, the then amateurish polemic with the genius madman of the last century caused only a new surge of his acrimonious skepticism by its short-sightedness.

Wasn't it clear that nothing accidental ever existed either in the sphere of the spirit or in the nature begetting it, and that consciousness, in principle, was always the phenomenon of self-regulation--both of an individual and of mankind, the planet and the cosmos; consequently, if someone was catching something widespread and dominant, something conquering and superseding the previous beliefs and attitudes of consciousness, then one should by no means refute the obvious, but, on the contrary, try to understand the natural meaning of the logically or intuitively discovered spiritual phenomenon, as well as its purpose, its place in the general process, and therefore its true origin, not closed socially or individually, upon careful consideration, because every subject was Nature at first, that is, in part, he was the entire planet comprehending through him, or rather by him, and thus every consciousness was partly planetary and at times universal.

So, for example, the discovering of an archaically full-blooded beast-superman in the soul (in his own above all) of an clichéd individual being standardized and emasculated by civilization was proving to be--in addition to self-defense as self-assertion--the discovery of its ineradicable naturalness, or otherwise of dependence on the elementalness creating it; while a careful research of the origins of the aspiration that had been realized as "the will to power" was exposing the pivotal task of this reaction to the excessive mass character of the human species, exceeded a certain quantitative and qualitative limit and dangerous for the planet, namely, the limitation of the superfluously omnipotent humanity for the sake of saving the planetary whole: limiting by means of the extermination in wars and dictatorships, of hewing out both physically and intellectually, of elevating the triumphing "strong" mediocrity, of suppressing the truly eminent alien talents, of degenerating in consequence of gradual common feeble-mindedness, and as a result, of partial suicide of an ethnos or people being expressed mainly in the desire to kill others, "enemy", and in exterminating an adherent of different faith or a member of different tribe, which, with the bluntness of a paranoid schizoid, was demonstrated by the totalitarian statehoods of the people's democratic regimes of party sort with their "red chieftains" and "brown Fuhrers", bestially monstrous in cruelty.

Since the supertask of self-destruction of surpluses was requiring cannibalistic zoological barbarism and resurrecting it through the release of bloodlust that was elevated to the rank of the law, then, naturally, the attitude towards man as such was also undergoing changes: the morality of the Christian commandments with the intrinsic value of each man and with the benevolent Almighty taking care of every soul was infuriating the individuals by the discrepancy between the prescribed humaneness and the constant threat emanating from the crowds of the "everybody else" to the sole "self" of every one, and a new round of primitive savagery was giving birth to a new God, as indifferently inhuman as Nature that was found in the soul, and, by the way, Nietzsche's "God" was actually its phantom likeness.

Formerly, when he was young, from an excess of conscience, he was tormented by the seeming aimlessness of those sufferings of his compatriots unprecedented in planned scale and genocidal scope and by those uselessness and fruitlessness of their death on which the ugly hugeness of the crumbling short-lived "new society" was erected, yet today there was clarity in this, too: such global self-annihilation of mankind--whether in the intestine wars and "civil" slaughter or in the tectonically destructive movements of the warlike hordes trampling down the claims of other cultures, religions and "national ways of life"--was indeed leading to catastrophes, but to local catastrophes for the time being, while on the whole, there was some changing or balancing of various human populations, slightly moderating the boundless power of the "bearers of reason", which they were managing so unreasonably and recklessly; and in prospect, such disasters were eventually becoming sudden changes in the minds with awareness and renewal, as, for instance, the bloody mess of the last century of the millennium was again returning presumptuous man to himself-nature, which he could already destroy and which therefore destroyed him more and more mercilessly, including destruction with his own hands.

"Yes, awareness, awareness," he thought half asleep, while his drowsy eyes were gliding mechanically over the midday field expanses running past outside the dusty pane. "Someone lives and acts, and someone draws conclusions, but the process itself is continuous, no matter whom you fancy yourself and how you single out yourself, unique and godlike, from the natural environment and from the biosphere... In our infinite wisdom, we have imagined that we are allegedly not Nature but something separate (though it is probably not by chance, otherwise we wouldn't have developed to what we are nowadays), and for this we pay now--for conceit, for considering ourselves the elect, for putting ourselves on the throne, and for our eternal desire to subject our Earth in order to devour everything like locusts... Why not to figure out instead of this who we are in fact on the planet and why we appeared here; why not to understand instead of subjection what is our destination; anyway, not only did we come to destroy the Earth and drive our evolution to a dead end... But consciousness is originally paradoxical, and I am proof of that: you seem to know you shouldn't overstep something, yet you overstep it, nevertheless; you feel you shouldn't cognize further than it is necessary, and in spite of it all you continue to cognize... Like everything in nature, consciousness is excessive and potentially unlimited, in contrast to something formalized and accomplished as, say, I am at present..."

"Have lived life, as they say... have actualized inner potential..." his thoughts started flowing through the usual channel. "What about pleasures it is next to nothing, and what else I can sum up, except my notes, conspectuses, scholarly articles and abstracts... In short, 'words, words', meanwhile words cost quite cheap in the current information boom, whatever stunning ideas they preach and whatever revelations are expressed in them... The overwhelming majority, however, don't care damn about realizing, as always, as in all epochs: everyday routine and newspaper-TV gum are what they are accustomed to, and as to all the rest, why the deuce they must strain their brains..."

The bus, in which he was joylessly sifting through his former thoughts, braked to pick up the passengers thumbing a lift on the roadside in the middle of the field; a breath of the dry dusty sultriness burst into the bus through the window from the sunlit plain, as if from an oven, so, again feeling the dampness of his still unfastened canvas shirt and the rough tightness of the jean cloth and smelling the garlic-onion odor from the wicker baskets covered with some rags underfoot, he reached for his flask of water into the bag, while the aunties loaded with provisions and cast-iron pots and pans were scrambling into the bus and squeezing to the back seat through the sacks, nets, packages and bundles of some necessities purchased in the city, whereupon they took their places beside him, pressing him against the metal heated from outside into the corner, where he morosely went on with his autobiographical investigation.

What he wanted to make clear for himself now, and why that was so torturing him, if he had taken such an irrevocable decision, he didn't know, considering that he was traveling one way, nevertheless, his elegiac farewell to life lasted longer and longer. He was again recalling how, after having made sure that his bones were intact, he kicked away the telltale uniform cap into the chasm to the yellow motorcycle and was bolting without witnesses, albeit injured and beaten but alive, along the highway on his battered yet functioning Java; how in the same day, despite the persuasions of his friends who were struck by his news of Jack's death and indisposed, for all that, to lose a month of summer vacation because of this misfortune, he scrammed out of the camp on the coast back to the capital to be healing his wounds and preparing diligently at the same time for the entrance exams to the university, where he was obliged to enter this time; and how with the beginning of the studies: he--at his philosophical faculty, Bez--at the philological, Yul--at the technical school, and the hereditary doctor Pete--at the pharmaceutical institute, they gradually began to gather at night less and less, separating and going away, as usual, into their new milieu and professional cells. Sam, being smitten with remorse on the eve of his army service, even married his girlfriend who became pregnant with his child by inadvertence; while Bob, contrived to evade conscription, got a permanent job as a "muso" of the jazz ensemble in the state Philharmonic and started knocking about some small towns, out-of-the-way district centers, and godforsaken villages with his guitar, working off the quarterly rate of concerts; and only Chris kept being a more or less stable rocker, making the dough of his start-up capital for his future prosperity by dint of collecting bottles on a motor-scooter as an individual employee of a glass recycling point. Then their gang finally disintegrated, although from time to time he saw and met with someone, as it would happen usually to "friends of childhood and youth", when their interests and environment were diverging too much over the years, and their common hobbies and pastime weren't connecting them so much that it might oblige them to waste time in vain.

Rocking him to sleep by the monotonous jolting, the bus was slowly running across the fields, and he began to think about the vicissitudes of friendship, which was hardly possible between people changing like him, but his eyelids closed--the reality, where he, sweaty and squeamish, was abiding in the bus in the present, got intangible--and, instantly rejuvenated, he was carried again to the past not dying in him, to that first--happiest--period of his student days...

*

The October chilly sun, resplendently reflecting in the glass wall of the youth cafe, was seeping through the rustling flimsy yellowness of the fluttering thinning foliage, slightly pricking their eyes with its piercing rays; the disorderly falling rags of the autumnal crowns of maples and poplars were rubbing dryly against a translucent awning of pressed epoxy-rusty plastic over the small tables brought out into the street, sliding down from it and covering the asphalt with the patterned golden scales round the secluded eatery in the depths of the park; and he with Pete, settled in the morning in their favorite corner on the edge of the summer terrace, were warming themselves with the next portion of scalding double coffee, watching the grumpily cawing unwieldy crows that were mincing about with an independent air among the trunks of trees and resembled pieces of wet anthracite from afar, and tiredly--with hangover sluggish bantering--discussing the yesterday's send-off of their friend Sam to the ranks of the glorious "Armed Forces".

The send-off was capital: with lashings of vodka and fortified wines and with their discordant choral singing and solo bellow to the guitar of Bob, now the adored "Beatles", now some street thieves' cant folklore or the sentimental "bardic" lyrics; with nipping any sober obstacles in the bud, in particular the overly caring girlfriends trying, unfortunately for them, to limit the strong drinks that their boyfriends were swilling, whereas any restriction of the hero of the occasion in boozing today was tantamount to an attempt of stopping halfway an avalanche rolling from the mountain, which his young wife with her inappropriate control got to know from personal experience, and good that everything ended without "assault and battery"; with the drunken heartfelt declarations of strong male friendship and the assurances of mutual inexpressible respect, and with the incoherent talks in the fresh air in a square courtyard by the cast-iron bollard of a standpipe that was surrounded with some two or three-storey decrepit communal rookeries girdled with rotten wooden balustrades along the facades; as well as, regretfully, with an indispensable scandal almost to the point of a fisticuffs, which broke literally out of nothing. And worst of all was that not outsiders nor relatives nor neighbors quarreled there, but he and Sam, two bosom friends and comrades-in-arms, and they were only just drunkenly swearing eternal "brotherly" allegiance to each other, not to mention mutual sincere sympathy between them.

Their quarrel arose because of a trifle--because of the soviet tanks which had invaded in Prague in August, when he was passing exams and had no time for politics. Since the summer, after Sam's wedding, they did not really talk, and he scarcely kept in contact with him, therefore he naively presumed that Sam did not like such occupation actions either, whatever arguments might be advanced for grounding them; however, Sam, already attuned to the militancy, had categorically grieved him.

"It's right that they got their comeuppance," Sam unexpectedly responded to the remark about "Stalin's affairs", turning on the tap of the standpipe, and put his palm under the spurt of cold water gushed from the tap. "What the fuck they sow discord, these brothers by the socialist camp!"

"Old chap," he was astounded by such a reaction. "You're an imperialist, though... In other words, if something is not as we wish, then a jackboot in the mug right away?"

"Uh-huh, just so," trumpeting like an elephant at the watering hole, his great-power friend sucked in the water from the cupped hand at one gulp. "We freed them for another objective."

"What, for our tanks instead of German?" he asked indignantly. "This is freedom, in your opinion?"

"Freedom," Sam broke into a drunken grin. "But not for everyone. If they know that we shall force them into submission, what the point in rocking the boat?"

"Reasonable," he got slightly angry. "To force all into submission is the most reliable principle."

"Isn't that so?" Sam shook the water off his hand with an abrupt quick movement. "The principle is one for everybody, only the means are different."

"Are you preparing for the service, apparently?" he observed with undisguised sarcasm. "Thus you're ready to fulfill every order of the Motherland?"

"What don't you like in your Motherland?" his chum-conscript grew stupider in a trice, taking into account that Sam was drafted into the Marines, into the Rapid Reaction Force.

"I don't like such a jackboot," he told Sam plainly. "I'm not a zombie, excuse me, and I still think sometimes..."

"This means I don't think?" Sam asked offended.

"What am I, a brainless pawn?" Overtly incensed, Sam went up an octave higher and exploded after all with roaring at the top of his voice, venting all the tension accumulated during the three post-wedding months before his forced absence for three years. "Yes, I'm not such a wiseacre as you, I know, don't grin, but I go to defend you!"

"I need no defenders!" he bawled, too, in drunken anger in reply to this hysterics provoked by him. "I'm spitting upon all jackboots; I always spitted upon them; and I shall ever spit upon it! And upon the tanks! And upon all this!"

In a word, he had spat all over what he could, and they had completely quarreled with each other: yelling like one possessed and not allowing themselves to hit the comrade, they were hopping in a puddle near the standpipe and pounding the innocent cast iron with their fists, poking the fingers at the opponent with the accompanying abusive characteristics and with the historical proofs of their own rightness; so that Chris who appeared just in time could pull them from each other with great difficulty, but did not succeed in reconciling them in any way; that's why today he didn't go to see Sam off to the recruiting station, and the occasional drinker Pete kept him company in order to prevent a new inevitable bender. Quite understandably, they were talking now about that ridiculous quarrel.

"So is that why you'd grappled with him?" Pete said derisively, putting a tiny cup on the table and smoothing his neat mustache with his little finger from below. "How did you rile him up?"

"To hell with him," he stretched himself.

The whole body was aching after yesterday's abundant "drinks", but luckily for him, he did not rise to the bait of those boozers, who were instigating him under the leadership of Bob and Yul to continue the unrestrained carousal, and evaded joining in their endurance competitions: it was not typical for him to get blackout drunk and shake from a hangover till the first--on an empty stomach--slug of anything alcoholic, although, naturally, he would happen to have one too many, especially in the heat of asserting himself.

"They've brainwashed him with 'patriotic education', therefore he is talking nonsense. I hurt his feelings, you see, I hadn't approve of the next banditry of his Motherland!"

"Each soldier defends his barracks," the apolitical Pete remarked somewhat superciliously. "Only I'm of the opinion that troubles should be digested as they come in."

"In what sense?"

"As for me, I don't participate in such cockfighting, and this does not regard me concretely. If this touches me, then we'll see."

"I'm afraid this will touch--both you and all of us," he foretold in passing. "But you're absolutely right: as long as there is an opportunity, it is wiser to live."

"To live--precisely!" Pete confirmed. "Sam, meanwhile, is ordered to execute the commands, for he is a recruit now, and he also has to accommodate himself to the circumstances. Let him assimilate among some soldiery as he pleases, but we have no right to condemn him."

"If we have not, then so be it," he hemmed, warming the cold fingers with the hot china cup. "May he be a good executor of commands."

"The country of executors of commands," he thought in silence. "Probably, just such ones that accommodated to circumstances finished off my father."

The parent was put behind bars exactly in the middle of the century, in the year of the birth of his son and shortly before the death of the deified "mustached", so he was sentenced to the traditional "twenty five" for the completely fabricated "politics", and that, in essence, was not very different from the quick and group wiping out in the torture basements with adding to the millions of those who were already ground into dust by the state bone-crushing mechanism of the All-Union Secret Chancellery; but he had served only seven years of his sentence somewhere in Kolyma, though this "only" proved more than enough for him: he returned almost fully disabled, without teeth and with injured "liver-spleen-kidneys", because, to all appearances, the orders were being carried out by someone with willingness and with due zeal; after which, by a miracle, as he once blabbed out, having survived in the servitude of a northern concentration camp, he came to his untimely demise at liberty in less than four years, coughing out the remnants of his indestructible health with blood; and to his son, in addition to books with the grandfather's ex-libris, he bequeathed his pre-war diploma of the polytechnic institute, his front-line medal "For Courage", and his standard rehabilitation certificate on tissue paper; so that he could only form an overall impression of his father's life before the arrest by the stories of his mother and by the photographs in the survived family album; however, he saw with his own eyes what this white-toothed strong man was turned into by their "just system", even if at first he was dividing the creators and apologists of such "Justice" being zealously implemented in Bolshevik style into good and bad ones, and the system itself was being divided for him into "right path" and "deviations-perversions", as it was accepted then, and as it was insistently instilled into him.

His father never spoke with him on such subjects, extremely dangerous for him, realizing that, like it or not, the sonny was to live here, "in the vastness of the wonderful Motherland," as sung in one famous camp song, and knowing from his own bitter experience of an innocent victim what consequences threatened a disobedient ideological freethinker for any seditious disagreement, let alone protest; but his father's aloofness on holidays and that dead extinct look into space which he noticed more and more often in the familiar eyes, finding the dying father, wizened like a skeleton with the grey face, hunched motionlessly on the stool by the window in the kitchen, as well as the silent glumness of his father detachedly avoiding any "social life", were undoubtedly influencing on him, and quite definitely, because this emaciated, crippled man, whom he had been waiting for so long in childhood, without hope for a meeting in the future, meant too much to him and had too little time to be with him after the return.

Presumably, some doubts about the political convictions being imposed on him were initially present in his mind, and in adolescence, they developed into his instinctive distrust of everything being persistently stuffed into his head by school guardians, newspaper agitators, literary figures and the puppetry of "cultural and arts workers": both covertly and overtly, they all wanted to cod and dupe him, so as to process him in a spirit of proper conduct and turn him into a kind of conveyor product, into a thoughtless executor of someone's "decisions", "programs" and "plans", into a selfless enthusiast and a self-sacrificing "hero of working days", who would be at everybody's disposal whoever conceived a desire to exploit him; so, involuntarily resisting this clipping of his wings and this reforging of his nature, he was looking for something else that would have enabled him to break out of the ubiquitous "educational process", with the object of glancing from outside at the habitual truths and axioms that were hammered into his head: he was searching for such a glance both in literature (especially in the forbidden and "harmful" literary writings), and in jazz (especially in American rock and roll of the homemade discs clandestinely recorded on the old X-ray films, "on ribs"), and in his sarcastic ridicule of various stereotypical formulas of common ideological lexicon (especially "ham-munistically" untouchable ones), and in the deliberately daring originality of the west style of his defiant teenager's attire or of his uninhibited behavior; for this reason he loved flaunting his good English and his snobbish predilections in art: "my favorite writer-Kafka, my favorite artist-Dali, my favorite composer-Berstein", he wrote in one of his school compositions, although he read only a little bit of Kafka, and saw Dali's paintings only cursorily in someone else's hands, and as to Berstein, he knew only the music from the world-renowned film adaptation of West Side Story, the melodies from which he hummed by heart at that time; besides, the marriage of his relatively young mother in the fourth year of her widowhood also strengthened his independence, since his stepfather turned out to be pretty orthodoxy and ordinary, and did not approve of his demarches, not coming, nevertheless, into conflicts on account of dissimilarity of tastes, but preferring to act the liberal with the wayward stepson, thereby following the example of the then high command that allegedly "loosened the reins" a little; needless to say, over the years he felt more and more uncomfortable in the family with his perkiness, and so he strove to escape at every opportunity from home into that life where there were neither blathering newspapers nor exhortingly lying announcers and conversations about everyday problems, and where he could obtain his complete independence and separateness, to wit, his real freedom from the nation-wide commonness and ordinariness which were so habitual to the adults.

"And as regarding their politics," he smoothed the hair that had grown from the summer, bristling on the back of his head, "it doesn't affect me at all. They have their own program, whereas I have my own, and, maybe, I'm more into improvisations."

"Who is not into it," Pete thoughtfully subscribed to his view, having in mind rather the intimate and love aspect of his actions, because in other matters, Pete was famed for tiresome pedantry, obviously hereditary. "If I'm not mistaken, Bob calls it 'in the style of ragtime'."

"In Nietzsche's philosophy, there is something similar, but couched in more precise images," he incidentally recollected the notorious professor of classical philology. "Dionysian and Apollonian origins, the elements and orderliness, in short, the eternal, as they say, antagonism... And for now, I choose Dionysus."

"Happy to join you," Pete again sided with him, implying their joint going with girls. "If there are the elements, we will find where to spend it, and we don't care a fig about all their prescriptions."

Having thus solved the problem of public morality, they fell silent and again plunged into the pensive contemplation of the park's slow fall of the leaves, of the oily black feathering of the squabbling pre-winter ravens, and of the barely warming sun whose dazzling reflection was sluggishly sliding on the huge glass wall of the cafe, over the few eaters chewing something at the tables, and over the counter of the buffet with a buxom brunette, a master of faulty scales and underfilling drinks, who was languishing behind the counter; and the pacifying pictures of this meek autumn, coupled with the drunk coffee, put him little by little in a melancholic cobweb-light mood of sad placidity. Whatever happened in the world, his life was developing successfully for the present: he was already at the university, and the June accident on the seaside highway had no consequences for him, while in the years ahead, he had exactly what he was striving for, viz. the systematic reading of philosophical books being paid by his scholarship and the temptations of student liberty of action at leisure; so now he could not wish more, unlike Sam who got into such a mess.

"By the way, psychoanalysis approves of us--the taboo should be overcome," the handsome Pete reverted to his pet subject. "That is what we shall busy ourselves with today, I think."

"There is a vacant flat?" he didn't believe in it at once.

This was far from being an idle question for them. The girlfriends, whom they walked together and separately, quite ceded to their street harassment, and the agreement reached on the benches and on the window sills had to be consolidated without delay, for the girls seemed to be sufficiently slick, and this homeless stray romanticism could hardly satisfy such wily birds in the autumn-winter season, during the period of rains, of the cold, and of other dirty tricks of bad weather.

"It is, and even with an overnight stay,'' Pete reassured him. "We can dive, so to speak, into the abyss of debauchery."

"And how!" After such information, his hangover melancholy vanished without trace. "Our beloveds, I hope, won't let us down."

"Touch wood," Pete knocked on the table three times to avoid a jinx. "Let Bez specialize in unrequited love. On him, as on a poet, abstinence sometimes has a positive impact."

"Poor fellow," he had shown compassion to the lyrist whose talent deprived its possessor of the only solace. "What pleasure he denies himself!"

"It's nothing," quoth Pete sternly. "There is no art without sacrifice. Come on, son of harmony, sublimate your base instincts, and perhaps you'll write still more verses."

"I'll pass on your recommendations to him, doctor," he was enlivened to some extent. "This scribbler will compose something for you, too, for, thank God, he's very versed as a rhymester."

"Lampoonist!" the proponent of lyrical self-sacrifice and sublimity contemptuously rated their master of epigram.

For me, he already concocted," he owned up to his vainglory, not without pride. "I haven't recited it to you? Marvelous verses which Pushkin never even dreamed of."

"Where is my best part sticking up as

my divine spirit feels no shame?

As the likeness of the god Priapus,

on all girls I bestow the same!" he had declaimed with feeling into the cold silence of the park still empty in the morning.

"It's really divine!" Pete exclaimed admired, having shaken his hippie mop of dark hair. "And most importantly, you can be envied."

"The question is, for how long."

They had finally tuned in their usual ironic tone making it possible for them to casually exchange their acquired knowledge in the domain of psychoanalytic "libido" being regarded as the primary sexual energy of all mental activity or of Nietzschean "nihilism" being interpreted as "the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals", switching over from their theoretical "probing" of the world culture to the practical aspects of the realization of their "denying through self-emancipation" and eschewing the otiose seriousness both in clarifying some mysteries of their own psyche and in the ragtime whimsical stream of events, accidents, coincidences and spiritual metamorphoses, from which, as it seemed to them, their life was forming as if by itself.

"However," he added modestly, "I am still able to give a lesson of the elementary riding school to those who desire."

"You and Pushkin are tarred with the same brush," the hypocrite Pete censured the rival in jockey races. "Both of you are mere animals."

Being a curious and inquisitive boy, Pete, of course, unearthed Pushkin's Don Juan list, which--as he would announce when enlightening the "cuties" whom he tried to seduce--became for him "a guiding star" and "a paragon of unattainable perfection".

"As the old man Friedrich used to say," he riposted with the words of the same authority, "'man is the animal that has not yet been established', therefore he establishes taboo for himself."

"It's reasonable," Pete praised "the old man Friedrich" condescendingly.

"Yes, to be sure. So reasonable that sometimes it's even overly and interferes with being established."

"Quite right, I mean just that," Pete took up. "How can I know what is there, within me--in the depths, as you call it--in the subconscious."

"If within you, then nothing good," he comforted this sensualist. "Only some rubbish and abomination."

"It depends on the tastes. What is 'abomination' for one is pleasure for the other," Pete juxtaposed the different aspects of his experience. "As you understand, no 'norms' exist, and there is only something widespread somewhere among some communities or, conversely, forbidden."

"That is, you're saying everyone has his own norm?"

"Don't you agree?"

"I'm personally pro--with both hands," he jokingly raised his hands. "But I wonder what determines my subconscious."

"'Who wants a lot will get a bit', as one of my shorties said." Pete always had a quote at the ready, lest he should lag behind his philosopher friend in resourcefulness. "Does it matter what determines? You need your freedom, while freedom, as I opine, consists in the possibility to follow your desires, isn't that so?"

"Perhaps it is so," he did not find counterarguments against such an exact formulation. "But in that case, freedom is some level of understanding, and no more."

"Okay it is nothing but the level," Pete preferred to desist from redundant debate. "But for us, I suppose, the level is enough."

"For you," he corrected Pete.

"For us, for humans," Pete explained to the dullards.

"The level is not enough for him, you see!" exclaimed the "ardent harbinger of the sex revolution", as Pete critically styled himself. "He turns up his nose at what is available, as if his freedom is already presented to him!"

"With them, I'd have to wait for freedom until the Second Coming, and I can imagine how they would free us." In such an urgent topic, they, alas, could not pass over in silence so-called "politics", and by his scornful "they", he designated everything intended for subordinating and regimenting his life in spite of his personal inclinations and intentions. "Freedom is a natural state, Petey; it is sent down to you from above."

"Or from below," Pete interrupted him. "Which is not important. Even if it is really sent down, it is difficult to obtain: these prudish mutts don't permit me to find out who I am."

"Do you think it's real to 'find out'? As long as you are alive, you are always incomplete."

"Who besides you would be such a comforter for me! You're a real sage, there is no gainsaying it," his opponent pushed aside the empty cup.

"So, my dearest colleague," Pete summarized the results of the next round of their dialogue about themselves, getting up from the table, "let's go continue to determine us. But we should notify our pussies in advance, otherwise, I apologize, we shall have both Sigmund Freud and taboos tonight."

*

This time they were to "determine" themselves in the truly royal luxury--in the two-room apartment provided to them by a compassionate friend for the night in the area of new buildings, which meant at the world's end: if to tarry here and be late for public transport, you wouldn't get out of here; and although the furnishings of the rooms were minimal, since the move into this separate dwelling was postponed for some reason and their friend, in fact, was guarding the legal accommodation from the encroachments of desperate "squatters" on behalf of the whole family, with their Spartan undemanding, the absence of gas and hot water not connected hitherto or of sheets on the striped flat mattresses replacing furniture did not embarrass them, all the more so after some dirty cement steps of dusky entrances, or some dusty felt of steam heating pipes in basements, or some attic beams reeking of cats, or some creaky chairs and plywood office tables in Red Corners, or some bare steel bed springs in student hostels, or someone's random sofas for a couple of hours, and some rickety folding beds, not to speak of all sorts of the dachas abandoned for the winter, or of summer lawns, evening beaches, secluded benches, open stages of parks, granite river parapets and of the other most incredible places, where in their youth they indulged in carnal pleasures and where the exoticism of a seemingly inappropriate environment, such as an elevator stuck between floors, or the risk of hurried intimacy on the night staircase, never stopped either of them. Their minstrel and troubadour Bez once moved them by the spontaneous expression of this indomitable aspiration in his immortal line, "Hormones have gone to young heads!", which corresponded to reality as correctly as possible.

Today they were extraordinarily lucky, and by the evening, there was naturally a full complement of participants: with the young wantons invited for a sleepover together, who were exchanging lascivious glances in anticipation of the forthcoming fornication and nervously giggling at any hint of wit from their courteous cavaliers; with a tape recorder "Comet" heavy as a boulder, which Pete as a true exquisite hedonist had brought to create a romantic "intimate" atmosphere; with three weighty eight-hundred-gram bottles of cheap rose port wine and with a jointly purchased gastronomic "snack" picturesquely laid out on a piece of wallpaper covering the uneven brown floorboards as an improvised tablecloth, where white paper cups stood among the silvery tinfoil molds that were being used as plates; with a dozen lemonade for "blends" and cocktails which proved a pretty strain even for his strong arms on the way to happiness; with the two battered and tattered mattresses serving as feast couches that were promisingly spread out opposite each other by the holiday table filled with publicly available banquet viands; and with a figured pyramidal candle, which, according to the plan of the great authority on everyday refined delights, was supposed to replace, on top of everything, the dim prosaic light of a feeble bulb hanging lonely from the ceiling by a curved wire spattered with chalk.

On the occasion of the festive event, he and Pete were more than ever sophisticated in gags, quips and puns, wisecracking without respite and courting the cheerful hetaerae by all the rules of table etiquette, like true gentlemen; and even rollicking from the heart, they were consuming the "nectar of the Gods" (that is, the port wine being diluted with the fizzy water as in Ancient Greece) in moderation, so as not to prematurely extinguish the fire of insatiable desire raging in them and intoxicating their voluptuous quartet stronger than any wine; while their flushed "rosebuds" were simply the perfect specimens of the very carefree bacchanal sensuality charmingly frank in its unconscious paganism--both his perky filly Mila with her impressive croup and the skinny owner of an outstanding bust, the Americanized blonde Maya, the chosen one of the black-mustached voluptuary Pete who was sharpening the impending passions of the inevitable enjoyment by emphasized suavity, in order that the transition to the long-awaited intercourse was made gently and elegantly, without hasty rude street intemperance and impertinent familiarity, from playfulness of toasts with subtext and chaotic frivolous chatter to the melodic recitative crooning of the tape recorder--towards the final getting stuck in the embraces of the so-called dances, with a candle as it should be, and then to the endless long-drawn-out kisses, to the gradual loss of the former sense of reality, and to the dissolution of all the surroundings in the erotic and tobacco fog enveloped their hug, through which they were swimming, slightly swaying, towards their closer contact.

"Let's remain alone?" he whispered to his partner inflamed with the same concupiscence as he, feeling that the merging of their standing dance had reached the critical point when it either should urgently enter the culminating phase and be resolved by the mutual quenching of their unendurable thirst, or--as it happened at times with those sillies who, panicking at the very last moment, suddenly recollected about their "decency"--might burn out ingloriously in the ignominious bitterness of the frustrated expectations, rewarding an unsuccessful attempt with miserable bodily indisposition and a loathsome aftertaste of wounded vanity.

The answer was understood without words--by the impatient shudder of her almost incandescent body, which was literarily vibrating now from the overloads of unbearable chastity; and, judging by the somnambulistic actions of Pete groping Maya's small of the back in her already unbuttoned dress, the competing couple had also reached the proper condition and was about to lie down right in their presence, which, true, was hardly surprising with the rich fantasy of such an erotomaniac dreaming of some oriental harem diversity, or of a "Swedish family" with the friends, or of the promiscuity in a sexual commune of hippie.

"Well, we leave you for a while," he said in an undertone to the accompaniment of a sweet-voiced French chanteuse. "Don't be bored without us."

He tore himself away from the dancer passionately clinging to him and bent down to pick up one of the mattresses.

"We shall miss your company," Pete muttered ambiguously, continuing the detailed palpation of Maya's "erogenous zones". ("Technology in such affairs is the key to success," as this natural scientist used to edify his prurient yet ignorant and loutish mates.) "You can drop in on us if you need anything."

"We'll cogitate on this," he responded to Pete's tactful invitation, lugging the heavy cotton mattress to the door.

"Shan't we, huh?" he turned to Mila obediently following him, and through the smoky flickering duskiness, in the fitful reflections of the candle disturbed by them, he saw her lustfully smoldering crazy eyes, in which he could distinctly read only her "I want" and "quicker", so it was rather inhumane to drag out the farewell and verify the degree of her shyness verbally.

"Turn up the sound so that we can listen to music, too,'' he demanded at parting, for both his hands were occupied with the bulky mattress and with the bottles that he had grabbed in passing, carrying them by the necks.

However, when they found themselves alone in the empty dark room smelling of oil paint and damp plaster, they did not begin to drink lemonade or port wine, but threw the mattress on the floor and immediately energetically proceeded to taking off everything hiding their natural nakedness and hindering their contact; and soon, as, say, Bez would have jested in the spirit of Boccaccio, his pestle met its mortar, and his priceless bow started playing its eternal jubilant suite on this happily moaning, gasping, ecstatically squealing violin, or even cello, soaring from the "pianissimo" of gentle relaxing to the bravura "presto" of frantic ups and downs and to the sky-high pleasure of dizzying denouements breaking into the hoarse spasms of convulsions with its post-apotheosis mechanical scraping in the wordless blissful gaps, after which new and new heaving waves of the increasing crescendo of the call of nature would surge in the excruciatingly intoxicating tension of the quickening rhythm of his virtuosic instrument again and again pushing into the flaming heavens of flesh.

But everything has an end ("and everyone has," Pete loved to add as a bawdy joke): the indissolubility that time after time arose in the instants of the supreme merging would split in two, in separate sweaty bodies, and now they had not enough room for both of them to be lying side by side on the narrow hard mattress in a draught blowing above the floor; the further their "request concert", inspired at first, lasted the more often it was gaping with discordant dissonances and silent prolonged pauses, "passing to the coda", according to Bob's philharmonic expression, and dying down in the final soundless sighs, since the instruments were already out of tune and needed a restorative respite; and in the end, they turned over the disgustingly wet mattress, which the sheet prudently brought by Mila and crumpled in their performing zeal had not protected at all, and ensconced themselves under his jacket and her cloak, to drink the port wine for warming, and then fell asleep peacefully, embracing one another, in the hope of a new pre-dawn rush of energy.

And strange was his dream.

In the still of the atemporal sunny midday of the evergreen olive grove, he, a young golden-haired god in a wreath of grape leaves and with the heavy clusters of the ripe translucently-amber grapes in his bronzed hands, was reclining weightlessly, stretched out on a hillock of the flowering meadow among the fragrant flowers and summer lush grasses; like a marble column, a huge mighty phallus of the sacred bull Apis was rising as a cast pink pillar pulsing with hot blood from the shaggy groin of his tireless inexorable body of a faun, goat-footed below the belly; and the faceless female bodies were going in interminable succession into his all-encompassing inviting embrace, as if emerging from the dazzling glare of the everlasting zenith to be ritually impaled one after another on the totem of his altar that was magnetically attracting them. The clusters of grape were again and again crushed by his mercilessly caressing hands, squirting the sweetest mortal juice, while the female squashed flesh was again and again melting away in an instantaneous furiously-languorous ejection of God-given fire to the hollow rhythm of volcanic tympans shaking the hill, and the bodies, thawing like snow, was flowing down his column, tickling him by life-giving tender warmth, into the soil under him, so that, once again becoming the earthly fecund womb, to sprout as scarlet flashes of wild carnations and to rise suddenly as a shining airy phantom of nakedness depersonalized by the endless cycle of life and the invincibility of the congenital instinct of reproduction. So lay he in a wave-like stream of eternal pleasure in the immortality of an instant of victorious possession stopped forever, hovering in a changeably-constant abiding of coition filling the space of his dream, where he, God, was also the elements among the elements, knowing no time nor losses nor sorrows but only his sinless and thoughtless hover of happiness in the vapors of the ever-resurgent earthly flesh.

A sharp, excitingly fresh scent of jasmine intruded as a whiff of unexpected dewy coolness from somewhere into the sweet languor of his slumber, and the fluidly ethereal body in his arms open for all grew corporeal and heavy and pressed down his triumphal pillar supporting the collapsed vault of heaven. Reduced to him real, he opened his eyes--and woke up in the morning gray twilight of a large room with stucco cornices under the high ceiling, with photographic portraits in round frames on the cream wallpaper adorned with pale yellow roses, and with a tall old wardrobe partitioning off a one-and-a-half sofa-bed abutting its back papered with the same tea roses and decorated with a lithographic image of the narrow-faced and big-eyed poet Pasternak in his youth, which his eyes lighted on, when he came back to earth facing the window with the half-drawn curtains and with the autumn rain streaming down the pane, beside a sleeping curly cutie hugging him under the blanket, whose bare leg weighed something despite its diminutiveness.

"Ah, Nadya-Nadenka, we would be happy..." he mentally sang a phrase from a popular ditty, again laying down and carefully moving the leg of this shameless gal from his vital organ.

*

Nadya was the name of his present love, the last one for more than three student years, or "Nadine", as he christened her in the French manner, with an accent on "i", and their romance had been blazing here, in her room, already for the second consecutive month, since just so long the beloved grandmother of the "mistress of the house" was in the hospital, and in her absence the flat remained at the disposal of the future successor of the grandmother's possessions; and during such a short time, this belle had advanced surprisingly far in the art of love, perfecting herself, one might say, before his eyes, although when, at his first serious approach in a home environment thoroughly prepared by her for such an approach, he bumped into her unforecasted virginity, he was a bit confused, not foreseeing, to be honest, how quickly she would comprehend not only the basics and the alphabet, but also something else especially attracting him in women and rarely intrinsic to the acquiescent or intractable "partners" of his love affairs and adventures whose charms he tasted over three years.

Obviously differing from Pete, a born molester of the "inexperienced and innocent", in love he preferred a certain equality delivering him both from preliminary instructions and from subsequent inopportune awkwardness, when, at the height of passion, it was becoming clear that not all the "complexes" and "taboos" of his girlfriends were surmountable, and that their understanding of "impermissible" and "immoral" slightly diverged from his, therefore, in order to avoid offending them, it was necessary to confine himself to something sexually-decent and not to allow himself anything beyond acceptable licentiousness; yet his craving for universality and maximum freedom, which would more than once lure him as one of the efficient members into some unsightly collective orgies, wasn't being satisfied with this open animal dissoluteness either, on the contrary, after a temporary Bacchic insanity and drunken ecstasy in the omnivorous savagery of the improvised Saturnalia, such "punalual" primordial overindulgence in sex plunged him every time into devastating dejection, as if every time, in addition to the contents of his seminal glands, he wasted on this frenzied Dionysianism his whole soul, apparently alien to the use of him as a nameless faceless body only and rebelling, contrary to desires, against neglect of its spiritual essence.

In principle, he would try to combine what was hardly ever compatible in women: the extensive experience and breadth of knowledge in the field of depravity that he gradually mastered--which, as a rule, induced a certain coarsening of an impressionable female nature--and the charm of cloudless cheerful coquetry, the artistry of disinterested flirtatious fascination, turning in most such cases into the clumsy affectedness and into the unblushing importunity when enchanting a hapless chosen one; and his attraction, now whimsically fleeting now manically obsessive, was always attended with an involuntary standoff getting aggravated in periods of sobering up after feverish erotic rampage, sometimes to slight dislike and even aversion, while his seemingly happy partners confounded him at times with their causeless irritation and malice, initially provoked, as he could guess, by the same utilitarian attitude towards them, which, upon reaching the goal of the bodily mutual understanding, was destroying the former aura of their surreptitious cognition, dispelling a preconceived image of each other and bringing a chill of estrangement into their free unstable alliances divided since then by a transparent but impenetrable wall of vengeful independence, erected between the ungrateful lovers.

And most importantly, how doubtful matters stood with the desirable "pleasure" of the antecedent period now: for three academic years and three busy summers in the company with the purposeful Pete and with Bez who occasionally joined them, he probably surpassed the most inveterate philanderers and womanizers of the university, so, with his prepossessing gaiety and winsome cheekiness, and, as Pete, who was inferior to him in build, lamented, with his "horndog's irresistibility", he went all the degrees of liberation that inspired him, prancing through various sorts of his inventive undertakings to the last limits of his fantasies (further it remained only to step over to voluptuousness of torturer and cannibalism of pathology, or switch over from "lovely ladies" to something more unisexually-exquisite, to which he was not inclined); but, unfortunately, too much, if not all, coming true, usually came to turn out to be not very fantastic, and his going beyond the bounds of "decency" was exciting the intimacy only at first, because then boredom was overtaking him again, and the "permissiveness" of the won freedom was again turning into some skillful "voluntary-compulsory" craft, so that the acuteness of feelings could be revived only by a change of object, viz. by the unpredictability and uncertainty of a new acquaintance or by the "unwinding" of some old contacts to the end. To achieve became much more interesting for him than to receive, but as to his failures with the sanctimonious stubborn girlies not succumbing to his temptation and with the asexual "frigid fishes" (in the words of Pete) experimenting on him, he bore them philosophically, as forgivable side cases, all the more because those who supported and shared his epicurean doctrine in every possible way were quite enough, and he needed have no fear on that score; thus the piquancy of his position was that, endeavoring to embrace in a reckless gambling race the seeming boundlessness of these "paradises on earth", he, challenging the foundations of popularized psychoanalysis, would ascertain the evident locality of what he could embrace; and while plunging as deeply as possible into the fathomless carnality of this maelstrom, he more and more quickly exhausted the "abysses" luring him, and after having reveled in his love elixir ad nauseum, he, surfeited, would look round in the vacuum, in the middle of the cold desert of his ennui unfolding under the surface ebullience and under the lulling blissful calm as a verily boundless space that was being enlivened only by some quagmire pits of bloody mud. As a result, all his frantic energy of "living to the maximum" was being spent not on multiplication, but on constant renewal and spurring, and the initial variability of his impressions was evolving from neophyte's indiscriminately greedy amorousness to the static of emotional repetitions, for his amorous adventures, having barely passed the stage of "deep drilling" (the definition was his), often lost their breathtaking paramount uniqueness, not that oppressing him too much, yet not in the least hampering his parallel searches and alliances with the other "gurias and Graces", who were not yet used "for the good of the cause", remaining therefore more or less enigmatic.

Unlike the painstaking collector and unsurpassed connoisseur of "feminology" (as, with abstruse humor, Pete had altered the "phenomenology" of Edmund Husserl, whom he had recently read, advertising now everywhere), from year to year with decreasing enthusiasm, he was content with the comparing of the nuances of behavior and physique or even of the tinges of his own emotions in the course of acquaintances, seductions, and sophisticated petting: softness or resilience, timidity or obtrusiveness, fleshiness or scrawniness, impetuosity or submissive stolidity, as all other anatomical or psychological differences inherent in his "passions", seldom imparted, in his opinion, anything memorable to those innumerable "fickle chicks", "snazzy babes", and "giddy girls", who were remembered as a kind of vague welter of eccentricities at the stage of cooing and spooning and as a blurry impression of pleasure itself at a crucial stage, and the latter, as it turned out, could not be recovered by retellings and any sentimental surveys of the victorious "fighting way" in retrospect; besides, his memory retained some scattered random details, such as several luminous hairs on a girl's touchingly bowed neck, or as someone's elbow and knee, or a "reddening cherry" of someone's nipple that had rolled out of the low-cut (he borrowed this image from the metaphorist Bez, who likened woman's breast to milk pudding in the same culinary verses), or, for instance, as an antediluvian clock with a dial on the facade of a painted little house and with two small weights-pinecones hanging by two thin chains that was ticking on the wall of a squalid flat, or as a sooty primus in the communal kitchen, where he had run to drink some water from the tap at night, which nowise appertained to the sphere of love.

This meant that instead of many different women, he sort of kept knowing "woman as such", one body, divided into figures and faces but actually non-individual and impersonal, for which he was also in effect a replaceable representative of the opposite sex, who as a part of "man as such" was intended, depending on the necessity and a desirable objective, either for healthy sex, or for the concomitant extortionate cupidity milking him of his cash, which, given his income, did not very much threaten him, or for compulsory marriage, though, as an honest man, he always confessed immediately to his disgust for the institution of marriage in all its forms, without exception, or--and that was latently present in the majority of them--for their biologically programmed narcissistic self-affirmation, where the man was assigned the role of a mirror and of a gratifying, albeit dangerous, tool; hence it followed that, being squeamish about the mass-likeness of the forcible narrow-mindedness of Soviet society, he accidentally fell into the mass-likeness of the physiological equalization that was self-willed and lawless in appearance, but required his individuality no less selectively, ousting the "superfluous" in his personality to the periphery of relations and cutting off the "unnecessary" in him as an hindering inconvenient appendage, while without his "superfluous" and "unnecessary" he was again reduced to a sheer function and lowered to the level of the common primitive.

In all probability, the reason of his boredom was that he perceived every freedom unconsciously as a condition of his unregulated development, whereas no development at the level of excessively liberated flesh was foreseen, for here he was in for moving in a circle and fading, since here, as he began to suspect, there was no evolution for his separate self, nor was it for all of humanity, and what was here might be regarded as some barely different forms of restrictions and incentives for the invariable blind elements of the bisexually-indivisible planetary life, whose freedom presupposed by no means quixotic battles with windmills of "taboos" being preserved, in one way or another, in the deep strata of the soul as natural barriers of self-defense, but, to use his dean's favorite word, the feasibly-individual "spiritualizing" of the might of instinct fermenting in everyone--omnipresent, omnipotent, and self-destructive. Apparently misjudging this natural might, with youthful impatience, he was eager to pass in a single dive through the entire playful complexity of humanized sensuality to the self-immolation of maximum possession, the intensity of which was lessening his attraction, like a flame devouring a candle, by virtue of some paradoxical quirk of his wayward nature; moreover, striving to the "limits", to possessing the instinctive animality concealed in the female ego, he would find accordingly what he was looking for, namely, the similarity of females, without noticing how many of his lustful "marmosets" were really becoming themselves just at such a mass level, gaining this experience, the most important in their life, and shaping by it their individuality, hysterically-capricious or haughtily-condescending, independently-artistic or suppressedly-servile, defiantly-impudent or impregnably-timorous.

"It's unknown what is more important to us," a dishy chubby medical student named Zoya once said to him during the meeting preceding their impending separation on the couch of someone's school medical room, in response to his expatiation about the duality of the immortally-perishable and spiritually-carnal man and about the priority of the "higher" over the "lower". (It is relevant to note that he often shared his revelations with the wrong person and in the wrong place, while at that time, after reading Plato, in their extracurricular debates he was refuting the old-fashioned "dialectical materialism", from the standpoint of which he was forced to correct such poor fellow "idealists" when taking the tests.) "I wouldn't divide so."

"Naturally, you're a doctor," he classified her pantheistic views. "For you, human being is an organism."

"And for you what, the holy spirit?" his minx remarked sarcastically, because the couch was necessary to them, of course, not for the purpose of spiritual improvement.

"Partly," he smiled, having seen the funny side of their dispute. "But if you opine so, then we have not a bit of freedom, and everything is conditioned, and consequently we are merely ants."

"What does it matter to you who we are?" she hemmed, lazily screwing up her eyes in the darkness of the locked room with the gleaming glass of the surgical cabinets standing along the walls. "The main thing is that we are."

"Nobody disputes that we exist, but in what capacity?" he got cross at her flippancy. "And if I am only 'libido', 'erection', 'ejaculation'..." he couldn't but show his knowledge of medical terminology, passing, as was his wont, to global generalizations.

"As to the latter," she did not let him to impress her with his erudition in polemical excursions into the vast history of human thought, "I can remember some cooler than you."

"You'd be comparing still more," he snapped, shot down by her remark like a jet on takeoff.

"Because the comparison is not in your favor?" she stung him.

"You know it better than I. Yes, indeed, if to seek purposefully, why not to find some sex giant, some Negro with a cock to the knee. And to fuck your brains out," he impolitely characterized her sincere interest in diversity and added offendedly, ignoring her biting "Not bad": "But I am not only 'genitals', I am also something else."

"That is, I can dress?" she kicked him jokingly in the most vulnerable spot. "You've already run out of steam?"

Whereafter, as might be expected, he showed her in practice that she was mistaken, and they no longer returned to their ridiculous conversation about the primary or secondary nature of the spirit.

But it must be acknowledged that in this comic theoretical skirmish on the couch, he incidentally touched upon the issue extremely urgent and topical for him. His proverbial "immoral" Dionysianism in the principally impulsive, carefree self-disclosure of formless "nature", on the one hand, and his speculative studying of certain simplified philosophical systems according to the syllabus of his faculty compiled by God knows what overcautious sage, on the other hand, were strangely converging at this point: the systems were explaining man and the world in various ways, offering a choice of their projects for the structure of the universe, society and the individual, while the unmotivated spontaneity of emotions and the miraculous vision of his sudden insights into the previously inconceivable "new", it seemed, deliberately disproved all the harmonious constructions of adherents of systematization, leading again and again to the overriding question "What is spirit?", on which, in essence, all the intricate systems of reasoning were founded; and making his meticulous conspectuses of the Attic-encyclopedic Aristotle, or of the medieval-spiritualistic "Angelic Doctor" Thomas Aquinas, or of the renaissance tragic seer Blaise Pascal, he thought not so much about the content of their treatises--for immediately after reading them, they were being internalized forever by his strikingly retentive memory and fixed in his discerning mind as some constructions of any level of sophistication and detailing--as about the authors eminent nowadays that were discoursing in their times for some reason just on such topics and in such a way as it was given to them to theorize, although the starting point and the ever implied theme was abidingly the one who was called "a political animal", "the soul as substantial form of the body", and "a thinking reed".

Whatever they were talking about--about the Pythagorean cosmos calculated by the law of Fate or about the individual plasticity of Democritus's atoms, about the Hinduistic periodic renewal of the universe with fire or about the creating radiance of the Neoplatonists emanating from the One into the universe, about the divine "uncreated light" of the Hesychasts or about the dialectical triadic self-unfolding of the Hegelian Absolute--extracting the initial seed of intuitive insight from the verbose scholarly monologues, he could not find any "reflections of reality" in the core of everything truly original, notwithstanding that both lecturers and textbooks expounded such ideas, persistently assuring him of the derivative character of the products of human consciousness; rather, on the contrary, these suppositions, these fantasies that were being very logically proved by their authors, reflected the metamorphoses of purely personalized outbursts of the spirit, which, counter to the orderly schemes of dependent development, outstripped their material and social provision, historical underlying motives, inceptive religious splits, and nascent antinomic splitting of causative contradictions. Besides, he could not altogether agree with singling out the spirit allegedly begotten by the mythical "matter", seeing that he did not feel such a division in himself, meantime, in the opinion of the oracles of the dialectical materialism, he was a mirror-microcosm, too, and if the flesh had an influence on the consciousness in him, then the consciousness equally influenced the flesh, forming a mobile self-regulating unity, that's why, as he disassembled the "eternally living" teachings, he began to feel discontent with the elementary natural scientific conclusions of a century ago, in which he was strengthened and inspired by both "Metaphysics", and "Summa theologiae", and Hegel's "Science of Logic", and "The Philosophy of Name" by Aleksei Losev, the stunning rarity fished out by him in the sea of the samizdat after he had avidly devoured the first published volumes of Losev's "A History of Ancient Aesthetics". In particular, he was interested in such an amusing thing: the "matter" originating supposedly from itself seemed to have the cognizability specially for a human being, thereby supporting the correctness of the conjectures about an affinity between that which was called "consciousness" or "reason" and that which was endowing the self-development of the materiality with some regularities and with the relative accessibility for this indefinable human "reason", in short, that which was the creative origin of the world, whatever you called it, "Absolute Idea" and "superconsciousness" or "God"; but this, firstly, was justifying the admissibility of another--direct--connection between God and human consciousness, that is, not only through "cognition", but also in the contacts of clairvoyance and divine revelation, and, secondly, in spite of the coruscating wit of his constant acerbic derision, this was tipping the scales in the favor of the comprehensive systematics of the foundational Hegel.

True, his scholarly admiration for the grandeur of the completed Hegelian universe was being somewhat undermined by his simultaneous obsession with the analytics of another German "classic" Immanuel Kant, who dauntlessly dissected the cognizing spirit and demonstrated all the subjective limitation of the knowledge that was powerless to exhaust the bottomlessness of the "thing-in-itself" in overcoming separateness; and then his reverence for the "great representative of objective idealism" was tempered to some extent by the critical revisions of Fichte and Schelling, which again aroused his unsubstantiated doubts about the existence of anything "objective". Seeking to dig down to the root sources of dozens of oppositional concepts, he found out that the basis of all of them was an arbitrary assumption either about a certain adequacy of the subject and object, not subject to contesting and verification, or about the solipsistic mirage of illusory reality arising and disappearing in consciousness, and, consequently, these gigantic chimeras were erected on the vanishingly small needle point, and all of them could be considered nothing more than hypotheses, equally plausible and conjectural, whichever of them impressed him and was more preferable for some generations believing in its incontrovertible truth.

He had not yet become keen on the skepticism and relativism of the sophistic tradition, but without any ambiguity or omissions, he had decided once and for all that in the unison and contrasts of the philosophical polyphony, only the fact of his own existence was credible without reserve, while everything else was originating from this fact; therefore, his meeting with the phenomenology of Husserl, who did not seem to deny "objective reality", but recognized it as possible for man solely in the form of Kantian intentional "phenomena" of consciousness, scilicet, already appropriated, already humanized, already qualitatively transformed, this unplanned meeting was for him a turning-point in his apologetic worship of the geniuses of the late Enlightenment: henceforth, as he had anticipated, knowledge began to mean self-knowledge, and self-creation withal, as he understood later, and from now on the accumulated baggage of numerous ways of knowing and explaining all existence had acquired a different, not only sessional, meaning, joining as the tried variants of the ways of thinking, and as the very thinking in its entirety, in his self that tirelessly played these interpretations over and over, leading out his spirit into ever new dimensions of wisdom and understanding, although such joining in was requiring a lot of effort from him, because besides having a good command of English, not school-spoken but high-level, he had to get in Latin and French, and for the sake of Heidegger and Jaspers, who had not been translated properly, he had to take up seriously the language of Goethe and Brecht. It goes without saying, at his university, he was sufficiently discreet about divulging his discovering of the philosophical heritage, and advanced in his freedom unaided and unbeknownst to the unwinking eye of the administration as well as without the fatherly supervision of the block-headed state, preferring to shun anything particularly shocking in publications and to be numbered among the excellent students and activists of the philosophical society in the faculty; and with his exceptional memory, diligence, and excess energy, his unchallenged preeminence in intelligence and knowledge wouldn't have burdened him in the least, but for diverse overtime tasks complicating his life, such as his familiarization with ancient Greek, albeit at the minimum level necessary for the correct pronunciation and understanding of the terms in academic texts.

In general, during the first three years, he was kept fully occupied with his affairs both in philosophy and in the love department; but, while the insatiable absorption of the spiritual fruits of the former "thought process" and finding himself, present and past, in the clear-cut structures or amorphous chaos of someone's world order always gave him every conceivable pleasure as a discoverer and trailblazer, every case of overdoing it with self-knowledge in the intimate and everyday spheres, frankly speaking, more and more often disappointed him, for he was strangely dependent here on others with his entire being, seeing what he imagined as himself in an overly distorted reflection in intermediate introspections, as if this gripping play was forcing him to adapt himself and narrowing him down to the role he played, whereas his going out into the euphoria of "pure animality" depleting his feelings with its excessiveness and smashing the magic crystals of his illusions to smithereens was noticeably sapping his moral strength by ulcerating and disfiguring the gradually forming spiritual ovary of his personality.

It appeared that in its disregard for the spirit, the private seamy side of the soviet society alien to him did not differ within the "human dimension proper" from the derogatory facade style of life of the prison-fanfare regime, where his outward freedom confronted the majestic bastions of punitive torture institutions for bumping off "enemies of the people" and the cosmetically-renovated red-banner temple sanctuaries for brainwashing and galvanizing some "educating" myths-legends, not to mention many housing offices which loved to put the obstinate inhabitants in their place "in the ranks" by means of humiliating and flouting and to disabuse the citizens of their delusions about "constitutional freedoms" and "rights"; and since he naturally did not want to spend his precious time on fools and bureaucratic scoundrels, being guided therefore by the wise tactics of non-interference and simply ignoring this communist farce, like many others, he, tired of the three-year Rabelaisian feats, began to adhere to the same rules approximately in his relations with the fair sex, irresponsibly dodging the expected courtship or his participation in the quondam group parties and devoting free evenings to training in the Sambo section and nights to grinding away at his studies and learning various original sources, thereby sometimes dispiriting Pete accustomed to him, who was amusing himself now in a pharmaceutical way by pouring some stimulants in the glasses of his "sweethearts", too pertinacious in platonic love: as he said, "it ensures success, though devilishly exhausts the winner".

*

And just then he happened to come across this curly-haired Nadenka, when, by the way, he had no thoughts to be conquering anyone and winning anyone's heart: from the party he was planning to go home to read The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, and no "sweet berries" were to tempt him today, considering that the party, in principle, promised to be too decorous, on the occasion of the birthday of their mutual friend from the university, with whom his relationship was comradely long ago, after a short fling he once had with her which had completely satisfied their curiosity; plus the parents of the birthday girl were invisibly present somewhere in the kitchen and in the study of this spacious apartment with the fanged, bristly snout of a wild boar threatening with its tusks above the hallway coat wardrobe in the antechamber, with the shiny light parquet floor, and with a rococo furniture set of the latest European pattern looking like museum exhibits; so the assembled youth company was forced willy-nilly to pretend to be harmless good-boys and aristocratic innocent prim schoolgirls, especially since the family silver of the cutlery, Saxon porcelain, and the restaurant cones of starchy table-napkins very conduced to their shamming in playing the high-society, quite cogent owing to the domestic servant in the person of a portly frowning aunt serving the young sybarites with some rare ration grub, by which, among other things, the apparatus significance of the high-ranking daddy was marked.

Of his own free will, he undoubtedly wouldn't be listening to all the usual table idle talk for want of time, but he was invited, and he could not help but congratulate the poor thing fettered by etiquette and the shackles of convention, in order to decorate her feast with the good-humored beaming of his manly physiognomy and with the brilliance of his mighty intellect, casually displaying the placers of his erudition scintillating with bibliophile's wit and heroically constraining himself to sit out the planned program of the soiree till the dances after the dessert, when he would have had a chance at last to slip away on the sly; whereas Nadenka, who had been introduced to him by Bez as his fellow student in the philological faculty and his fan, was sitting next to him, and he struck up a conversation with her, by God, for no particular reason, only to fill the pause, while Bez, emaciated in creative ups and downs, tucked into the delicious choicest viands not often falling to his lot, savoring collection cognac with caviar and guzzling the salmon, vinaigrette, pork roast alternately with relish.

"Want a drop?" having admired her chiseled medallion profile and the Egyptian fashionable shape of her dark eye of gazelle, he nodded at the flat cognac flask being barbarously emptied by the exquisite fop Pete with a red bowtie fastened to a black funeral suit who was shamelessly treating some dumpy girl to Martini, though this devil-may-care hussy was swilling elite wines of her own accord without a twinge of conscience.

"No, that's enough for me," she cast a sidelong glance at him, and something in her basaltic-obsidian pupil absorbing light and in the instantaneous curve of her almost African, well-defined lips suddenly stirred up his dormant sensuality. "But you, apparently, don't drink at all."

"Which is not at all true," he self-critically rejected her hasty assertion of his holiness. "Inwardly, I'm a heavy drinker."

"Yet today you have a lucid interval?" she immediately grasped mockingly what he meant.

"A gap," he elucidated. "And a lacuna."

"Today, Nadine, I have a harvest-time,'' he dubbed her at once with the silverily clinking name ideally suiting her and sounding like a thin ringing of the ritual Buddhist gong when pronouncing it.

"The next exam?" she supposed, and he was struck on the spot by the mysterious ancient magic of her fantastic beauty unexpectedly seen in full face.

"The next whim," he said, enveloping the halo of her copper-red curly hair and the luminous outline of her tenderly passionate, affectionately ironic face with his immodestly intent, memorizing gaze. "I'd like to think a little today."

"Hor, I warn you," intervened Bez, alarmed by their "staring contest". "An encroachment on someone else's property is persecuted by law."

"Never!" he swore by all that's sacred, having knocked on his broad chest with his fist. "The girlfriends of my friends are my friends!"

"That's just what I'm afraid of,'' Bez dropped, joining in someone's toast by raising his glass.

"What is typical," slightly surprised Nadenka appreciated Bez's care in her own way, "everyone loves to divide what does not belong to them. And what do you intend to think about?"

This was already addressed to him.

"Ask me about something easier," he defended himself stereotypically from not the first attempt to invade the area of his reliably guarded freedom. But then, contradicting himself, he continued the forbidden cherished theme: "There is an amazing definition in the book of Francis, 'A monk is God's buffoon'."

In the subway, he could not resist the temptation to leaf through the book taken by him for a day.

"It's intriguing," she agreed, and the dewy sparks of the dangerous hidden flame gleamed from under the eyelashes in her drooped impenetrable velvet eyes, which had fleetingly glanced over his face, as if touching his skin.

"And I personally construe this 'God's buffoon' as the highest level of the performing of life," he aphoristically set forth his initial postulate. "I think, you're not going to disprove the fact that the life of every creature endowed with consciousness is play by its very essence."

"Naturally," she could not argue away such an obvious fact. "However 'creature' sounds somehow strange."

"Okay, let it be an 'individual' or 'personality', it is all the same. Homo sapiens, in a word. The point is that every consciousness is necessarily multivariant, and we all are potentially all of humanity, so in order for each one of us to become himself, each ought to be many people, or otherwise to play, which we just do while living," he was outlining the basic conclusions of theoretical observations and introspection accessibly and in brief. "But it stands to reason you can play at different levels. Either at the level of everyday life, where the roles are simpler, namely function, behavior, imitation, manipulation, and sociology quite copes with this; or at the level of competition and risk, that is of playing with someone or something, where everything depends on various obstacles, on adversary, on your luck, and where, of course, you lead the gayer life, but it is subordinated again to blinkered expediency and puppet 'vanity of vanities'; or you can arrange a real theater, changing masks arbitrarily for pleasure when and what you like..."

"Judging by the tone, the third level is yours," remarked Nadine in passing. "But masks are something separate, while there you are yourself in person."

"Not entirely," he clarified his concept. "The masks are required to avoid wasting yourself on performing roles."

"I get you," she guessed, mechanically twirling a cast silver knife with rounded edge on the tablecloth. "The inmost part we preserve for the highest level... But then in what is my uniqueness at these three ones?"

"In choice, in combinations, in talent, in character," he enumerated without hesitation. "And in something that directs your choice."

"What directs? Concretely?" she demanded an immediate answer.

"I have no notion," he admitted. "They say, 'God', but 'God' is various. Probably, when refusing the external that is socially conditioned, and when concentrating on the soul, on its deepest source, human finds himself as his unknown self, I think so. Meantime, the monks cultivated the divine in themselves, while in human, as far as I understand it, the divine is always revealed as his new self--as some unprecedented embodiment of his spirit not molded by the ready-made forms from the outside--as, perhaps, one of the earthly hypostases of what we conditionally identify with 'God', 'the Almighty' and the like. And, consequently, here it is already God who plays us: we are his roles, and he is an actor; although for us such a play is the only true self-realization, freedom, and spiritual entirety..."

"You, I see, are almost a monk," Nadine interjected in his philosophical rants becoming increasingly complicated. "I am, alas, not yet ripe for this."

"Yes, I got carried away, forgive me," his conscience awakened at last. "Sometimes I will be blown aloft to the higher spheres."

"Well, it's my fault," she said, putting down her blunt "cold steel", and the casual plasticity of this gesture and of her dainty little hand with manicured lilac nails instantly plunged him into his all-too-familiar carnivorous confusion of feelings that was hardly reduced to his innocent aesthetic admiration for the fragile harmony of her ideal proportions and usually preceded the energetic prelude to his courteously-perfidious and crazily-stormy onslaught.

"Hey kids!" jealous Bez interposed anxiously into their dialogue. "May I sit between you?"

"Bezel, don't worry," he hastened to anticipate her answer, surely unflattering for Bez. "We are only exchanging scientific information with Nadya, like at symposium."

"How your 'symposia' are ending I know well," Bez grumbled. "Then I shall be in communion with you, too, if you don't mind..."

But, unfortunately, Bez belatedly attempted to meddle in the affairs of their scientific community: scarcely had his potential rival risen from the table to drag the chair to the place between them, when the birthday girl announced a time-out for preparing to the sweet course and invited the whole select company to proceed into the drawing room for the time of dishing up the dessert in the dining room, since smoking was allowed only in the hall, and there to the attention of the guests who had taken their seats on modern leather sofas was offered to hear the poetry reading of their own avant-garde poet; therefore, Bez, who tried to impede his acquaintance, had to respond to the collective call of the smoking public and to leave Nadenka, who had switched over from art to science, under the care of the philosopher friend, whose lecherous eyes were suspiciously riveted on her.

Today Bez dressed up with canonical flashiness, in the pop-kitsch garish style of the youth "underground" that was foppishly flaunting both gaudy costumes and extravagant texts; and in his orange-yellow checkered jacket, azure shirt with a claret-colored neckerchief, inky trousers, and cherry suede moccasins with white laces, he looked very splashy, striking the eye with his motley finery and resembling a bright parrot both by this gorgeous plumage and by the wavy blond forelock of his Byronic disheveled hair; in comparison with such a colorful figure as this lean brawler-lyrist, famous as a favorite of the female audience and a genius of outrageous frankness, he would have paled into insignificance in his everyday worn leather jacket, were he not built like the male etalon of Leonardo inscribed within the circle and square of the golden section (following the example of athletic Plato in this regard), towering above the graceful petite Nadine and obstructing the doorway behind her with his broad shoulders.

However, the property status of both of them was not much different, and in the summer months, they usually rectified their deplorable "financial situation" together--now in the student construction brigades on the rural "virgin lands", now in a team of wagon loaders at the freight station in the city or on cleaning the manholes of the water-pipe network, from which, on the rope, he time after time pulled out the bucket of sludge and mud that Bez was loading below in the bowels of the earth, cursing their "fucking honest labor" from the belly of the damp well, but this work was paid more or less decently, even if it was fraught with radiculitis and rheumatism, as well-off loafer Pete frightened them; while during the educational season they were earning separately for books and for squandering on drink--he, as before, with feasible repairs of radio receivers and tape recorders, whereas Bez, in capacity of an anonymous ghostwriter in some edition, began to write internal reviews on the amateurish manuscripts from outside which constantly accumulated there.

"Bezik, no hooliganism, please," their young hospitable hostess cooed prudently, settling down in one of the armchairs. (He was aware that she once slept, inter alia, with the well-known ladies' man "Bezik".) "Anything from the lyrical."

In the interim, standing behind Nadya, very close he sensed through the silky warm fabric of the tight-fitting lilac evening dress her supple back that was slightly touching him, and, enjoying the delicately tickling sweet scent of jasmine, stoically continued the casual conversation in an undertone.

"Okay, my Egyptian kitty," he was thinking to himself, deeply moved, withstanding the unbearable temptation, the waves of which were sweeping over the indestructible crag of his fortitude, and barely restraining himself from a premature rash embrace. "Okay, Pharaoh's pet..."

As it was easy to understand, his "okay" contained both the entire contrapuntal range of the passions overwhelming him, which could not be conveyed by meager speech means, and the entire immense spectrum of the still unrealized projects of his vivid imagination, where the central role was assigned to this living svelte statuette driving him crazy, and what a role it was!

"To my mind, Bez is inimitable," he remarked gallantly, sounding out her attitude to his friend. "Don't you think?"

"No, I'm used to it." Taking advantage of the boudoir semi-darkness in the hall lit by the only standard lamp, she half-turned and glanced over her shoulder into his eyes. "He has borrowed it from Yesenin that he is such a rake and charlatan. From Rimbaud, too."

"Don't you like it?"

"As a poet, he, yes, perhaps, to my liking."

"What about the rest?"

"'The rest is silence', as Hamlet said. With poets, you know, it is better to deal at a distance," answered Nadine, having weighed all the pros and cons. "Coquetry in males smacks of operetta."

"I'll take that into account," he pronounced meaningfully.

But here, after waiting for relative calmness, Bez, who was biding his time, stepped forward from the wall darkness into a pink circle of the alcove-soft light and stretched out his hand warningly over the seated ones like the Roman tribune.

"The Divergence! Sonnet!" with gloomy solemnity, the author disclosed the name of his poetic opus to the quieted public.

And after having listened attentively to the silence reigning in the hall, he suddenly cried out in a stage-loud voice, with a heartrending tragic affectation:

"Among the deaf my soul will recoil

from wingless trials, hurrying off to fly!

It's my requital for all my lifelong toil

upon the soil of rival grubs and fry."

"He's devilishly sly, rascal," he chuckled to himself. "He knows how to intrigue the weaker sex and what is to their liking. Loneliness, rebellious spirit, and bidding defiance to suburbanity..."

Meantime, the ecstatic sufferer Bez being torn by anger and intransigence, waving his right hand and drawling the rhythmically effective vowels with declamatory vehemence, was already reciting the second quatrain of his fashionably rhymed sonnet full of sonorous alliterations:

"Alienation is my sole foil!

From different sources, they and I arise...

They would be glad to bring me to the boil,

but in my 'madness', I am always wise."

"Yes, that's impressive, there's no denying it," he acknowledged the magical power of this verbal spellcaster. "The reason isn't worth a damn, apparently, but the result sounds quite convincingly."

And at last, the actor's skill of the reciter culminated in the final tercets:

"In their spirit they are on all fours

and foist this way of life on me by force

as if I was a ruminant of rumor!


'What for?' they shout vainly, making froth...

While I prefer again to go forth,

for with my artistry, I don't wish to humor!"

After such a heroically heretical sonnet, the lonely rebel could safely sob out his Weltschmerz on the breast of either of the lasses present, except, maybe, Nadenka, who did not favor Bez's acting talents and aplomb.

"In the text, this is much more digestible," she observed to the loud approving applause.

"But aloud this implies an ulterior motive," he easily figured out the wiles of his rival friend.

"His motive is not very ulterior for me."

"As, probably, our ones, too," he finished her thought.

"Yes, probably," she was not abashed by such sincerity. "But in him, only his poetry attracts me."

"What in me?" his blunt question nearly slipped out, but he bit back it.

"For some, even that's enough, even poetry," he said instead, meaning either self-sacrifice or self-interest, depending on what will be the further destiny of the "poet of the Russian land", the fate of an outcast or of a careerist.

"Not for me," she closed the unpromising discussion, and their conversation was interrupted by Bez, who was again burning with desire to strum the sensitive heart strings of the narrow circle of "connoisseurs" and resumed his public readings.

While Bez was poetically narrating about the incinerating emotions of the "vagaries of unexpected happiness" ("The mutual infatuation and/ you're whispering 'I love you!' night by night.../ Yet morning comes--and all comes to an end:/ again, your eyes are silent at first light.// I don't argue--you would like to love!/ But I believe my heart, not in your heat.../ All that we babble by nights--that fevered stuff--/ how can I make my honest heart repeat?") and how in the "hopeless loneliness of the night" he, abandoned and betrayed, was sensing "a nest of vipers" wriggling in the convolutions of his brain, they were forced to keep quiet, so as not to violate the veneration of the lyric mysteries with their uncultured conduct; but when Bez's reciting on the subject of erotic troubles consonant with the pensively smoking listeners was suspended by going to the sweet table ("Ice cream will melt, Bezik," the unstoppably flitting Pegasus was quickly hobbled by the organized hostess), Nadenka slipped away from the hall first--supposedly, from the pestering of her inspired fellow student.

"I can help," Pete winked conspiratorially at him, getting up from the leather sofa, for his mate had been sympathetically watching his methodical siege of the next fortress. "How about tonic ingredients? No objection to pour in a smidgen of it?"

"Get away, poisoner," he jokingly shrank back from the benevolent pharmacist. "I'm not a rapist, I'm only learning."

"What pious you are, however," the fornicator Pete was astounded at his moral firmness. "Sheer anchorite."

"Don't employ idiomatic expressions, sir," he raised his chin haughtily. "There are the ladies among us."

After that he stalked proudly to the dining room to take a seat next to Nadya as quickly as possible.

Over the dessert, jovially bantering from time to time with Bez, who tried to assert his rights yet was again, through their efforts, out of the fencing lunges of their witty dialogue, he found out that she did not live with her parents, but with her sick granny, and that in art, unlike him, she was focused, rather, on the French (Marcel Proust unread by him, Albert Camus and Françoise Sagan that were already read; or in the theater--Sartre familiar to him, the insufficiently familiar absurdist Beckett, and the overly popular interpreter of ancient myths Jean Anouilh; or among variety artistes--of course, Edith Piaf, but also Jacques Brel, and Georges Brassens, and Charles Aznavour), and in addition, she was keen on structuralism, which he knew superficially in its philosophical application; and in general, in the process of his ironic research, new and new deposits of valuable information on the history of world culture and modern "avant-garde" were being discovered at every step in her pretty red head, while her professional knowledge of French, necessary for him, even prompted him to make a purely practical offer to her.

"Nadine, you are simply the fount of wisdom!" he exclaimed, finishing his portion of ice cream. "Without language, I am in the complete information blockade: they bring some books from abroad, Foucault or Barthes, or some of the new philosophers, and it's real to procure them, but there is no one to translate, except perhaps myself with a dictionary..."

In indignation at such a penny-pinching dosing of foreign knowledge, he swallowed a huge piece of sweet cold and, scraping off the milk gruel with a gilded teaspoon, concluded:

"Let's do a swap: you teach me French, and I teach you English? Quid pro quo, so to speak. It is the international language, like Latin in the Middle Ages, so you won't miscalculate."

"Quid pro quo, you say? Then when do you think to study?" smiled clever Nadine at his "ruse de guerre", having ample reason to suspect a well-disguised trap in his ingenuousness, but not hurrying this time to evade the set snares and traps. "In the evenings?"

"When you'll agree." It had sounded ambiguous enough, but just so it was intended. "Even now, for example, my room is always vacant."

"Right now?" she glanced at the habitually taken pendant watch hanging by a silver chain on her chest between her two still hidden bulges that were causing his shamelessly demanding excitement, not very appropriate in the presence of others, which he painfully endeavored to master, because he was almost constantly seized by this sense beside her.

"Why not," he kind of accidentally let it slip, giving away the decisive argument. "I have nobody at home this evening. We need some alone time, after all," it burst out of him with frightening outspokenness.

"Really need?" inquired Nadenka without asking "why", looking at the dial, and she, for all her caution, was not afraid of the prospect of passing the evening offered by him.

"True, who knows whether she should be afraid of anything," he thought as an experienced seducer. "Well, no matter, if only I could entice her away from here..."

"And how do you imagine our disappearance?" she asked about technical details, lowering her voice.

"Elementary. You go out unnoticeably before the dances, and I follow your example," he planned in a jiffy. "And then I abduct you."

"What about Bez?" she remembered apropos.

"I'll neutralize him," he promised firmly. "So, what do you say?"

"Before the dances?"

She suddenly looked at him askance, so expressively that for a moment, he went numb and his mouth was dry.

"Before," it was all that he could utter.

"Then let's get down to dessert," she said, averting her eyes, and reached for a box of assorted chocolates.

The unlucky applicant, inspirited by the beginning of the dancing part of the festivities, was eliminated by him without any prolix sharing out, and they managed to avoid provocatively taking away one girl for two partners from each other: as soon as they all got up from the table and Bez, taking the opportunity of using his oversight, grabbed Nadenka, again free for tempting, chattering something about literature to her, he rolled up to the hostess already congratulated by him and took her blandly aside.

"Mother, rescue me, I beg you," he asked heartfeltly. "Please distract this 'son of harmony' from us for a couple of minutes, otherwise the world poetry will bear an irreplaceable loss," he parodied a typical newspaper jargon.

"Picked her up already?" the "mother" sympathizing with him reproved him affectionately after estimating the balance of powers in the formed triangle with the keen all-seeing gaze of a competent strategist. "You're a beetle, I'd say..."

"Yes, scarab," he supported her reproval. "I supplicate you tearfully, I'll be grateful to you until death."

"Well, don't fool around," she gave him her "fatal" smile, by which she once hooked up him--Cupid's bow lips and soulful eyes in the haze of erotic craving. "For the sake of art, I'm ready to do everything."

Soon, the vainglorious poetaster, fooled by her classical female flattery, was briefly removed from the scene, which immediately caused the disappearance of his fellow student, inadvertently released from his hands and escaped inconspicuously in the general hubbub; and then his pal also took French leave, having walked along the corridor to the stuffed boar and caught up with Nadenka on the landing.

"I never noticed what a clinging type he is,'' she dropped, when they went out of the entrance with a duty cop standing at the door into the September warm drizzle of the automobile-asphalt city evening.

"Thanks, you saved me," in passing she grounded her hasty escape with him.

"Not quite yet." Now he had to advance to the last--the first line of defense seemed to have fallen. "Undesirable visits to you are still possible. And therefore--"

"Therefore we ride to you?" She lifted the hood of her purple corduroy cloak, in which she looked somewhat like the heroines of Stendhal's novels. "You'd been already inviting, I remember."

"I don't retract my words," he put right the visor of his leather cap. "On the contrary, I insist."

"By the way, I don't like coercion," she slightly reined in him.

"Strange coincidence," he retorted. "And plus also pedagogy."

"But I thought you needed a teacher... Or not?" she had needled him.

"I very need her," he underscored the duality of the meaning of the uttered phrase, which both of them quite caught.

"So we ride to you on business?" this mocker looked out from the shadow of her velvety nun cowl.

"On business, of course," he assured, not amplifying too much on the specifics of the very business. (Perhaps there was a disparity between their interpretations of this "business".) "Otherwise, I wouldn't have postponed my work."

"That is you are a toiler like me," she ironically registered the main one of his merits. "This gives me hope."

Without stopping their fascinating witty play with the parallelism of the meanings of their seemingly commonplace remarks, they descended into the metro, flew in the crush of the subway car through a sizeable chunk of the territory of the expanding metropolis in the underground catacomb tunnels, and, having surfaced on the steps of the escalator upward to the multi-storey, multi-window buildings-quarters, to the illuminated avenues, and to the interweaving of some dark villainous streets-alleys, started trailing along to his house, bandying their repartees as before; and only in the lift cage, at the approaches to his empty, as he said, flat, did she begin to evince some nervousness, but her agitation manifested itself only in the question she put to him rather inopportunely.

"Why are you 'Gor', properly speaking?" she broke the silence that had arisen in the lift, having slightly mispronounced his name. "Is that a nickname? From 'Georgiy'?"

"From Georgiy in all likelihood. From that who with the dragon," he let her through the sliding doors of the lift. "It would be inexpedient to deny my kinship with such a glorious forerunner, but I'm rather 'Hor'. And as Hor I descend from Horace, though there is the sophist Gorgias as well in the depths of time, if from 'Gor'..."

"And Medusa Gorgon," she prompted, turning to him already on the landing.

"As sure as death," he said, taking out the keys. "Under the gaze of a philosopher, being turns to stone."

"Whose saying, if it's not a secret?"

"Mine." He clicked the lock and opened wide the gates to paradise before Nadine. "I've only just thought up it."

"I hope, to us philosophy does not apply..." she muttered, crossing the threshold of his flat, deserted indeed, because today his mother and stepfather were seeing one sensational "hit of the season" in the academic theater, enjoying, like all cultured people, the problematic-moral everyday hodgepodge of the new "production" melodrama.

The interior of his small "monastic cell" slightly perplexed the gullible Nadine for want of habit: the shelves of the racks standing along the wall were crammed with rows of books up to the ceiling above a long workbench with disassembled radio equipment; the other books filled the bookshelves above the low ottoman which found room for itself between the window and the wardrobe; besides, the thick stacks and heaps of books lay on the wardrobe and on the writing table by the window; while a motorcycle covered with tarpaulin behind the wardrobe near the door, definitely imparted to the room the appearance of some library-workshop resembling the study of a medieval warlock-alchemist, but, true, instead of lancet many-colored stained-glass windows, there was something transparent-rectangular with the peeling paint of the window frame, and instead of bucolic lake landscapes and knight castles, there were the barely lit backyards of the neighboring house looming in the rainy mist.

Having become aware that the overhead light excessively exposed the wretched furnishings, to say nothing of its needlessness, before taking off her cloak, he replaced the modest chandelier by his table lamp, which immediately created the intimate darkness with mysterious shadows and with rich opportunities for assault maneuver.

"You would cease airing your den..." she said, handing him her cardinal's vestment (the outer clothing for now). "I'm not good with cold."

"Never mind, I'll warm you," he took pity on her, shutting the window that was left ajar. "Sit down, or lie down, or turn on the tape recorder, while I'll make you coffee."

When he returned, balancing two full cups and with a packet of cookies under his arm, the vociferous chaps from the Rolling Stones were already muffledly bashing out rock-and-roll in his room, and Nadine, leaning on the table with her hands, so that the contours of her slim waist and the curves of her hips under the tight dress stood out against the light of the lamp as a graphic silhouette cut out of black paper, was scrutinizing the quotes on the white strips of Whatman paper stuck in pairs on both sides of the window frame: upper on the left--"None of us knows anything, not even whether we know or we do not know" (Metrodorus of Chios), opposite on the right--"I love you, O eternity!" (Zarathustra), below on the left--"The search for truth is the truth" (Hermann Cohen), opposite on the right--"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn" (Albert Camus).

"Is this a guide to action or your mottos?" taken by surprise, she turned back to the tempter entered so inaudibly, having realized that from behind in such an outfit she was too a fetching tidbit for him.

"Rather reminders," he set the cups gingerly on the table. "We shouldn't trust any authority very much."

"Aren't they authorities?" she pointed a manicured finger at the quotes, trying in vain to divert his attention from her backside exciting him to some abstract objects. "I've heard who are two these ones, but who are those ones on the left?"

"Metrodorus is a disciple of Democritus, and Hermann Cohen is the professor of Boris Pasternak, the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism," he struck her by the depth of knowledge gleaned from various brief excerpts of chrestomathies and anthologies.

"Pasternak is my favorite poet, but I didn't know about it..."

It was evident that the conversation in close proximity to each other embarrassed her more and more, but it would be no less awkward to move back.

"We have a lot in common," he lied. (Any kind of lyrical fusion with the idolized "Motherland" and the much-vaunted "soviet people" ever sickened him, and in poetry he preferred individualists, the egocentric Mandelstam or the recently discovered elitist Eliot, not too troubling himself with perusing the geniuses of the school course, for, in his view, all of them were essentially some agitation-servile windbags.)

"I like his 'Marburg', at any rate," he concretized his attitude to this semi-official idol, hinting, of course, at the content of the poem, which boiled up when reading aloud by the unconcealed youthful love of the author, who was their age then, at the beginning of this century.

"You're a man of taste," she involuntarily instigated his next cue.

"Not only for literature," he did not miss his chance.

How could he stand so, losing precious minutes, when her breast was only a few centimeters away from him and her breath was coming in gasps--was he what, damn it all, an ascetic or eunuch?!

"What do you mean?"

From the inevitability of his predictable answer, she stopped breathing altogether.

"You," he said quietly and carnivorously.

And translating her premonition into deeds as intelligibly as possible, he grabbed her pliant-light body around the waist gently but imperiously and, pressing her tightly to him, sealed her mouth with the first incitingly long-drawn-out kiss that slightly opened her lips.

A sudden wave of feverish unconsciousness swept over them, and while their coffee was getting cold on the table, they, fallen out of the surroundings into a pulsating instant of their embrace and immersed in comprehending the long-awaited flesh of each other by their thirsty flesh, were blindly swinging in the oblivion of their voluptuous hug as convulsive as a grasp of drowning one; however, as soon as his playful hands felt their way under her dress, the hem of which was pulled up by him with unrestrained determination, in order that their mutual torment could finally be resolved on the blanket of his ottoman, her body tensed in protest, and she rested against his shoulders with her palms, powerlessly overcoming herself and making a heroic attempt to increase the distance between them.

"What do you do..." she, frozen, murmured. Although what he did she could understand without words--by touch so to say.

"It's okay, don't fear," he whispered, tenderly tickling her neck with his lips and not removing his hands from the "priority places", as Pete called it.

"I don't want, I don't..." she had cried for mercy, completely demoralized by his delicate manipulations.

But he knew by heart all female excuses.

"This will happen anyway... in any case..." he went on persuading her, squeezing her body and advancing his gentle skilled hands behind the elastic waistband of her tights. "No time like the present..."

"I barely know you..." she breathed, seemingly yielding to his blandishments.

"You'll know all..."

Yet when he touched her bare warm skin and lost his head for a moment, he, unable to bear the tension, thrust his hands in a paroxysm of passion into the places where he should have got her permission to enter, and paid forthwith for his unceremonious rudeness, for to such straightforward overt "storm and stress" she offered serious resistance.

"Stop that!" she pushed him away, already without her former compliance, and he had no other recourse but to give back what he seemed to have won in a yielding moment.

"But why?" he again drew nearer to her, refusing to accept his defeat. "An affair with Bez?"

"Neither with Bez, nor with anyone," she angrily smoothed down her dress.

"Made a vow of celibacy?" he got angry as well.

"Why on earth?" she flashed a glance of her mockingly sobered black eyes at him.

"Maybe you are prone to perversions?" he relented a little, checking this hypothetical reason for her refusal, just to be sure.

"I hope you're not going to explain what you consider perversions?" she quite understood him.

That meant she was knowledgeable about this, whether theoretically or otherwise, he assumed anything.

"I am tolerant toward that," he ingratiatingly expressed his principal consent to any way of love that suited her. "All is normal, in my opinion, in accordance with individual preferences..."

"Isn't it better for us to talk about something else?" she did not fall for that trick.

"It would be better not to talk..." he began.

"No," she cut short his half-hearted attempt to put out feelers for any sex with her. "Sorry, but no."

"No--for good?"

"I wouldn't say so." She was not alien to compassion. "If it were 'no--for good', I'd have scarcely dropped in on you. But not today and not here."

"Today you cannot or--"

"Or," she rebuffed his insinuations. "In short, let's not mar our first meeting."

"Then when?" he tried to cajole her, haggling over at least a date.

"You're too picky, Tutankhamun's daughter!" he exclaimed to himself, but she attracted him as no one before (youthful forgetfulness, as usual, was strengthening his self-deception), and now, until his new assault, he was obsessed with the "idée fixe"--to get her at any cost--to conquer her if not by storm, then by siege--and to take possession of all that which he already held in his hands, unfortunately, only for a while.

"My gran is supposed to be hospitalized the day after tomorrow," she raised hopes in him. "After that I'll be alone. Can you wait a bit?"

From this "wait a bit" he all but folded her in his arms once again.

"With difficulty," he made his original sin knuckle under, nevertheless. "Where and at what time?"

"Don't you see me off?" she peered into his eyes from under her heavy eyelids, shadowed for greater mysteriousness.

"Yes, it's my blunder. But what about coffee?"

"On one condition," she warned. "You don't grab me anymore."

For the rest of the evening, Nadenka was constantly on the alert, and their communication was limited to their intellectual warm-up and to subduing his reflex impulses, which were not going further than osculating the permissible parts of her body and lamenting the waywardness of his volcanically ardent male nature: "I'm not made of stone," he again and again justified his carnal intentions, useless this evening; "Me too," Nadine would bring him to reason, although his favorite Latin maxim "Bis dat qui cito dat" ("He who gives swiftly gives twice") was on the tip of his tongue all the time; but a day later, here, in her tidied room smelling of thyme and heart medications in her grandma's sofa corner, she unexpectedly gave him a surprise, meekly allowing him to possess her, and even having prepared this creaky folding bed beforehand and simplified her apparel to the conveniently opening dressing-gown, yet being an absolutely chaste dilettante in direct contact; and in the riotous student flood of triumphant sexuality, she managed to keep intact not only her bodily virginity (he was acquainted, by the way, with such young floozies who specially reserved "innocence" for a profitable marriage, as evidence of their girlish "purity" and "chastity"), but also a rather burdensome set of "moral principles", which, despite her "sexy" harem appearance, forced her to erect protective barricades for so many years and waste the best years of her maidenhood. He personally, for example, was happy exception, because he was honored to be loved at first sight for the first time in the life of this maximalist, which she told him about with disarming straightforwardness.

Fallen in love, she was acting in essence no less consistently than when rejecting sex without love: not caring about her reputation, she was going for broke, as if her love guaranteed her the love and faithfulness of her "conqueror", who, naturally, did not hesitate to plunge into dissipation with her, but without thinking too much about the seriousness of his feelings and about their steadfastness; though, of course, teaching her with enthusiasm the subtleties of mutual pleasure for a month since her fall and finding a very capable disciple in her (her eastern blood told), he did not feel cloyed with her, and their love by no means began to pall, on the contrary, he became attached to her more and more, and, stirring up her emboldened sensuality as best he could, through knowing her, he was knowing something new about woman as such, which he did not notice or missed in a hurry before, even observing it, as the factor interfering and complicating the simplicity of the carefree and irresponsible relationships that were sometimes clouded because of negligence only by the gynecological scraping of the accidental consequences of their larking about.

Usually, bridging such extremely essential gaps in education was fraught with the awkward resistance of the balking ignorant "vestals" who, with their clumsy modesty, could suddenly regard his bed somersaulting at the very climax as an attempt upon their illiterate diffidence and overthrow him thus from the heaven of thrilling sophisticated erotica into the rude vulgarity of the again exposed obscene reality; but Nadine trodden on the path of vice did not reckon very much with the rules, accepting her paramour without abridgements and censorship expurgations and receiving his increasingly inventive fantasies with the self-forgetfulness of reciprocal enthusiasm: in their orgiastic night festivities she was joining with rare dedication and fearlessness, disregarding any conventions and tactical ruses, by which his other voluntary concubines stipulated their amicable agreement, and this readiness of hers for happy openness with her trustful liberation and transformation in the arms of her demiurge--which he compared jokingly with the spring thawing of the "chernozem soil" caressed by the sun or with the flowering of the Asian steppe desert reviving under the "blessed downpours"--was strangely liberating him together with her. She was the only one with whom nothing forced him to resort to violence or to defend himself from violence--to achieve dominance or to prove himself--to abandon her before she leaves him or to beware of retribution for his sins and inconstancy in the person of an egged relative or of a jealously aggressive cad lying in wait for him to lambaste the seducer; alone with her, the passage from their episodic mutual understanding of coition to the morning everyday separation was almost absent, and all their daily public cryptogram of interjections, glances, and gestures was in effect the continuation of their uninterrupted irreplaceable intimacy, so enthralling, engrossing, and all-encompassing that with all the wasteful lavish inexhaustibility of his attraction, he felt in the depths of his soul the divine tranquility of the attained happiness which was not being rocked any longer by any envious looks back, nor squandered on his incidental omnivorous pluralism.

Now his former liaisons were reassessed by him all in a row as unsuccessful trials, mistakes, experiments, approaches, and exercises, which was by and large not very noble and premature, as Pete pointed out, damping his rapture, when he shared this new experience with his friend.

"She's Shulamite, Pete! She's from the Song of Songs!" he was interspersing his speech with exclamations, seeking characteristics as artistic as possible for Nadine. "She, how to put this, is in tune with me, or something; she's like an Aeolian harp, while they are all either like logs, or females and predators..."

"As one big boss expounded the gist of your dialectics, 'Nothing is standing constantly'," Pete quipped sarcastically. "No, the fact that you laid her does you credit, anybody would do the same, but to my mind, you are quite ripe for marriage, and soon she'll charm you enough to get you to marry her."

"It's not in her nature to be husband-hunting," he had casually warded off the delusional speculations of this inveterate bon vivant, too suspicious lately, who wanted to get him out of the trouble of "true love".

"They're all the same," Pete, already lost faith in the "beloved women", waved his hand hopelessly.

"It turns out that not all of them..." he thought indistinctly, lulled by the monotonous susurration of the murmuring icy rain that came down outside the window, babbling, gurgling, and washing away the remnants of wilted wax foliage from the balding poplars in the street. "Not all of them... not all..."

He subsided into the warmth of the bed cocoon heated by their bodies and fragrant with jasmine, and sank at once into the hazily blurred oceanic irreality of sleep, where, merging in an embryonic floating dual clot and flowing into one another, he and she gradually grew as a shining solar epicenter of the abyss, until they filled it wholly and their light splashed out somewhere into the pitch darkness and cold; and when, pierced by this lifeless cold, he suddenly ran ashore from the ocean in a panic, like a dying beached whale, on the saving solid ground of the consciousness that had returned to him, he again found himself laying on the same bed in the same room near Nadine, not yet awakened, but there was a February windy fall of snow outside the window, the dry snow crumbs were lashing against the glass, and the whiteness of the raging blizzard drowned immediately behind the wide window sill in the duskiness of the room with the photographic portrait of her grandmother, passed away on New Year's Eve, that was gleaming on the round table in the center; the winter was running out, according to the calendar, and this winter his "Egyptian girl" got a lot from both him and the Lord God.

*

She caught "Egyptian flu" probably out of her own negligence, or maybe because of her excessive natural predisposition to procreation, but, unwilling to upset him, she dissembled this unfortunate fact and notified him of it relatively late, apparently endeavoring to prolong the time of their happiness, so the stage of her pregnancy was near the deadline for its termination, whereas he had to connect with Pete and decide through him, where and when to procure an urgent abortion and, besides, how to financially provide the culprit of such a surprise. Moreover, his "baby", missed out her conception, did not express any particular desire to get rid of her additional burden.

"Do you think this is the way out?" she shillyshallied about what to answer after listening to his project of restoring the former "status quo" over morning tea.

"Then what is the way out, say to me?" he got cross, for recalled Pete's prediction ridiculed by him. "To walk about with your baby bump?"

"Why, it's not forever," she smiled apologetically.

"Do you prefer childbirth?" It seems the prophetic predictions of the cynical soothsayer come true--in such a manner they tried to "take" him more than once. "And how about study, for example?"

"I'll miss a year, and that's all," she paid no heed to his warning. "Anyway, I haven't decided yet, don't fuss ahead of time."

"Later will be too late, no one will agree to do a curettage after the present stage," he tried to scare her. "It brooks no delay: either now or never."

"And you're not afraid for me?" she noted almost affirmatively, looking down. "It is not very pleasant, what you offer."

"I shall be beside," he promised, as he was wont to do in such cases.

"As an accomplice?" she asked dryly, and in her tone, in her gloomy constrained angularity, he easily read women's dislike that was too familiar to him. "There's already not love there, but something completely different."

"It's not my fault that I'm a man," he uttered another banality.

"I don't blame you for anything."

Such a detached contemptuous humility, he couldn't stand--why the hell did she impute the role of executioner to him?

"Yes, of course, it was the holy spirit who knocked up you," he said, embittered by shifting responsibility to him. "And I'm only a natural disaster here."

She didn't answer him, and he hardly restrained himself from banging his fist on the kitchen table.

"Instead of repenting in vain," he advised her irritably, "you should go and scrape it out pronto."

"You speak with me like with a prostitute," she remarked, rather indifferently than offended.

"Don't talk nonsense."

For some reason, he suddenly felt unbearable pity for her, but, unfortunately, there remained too short a time to postpone the desperately necessary procedure, and he was obliged to insist on undergoing it.

"So no offense, let's be adults," he got up. "I'll organize all and drop by after that to tell you who to turn to."

"It's easier to call me," she reacted apathetically.

"But I still must supply you with a fee and bring you there."

"I won't take your money," Nadine said icily. "There I'll go by myself, I don't need you there."

"Do as you please. But give me a call at least when you're done."

"And if not, what then?" With a vacant unseeing gaze of a passer-by she looked thoughtfully at him. "If I don't?"

"As a certain Jean-Paul Sartre used to say," he quoted, "'We are our choices'."

"Thank you for the tip." Judging by the intonation, she was kicking him out, intercepting the initiative of their breakup with a telepathic intuition.

"Given your fondness for everything French," she put a farewell point, "Adieu."

"I'll phone," he took his leave, not daring to kiss her at parting.

And he did indeed phone--to give her the coordinates, the necessary names, and the password of Pete, the recommendations of whose kin usually rescued his preggo heifers who had a run of bad luck then in this sort of relationship; however, when he, received no telephone news from his ex-inamorata, caught her at last in the huge vestibule of the university, their conversation boiled down to just a few phrases in the telegraphic style of the literary avant-garde of the epoch of "War Communism".

"How are you? All right?"

"Yes."

"You look not well."

"My grandma died."

"My condolences."

"For what?"

And having passed by him, she went so proudly and independently across the spacious vestibule that he deemed it demeaning to himself to go after her.

In short, she had irrevocably parted with him, and her former love for him had been probably extracted from her body along with his unborn child, while he, coerced, as always, by objective circumstances to do such a gift to his beloved, could not but attempt to shuffle off part of the guilt complex from himself to the principled Nadenka, who, you see, did not wish to waive her stupid Old Testament prejudices for the sake of happiness, making him feel remorse for his irredeemable evildoing which he never regarded before with others even as some extraordinary nuisance, let alone a dramatic key event: as far as he remembered (which was quite clear), from the very beginning he excluded any "joint production", for in love he wanted love only, without hanging the chains of his father's and other responsibilities on himself, and a woman who truly loved him could have understood this, not denying him sincerity because of his concern for her and her future. Or, perhaps, she saw the future differently--with him as before?--in that case, he was all the more a consummate swine and villain, with which it would be difficult for him to agree.

No matter how hard he pored over books (meantime, he again passed the winter session with excellent marks and earned an increased scholarship); no matter how hard he delved, like Karl Marx's "mole of history", into the tectonic faults of theoretical monoliths and into the conceptual cracks of high-mountain massifs of thought (meantime, this winter, the separation with her amazingly sharpened his analytical abilities, and he was quick on the uptake in unraveling the logic of any initial positions, hitting upon the same conclusions intuitively, albeit in his sloppy terminology); no matter how hard he studied the volumes of the enlighteners, utopians, positivists which he was sucking out in one sitting, or how long he pondered over the Kantians and phenomenologists (meantime, the subtleties of the relationship between the knower and the knowable interested him much more than the superstructure architecture of derived sociology), Nadine was constantly present in his intensively working brain as an obsessive background, impudently intruding into the course of his reasoning whenever he relaxed, muddling all logical calculations and pushing back all philosophical schematics to the periphery of his consciousness either meticulously resurrecting her magical beauty (more precisely, the memory of her that lived in his whole body--of her enchantment driving him to distraction and to the sudden frenzied rage of unsatisfied passion) or futilely turning over the details of their opprobrious parting; and shaking off the momentary stupor with willpower, he was indignantly banishing his pitiful reverie and obsessions, so that they would not clutter up the proscenium, where the mystery of the spirit being watched by him was unfolding, given that it was the mystery of the human spirit and of the world spirit at the same time, between which, as it dawned on him frequently, there was virtually no difference.

Undoubtedly, all purely spiritual perturbations and purely worldview peripeteias were unsuitable for curing pangs of love, but he was capriciously rejecting that universal remedy which served him as balm and nectar in former times and with which Pete was luring him now, being bored without such a companion whom this reprobate failed to inveigle into "exploration of new wells", as Pete smuttily perverted the reporter clichés about the oil rigs, for he shirked his duty of rake repeatedly on the pretext of his sessional busyness, already devoid of epicurean responsiveness in his fanatical concentration that tightly blocked his other urges, like a hardened monk being haunted by demonic teasing, immured in his frowsty obsession, thanks to which the category of his Sambo successes was sharply increased during the vacation competitions (by that he very pleased his trainer who counted him as a gifted wrestler, but too slothful this autumn, that's why, when opportunity offered, the trainer was ready to personally beat him against the mat to awaken his proper sporting ambition), because in martial arts, he always found an outlet for his ire, as well as in the physical strain of workouts, especially since he was a great master to act unpredictably in his explosively swift combinations of holds, inasmuch as Mother Nature endowed him with a reaction, quick reflexes, and an innate ability to orientate in the millisecond vicissitudes of a fight with a wasteful generosity for his philosophical bent of mind, and the fighting aggressiveness was combined in him with his agility and cold-blooded automatism of using the adversary's mistakes, blunders or weaknesses.

"Be that as it may, I prepared her for her future life, and she gained experience," he tried to salve his conscience that surreptitiously gnawed him now in the night prostration near the trolleybus window, now in his indefatigable vigils over the typographic tomes of library collections and the manuscripts of Xerox copies. "If she meets someone more worthy, she'll be fine..."

Regretfully, neither his guilt nor the twinges of conscience were the main causes of his anguish--without her, he sensed how all of his feelings were perishing by her absence and how he was gradually disappearing as a former whole, as a unity of spirit and soul, disintegrating into his two selves: one of them was intellectually dispassionate in absorbing the "legacy of centuries", which was imperturbably criticized by him only on exams and tests, for in his imagination, all that was being built into a single planetary evolution of polyphonic self-awareness, where each was the focus of something greater than he was separate, another was hopelessly desperate in his carnal suffering, and this self was being undermined by suppressed disgust for everything and everyone, so sometimes he had a keen desire to inflict some kind of harm either on himself or on the first stranger he met; without her, he was losing his taste for life, as if while removing her from his soul, he removed all that fertile layer, where the transformation of sensations and impressions into full-fledged feelings might come about, and as if together with the love for her that filled him, he was wrecking the entire level at which his desires accumulated and without which all that he was living through and experiencing began crashing without a trace into some bottomless pit; in a word, without her, he was already not he but "some laughing stock", according to the neat characteristic of Pete who endeavored to knock some sense into him "over a glass of vermouth" in the cafe which they loved to visit at leisure.

True, the park was bare and empty; after a short thaw and dampness, the trunks and branches of trees froze glassy; the dark stratified heaps of rotten fallen leaves among the dirty gray snowdrifts were crusted over with brittle thin ice; and the frown crows, ruffling up their black feathers, were exchanging cawing near to the tops of the leafless crowns slightly ringing in the wind; so they was talking in the draught inside the cafe, in the muffled hubbub of the random customers partaking of their repast here.

"But what about your Dionysianism?" asked Pete, despaired to elicit an intelligible answer. "Has it gone out already?"

"In principle, it's still early for it," rolling a melting mint-sweet pellet of candy fudge back and forth in his mouth, he stared into space through the transparent wall at the bleak winter view outside. "Simply some reluctance, and that's all."

"Overcome it," Pete recommended encouragingly. "Each skirt has her own zest, you should only start."

"I'm fed up with these zests," he joked dejectedly. "I don't feel drawn to this anymore."

"To what do you feel drawn then?" Pete became indignant. "You've even mothballed your motorcycle--apparently want to make your head safe..."

"Everyone needs his own," he snapped.

"I'd understand if you, for example, keep dallying with your sex cutie, then I wouldn't bother, her fanny is really something..." gourmet Pete praised his choice, touching one of the most painful points of his nostalgia for the lost hanky-panky with her. "But you stand idle now, you're a bachelor, whereas I have my eye on two sisters-twins. We could have slept with them by a cross method..."

Being lost in day-dreaming, Pet excitedly took a sip from the faceted glass and looked around the cafe with his glittering oily eyes of the heartthrob, as if looking for targets for aimed firing among the scattered customers.

"Don't be a misanthrope, this is not your role."

"Naturally, I'm a rare merrymaker," he confirmed with the gallows humor, mechanically sipping the cold sugary-tart wine diluted in the buffet with raw water, as it was once the custom among the wisely moderate ancient Greeks. "I can't make myself want anything: something is wrong with me after this 'priestess of Amun', something she has turned upside down in me..."

"Diseases should be treated, instead of enabling them to develop," authoritatively declared Pete who, among other things, periodically supplied him with the means of protection in their forays into the "petticoat government". "As I recall, it was you who told her to scram."

"Yes, I," he admitted with the ill-concealed disgust for himself. "Complete freedom now."

"And what the heck you have freedom for, if you don't use it? I wouldn't snivel if I were you, even because of such a 'sexy'. One can think that others cuties don't turn you on anymore..."

"Maybe I'm a one-woman man."

"Then castrate yourself!" Pete so angrily put his glass on the blue plastic of the table that all but splashed out some precious grams of port wine measured off by the barmaid's beaker. "Or, please, you may come back and do the unmarried girl a great favor. Brighten, as they say, her difficult life journey."

"You'll jinx me so."

"When some returns, it always happens," the dubiously impartial oracle predicted his probable future. "This is by what everyone is caught."

"It depends on what to return to."

"You mean--'to whom'?"

"I'm a philosopher, my friend, and I'm accurate in the definitions."

"In short, the twins haven't inspired you," lonely Pete sighed ruefully, examining the ruby contents of the glass into the light.

"As though no for the time being."

"But this, of course, is not final," his orphaned partner seized upon the assumption that had slipped into his "no".

"Let's drink to love!" Pete raised his glass.

"To love," he responded with the same.

But while clinking glasses with one another as friends, he and Pete meant very different things.

"Why not? Why not come back?" he bickered with himself in his night seclusion, blindly staring at the page in Schopenhauer's texts which somebody lent him for a week, whereas the irrefutable, but still renaissance, arrogant dictum "The world is my idea" ("mine" was very doubtful and hardly primary) hauntingly resonated in him with a similar state of the illusiveness of the universe encompassing his waking consciousness, where he was not a tiny thinking component of this microscopic particle of galactic fiery whirlwinds forsaken among other immeasurably small bits of flesh on a planet-grain of sand, but the only eternal center of the chaos that reigned around, the center spreading his radiant "self" into the whole infinity of the corpuscular-closed space of cosmos (the reborn Attic myth of the universe was emerging thus from the archaic of the subconscious in his universal disembodied self-deification); yet the chilly astral magic of omniscience and omnipresence was only unendurably exacerbating the call of that earthly which solely returned the meaning of his own existence in the perishability of the mortal flesh of his transitory biological organism. "I did not explicitly break with her, and our spat can be settled if she does not be foolishly balky. And if that fails I will know at least what's what and be sure that it is not because of ambitions..."

He didn't mention the main obstacle, for then his striving for the former parity balance in love, in which she had once already endured the pain of the undeserved humiliating ordeals that accrued to her as inherent to a woman's lot, would have looked not like a concession of swallowing his pride for her sake and not like his compassionate reciprocal sacrifice, but like his selfish try to receive additionally what had been given to him insufficiently, considering that he was going to return, most likely, for a while, in order to reduce the obsession that tormented his soul to inevitable exhaustion and sobering up from this passion, too all-consuming and tragically draining his gaiety (his "crown of the laughter ", as Nietzsche said about Zarathustra), because it again and again prompted him to commit deeds not characteristic of him; the current paradox was just that he was not free now without her, and not with her, and that in their love, it was as if the way out into a new dimension was opened to him, where their utmost closeness and even his partial habituation did not disillusion him, nor being accompanied by the usual tiredness from each other and the familiar boredom.

*

The next evening, he broke all his vows and called Nadine.

"Hi, it's me," he greeted warily. "Are you at home today?"

"At home," she replied, not right away, but without unnecessary emotions.

In general, their dialogue proceeded in the spirit of Hemingway's reticently taciturn heroes, popular in their adolescence.

"I'll visit you--do you mind?"

"In order to what?"

For a philologist, the turn of speech was rather clumsy, and she corrected herself.

"What for?" she repeated not so colloquially.

"I'll come and explain," he said. His explanation required more than a telephone contact.

"You'll come--when?" she again did not cope with literary grammar.

"I can right now, I must only get to," he paused expectantly.

"That is in forty minutes?" she estimated aloud the length of his route. "Okay."

And she hung up first.

In her spacious bright room, everything was, as always, tidied up, wiped out, arranged and laid in perfect order; the light polished top of the writing table, which reached half of the window and occupied the corner opposite her bed folded to the wardrobe, was shiny; the geranium on the wide window sill, where to the right her cosmetic and manicure phials and boxes were standing by the round mirror, was blooming magnificently with scarlet and lilac-violet hemispheres of petal mosaic; but there were no more the oval photos on the walls; the smell of medicines from the sofa at the entrance to the left had completely disappeared; and on the ironed linen tablecloth of the dining table under a bronze three-arm chandelier, there was the not very photogenic portrait of an aristocratically prim, strict old woman, in whose hard face he could not discern even the slightest resemblance to Nadine.

"Sit down, please, I'll bring some tea," having let him into the room, the hostess indifferently informed the uninvited guest, shifting the granny onto the bookshelf; and while she laid the table, going hither and thither for her teapots, cups, cherry plum jam and neatly chopped cupcake, their silence was interrupted at times only by her casual remarks and by the nods of the visitor furtively watching her.

"It seems that's all," she looked with a critical eye at what she had brought, then moved up the blue saucer with the full cup to her and took a seat in front of her former lover--so that the round table separated them.

"You may commence," she invited him, meaning both the tea and his explanation.

And after taking a sip of the hot tea, he commenced.

"Basically, I'm with an avowal of guilt," he muttered repentantly, crumbling a slice of cake on the dessert plate. "Forgive me for being such an uncouth boor."

"Add that 'such a benighted bumpkin'," she amplified his self-depreciation. "But there is nothing to forgive you for; you are not implicated in any crime."

"Even like that?"

He mechanically picked out a raisin from the cake with his thumb and forefinger; thoughtfully took a nibble of it, unable to find words to appreciate her charity; and put the raisin in his mouth, chewing this dried grape, as a piece of bubble gum which had stuck in his teeth.

"What surprises you?" she explained dispassionately, spooning up the jam from her jam dish. "You personally did not take anyone's life, you conceded this prerogative to me."

"That's why I ask your forgiveness," he hastened to repent for the second time. "Now, I suppose, everything is over, and let bygones be bygones..."

"You're mistaken." She lifted her head and suddenly glared at him with her bottomless coal-black eyes, and the swallowed cake stuck in his throat. "It is not over, no. I didn't take advantage of your grace."

"In other words..." He felt the chills run up his back. "In other words, you didn't go?"

"But you and I broke up, didn't we?" At the given moment, she could give her haughty grandma a head start. "You'd left then, isn't that so? You'd galloped away to freedom in the prairie..."

For his muscularity, she sometimes compared him lovingly with a mustang before.

"And you, therefore, decided to leave it? As a memorable souvenir?"

"What do you care about me?" she rubbed his nose in his betrayal. "My difficulties don't concern you, and I am not going to make claims."

"Maybe you'll be honest?" he stopped the stream of her eloquence. " Did you so fear?"

"I couldn't," Nadine said quietly with a forced smile. "Two deaths at once are too much for me."

"You were in such a sorry state?"

"So-so," she did not accept his pity. "It's just that otherwise I would have nothing to live for."

"By gosh!" he slightly decreased the level of their sudden sincerity with slang vulgarism. "Your meaning of life is cool, it must be said..."

"I haven't another," Nadine could master her weakness, and her features froze in a pale mask of sphinx's equanimity.

"Isn't it time for you yet?" she asked him, nevertheless, out of place, tracing out monograms with her teaspoon on the jam.

"I'm in no hurry." And, in corroboration of what was said, he poured some tea into his cup.

"There is a flick on TV today," he nodded at the gray screen under the bookshelves. Although in his home he avoided watching TV, since he never had enough time for idleness, and the truthful information about events on the planet he received from Western radio broadcasts through the noises of "jammers".

"Now I go to bed early," she again hinted insistently.

"So much the better," he dug his heels in. "That suits me."

"How you like to inflict pain..." Without changing her countenance, she slightly curved the corners of her lips, and his head was spinning from an unexpected desire to kiss those lips right there and then.

"Just for that I'm here," he said and moved back with his chair from the table. "Exclusively for reasons of bloodlust."

Having risen and quickly stepped to the motionless Nadine, he took her face in his hands and leant over to her widening huge eyes that seemed to have breathed out the dry dark heat of the night desert in his face.

"What?.. What?.." she whispered, as if her breath caught.

"Hush, witch," he murmured lovingly, and his first tender kiss on her cold compressed lips, lingering beyond all measure, grew, already with their joint participation, into a real gluttonous-greedy embrace of two maniacs starving for the sacrificially adored flesh, which told them about each other much more than any explanations, narratives, and confessions.

After that the conversational part of their communication assumed a scrappily fragmentary and incoherent character, being almost overshadowed by the more active and effective wordless dialogue of their bodies that was absorbing all their attention.

"No, you're crazy... Think of the baby..."

"Quite the contrary, it's safer now..."

"I must clear the table... And the bed isn't unfolded..."

"I'll unfold it... Just a minute..."

Their spasmodically passionate whispers concluded by her hasty removal of the tea utensils from the table to the kitchen while he was diligently but also acceleratedly unfolding their bed (like a fairy-tale prince on the lake with swans, he hid her nightgown away under the pillow); after which, with the extinguished chandelier, in the diffused faint light of her night lamp, they finally reached the longed-for vastness of mutual possession, drifting in a stormy or blissful oblivion until late at night--until their battered cockleshells calmed exhaustedly, rocking on the lapping waves of their doze and she, having pulled out her powerless hand from under the blanket, turned off the crimson nightlight that had been illuminating their entire happy voyage.

"I fell out with Pete over you," falling asleep, he whispered the latest news to her in the darkness.

"Pete is a nice boy." She rubbed her cheek sleepily against his shoulder. "But he is unable to love..."

And now he was lying beside her--beside his happiness--in the small hours, hearkening to the predatorily clawing slaps of the raging blizzard against the glass squares of window and gazing at the geranium blossoms discolored by the whitish snowy dusk and at the furnishings of the room, almost invisible in the murk; he was lying so and thinking about what he did not finish to think over yesterday.

If he needed her so much, and, by comparison with her, all the others were some substitutes, unsuitable to replace her, while he might actually go crazy without her and become a possessed dervish, running amuck like the legendary Majnun and aimlessly racing around on his Java on the night motorways in search of the "fatal accidents", and only his return to her revived him from overcoming his constraint and compulsoriness to his former cheerfulness and carefree freedom of a gambling competition both with the cunning of the ancients and with the challenges of the modern everyday life, consequently, his present feeling couldn't be qualified otherwise than "love"; and she--he couldn't be deceived in that--also loved him, or loved in him, at worst, something essential for him, and not some primitive "physiological function": she was yearning just for him in her desolation, and she tried to save herself with the memory of her love for him, but at the same time, she did not insist on anything, nor annoyed him by hysterics, unlike some of her self-seeking touchy sisters who wanted to corner him and drive him into the pitfall of moral obligations, as if he was a hunted beast for taming, which spoke of the undoubted genuineness of her love (or, perhaps, of her supernatural Jesuitical self-possession), meantime, in his past, he could not boast of such a two-sided practically conflict-free coincidence, even if some occasional precedents of partial "harmony", of course, did happen.

Besides, he, alas, did not lust for anyone else, whereas, for some reason, she was attracting him as insuperably as the promised land (it did not matter, whether she was Solomon's Shulamite, or Jacob's Rachel, or Majnun's Leila, or Amenhotep's Nefertiti), therefore, he shouldn't have resisted in vain, apparently, and refused such a gift of fate, God knew why: living apart was unbearable for both of them, so life together would have been the best imaginable variant, and he, beyond doubt, would have acted absolutely logically, reasonably, and rightly, if he had deigned to settle their two-month tiff once and for all.

"The die is cast!" he sighed with the determination worthy of a true Roman. "Let's marry, and then we'll see."

Already matrimonially--with a caressingly tender touch of the caring owner fondling his priceless property--he stroked Nadine's tummy, slightly bloated thanks to his diligence, and with her usual sensitivity, she immediately turned to him.

"Look, what if I move to you altogether?" he asked in a whisper as before.

"For good?" she banteringly repeated his indiscreet question in that first evening.

"As you say."

"For good--yes," she said.

And, kissed the blissfully fluttering eyelids of her closed eyes, his lips began to descend down her hot body more and more lower to her breast and to her rounded pregnant belly, when suddenly the sunlight struck through Nadine's flesh, his temple bumped against a solid iron ledge, and he woke up, flabbergasted, in the unceremoniously clamorous stuffiness of the bus that made the next halt....

III

The bus stood in the center of a square asphalt patch, one side of which adjoined a squat brick barn with a signboard "Bus station" above the plank door open because of the heat, and the corner of which on two other sides was fenced off from the intersecting streets by a turnstile of welded metal pipes and by the dry drainage ditches with the parched gray greasy silt on the bottom and the green mossy grass on the slopes, while from the fourth side, opposite the entry to the parking lot, it was occluded by the picket fence of someone's orchard that had strewn the asphalt with shrunken, worm-eaten wild pears and scrotum-like, shriveled orange-yellow apricots dried out by the scorching sun.

The same garden fences and one-story brick walls of the slate-covered private estates differing in color of window frames and open shutters stretched both along the highway that cut through this tiny hick town and along the breakstone pavements of the deserted straight streets narrowing somewhere in the distant outskirts into the dusty haze of the fields; and there was only one two-story building towering across the street from the bus station and being, judging by the shop-window of the facade, the local seat of public catering. When the talkative fellow travelers explained to him what was the reason for the general commotion (the driver was about to drive off to refuel to the petrol station, so all the passengers were disembarking for half an hour and leaving their ownerless stuffs under the responsibility of the driver who was a native of these places), and when he raised his gym bag on the seat he had reserved and alighted from the bus into the sunshine to stroll along the street studded with dry cowpats and do a little sightseeing in the surroundings to while away the time, the building turned out to be a department store on closer inspection, but indeed with a restaurant upstairs; therefore, having remembered that he hadn't been eating anything from the morning, he put off his tourist survey of the area and walked up the stairs to the empty restaurant hall, which would have looked like a typical works canteen with its buffet counter, with its high plastic partition before the kitchen, and with its porcelain orphan saltshakers on the bare tables, if it were not for the emptiness and a low orchestral dais in the corner.

After he settled down by the half-open section of the window, he tapped demandingly with a saltshaker on the grey plastic of the table, which, surprisingly quickly, caused the unhurried appearing of a somewhat corpulent blond wench in a white apron of waitress, who shambled from behind the partition to the only client with the drowsy dignity of the emerald flies crawling on the table and voiced her non-alternative menu of borsch and stuffed peppers; and since five minutes later, she already placed before him the dishes guaranteed for lunch today, and in addition to them, brought both a separate plate with a couple of hunks of wheat bread and a bottle of chilled lemonade with a thin glass on its neck, he was so overwhelmed with such an unexpected service that paying for the meal in advance ("lest should be late for the bus..."), he was generous with a modest tip.

The waitress leisurely sailed back behind the partition to her garrulous female collective, and he, with an instantly awakened appetite, began to consume the home-made rich red borsch of fresh white cabbage, peppered with a scarlet pod of capsicum hellishly burning in his mouth, masticating the warm bread with its springing porously-soft crumb and with its crust baked well to matte swarthiness and summing up the earthly results of his life experiment, to which, striving for the lure of freedom, he had been subjected by some unknown beginning self-fulfilling in human diversity and including his fate as its unique component.

From force of his long-time habit of equipping every internal monologue with aphoristic borrowings, the flight of his thought was following the trajectory of a perfect figure of antiquity, a square, laying the mental foundation of his ephemeral Tower of Babel composed of such four quotes: "Sin is not charged against anyone's account where there is no law" by the apostle Paul was reinforced by the neo-Kantian of the Baden school, Heinrich Rickert, "The ethical sense-component can only attach to the subjective will", while Nietzsche's sharp remark, "Man represents no progress over the animal", was moderated in Russian by Berdyaev, "All generic is opposite to freedom".

All of them were right: biologically, the evolution of man probably ended and was replaced by the evolution of his spirit, which was in fact the meaning of his emergence, for his mission consisted in adapting everything without being adapted himself, and that enabled him to develop from the scattered tribal foci of reason into the holistic consciousness of the Earth--into a single humanity realizing itself already both by all nature and by the entire planet; meanwhile the freedom of the spirit, with its original universal nature, constantly--at all times--opposed various mechanisms of self-restraint, in particular, moral ones, to its infinity and eternal potential incompleteness, because otherwise the sinless permissiveness of choice might doom the spirit and the body, or on the scale of the Earth--the consciousness and the planet, for extinction. But not such self-evident facts interested him, desirous of knowing what was causing this spontaneous self-regulation and the very changes in spiritual landmarks which was giving rise to the entire pivotal logic of the earthly evolution of freedom manifesting in the external non-stop transformations of history and culture, and why either the morality of survival and rebirth or the morality of partial self-destruction dominated here and there in the planetary ethnogenesis, as if the planet, maintaining the balance of the whole, would either exalt or overthrow separate nations and peoples, religions and civilizations, spurring the conquering activity of some and extinguishing the vital energy of others, imparting persuasiveness of salvation and actuality to certain beliefs and emasculating seemingly unshakable truths, molding states, countries and tribes in conglomerates of hordes and unions, regions and continents, and mixing human masses and ideas, moving the world progress and demolishing what was once created "for all eternity" by social cataclysms or by grandiose natural calamities.

The impression was that in a multitude of options, including dead-end, absurd, in humanity, just as in the entire planet, some kind of wholeness and integrality was being embodied, growing from a primary spark, maybe a gene or a clone, and developing into consciousness, which was excellently described by theologian-paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in his "Cosmogenesis-Christogenesis"; and the same single whole essence was guessed in the inexpressibility of self-awareness in the bottomless depths of his "self", where, however, the uniqueness of his individuality originated. It was this transition from the general to the personal that occupied his thoughts at dinner, because the solution to the riddle of his then upheaval and of his refusal from many women for the sake of one was just there: when digging out of the unconscious the total sexuality or "vitality" of Freudianism, and later the collective archetypes of Carl Jung, he did not even suspect, indiscriminately picking up diverse knowledge, that the soil of instinct, on which all observations of the pathology of psychoanalytic complexes, as well as all generalizing conclusions, were based, extending to the healthy organic nature, represented rather the solidified surface layer of existential lava, splashed out suddenly through the faceless naturalness of two genders and, as it were, smelted out his humanized instinct into the formed all-embracing attraction to Nadine that immediately crystallized a new hierarchy of "main" and "peripheral" in his soul, and henceforth the main thing was this omnipotent, nearly fanatical "individual" love; that is, then in love he fathomed in some measure the mystery of the secondary nature of the material, and even more so, the "generic", and saw its subordination to the self-creating spirit realizing itself not only in evolutionary becoming, but also in similar sudden "surges" directly, in the revelations of love and providence, in the inspiration of genius, and in the consonance of prayer meditations, whereupon the previously hackneyed formula "The world is God's creation", after his conscious participation in the act of this permanently lasting creation, started twinkling with the infinite cosmic spaces of the meaning embedded in it.

Without displaying itself somehow objectively, in love or in creativity, his individuality would have been eluding him, he thought, finishing to chew the boiled bitterish Bulgarian pepper with minced spicy stuffing of meat and rice and incidentally driving the annoying flies away from his glass, for the return to the former self-affirmation at the commonly available level had since then become a descent to the known and the simplest; and yielding to his vices, he was putting himself, "relaxing", in the idiotic position of a grandmaster solving a chess problem for beginners, as when he ironically polemicized during his postgraduate studies with some of obscurantist "Marxists", who were puzzled at times by the topic of his Ph.D. thesis, "The Mind of Aristotle in the philosophy of the Neoplatonists", to a state of the supposedly comprehending thoughtful mooing; but, nonetheless, the division into "soul" and "body", which was current in speculative inferences from primitiveness to this day, apparently never existed, and there was a predominance of the different levels of someone's personality in a person--someone's aggregate soul which included corporeality and was truly, as the first Christians noticed, impenetrable to others and open to God, or, if without mysticism, physically open into nature and into the universe as their sensitive atom-tuning-fork and spiritually sprouting from the pre-existent light-darkness, from the still pre-material and preconscious self-creation incarnating in the materiality of the cosmos and equal in its unfolding out of chaos to the self-knowledge of this individuality pulsatingly exploding from a spark into the blowing universe and probably comprehending himself, like him, only in realization--accumulating his universal "self", like him, both in the unconscious fleshliness of being and in a multitude of hypostases of reason separately hatching out of being--and remaining, perhaps, open, like him, into something else, inaccessible even mentally for the intrapersonal cognition closed in its infinity; like a hypothetical God, he could cognize the world only as himself, while he could cognize himself only in the world, like the Spirit (with a capital letter), from which his spirit (with a small one) hatched out in the flesh as a timid fiery tongue, in order, spreading as the next bonfire of enlightenment in the combustible experience of his life, to blaze as a local conflagration devouring the perishable shell, on the eve of the future posthumous radiance in some higher all-encompassing consciousness that would be slightly supplemented with his contribution increasing the zone of planetary light.

"By the way, although our immortality is the merging with the fire that begets us, and what we call 'God' undoubtedly accepts all variants of earthly flare-ups and the entire human spectrum of comprehension, but the significance of His memory is unequal in different points, just as in ours," sipping the cold effervescent lemonade, he was again rediscovering the ascension-return, described not by him only, which, according to ancient beliefs, was granting calm in some kind of common motherhood and the preservation of the distinctiveness achieved in this life (true, the coming requital presupposed a certain righteousness in observing some moral norms and God's commandments, diverse enough in all past epochs). "Ultimately, here everything depends on the power of combustion and on the coincidence with the dominant of earthly self-regulation, because the salvation of mankind as a species is always in his own hands, while the planet, conscious in human awareness, only unapparently guides our evolution, and, as they say, signals danger in our realizations; and 'paradise' is probably our presence in God as part of His living and vivid memory, whereas 'hell' is either the remoteness and vagueness of individual pettiness or the protective ousting of the purely bestial and animal into the darkness of oblivion as something not bringing anything new spiritual, and God himself--in which he could quite agree with Christianity--is really humanlike, or human being is simply not given to go beyond the human..."

He glanced at his watch, and, hastily getting up, emptied his glass in one gulp, after which he rushed headlong at once from the restaurant, cursing his thoughtfulness and absentmindedness as he ran. However, before the bus departed, he had time to recover his breath and refill his empty flask from the tap of an artesian standpipe sticking up next to the station.

With the greasy belch of the borsch gurgling in his stomach, he flopped down on the same back seat and, switched off from the circumstantial conversations of his fellow travelers as soon as the bus started, reverted to his thoughts of hell and paradise, but now these definitions were seen by him, for some reason, as two vectors of man himself striving at once up and down, both into spirit and into flesh, into God and into nature; and "sublimation", the transformation of the lower into the higher, was regarded by him now as a result of the release of the "libido" gushing from the atavistic abysses of the organism in the consciousness, since the "libido", capable of spiritualization in a person, was proving to be neither Freudian sexuality nor Jung's archetypes, but some energy of existence colored in one way or another (Henri Bergson, whose "anti-intellectualist intuitionism" he was keen on in the graduate school, called it "vital impulse"); and besides, his philosophical wakefulness in the afternoon siesta lasted for not very long time.

"And in the case that the sexual predominates, no matter how liberated you are, you cannot saturate your spirit with such bodily surrogates," his gaze was sliding indifferently over the town houses flashing by. "The family in this sense is also protection, the creation, so to speak, of an individual sphere of freedom. And while it protects, it is needed, as long as the family is freedom for you, and not enslavement..."

His rattling decrepit bus rolled out along the straight asphalt road onto the flat expanse of foothill fields and rushed with a breeze among the plantations of scrubby trees unknown to him, already slightly ascending to the approaching wooded slopes that screened the snowy peaks of the summits; and he again closed his drooping sleepy eyelids and plunged willingly into the instant abyss of his memory revived by the dream....

*

It was an early serenely clear evening of April, and he was sitting under the linden trees on a wet bench of the boulevard in relative seclusion, with his legs crossed and with his arms freely spread on the metal back of bench, breathing in the teasingly-elusive woody dampness of the green branches decked with swelling buds and the titillating smell of thawed soil and rotten leaves, and habitually noticing neither the passers-by purposefully scurrying and strolling along the wide walkway, nor a shabby mummifiedly-wizened crone with a martyr's intellectual face who perched on the edge of the next bench, nor the bustling rumble of the opposing traffic from beyond the cast open-work fences of the middle boulevard zone and the incessant din rolling away along the lanes that abutted the boulevard.

On the way from the library, he could afford now to be a sybarite a little, inasmuch as until his daughter fell asleep and Nadine finished her evening washing and cooking, he had no conditions for work at home, while his previous sedulousness in the graduate study already guaranteed him the successful passing of the required minimum which had not overloaded his brain very much by the knowledge compulsory for everyone with his tenacity and professionally developed technology for systematizing book material. To tell the truth, over the two elapsed years of his family life, only the very first months were more or less calm and happy, until the June post-session birth of their charming Victoria, whose angelically curly head and pretty face, disarmingly cheerful or puckered by weeping, with mom's big mouth and shape of brown smart eyes were always arousing the most tender feelings in him, too, as well as the strong little body of their nice piglet properly gaining weight, but in her first year, this poppet usurped all the time and attention of his beloved wifey--who managed to finish her last course without taking academic leave, in the intervals between feeding-lulling-rearing her daughter, whom they would leave with her parents or his mother alternately, or palm off on her girlfriends for a free hour in the morning--and made him, a young dad, toil in the student construction brigades during both summer vacations with the object of providing her with decent living, since his scholarship and seasonal small moonlighting were dwindling too quickly; so that, deprived of his favorite consolation, he sometimes became infuriated from the forced celibacy (which likened him to one of equestrian monuments of the epoch of delayed socialist realism with heavy cast-iron balls in his groin) and from the coldness of Nadine, who, of course, endeavored not to offend her hubby by refusal, but felt completely exhausted at their night meeting and had no strength to respond to his passion, not to mention the former insatiable intoxication of their intimacy, and by that, unfortunately, she differed disadvantageously from him, who tried in vain to emaciate his rebellious flesh by absorbing all kinds of spiritual food for thought, both recommended by someone and strictly forbidden in order to avoid challenging the recommended (as if every absurdity did not exposed itself by dint of impartial consideration, or every idea did not disclose itself in the entire perspective of its implementation, or every ideology did not reveal itself as a means to enslavement, voluntary or violent).

Naturally, when their Vicky began to toddle, articulately babbling some words, and needed her mother's breast no more, whereas Nadine had possibility to settle down at last in the comfort of her home coziness, backing up the shaky family budget with literary translations from French until her baby grew enough to attend day nursery, their previous "friendly relations in bed" was partially resumed, but differently than before, not reaching the former fearlessness and intensity, as though the travail she had endured (for the delivery was difficult, and he had been hanging about under the windows of the hospital all night pending the result) somehow psychologically barricaded her with instinctive bodily fear and unaccountable resistance to their complete premarital closeness, meantime, with all his experience, he did not know how to overcome her obedient self-protective alienation that he guessed in her love, especially in the constant presence of their daughter who slept nearby and unintentionally restricted their reveling in any erotic intercourse, innocently reducing "the heights of ecstasy" once experienced by them to some controlled sports copulation or to some conjugally cautious health-improving exercise, which was unlike the soaring to the seventh heaven that united them in former times; even giving him a little of tenderness at night, Nadine did not give herself entirely to him as she did before her daughter appeared, which, perhaps, could be medically explained (regretfully, his marriage had separated him with Pete), but, alas, justified his fears about the inevitable insipidity of the safely-measured satisfaction of such hunger not connected in the family with risk and adventurism.

Fulfilling the eternal, naturally inherited program of procreation, Nadine did her best with such mothering selflessness that her beloved, who seemed to have been placated in their family idyll, got, as a rule, only her tired indulgence and ironically-sincere gratitude; and when Vicky was ill or capricious, he had to bear with her nervousness and her grueling anxiety, along with her wakefulness while she was listening to the breathing of their sleeping child and getting out of the bed at the first suspicious sound; which meant thus that both of them, with all their plans, feelings and desires, depended now on this voracious bonny suckling goggling her bright eyes at the parents--on some allergic rash on her chubby ruddy cheeks, on the upset of her paramount stomach, on her coughing, snotty nose, high temperature and so on--and they would also get sick every time together with her, becoming crocked and irritable; and if for the mother, the daughter was really some separated part of her own flesh, promising her the soul-saving relay race of biological immortality (the global interruption of which might completely undermine the meaning of childbirth and even the act of conception itself, as, by the way, one could observe in all apocalyptic periods, including their nuclear era, in the mass indifference to the creation and breeding of "new generations" and in the childless preference for the same sex that was coming into vogue and getting "normal"), he, unlike her, sometimes began to feel a certain dislike to his "Cupid", as, say, to one of the hindrances vexing him in the course of his thought process in their small kitchen with the drying diapers hanging from the ropes above him, where he sought shelter from the whimpering of their "little piggy" and from the television vigils of his fagged wife.

His dashing foolhardiness not spent till now was seething in him like the subcrustal boiling magma of the stellar core of the planet, squeezing out from time to time the diamonds of brilliant thoughts that suddenly acquired an indestructible crystallinity, but its fiery irrepressibility was gradually fusing his melting external reconciliation and his often feigned sympathy from within, which Nadine, who relied on her "toiler-breadwinner", could scarcely surmise, for outwardly, he seemed to be quite content with what he got so rarely, and he did not object to carrying the additional burden of paternity, on the contrary, he strove to make her household chores easier for her in the hope of reward again and again dispiriting him by its secondary and residual character, serving rather relief than gratification and convincing him of the deceitfulness of all the lures at the happy stage of the pre-family "harmony", engagingly frank and so promising, yet waning now up to a pale shadow of affection and compassionate friendliness from the then magnetism of bleeding passion and supernatural fatal predestination to each other.

"Merciless love is disgusting," he essayed to reason with himself by quoting Nikolai Berdyaev, seditious, and therefore being thoroughly read over and over again, who had been withdrawn from circulation as long ago as in the 1920s by the "revolutionary cohort" of party leaders, and who was being clandestinely imported now from overseas, like other émigré "slanderers", among other "subversive literature", such as the religious philosophy of the Russian Renaissance, or the French existentialist rebels, or the filigree-systemic pedant Martin Heidegger, who once lapsed into the heresy of the Nazi "back-to-the-soil" movement, though for Berdyaev, he felt a special affinity, and this thinker was so close to him both as an incomparable champion of spiritual liberation and by the very personality combining a voluble fighting temperament and the sharpness of heightened intuition that for individual use, he already compiled a kind of "Catechism of Liberty" from Berdyaev's pithy quotations; "Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him," he made the unsuccessful attempts to console himself with Carlyle, additional for him, but the fact remained: the real shared love was not enough for him, no matter how much he admired his long-suffering "Tutankhamun's daughter" and their big-eyed "precious", while to join the wanderer Pete anew would have meant to admit this "sexual gangster" was right in their dispute about the essence of such an indefinite concept as "love", which, according to Pete's judgment, was simply a phantom of overly individualized fantasy and the superstructure of the imagination cherishing its exclusiveness over the general impersonal Brownian wandering of the biospheric human herd in search for "optimality of crossing" or "perverse realization of unhealthy predispositions" in forms of art, politics, criminality and pathological "patriotism", and in Pete's opinion, any religion and everything, so to speak, "platonic" and predominantly spiritual also fell into the same category of perversions. Earlier, in the bloom of youth and of "taking this bloom off", as Pete vulgarized, not that their happiness refuted Pete's naturalistic fabrications, but it invalidated the credibility of this livestock rhetoric, in relation to them at least, whereas today, when the changed circumstances robbed him of the former enjoyment, with the painfulness of an inveterate egoist, he felt firsthand the correctness of one of the theses of Nietzsche, "attraction is a certain kind of lust for power", since he was powerless to get the due self-giving in concentration on himself out of Nadine; meanwhile without her involvement in the recklessness of "playing on the edge", his vagrant impudent sensuality outweighed his pared love and his decorous prudence, and in spite of the secret cult of freedom, he again and again suppressed his nature, driving the brazenfaced sinner of his soul into the framework of ambiguous innocuous chaffing over the "debauchery" allowed by the unspoken marital code.

In a word, he excluded Pete in any case, not because his friend was right, but because Pete would have reduced all the dramatic complexity of his disillusionment to rude and stupid platitudes, like "better to sleep around than be henpecked", while he did not need primitive diagnoses and mocking advices, not to speak of witnesses to his possible extrafamilial emancipation, which Nadine should not have known about, as well as about his dissatisfaction with her and about his reprehensible thoughts; that's why he couldn't confide even in Bez, who had also recently married that sprightly exemplary heiress of the high-ranking daddy, in whose house he and Nadine met, as after the marriage, Bez almost stopped visiting his old friends, for Bez's judicious wife farsightedly took into account both factors: the compromising memory of her stormy youth in the person of her quondam passion and the long-standing fascination of the barely tamed poet with the virtues of his captivating fellow student who was rated in Bez's lyrics as the heroine of an unfulfilled dream--in the image and likeness of Laura extoled by Petrarch. Realizing that if he rebelled, he was able to kick over the traces and behave unseemly, and being concerned about the woman he loved, he was surrounding the imminent breakdown with absolute secrecy in advance, so that the information exposing his infidelity couldn't have leaked into this calm windless bay of his family to disturb the peace only just established that was necessary for him to work productively and take shelter from the self-satisfied mediocrity of the stagnating "social reality" again turning into an impassable swamp, even if it was not as bloody as in the years of panic enthusiasm and inspiration of meanness; and the desires to keep love and go away at random into free swimming, incompatible and mutually exclusive according to the canons of monogamy, excellently coexisted today in his soul to his surprise, making him adduce such far-fetched arguments as the seraglio inclinations of Muslims, the centuries-old traditions of Japanese geishas, and the promiscuity of contemporaries-swingers.

"No, I shouldn't have given up Sambo," he reproached himself for this explosive cocktail of puritanical constancy and excessive Papuan unbridledness, looking through the branches of old linden spread over him in the darkening whitish sky. "Surpluses of energy should be being burned somewhere...", as though his regular student trainings conduced to his episodic asceticism more than his avid reading which in graduate school sometimes reached the climax of sixteen hours of sitting in library or in his kitchen, and as though the successes of his sports gladiatorship could sweeten the bitterness of the current commonness of his love that was aggravated by his immersion in the scatteredly personal philosophical schools of the late Hellenism being corroded by the subsoil skepticism of the civilization outgrown its gods and in Plotinus's Enneads and Porfiry's comments groping for a new faith in the myth of the all-penetrating and all-creating light of the Aristotelian Mind-"Nous", after the decadent virtuoso ornateness and dry sophisticated rationality of which, it would have been nice to stir himself by the former emotional upheavals and by the courage of temerarious self-immolations, not limiting himself to "warmth of the hearth" and the amicable balance supported by mutual concessions, for which, as an intellectual worker, he had some philistine weakness, of course, but which, as already habitual existence, he did not value so much that for the sake of what was called the "higher", after the example of the early Christian interpreter and apologist Origen, who had emasculated himself, to cope at the cost of an imperatively categorical prohibition with the satanic temptation of skeptically godless following the spontaneous calls of his paganly self-willed nature; and without that, he had to be very cautious at his philosophy department, in order to avoid causing the senseless controversy with carping ignoramuses and vindictive falsifiers, who were great experts just on dogmatic incriminations and who would not have failed to stall a free-living lover of antiquity for ideological indiscrimination, or even spoil the chances of success of an unversed colleague by comradely delation, which could complicate his position as an acknowledged favorite and a backstage pet of the "liberal" part of the professorship, not blinkered in cognition, that supplied him without publicity with rare--not auxiliary and not anemic-empty--scientific literature from their private libraries; besides, such conflicts would have harmed the working process of his carefree daily reading into the previous comprehension of humanity and of his parallel dialogue with comparable epochs, so it was more reasonable to hit it off with these "social scientists" with the help of visible and understandable conformism and be guided in his free genuine philosophizing by the two postulates pinned above their common writing table with Nadine: from Kierkegaard--"Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself", and from Camus--"One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt".

"And my motorcycle rusts in vain," he sighed plangently, although almost every weekend he rolled out his Java from the corridor with a closet to the lift to go down outside, not for crazy races on ice, true, but for household needs, for in obvious contradiction with the temerity impelling him to rampage, he protected his head stuffed with knowledge from blows and harmful influences, i.e. had completely given up smoking and even forwent drinking alcohol, invariably escaping conversations on abstract topics with his edifyingly righteous stepfather, who loved retelling to him the latest newspaper and magazine pompous rubbish and political vicissitudes. "I'd rev up the engine when it gets warmer and hurtle away somewhere thousand kilometers from here..."

But in the meantime, he should have set out for home, to everyday small surprises of family life and to Husserl's "Logical Investigations" translated at one time in pre-revolutionary spelling with "yats", which his university patron lent him "for broadening his horizons", yet, nevertheless, confidentially, since the Husserlian "phenomena" echoing the "seemingness" of the ancient skeptic Pyrrho and the "intentions" of the scholastics were the only way by which all being might be revealed to presumptuous Homo sapiens, and they discredited thus the convenient position of materialistic cognition of the "absolute truth" abiding in its objectivity outside of consciousness and being reflected with a certain degree of scientific certainty, and instead of a walking mirror of the realizing "subject", he had an arising image of some newly created microcosm turning out to be the whole universe for itself each time and interpreting the universe created by consciousness depending on the frame of mind in the given planetary area of all mankind that was establishing the scope of its freedom. By the way, that accounted for both the similarity of the initial questions of the fundamentally different cultures, closed itself off, as Oswald Spengler believed (absolutizing the fragmentation into civilizations and individuals in The Decline of the West, the cultured and pessimistic Spengler was missing out the pre-cultural and pre-individual natural unity apparently determining the changeable planetary balance), and the discovery of the prerequisites for virtually all the philosophical theories of the future "disclosure of meaning" in the mythologies and worldviews of antiquity, as if at different stages, growing humanity chose the different aspects of something original, inexhaustible, and comprehensive as the cornerstone of fundamental detailed interpretations and beliefs given from above, and when petering out in an archaic outlook on life, incapable of finding a suitable aspect for restoring meaning and faith, humanity again and again fell into the chaotic eclecticism of obsolete cults and into the suicidal hopelessness of vengeful despair and godless brutishness.

"And it is characteristic of our time," he had indifferently passed the sentence on the soviet empire surrounding him from birth, the collapse of which was a foregone conclusion as a result of the exterminating cretinism of GULAG and the reign of widespread roguish cynicism. "As Berdyaev put it, 'We live in an era of fatality'..."

And this fatality, detected by him in the cooling damp air of April, immediately materialized in the shape of a red-haired shaggy hippie with a ragged beard in a pirate-style, dressed up in a fashionable down jacket of lemon yellow color and smoky steel-rimmed glasses, who was carrying a black guitar case with the nonchalance of a true maestro.

Having sharply turned off the walkway to his bench, the hippie suddenly swung the case with a wild Indian yell and flung his fist in a yellow leather glove forward in the karate manner into the bridge of his nose, whereat he caught the attacker's arm and abruptly twisted its wrist, which caused the hippie to fall on one knee like a ballet dancer and yell again; only then did he recognize in the crazy guitarist the gaunt bearded Bob, the permanent singer of their erstwhile rocker gang.

"Don't scare the granny, hooligan," he rebuked the bohemianly disguised friend of youth, releasing the twisted arm. "What if your glasses were smashed against the bench?"

"Hor, you're a titan!" Bob laughed cheerfully, flopping down beside him. "Though you're a philosopher, you have excellent reaction!"

"I'm fine indeed, but where are your muscles?"

"What are they for, the muscles, to strum this bandura?" Bob slapped the guitar case. "The philharmonic devoured everything: for three years, I lived half-starving on daily subsistence allowance, plus cheap wine in horse doses, because otherwise in our hotels you may just hang yourself..."

"You don't seem like a haggard sufferer, I'd say; and you're somehow too merry for such a season," he remarked, studying Bob's freckled peaked physiognomy in the pale watery twilight.

"That's because I'm for the second year at large. Besides, I'm a bit stoned today," Bob chuckled. "Actually, I haven't any particular reasons for merriment, if I'm without doping."

"You again took to pot smoking?" That is, cigarettes with "weed" still raised the spirits of this jazzman, bright as an Easter egg. "You have some income?"

"I have no right to be out of a job in our state of workers and peasants. So I earn money at dances in the evenings, in the Palace of their culture."

"Whose is it 'their'?"

"Sovdepiya's," Bob contemptuously embraced in one word all the hated art of official pomposity, heartfelt falseness, and pop-restaurant rollickingness.

"So you play in the orchestra there?"

"In a beat group," Bob winced at the word "orchestra". "At dances, as you understand, we earn our living, while to play music we prefer in a narrow circle."

"Which is natural in the catacomb period of culture," he summarized sorrowfully.

"In what period?" Bob did not understand.

"In the period of catacombs. Did you hear, probably, about the first Christians? They were hiding with their rites from the Caesars in the catacombs. And afterwards from there, from those underground caves, they spread all over the world; the main thing was to preserve the new religion, the faith in the Savior... It's the same with artists: if freedom of religion is not given to them, they are ready to create secretly for the sake of being their own masters in their arts."

"Some secretly, and some--trampling on them," the representative of the musical "underground" bared his teeth sarcastically. "And how long will this period last?"

"I'm not Nostradamus, Bob, I don't predict anything," he grinned at the holy naivety of his friend hoping for a successful outcome and believing, like most disinterested priests of their own talents, that the totalitarianism of mediocrity would certainly fail in his case and that the caddish age of mass slight on any uncontrolled creativity would be peacefully transformed during his lifetime into an era of freedom and justice, where the artist himself would be both independent and loved and where his useless pursuit of "art for art's sake" would be rewarded according to its purely artistic value, determined, apparently, by him. "But I think you and I will futilely wait for reward."

"Why?" Bob got sad about such a bleak future.

"For two reasons, and both are sufficiently weighty," he looked absently at the oval of the lamplight that dimly flashed out in the thick tangle of branches. "Historically, our 'great and immense' country will be decaying long enough, whereas the decay does not improve the atmosphere, and it is beneficial not for us, but for those who grow fat on this decay; ontologically, as one wise uncle said, 'every grouping mass is hostile to freedom', especially if there is no freedom in the project either... Therefore, we should proceed not from yesterday's illusions, but from our today's uselessness and their tomorrow's hostility."

"Maybe it is tomorrow's for you, but not for me," the persecuted devotee of "hard rock" dissociated himself proudly from the myrmidons and philistines trying, so to say, to jump on the bandwagon of his persecution. "True, I personally don't care a damn about their edifications and injunctions."

"So you're in a better position," he envied. "And you're not married by all appearances?"

"God had mercy. I'm not Sam, to enter into marriage with every skirt. But you're already a family man, I see?"

"Yes, already," he confirmed dolefully. "I am in graduate school at present, with a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter to boot."

"In short, you're burgher," Bob concluded.

"Just so. But my philistinism doesn't tell on my thinking, at least not yet."

"I'm exulting together with you," his antisocial opponent hemmed; for the very word "thinking" occasioned Bob a frightful bore and desire, to spite everyone, to get on all fours in his thoughtless buzz. "If only there would be any sense in your thinking, except, of course, your academic career."

"The sense is in the process, just like yours," he suggested not too originally. "'Cogito ergo sum' and vice versa."

"How I love gibberish," Bob praised his Latin. "Then it's better for you to speak in our musician's argot: 'What a crappy jam-session, dude!' and such like... But if, for example, I often have the blues early in the morning, and it seems to me that I will die soon, moreover, ingloriously and impiously... What kind of conclusion should I draw from my life in that case? That I had been born for nothing?"

"I understand you would like recognition, and fame, and absolute freedom, and moral satisfaction, but, excuse me, this is from the field of social utopias, and here such idylls remain pie in the sky for you. Probably, for me, too."

"You're a great specialist in cheering a suicide up, old man," Bob patted his knee approvingly. "You should make the acquaintance with Veronica: when she decides, in her infinite wisdom, to console you, you will either lay hands on yourself after that, or go on a binge drinking. By the way, we are boozing at her today, so let's go, I'll play you and her off against one another..."

"Do you want me to hobnob with an old hag, in retaliation?" he glanced suspiciously at this junkie, who was extremely joyful at the brilliant idea that dawned on him. "She's, of course, such a cantankerous termagant?"

"I wouldn't call her old. And I lead you to her not for screwing her, but for conversing only."

"For what purpose?"

"Out of childish curiosity. In her, you'll meet your match, so that I cannot but bring you and her together. Or you are afraid?"

"Yes, I'm afraid, it's no laughing matter."

In essence, at home he could always justify himself by his sitting in the reading room, and he was not averse to shake things up a little, but, naturally, without any drinking bouts and drunken monkey business; he'll just plunge into artistic bohemia to interrupt the usual, and, without lingering too long, retire back to his working virtuous routine.

"I'm afraid to swat a weak creature inadvertently," he straightened his broad shoulders. "Even if she's a young virago."

"Then come on, forward!" Bob jumped up quickly from the bench and grabbed the guitar case. "We must celebrate our meeting..."

"But I won't be long," he warned, also leaving the bench under the lindens. "I have very strict limits."

The famous Veronica proved to be not a portly grande dame advanced in years nor a bluestocking withered by book learning, but his skinny, yet extravagant coeval in a buffoonish garish sweater reeked of tobacco with a neckline to her collarbones, who wore flared trousers of an unpretentious lingonberry color and whose aristocratic face of a thoroughbred Petersburger with the narrow slit of her mouth and with her lazily squinted gray transparent eyes looked somewhat more ordinary only because of her ducky nose and small black sidelocks, playfully curled up from under the colorful turban of her gauze scarf, which, together with the coquettish ringlets of her curled fringe and her thinness, was supposed, apparently, to emphasize the promising depravity of this perfumed, languidly cold brunette ideally harmonizing with the theatrical decorativeness of the carpet-sofa furnishings of her smoky room, where on the floor on the carpet he saw the company already feasting to the free warm-up recitative of a black concert piano and consisting of some hirsute bearded and actor-shaven young people of clearly artistic appearance in paint-stained jeans, in worn fur vests, in frayed leather jackets, and in gypsily unbuttoned cowboy shirts, whose interlocutors were the persons of the fair sex, mostly trousered, in the motely plumage of Russian fringed shawls and Argentinean ponchos, in the multicolored gamut of knitting ornaments of jumpers, sweaters, turtlenecks, and in the carnival meretriciousness of brooches, chains, hairpins, rings, badges with cartoon faces or photos of rock idols and in other trumpery jewelry and trinkets. In the crimson glow of a globular lampshade lowered low on a spiral cord, they were a real wandering Gypsy encampment, and from the threshold, he immediately found himself in the excitingly close, carefree atmosphere of fraternal revelry with its drunken familiarity and disorderly incoherent conversations, with its champagne sparkling wit and bursts of laughter, with its unintentional closeness and heady unpredictability of table acquaintances.

"Hello to the soviet cesspool!" Bob, thrown off his down jacket and winter boots in the antechamber, shouted out, appearing in the doorway. "Nica, my dear, I've brought a philosopher to you!"

The front door was not locked, so they penetrated without distracting calls into this formerly respectable apartment bequeathed by the dignitaries-ancestors to the rich orphan, and after contributing their mite in kind to the drinking fund of the "venerable assembly" (in addition, in anticipation of a steep take-off, Bob called the gathering the "salt of the nation" and the "intellectual elite"), he and Bob also seated themselves on the carpet near the serene hostess of the hospitable house, who sat, smoking long thin cigarettes, with the imperturbability of a multi-armed Buddha at the head of the riotous encampment carousing to the full.

On the way here, Bob described this newly-minted decadent damsel very expressively: as a late child of the eminent father who had been reaping the plentiful harvest in the fertile field of the soviet Writers' Union, she, after the mourning honorary dispatching of her parent "socialist realist" to the eternal rest (with the speeches of a civil funeral about his "significant contribution to Soviet literature" over his coffin, with an obituary in the central printed organ, and with a banquet wake in the expensive restaurant) and after the more modest home funeral of her mother who had profitably arranged the posthumous reissues of the writings of the husband for the future, was provided enough with her apartment, with her dacha in the writers settlement, with her Volga car in the private garage, and with the cash that was being replenished on her savings books to live in clover, as they say, and in abundance, so not a few profit-seekers were wooing her, coveting what she possessed thanks to her enviable prosperity, but she, addicted to unbridled dissipation from her youth and spoilt by the absence of straitened circumstances for lack of money or due to unavailability of any choice, did not hasten to share her wealth with some grasping spongers and imprison herself in marital monastery, on the contrary, she herself sometimes used the calculating males fawning on her for their intended purpose, setting them on one another after using; and in the three rooms of her lap of luxury, in the evenings, she liked to convoke a mixed bunch of young scapegraces, such as surrealist and nonobjective artists, stage-directors experimenters, actresses and actors from semi-underground studios, musicians from basement rock bands, composers-"atonalists", and other creative outsiders and outcasts of that state art which made her pushful dad time-server so illustrious and enriched, with the exception of writers (save some snobs-esthetes and absurdists), for to Veronica's mind, they all were appertaining to the category of "these hack-workers" fabricating the same kowtowing potboiler as her father and aspiring to snatch something parental from her, a place in the "literary environment" and in the "cadres of ideological front", so that they could participate in dividing the ration pie of print runs and publications, meanwhile since childhood, she felt loathing for the struggle of talentless rapscallions for privileged status; and to maintain comparative cleanness in the apartment, she was recruiting the homeless girls from student hostels, who cleaned up after the guests and ran around the shops in exchange for overnight stay here, while the mistress, retired to her room locked from strangers, read--watched TV--made love--listened to music--or slept the sleep of the just before the evening pranks.

In a word, this eccentric scraggy Nike of Samothrace was a pretty freak, and even in absentia before coming here, she had already stirred up all his philosophical fronde in him; however, judging by her impassiveness, he did not intrigue her by anything the first time nor created any strong impression on her, which slightly hurt his pride and required some activity from him to make her understand who she was dealing with, or else his incidental visit would have been limited to the tracelessly-trivial drink and snack only.

"It is, as I see it, a society for the protection of free artists," he politely turned to Veronica. "So you are our present-day Maecenas?"

"Not quite." Veronica slowly looked him up and down with the eyes of an art critic evaluating a dubious museum exhibit. "Therefore, you may be not so official."

"Excuse the high-flown language then," he changed the register of his studious politeness. "Bob in effect dragged me to compete with you in intelligence, but, as it seems to me, you are not inclined to speculative pastime... By the way, what are you up to besides philanthropy?"

"What, I'm an object of sociological analysis?" she cooled the ardor of the combative guest good-naturedly.

"Rather metaphysical," he courteously exaggerated his interest in her. "Either man as a subject of research or man as freedom, as Karl Jaspers said. I am for freedom."

"Well, I'm the same, too," she dropped, taking her smoking cigarette from the gaping mouth of a cupronickel ashtray-frog.

"'Eternal bliss is destined only to those sages who see it in themselves'. It is from the earliest Upanishads," she replied with a quote to his quote. "So I don't do anything special, I simply live."

"I sympathize with you."

"In what?"

"In your misfortune," he pitied her, having used "misfortune" instead of "idleness". "Man is a goal-setting being, otherwise his life is empty for him, and he can't cling to anything in memory."

"But goals may be not only in life," she lazily waved his exhortation aside with her cigarette. "Lead me from non-existence to existence. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality..."

"Perhaps, you read mantras in the morning?" he smiled at her homegrown yogism-Avestism. "To purify the spirit."

"It doesn't help," she admitted detachedly, as if from afar, looking into his pupils with her icy winter stare.

And, frostily transfixed by the fleeting chilliness of an affinity still secret for both, he suddenly felt himself in her, and in their exchange of archival excerpts--his own manner of refracting a leitmotif thought in the many-voiced arrangements of orchestral quotation polyphony.

"But, if I'm not mistaken, only the one who has got rid of desires is worthy of bliss," as though with himself, he again began talking with Veronica, spellbound and motionless, who had frozen with the fierily smoldering cigarette by her compressed lips. "If you overcame everything earthly and attained to divine purity, then welcome to nirvana. Or to Brahman, to God, to immortality, to the universal eternal radiance--which suits you more... But if you hasn't attain, then deign to set off in a new circle of your next incarnation, until you eventually obtain your shining and get out of the floundering in the local cycle, where you are drawn by the mirage of this life... I understand the teaching correctly?"

"Understanding is not enough," he guessed from the nervous movement of her mouth, since the sound of her words had been drowned by a bravura piano passage, to which a thick-set longhaired subject with an acoustic bass guitar attached himself as a replacement of a bulky jazz double-bass.

"Do you mean we should believe?" he asked Nica, struck by their similarity. "But what if I am deceived, and life is not an ascent of the spirit, while I myself, for example, and my consciousness, is a mere accident in nature and a sheer blank being born in me alone, and existing, and fading away, and disappearing in me only? I'll believe that my death is my birth in God; I'll become yogi; I'll give up passions and everything bodily and temporary; and after that, it will turn out that this life is the only thing I've had at my disposal, and that I am, excuse me, a 'social animal', though considered myself the Almighty, whereas there are only emptiness and non-existence for me beyond the margin of my blank, without any rewards and punishments, without selections of the righteous and sinners, without Garden of Eden and hellish flame, and, most importantly, without the slightest chance of merging with something 'higher'... And what, 'the autopsy will show'?"

"It's not about the 'higher', it's about you," said Veronica. "What is your karma, so are you. And everyone sees what he deserves..."

"Undoubtedly. But if everything is predestined--preordained--predetermined, then it is all the same to you how to live, and there is no need to overstrain yourself."

"If you could comprehend your own destiny, then yes," she agreed. "True, in order to comprehend, you must rise to something, which again is due to who you are: when you don't feel that you are more than yourself and that your departure is a way out, you may be an animal or some creature else, it is no matter."

"And what when you do feel? To sit down in the lotus position somewhere in Tibet and meditate?"

"Not necessarily in Tibet and with meditations," she admitted such a variant, not annoyed by his jokes. "You can go out from here everywhere and always, if only you are ready."

"Ready for what? It's not difficult to go out, but where you will go out is somehow unknown."

"What I want is just the unknown," Veronica briefly disclosed her and his secret. "Here I'm bored to death, and nothing keeps me here."

"You are not alone, in principle. There is no misfortune greater than the body," he effortlessly revealed the underlying cause of her and his boredom. "The ancients understood this very well."

"But this regards not only the ancients," she put down the extinguished cigarette butt in the mouth of the cupronickel frog.

"Let's end for now, we cannot shout down such bedlam..." Veronica found a plausible excuse to stop the stream of their sincere frankness that suddenly started carrying both of them, although, as a rule, this sin was uncharacteristic of them.

Meanwhile, "Ginger Bobby" (as the bohemian girlfriends hypocoristically called his hippy crony), who had already managed to quaff several wineglasses, took the instrument out of the case and set about playing the virtuosic groovy cadenzas of his six-string guitar's arbitrary improvisation; the piano-raping short man resembling a crazy dwarf by his tousled beard and disheveled curls armed himself with the third guitar and joined up with the tense rhythm of the bass, weaving the musical warp for the swirling bizarre fireworks of solo together with his comrades; and a gangly chap with a straggly blond beard and a straw-yellow mop of hair pulled back into a ponytail began shaking his rattling maracas and beating a booming ringing tambourine against his thigh, replacing the missing drums.

Now they had their usual full complement, and after limbering up in the cacophonous variations of the theme suggested by Bob, they came to an united harmonic chord, enjoying the introductory coherence, and, to the wild jubilation of the savagely screaming company, burst into their own song in English about the "wall of loneliness" closing into a prison ring of concrete test-tube, and about the refractory homunculus smashing his skull against the walls of these giant pointing fingers-wells poking into the sky in his vain attempts to break through aloofness to the "flowering valleys of love", but, as it was clear from the continuation of this composition, now frenziedly boisterous now opium-deliquescent, even in the freedom seemingly acquired outside the former walls, bumping into the impregnable concrete towers of the loneliness of the other people, which were enclosed, besides, along with the cherished valley and the unmowed meadows of "oblivion in happiness", with the wall of the loneliness of mankind in the endless cold space of cosmos; and by the fadingly disappearing dissolution of string vibrations in cosmic muteness and darkness, this work of the prolific author of the group (that comical dwarf-like pianist) was ending, though being vague enough in direct translation but enthusiastically received by the yells and tempestuous applause of the public that was wound up by both the besotting melodic turns and the unceasing beating of the shamanic tambourine and warmed up, of course, by multiple doses of not first-class alcoholic beverages and by the popular "drugging" marijuana weed in the thick of the tumultuous welter of their devil-may-care comradely feast.

Bob, who had knocked back a glass of red wine in an intermediate hurly-burly for the euphony of his hoarse tenor straining in the piercing falsetto roulades, abruptly passed the plectrum over the joyfully responding strings of his lacquer-black guitar with two figured cello slits and with a white stripe outlining its feminine contour and--after a sixteen-bar portion of the cocky bickering in the quartet instrumental bridge with stomping, jerking, and waving the guitar necks--started singing in frenetic patter the next bacchanal-hysterical and epileptic-rollicking opus of the leader of the rock band, who was rebellious in the pro-Western spirit and called, judging by what was distinguishable in this vociferating of three voices to the deafeningly thundering accompaniment, approximately to the same things to which the free-thinking and free-loving youth called in the hymn of student corporations of medieval slackers "Gaudeamus": let's be enjoying ourselves and playing tricks, while both wine, and love, and friendship for us, while all the joys and pleasures are ours, while the sun is shining, and the birdies are warbling, and the flowers are fragrant, and life is so splendid, whereas our youth grants us carelessness and happiness-in the traditional set of the advocates of the "human in man" proving the elementary and fleeing from social balderdash into the traps of artificial conviviality or voluntary drunken anabiosis; but, unlike him, the artistic impressionable natures were thrilled by the singing of the beat-group to such a degree that they were reacting at first by spontaneous cries from the audience and by a kind of dancing in a sitting posture, but since the performing ecstasy was increasing, soon this high jinks were supplemented by their collective jumps to their feet from the carpet to be hopping among the musicians bawling their hit; and by the end of the "Song Without Meaning" that was coming on without interruption and consisting of various scraps of phrases of the soviet clerical "newspeak" being mounted with deliberate idiocy, the entire area of the room not occupied by bottles was crowded with the drunk horde of "free artists" cavorting and dancing like one possessed, so that it was only he who did not take part in the improvised happening of the party and Veronica who was absentmindedly watching the dashing dancers capering about the room.

To speak in such a noise was practically impossible, because the rumbustious quartet spared neither the instruments nor the vocal cords in their frenzied self-expression, and to listen, without participating, to the tympana-cymbals of this roistering orgy was getting more and more awkwardly; besides, by the sweetish smell of cigarette smoke and the clouded eyes of the hostess, he unmistakably determined that she, like Bob, indulged in "grass" in the Asian manner today, and she would not need an interlocutor after some time; therefore, if he was not befuddled by the cave-men's kamlanie in her pagan temple, it would have been best for him to leave and not plague others with his disgusting sobriety and insupportable virtuous prudence.

"Sorry, I have to go," he said loudly in the ear of Veronica. "It's a great pity that we haven't ended the conversation."

"Where you leave?" she asked, not too interested, and he could do without any information about his unenviable family state at present.

"I'll drop in later, maybe," he promised instead of answering and touched her thin shoulder, getting up from the carpet, not without regret.

"Write down my phone in the corridor," without glancing at him, she slightly waved her hand with ancient cast and penny massive plexiglass rings on her bony fingers and with two twisted nielloed bracelets on the sleeve of her sweater. "But not earlier than two, I'm usually at home then."

When he was copying the number into his notebook from the telephone set on the nightstand near the heavy box of the oak hallway wardrobe, some couple inflamed with passion bounced out of the raging room into the corridor and proceeded hastily, embracing one another, into the next room, where the light was not switched on at all, so, having seen for himself the timeliness of his own disappearance, he turned off the corridor lamp above the nightstand for the general good and set off at slow speed to his family backwater.

"Where you were that got so permeated with smoke?" Nadine smelt the reek of tobacco in passing, looking out of the bathroom, busy with evening laundry and not alarmed, naturally, by his not very late return, for he had to speak out after all to someone about the former pagan Augustine the Blessed with the "city of God" in his Christ-loving soul, about "Occam's razor" cutting off superfluous assumptions, about the completion of the evolution of matter that turned into spirit by the final overconcentration of all consciousnesses in the personified universe of Teilhard's "Omega point", and about The Great Refusal by Herbert Marcuse--in short, about all that he sometimes, continuing his conceptual thoughts, tried to stuff her head with, although her head was sufficiently loaded, without his oral lectures, with linguistic vocabulary and international innovations in literary semantics; while he had considered it inadvisable to tell her about today's encounters and coincidences, fearing lest she would misinterpret his rather aimless intention to meet with the mysterious Veronica tête-à-tête, in private, without being distracted by either someone's drunken amusements or rock-psalms to Bacchus and Venus and the recent buffoonish mockery of historical parodies with the "smooching" in the corners which accompanied unholy songs and dances.

*

He called her only three days later, in order not to belittle himself by his visit with a snap of her finger, but it seemed that she did not appreciate his observance of the conventions of etiquette, since, without complaining about a weary wait of these days, she ordered him, if he was free at present, to call on her even this minute, because she is "dying of boredom alone, while her day has barely begun"; and when he arrived, she let him into the apartment as an old friend, having left him to undress in the hallway, and went back into the former nursery in her stunning, hand-painted, toe-length robe (or rather in some homespun chlamys with wide sleeves that was painted with fiery devils as if for auto-da-fé), where she settled down cross-legged in her favorite position in her favorite deep grassy-sand armchair near the floor lamp, with unwrapped chocolate foil on a stand for newspapers she did not read.

In front of her, diagonally, was a switched-off big colored television set; on the right, the huge empty writing table was cluttered up with the ceramic pots of all kinds of ball-shaped cactuses, and the same green prickly hedgehogs were seen between the ocher-yellow curtains on the windowsill; opposite the table, the tiers of bookshelves rose to the ceiling; and on the left, at the wall with a carpet, he saw Veronica's low and wide bed, tidied up extremely negligently and obviously hastily, so that its slovenliness was defiantly reflected in the mirrored three-leaf plane of the near-door wardrobe closet, beside which, under an oval mirror, all cosmetics and accessories found room on the long dressing table, while closer to the chair, there was a stereo combine with a forgotten long-playing disc, and with a rare Japanese cassette player at that. In a word, her room looked from the side as a cozy mother-of-pearl shell round a Spanish-bright dark-haired hermit with the short boulevard hairstyle of a movie star of silent cinema, and the apricot-peach warm color range of wallpapers behind the armchair was almost completely shielded by a gigantic iconostasis of paintings depicting either something Roerich-like mountain and cosmic, or Buddhist symbolism embedded in phantasmagoric kitschy collages, or shocking still lifes of human organs, mainly genital, mixed as vinaigrette, whereas behind the glass of the shelves, Veronica arranged the exhibition of such whitened gypsum, ivory-like, Indian figurines that imprinted for centuries multi-figured poses of inventive collective love.

"There is a whole art gallery here," he observed, glancing round her nice small interior and inhaling the stagnant, backstagedly intimate, tobacco-spicy smell of her expensive cigarettes, fine perfumes and compact powder, of a half-eaten bar of milk chocolate and of the dried brushstrokes of thickly applied paint that impressionistically, like bird droppings, covered the canvases.

"I'm snowed under gifts," she disdainfully stirred her pale long fingers with crimson manicure. "Take a seat on the carpet or in the armchair," she motioned him to sit down, breaking off a piece of chocolate, and her barely noticeable light burr tickled his anticipatingly tightened "heart strings" gently as squirrel's nimble tail.

Having muttered, "It's premature to fall down at your feet," he subsided into the chair prepared for visitors in the center of the room and stared, already at daylight, at this unencumbered sweet tooth, sensing through his socks the woolly pile of the untrodden Afghan carpet, laid on the dark parquet with a geometric brick-blood ornament.

Veronica responded in kind, and they devoted a couple of minutes to the searching study of the appearance of their vis-a-vis without compliments and comments, confirming and adding the initial impression, as a result of which she probably made sure of his physical aptitude, while he made certain of her irrefutable youth, which, slightly worn and faded, had been bared after the removal of her evening make-up and without the lampshade lighting that had been imparting rosy tone to the grayish skin of this smoker; plus he also got a visible confirmation of the disharmony noticed by him then between her salon exterior of the modern Cleopatra and her watery-impassionate eyes of a sexless creature in a chronic sluggish trance, staring numbly from her thin face from under the sleek black sidelocks a-la "femme fatale".

"Well," she said, finishing up her chocolate. "Sightseeing can be considered completed. If you want coffee, go to the kitchen and make it."

"I don't want to yet," quite satisfied with his inspection, he lounged in the soft cushions of the chair.

At last, he had the luck to meet a worthy opponent, against whom he could act on an equal footing, fully armed with his experience and his knack which he did not test on anyone for a long time, given that the possibility of the relations with her did not seem a vulgar adultery or a passing fling to him; and their spiritual affinity, strengthened by the mutual guessing of the identical sophistication in the metamorphoses of earthly Eros, was kindling their bodily polarity and his fighting determination to join battle with her on her territory still more.

"Where did we leave off that time?" he threw a question at her for starters. "It was boredom, in my opinion."

"Maybe so," she shrugged. "But there is no sense in talking about it, for we are destined to be bored, such is our lot."

"You're a pessimist," he blamed her, as if praising. "You probably tried everything before, in previous lives, and in this one, you undergo your karma for your past sins."

"I know," she said seriously, unwilling to make a joke of such a sacred theosophical theme. "I am in an intermediate state now, waiting until my real birth."

"You think the real will happen? What if this is the last one?" he slightly goaded the lover of sweets shirking any responsibility for her life.

"Unlikely. (And again it seemed to him that both he and she were talking to themselves.) In the last incarnation, the initial design is usually clear, but I have nothing, no vocation nor talent... And perfection sickens me, by the by."

"As well as all ideals," he ended her thought.

"Just so. I don't live, in essence, and I don't feel like going to church somehow."

"The church is first of all in the soul, as they say," he reminded her of the seditious principle of the early sectarian Christianity.

"It is when you have soul." He wouldn't call her narrow-lipped evil grin pleasant. "But if there's emptiness in its place? Vacuum with absolute zero?"

"Vacuum is an artistic exaggeration, I hope?" However, his assured tone smacked of artificiality, for he also happened more than once to plunge into such spiritual emptiness and cold. "True, although Blaise Pascal distinguished between two abysses, of infinity and nothingness, I hold that there is only one abyss, namely myself, just as you." ("Therefore, Sextus Empiricus is right about Protagoras," he expanded his apt remark with a footnote to his précis. "Man is the measure of all things, of course, but the measure that is measured by nothing in its essence and indefinable, which is why the highest wisdom of the oracle is 'Know thyself'".) "And you don't try to fill your abyss, do you?"

"By what?" asked she with a sneer and with unfeigned contempt for the ruthless tyranny of everyday needs, for the spurious sentiments and worldly-carnal tricks of the majority driven by habits into mediocrity, and for the individualistic ideological tricks of the mortals mystifying their doomed minds. "By hallucinations?"

She apparently meant both the ordinary life that did not bother her very much and the vague sphere of thinking together with the deceptive reality of art, which had grown equally detestable to her in her long sybaritism and laziness being cherished without hindrance.

"By life," he advised ironically. "The design is getting clarified as it is coming to fruition, you see, and the meaning is a changeable notion."

"It is constant in my case," his empty-eyed "alter ego" grumbled, breaking off a peace of the chocolate. "Or rather, the lack of meaning."

"Well, yes, I understand. And to acquire this temporary meaning is no less pointless," it did not take long for him to word the quintessence of her emptiness. "Then how about overcoming? It is not inspiring you?"

His gesture referred to the plaster cast group of three inspiredly united lovers standing alone on the table surrounded by cactuses, in which a bent woman, her lips carnivorously clasping what Vladimir Nabokov, being idolized by Nadine, evasively called a "priapic cigar", was putting up her Indian-lush buttocks to the second lover, who settled behind her, so that all three of them fully participated in achieving the joint pleasure.

"It is inspiring while it is a novelty," without casting even a glance at the statuette, she peered into his impudently cheerful eyes, and the transparency of her imperturbable gaze became somewhat clouded--either from some warm memories or from the approximation to the only occupation that warmed her. "I remember, Leonardo da Vinci said that the genitals are allegedly ugly. This is all because he himself is a faggot."

"He is a genius," he defended Leonardo. "This happens to geniuses--it is not the lower that subordinates the higher, but, on the contrary, talent determines the whole of biology: the more talent is divine, the more it is spirit, not gender, and combines both sexes, like Androgyne, not involved in sexual separation.

"Androgyne it is a freak among the Greeks?" was her next raillery.

"Precisely," he nodded assent. "Judging by the paintings, these private parts do not seem ugly to you?"

"I like it." It looked like she did not intend to seduce him, and she was setting forth her indecent predilections with cold-blooded shamelessness and undisguised interest in his reaction as though he was her psychoanalytic confidante. "Especially if in people everything revolves around this, and this should be sung as the most precious, and not hidden and declared forbidden..."

"In ancient times, they were objects of worship, so was," he included her idle blather in the context of planetary evolution. "But then the survival of mankind virtually depended on them, whereas now the priorities are other, and the deity has shifted higher," he tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "So now the attitude to them is more pragmatic: either pleasure and planned economy, or curbing and a sinful appendage."

"You're a pragmatist too?"

"No, I'm a romantic, like you," he quipped. "But I'm not such an extremist regarding the 'cornerstone', I'm already poisoned with the fruits of self-knowledge."

"You're simply not free," Veronica immediately stamped the standard indelible brand on him, which he partly, perhaps, deserved for his patient marital fidelity and voluntary vegetation in the shackles of joyless day-to-day orderliness. "And you count your thralldom self-improvement."

"You, unlike me, live life to the full in all probability? That is, you do what you want?"

"Absolutely right," she confirmed. "The problem is only one--to want."

"Only one, but worthy of all the others," he chuckled knowingly. "Maybe the reason is your tiredness from sex? Maybe you're focused on something wrong?"

"I had lesbians," she construed his hypothesis in her own way. "But it's better when men..."

Here she stared at him with such unseemly sensual intentness that no additions nor clarifications were required, and it was time to pass from verbal probing to real actions.

"No, no, I'm traditionalist," he warned her, just in case, with certain slyness, because, at the very beginning of his intimacy with Nadine, they had mastered almost everything in making love, and the problem, as this fornicatress correctly formulated, was only to really want.

"Let's check..." she suggested with the same disparaging grin not adorning her, and then she lifted her hands and pulled off her devilish mantle over her head, being under it stark naked and not as scrawny as he feared.

"Now it's your turn, I'm ready," she expressively arched her thin eyebrows, lowering her Bryusov's "pale legs" onto the carpet.

"How I want to grip this

between your pallid thighs!

Like Scylla and Charybdis

they wait on both sides!" he recited Bez's old smutty verse, skeptically examining her sunken abdomen with protruding iliac bones and a tuft of pubic hair and her concave chest with the flabbily sagging swellings of her mammary glands crowned with two sharp pink teats, and lazily got up from his armchair. "How do you think I have sung of them poetically enough?"

The denuded skinny body of such a smoker as Veronica could not be compared with the gorgeous body of his Nadine, and he felt nothing but some awkwardness and desire to "teach her a lesson", being in a quandary, however, about the implied addressee of this lesson; but he came here, in all likelihood, with the aim of shaking off, so to speak, the bonds of righteousness and duty, and Veronica, with her obsession with the process of "moral decay", suited him in all respects for his amoral "liberation", taking into account that her bodily unpresentability was compensated, no doubt, by her reclusive concentrated immersion in the "abyss of vice" and her heartless depravity.

"Quite enough," his shameless seductress approved of his lyrics, rising from her armchair to him. "Can I help you?"

"Why not," he good-naturedly entrusted the initiative to her highly experienced hands.

Soon he was stripped naked, and Veronica, her body clinging to his, led him into the bathroom under the shower, where in the first act of their detailed acquaintance, she proved to him that her admiration for the living full-blooded symbol of the sacred totem was sincere and that the female progenitor in the Indian trinity served her as a good example to follow ("I hope you aren't prone to cannibalism?" he joked condescendingly on the threshold of a delightful-for each in his or her own way-procedure); and on their return to the room, she was rewarded for her labor of love by his mighty exhausting onslaught, in which, alternately achieving superiority and unfolding each other's rich sensory palette, they ended their match in a draw nearly after an hour, for which reason they had a friendly smoke break. Needless to say that it was only Veronica who smoked, walking about in the nude, whose feminine charms, such as her stooped posture, or her "Ford's" low flat bottom, or the constrainedly cheeky demonstrativeness of flaunting her skin and bone, not very sexualized by striptease, did not justify her importunate exhibitionism at all (she was pampered from her infancy until her complete loss of healthy self-criticism), and as to him, he was again engaged in introspection to the sweet-voiced "Lament" of Paul Anka with his "You are my destiny!"

It was the first case of his infidelity to Nadine since the day they had met, and after such a long monogamy, to touch another, not her, body was strange to him, as well as to do all such unusually similar body movements, which, despite the photographic distinctness of what was happening, seemed to be something unnatural and no less showy, as if he were an actor in a pornographic stage performance, striving to impress the invisible audience with the proficiency and heroic tirelessness of his newly mobilized "genital organ".

"What a handsome cockerel," Veronica was melting with admiration, incentivizing him to show his mettle in new "cavalry raids", though she herself was a "punt barge" in the classification of the ardent collector Pete. "Shakespeare called it 'the club of Hercules'..."

And, in gratitude for her thrill and adoration, he again and again drove her with methodical mastery to the shrieks of her short orgasms that looked like hysterical fits, categorizing her as the type of exalted "March cats": for a real "vamp" she lacked charm and skill to keep a distance with sadistic perfidiousness, evading anyone's undivided possession, and for an amorous "émancipée" she was too cynically open in her overt harlotry, while her manner of differentiating the "bearers of secondary sexual characteristics" predominantly on grounds of these signs was fraught with scandalous scabrous publicity.

It should be noted that, instead of any guilt and due remorse, he felt some incomprehensible, almost joyful relief, which, unlike a great many impish spouses cheating their helpmates on the sly, he had no wish to substantiate with anything, seeking mitigating circumstances in fairly common accusations against his "better half", who did not cope with the task of providing him with everything he expected from her, thereby involuntarily pushing him to committing "adultery", as, firstly, he already understood that it was very naive and useless to solicit "everything" from one woman in earnest and that the volitional ability to curb the restive and often unbroken stallion of his nature with the restrictions of monogamy was not inherent in everyone, and secondly, there was no unfaithfulness as such in his loveless "supplement", for Veronica could be replaced, in effect, by either wanton of the generation of the last sex revolution.

Of course, if his touchy Nadine were a witness to his present "base delights" formerly intended for her, with her moral standards and faith in him, she undoubtedly would have been insulted forever, and, as a jealous defender of monogamy, she would have hated him as a lustful vile voluptuary by the inextinguishable righteous hatred of a suddenly and causelessly betrayed proprietress who deluded herself into the uniqueness of her attractiveness disproved by him (or, in other words, into her seemingly established full-value femininity that was the main support of love), since that was depriving her of the confidence in her own spell and in the omnipotence of their mutual "great feeling" corroborated by the successful alliance, because the illusion of her exclusivity originated from their happy marriage; but even protecting her from grievous insights regarding the zoologically wayward constant of his male nature, he was not going to waive his right to be himself: he did not profess her possessive morality, and he belonged to her exactly as much as he belonged in reality, and not in the abstractions of an ideal or jurisprudence, that's why, having given a preference in love just for Nadine with her prejudices, now he privately followed the dictates of the fossil-ancient instinctive call cancelling all later human regulators and colliding the two poles of the flesh of passionate marionettes in the deed of recreating their dual wholeness and mutual liberation, and Veronica, who did not need anything else, sort of returned to him that premarital unpunished single freedom, which he was missing in his happiness and without which he was not quite himself.

"Wouldn't you like to burn one down?" his anthropological thoughts were interrupted by naked Veronica, smoked her joint almost to the fag-end, who was sitting at his feet, pressing her bent knees to her chest and sadly gazing at his wilted "cockerel".

"With pleasure," he took the cigarette butt crushed with her dry lips. "If to be immoral, then in everything at once... By the way, you catch a buzz out of this only on holidays, or on weekdays, too?"

"I have no weekdays," she took her eyes, lightish from an admixture of northern blood, from his cock to the face of her hard-working Hercules.

"So it is such a daily holiday?" he asked, inhaling sweetish smoke. "And afterwards what, you'll begin injecting?"

"I have no 'afterwards'," she buried her sharp chin in her knees. "Afterwards I'll die."

"You're not the only one, if that's any consolation." The first puffs made his head swim a little, and his voice sounded as though through cotton wool. "We'll all be there."

"We'll all, but how?" she made a corrective.

"We don't choose death," he again puffed on the cigarette.

"Why we don't choose?" Veronica stroked his thigh with her cold fingers. "We choose if we want..."

"Are you serious?" by touch, he covered her icicles with his palm.

"Wouldn't you agree to die so?" She rolled over on all fours and stood over him like a dog, so that her hanging breasts touched his chest and her pale face of a suicidal dreamer was now before his very eyes. "If your death will be like festivity, if no pain..."

"What, you're looking for travel companions?" he muttered indistinctly, closing his eyes.

"To die it's without me, with me to live," he cracked a joke half asleep, letting drop his limp hand on the edge of the bed to crush out the cigarette butt in the empty crystal ashtray, yet then his day consciousness switched off, and he started rocking, spinning, in the thoughtless and weightless languor of narcotic reverie, rather disproportionate to the dose he smoked out.

However, the dull diaphanous silverish patina that covered the surrounding objects at the blurry moment of plunging into the infinity of his blissful trance, instead of jubilantly turning into the dazzling radiance of the desired nirvana, quite the reverse, began to darken and thicken until the sticky molasses of impenetrable darkness obscured everything visible and tangible and he found himself hovering, tightly swaddled with the transparent glass of a test tube occluded at both ends, over the expanses of pastoral forest-steppe, maquette-cartographic, but seeming genuinely earthly to him. The rugged relief of the hilly-flat broken terrain below spread out, as in spring, the green dewy meadows and the clumps of clustered disheveled trees alternating with the vast grassy clouds of forest tracts and with the glistening mercury of meandering rivers edged with emerald ribbons of reeds and weeping willows, while the sexless angeloids that inhabited this ecological Eden were fluttering in cheerful, playful flocks in the ever blue skies, where his whirling glass capsule-cradle soared; and he was not him, but some mutant that had not hatched yet and still remained man in raw state who was associated in the internal vague self-determination of his beginning identification not with him present-day, but for some reason with Bob.

The steel bottom, against which his feeble body rested, standing upright, budged and started moving upwards, slowly pressing his fetal soft cranium to the steel ceiling with a tiny round hole in the center, and he realized with horror that the rocket of his test tube was a syringe and that the piston being pushed by someone unknown was inexorably flattening his unformed flesh, breaking his cracking skeleton that was jumping out of every dislocated joint with hellish unbearable pain and being crushed in every fractured bone, and this fragile frame was crumbling as a chaotic jumble of snapped twigs and branches within the ripped--ruptured--torn mangled bloody meat, which was shoving the bursting skull by pressure from below, squeezing the extract of the brain being spewed out of the body into the hole for needle; and the more agonizing the torments of the flesh grew, fallen under the stamping press, the more forcefully the substance of the spirit rushed through the needle-rift upwards into the airless heights of the saving empyreans, acquiring the bloodless and forgetful wingedness of soaring far off from his squashed mortal organism.

After the brainless marcs of his pain, squeezed out into the needle, his horror and life also slipped out into the bottomlessness of non-existence, and at the instant when his parted eyelashes waved the short nightmare away, he again saw the whitish-mad eyes of Veronica speaking to him face to face.

"Why do you want to live, what for? For your natural functions?" this Pythia persuaded him in a hoarse whisper. "The best is behind, and further only humdrumness and boredom... And does it really matter when? But now you are still fearless, for you are strong, now you can do it of your own free will, and not under duress, not in your hurry, not being decrepit... Death will overtake you in either event, and when you are not ready; death may grasp you at any second without asking, however much you try to delay it; death may be horrible and disgusting, irrespective of your supplications and invocations... But if otherwise, if by your own hands and in the proper mood, if death as pleasure, as soporific..."

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come," he mechanically reminded the admirer of Shakespeare of Hamlet's question from the academic pre-war edition in his father's library. "It is not difficult to fall asleep, but what is after?"

"You won't be you anymore after. After there is either immortality, or another life, or I don't even know what... But it is all one for you, because the other world will not affect you living here and today, if you throw off your bodily shell..."

"But what is myself, that's the rub," he concluded the discussion, a little amusing in their piquant pose, and wrapped his arms around her bony loins.

"So let me impale you on my stake," he pulled her to him. "Or on your lollipop, if you like..."

"You think about the one thing only," she sighed reproachingly, feeling the indisputable proof of his determination to resume the love reciprocity under her buttocks.

It is understood that the sampling of the new technological construction diverted their attention from the decadent suicidal conjectures of Veronica, all the more so that the next respite was broken by the arrival of some noisy lass who opened the front door with her key and reported to the hostess from the corridor in a professionally trained voice of actress about successful purchases of provisions.

"It isn't immodest that the door is ajar?" he got worried about violation of public morality. "I'm not exhibitionist, I have problems with concentration."

"She'll never come in without an invitation, or else I'll kick her out," his unabashed partner lazily outlined the conditions on which her friend lived here. "If you want, I can invite her to participate."

"I'm afraid I shan't be equal to the task," he rejected, delicately, but firmly, such a backbreaking entertainment. "And I don't like cocktails."

"Don't pretend you're bashful, prudery doesn't become you," she doubted the veracity of his assertion, rising on her elbow, and said loudly to the corridor:

"Lucy, stay there, we will finish soon..."

Until the evening revelry, he beguiled time over tea and coffee and listened to the theatre gossip that poured inexhaustibly, as if from a cornucopia, out of the mouth of the go-getting blonde Lucy, whose vital principles and propensities, unlike the subtle effete strumpet Nica, were easily read in her demeanor of a thorough bitch, accustomed from a young age to carve out a creative career for herself by means of timely tractability--true, in her behind-the-scenes world, such a trait was not too reprehensible, since very few were endued there with freedom of choice and with sure chances for success in their precarious art; then, after he casually found out from the absent-mindedly polite Veronica that she never left anyone for night, lest someone would wake her with his out-of-synch lustfulness, he, by the inertia of the former carousals, was so immoderate in sequence of slugs of wine and vodka that he began to drink bruderschaft with Bob's bearded comrades, kissing with his boon companions out of the fullness of the heart, and to hop as a crazy goat among the racketing drunken "artistic intelligentsia", where some wenches embracing him were slobbering all over his face with their lips and smearing it with lipstick, and where he entered into incoherent passionate polemics through bottles and snacks with a gabby young theater critic, a local coryphaeus in round glasses, who looked like an European bank clerk; and having called Nadine in the course of booze-up, to warn that he would linger in the library, he threw aside all restraints and started swilling various drinks indiscriminately, jauntily interchanging some incompatible beverages and beer, so that soon he got plastered to the state of heavy sullenness, but, nevertheless, kept drinking in the salon circle of Veronica; so when going home, he had been wandering some time over the alleys that were unrecognizable now, whence, soused and crest-fallen, he had hardly dragged to his family.

*

Fortunately, Nadine did not watch his heroic struggle with a toothbrush and with the clothes he was taking off, however, his maneuvering in drunk somnambulism between the daughter's cradle and the table which he bumped into in the dark positively testified to the maximum eventfulness of his pastime in the evening, to say nothing of the alcohol reek he exhaled until the morning, and that had alarmed her, of course, for, as an exemplary wife, she did not really like his old friends and drinking companions, but she took on trust his words about "stag-party", though even in his dreary hangover self-blame he could not but detect a note of the involuntary arisen alienation in her silent mercy, as if in his usual understandability for her she suddenly disclosed a somewhat baffling flaw of a very suspicious origin.

Perhaps his reverse reincarnation into a loving spouse and his hypocritical fib were not of the highest grade, or perhaps Nadine was endowed with excessive sensitivity by nature, but his unexpected binge was the first inkling she had that something was amiss in their mutuality, therefore all his subsequent visits to the recluse Veronica he finished, as a rule, before dark and before her nightly jollification, returning to Nadine and Victoria exactly as he arrived from the library and having time at home to leaf through some treatises of the pretty neglected philosophy. This notwithstanding, such clandestine compensation of his "viciousness" as his cruel-hearted violent passions in the lawless sex being perpetrated with such a ready-for-everything and soullessly-alienated accomplice was presumably leaving a barely noticeable imprint on his entire behavior, because his family idyll got shadowed little by little by the increasing seriousness of Nadine guessing something, whereas his surprisingly nonchalant alternation of her body and Veronica's "common areas" was certainly affecting his attitude to his wife: conjoining her with her antipode, he did not so much supplement his love as displace it in his soul, not really comparing two women, but sometimes muddling, half asleep, in different approaches to them and feeling the same cold aggressive concupiscence and contemptuous disdain for the compliantly-tender Nadine as for the lecherous lost Veronica.

Such consumerist slips of his forgetful flesh led Nadine, naturally, to the most offensive thoughts to her and exacerbated her humiliating perspicacity, but to share these accusatory surmises with him would have meant either to obtain the verbal avowal of his moral turpitude into the bargain or to ascertain the fact of his duplicity in the process of eliciting his honest reply from the falsity of his indignant rebuttals, which would have immediately ruined the house of cards of their two-sided infallibility, erected on their reciprocal trust, and exposed her caring refined hubby as a deceitful vile womanizer, who had liaisons on the side with some sluts and, with unimaginable cynicism, substituted their lechery for her likely palled embraces; so it was more saving to attribute the strange rudeness slipping in his love to the whims of temporary satiety, and to chalk his periodic polite evasions from their early "going to bed" and his remissness at such nights up to the workload of the philosophical heritage, still not rammed down into the copy-books of notes, or his partial overwork from library studies.

Anyway, howsoever the matter stood with the graduate school and with his extracurricular comprehension of the three thinkers explaining him to himself, Husserl, Bergson and Sartre ("In the psychical sphere," he was scooping out the lapidary essence of their doctrines from the books of these pillars, "there is no distinction between appearance and being", "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life", "There can be consciousness of a law not a law of consciousness"), and whatever influence his liaison might exert upon his family relations, he visited Veronica throughout April and May, albeit irregularly and not very frequently, now arranging with her in advance, now simply calling at random, yet stubbornly declining her tempting group projects and chastely confining himself to their paired love-making, even when he met at times with the company barged in her flat to whoop it up, but rarely taking part in the feasts of these drunkenly "communicating" young revelers who were sometimes already forty-year-old.

For the sake of Nadine and of his philosophy, he had to be a teetotaler, and besides, he took much more pleasure in the heart-to-heart talks preceding the drunkenness, when he conversed with the faddish Nica obsessed by her quirk, who loved to started theological disputes about the mystery of death and the absurdity of life in the pauses of their sophisticated "wrestling in the bottom position": while others superficially argued about the precedence of Latin American "magical realism" and Franco-Spanish surreal metaphorism, about spontaneously absurd associativity and system-allegorical phantasmagorism, about Bakhtin's "carnivalization" and stylistic individualization, plus about improvisation--eroticization--epatage elevated to principle, and most of all, about the shameful grimaces of the marasmus of their own society, "closed" according to Bergson, or about the slum lumpenization of the Russian super-ethnos, inevitably degenerating like Lev Gumilyov said in the samizdat, this squeamish nymphomaniac was completely immersed in the abyss of inexpressible and prepersonal existence that was gradually sucking her numb soul in, and all her scenarios of bodily follies being played out with him couldn't distract her from the spellbound contemplation of the hypnotically chilling darkness of the existential chasm yawning within her.

For the last few months, he lived in his true "self", just as she, with the same deeply gaping vacuum, which he was trying to plug up and fill up with some books and everyday stuff, but which was seeping as the senselessness that was gradually mortifying his undertakings or as the feeling of the immeasurable tininess of his own instantaneous consciousness embracing his midnight all-seeing titanism and being lost in the space of the exploding universe; so his intemperance was caused not only by physiology, but also by the task, as in youth, to reinforce with new impressions the foundation of his earthly individuality comprehensively expanded by him, which covered the abyss relating him to Veronica; it hardly needs saying that he and she made a worthy couple, and their zeal in purely physical warming rather created the intimate background for the lengthy emotionless narrative confessions of the suicide candidate luring him to death and his explanatory inserts about the origin and fate of certain of her views, gleaned mainly from prehistoric parchments, papyri and rock hieroglyphic inscriptions that were transcribed in Sanskrit and in many fragmentary translations: for example, he was deducing "The life style is a unity because it has grown out of the striving for a goal" of Alfred Adler from "As your deed is, so is your destiny" of the ancient Upanishad Brihadaranyaka, and "God acts through freedom" of Berdyaev from "All beings follow their nature. Even the wise act according to their own nature" of The Bhagavad Gita.

"Do you know what that resembles?" he drew an analogy with the desire haunting Veronica to drown in this gulf of numbing cold. "It is as if you were freezing: at first you are trembling and your teeth are chattering, but when you already feel sleepy, you find yourself in perfect bliss with angels in white chitons around..."

"Angels are fiction," she parried his humor despondently.

"Who knows," he objected. "All the heathen have pantheons of gods, all the great religions have hierarchies of angels, and even we, atheists, have spirits and extraterrestrials. The same inventions are recurring, for some reason."

"And why, do you think, that's so?" she asked indifferently.

"Because we are nature, first of all," he let her in some of his conclusions and observations. "And here, at the natural level, all our demons, celestials beings, totems and moirai exist, including Satan-Beelzebub that exceeded his authority and was overthrown for this..."

"By the way, this legend is very edifying for us: it is dangerous for nature to rebel against its higher laws, viz. against its own destiny, otherwise it becomes hell and self-destructs," he removed the mythological peel and the chasubles of a mediaeval morality from the meaning of the eternal dualism of some unknowable and ubiquitous God's Providence in ordering His universal self-incarnation organically striving for the comprehensiveness of certain components of this incarnation. "So it happens to cells in the body, or to human in the environment: an attempt on excessive independence leads to death and to the responding restoration of the hierarchy; thus, both the angelic nomenclature and all kinds of evil spirits are, strictly speaking, our symbols of the endless confrontation of such earthly self-development, where, like it or lump it, we are also a kind of cells, and Satan is an expression of the extremes of our conceit..."

"The panorama, I tell you, is depressing enough," not encouraged by his excursus, Veronica lit up a cigarette with grass giving her blissful warmth. "But what if I am foreign as a cell, and there are incompatibility and rejection everywhere, cannot that be in life?"

"Of course," he was forced to admit.

"However, it is not for us to measure off the time for ourselves, for we are unable to judge our place in the whole," he persuaded both her and himself, who sometimes dipped too deeply into the baptismal polynya of senselessness.

"Then what about our freedom?" she instantly found a theoretical loophole. "Freedom is the only definition, and there are no others, which means that I want what is necessary. 'He who fulfills innate karma does not commit a sin'," she replied to him with a line from a selective Mahabharata.

"You're an absolute fatalist," he kept on polemizig with her, though intellectually, he understood that Veronica was right and that freedom was nothing but a feeling of independence--even if independence as such was not given to anyone, notwithstanding its multiplying relative forms--and of the boundlessness of seemingly random preferences, about which equally could be said that they, like everything in the universe, were albeit chaotic, but causal, and always limited in their potential "inexhaustibility" by their choosers.

"Naturally," she continued. "Some are fated, as you would like, to be 'spiritualizing' their souls and cultivating 'pure consciousness'; some are fated to be returning to their origin; and the program is put into us from birth..."

"But with amendments," he vainly endeavored to instill a droplet of common sense in her. "We only have a design within, and the rest must be lived."

"I personally did it already," she was poking fun at his love of life. "To live further will be, perhaps, superfluous, so it's better to force events a little."

"It's clear as day that you're impatient to drown yourself," he thought, falling silent, "but you're like a mermaid, my dear: you don't mind drowning me either, or taking someone else with you. I wonder for what purpose?"

"Well, say honestly, what do you need me for?" he asked her, resting in the corner of the bed after a series of indispensable "horse-races" under the lit wall lamp in the shape of the bronze mask of a grinning goat-bearded goggle-eyed satyr with two shades-buds on the horns and with the ruby-fiery bulbs in eye sockets that were being turned on separately at night (the work was handicraft, but masterfully done in imitation of antiques). "Or you don't care who will keep you company?"

"No, I'm choosy," his sexhausted race equestrienne replied languidly, lying motionless beside him. "It would be best with you."

"I get you. Such an honorary escort, retinue, beloved slave of the doomed queen of Egypt..." he described her unmistakable choice in Shakespearean style. "But, alas, I am like some of your cacti--I bloom once and grow, regardless of climatic conditions, until fading."

"No, contrariwise, you've too comfortably settled," Veronica gave him another slap in the face in a weak voice, slightly burring. "And your conditions are so favorable that soon, by the age of thirty, you will no longer be you of today and have turned into a faithful family man and a seedy teacher of 'social disciplines' actuated by duties and foibles, in a word, into something reptilian and devoid of fortes... Meanwhile at present you're strong, brave, and genius, and why not to preserve yourself as you are now?"

"In the memory of grateful descendants?" he cast a sidelong glance at her faded face with a bill-shaped nose in profile. "Shall we embalm me and put me in the mausoleum for greater preservation?"

"It's not about the body," a note of contempt sounded irritably in her hauteur.

"You're able to divide yourself? I can't unfortunately."

"It is not we who divide," quoth she, turning to him, and the pinpoint pupils of her frozen eyes pierced his soul, reproaching him for indecision by the eerie intentness of her meaningful gaze and schismatically enjoining him to submit to her occult witchcraft, yet ingratiatingly soliciting his magnanimous consent at the same time. "But immortality is not the same every time, because it depends on what you have lived; and the main thing is to catch the culmination, the peak of your incarnation, and part with your body in time, not in your declining days, not cursing the flesh, not going into the 'world of shadows' as an obtuse pot-bellied grouch or as a crippled Quasimodo, like your Bobby."

"People without a future," an offensive thought pricked him. "Bob, and Nica, and I, too, maybe... But the meaning of life for man is in the goals that he achieves, and I know how to set goals to myself, whereas they don't. Therefore, the real reason is most likely envy: she doesn't want me to live and my successful variant to pan out..."

"You should chum up with Bob," he recommended jokingly. "When he is getting sloshed, he always pesters me with hopelessness and 'Russian anguish'..."

"I'll take it into account for a rainy day." It was evident that she wasn't tempted by such an unequal replacement. "But I want you."

Her "want" was construed by him with his usual pragmatism, and Veronica was forced to leave her soul-saving declarations and switch accommodatingly to what she constantly practiced, but with which she could nowise caulk the frighteningly growing black hole of aimlessness and randomness in her orphan life that was a mere happenstance and might easily turn into the hopeless "vale of sorrow" from her present everyday festivity.

*

Soon after, a week later, he was found in the drawing room with the piano by Bob, come in first today, who was somehow not very animated and without the philharmonic guitar in its black leather case.

"Bobby, you're in the front ranks this evening," he closed the printedly impeccable Delhi edition of the Dhammapada, with which, among other rare books of Veronica's home library, he brightened up the idle remissness of his truancies and the dereliction of duty as a thinker operating with the gentlemanly sets of definitions of the paramount Western tradition, where the scrupulous elaboration of the conceptual apparatus was based often on God-fearing inertness or intended to prove the professional fruitfulness of any prerequisites--paths--efforts of human reason by the cyclopean construction of speculative anthill-like edifices. "Why do you look so shattered? What's the trouble?"

"I'm in catastrophe," Bob croaked in a hoarse cracked whisper, with his right hand put in the bosom of his stained denim jacket like Napoleon.

"What's with your voice?" he asked in amazement. "Drank too much cold water?"

"Worse," the gloomy "soloist-vocalist" wheezed. "They damaged my vocal chords, these Caucasian goats."

"What did you meddle in and where? Tournament in honor of the Beautiful Lady or an unforeseen rendezvous?"

"Very witty." Bob carefully pulled out the hand wrapped in bandages. "They chopped off two of my fingers, to your notice. I was in the hospital for three days, and now I'm disabled."

"Who are these 'they'? I'm not in the know, so tell me intelligibly."

"There is nothing to tell." Bob gingerly laid the bandaged hand in his second palm. "I remember, I had one too many then, and aggravated it with hash, it is true, and I was high, in short, so I was itching to pick a quarrel with someone and commit rowdiness... I was alone, after all, and there was no one to stop me, that's why I got into a scrape and collided with some Caucasians, in the heat of the moment... At first my guitar was smashed when I grappled with them... Then I grasped someone's knife, and two phalanxes were cut off at once, and all my clothes were covered with blood... God knows, how they knocked me out, it is good that the ambulance picked me up in unconsciousness..."

"And you aren't killed, which is also important," he interrupted Bob's hoarse broken whisper.

"Yes, I am not killed," Bob shook his unkempt-shaggy red head. "But I am a crappy singer now, as you can see, and I haven't my right hand to play music."

"I heard one eccentric could play with his feet," he suggested a productive idea to the crippled jazzman. "As long as you are alive, all is not lost."

"I live as long as I sing," Bob hissed with hostility. "And besides, there was a bell to me from above in the hospital, and quite a loud bell."

"What a bell?"

"Or a sign, you can call it as you like. I thought I was simply toying with hemp and opiates, I thought it was only for relaxation, and although I sometimes indulged myself in jabs, but the doses were small, while a trifle doesn't count, since a "joint" for warming isn't dangerous..."

"And what, you were wrong?"

"Were wrong is not the right word. On their diet in the hospital, I had 'withdrawal' and nearly kicked the bucket... I was literally dying there without my stimulants: all the joints are being twisted, and horror, and fever as if in inferno, so I'm burning all over and have shakes and so on... Meantime, those knackers economize promedol, saying: 'The doctor didn't prescribe it to you'... If it were not for my guys that brought some tablets by stealth to save me, I would have croaked for sure or finished this bitch off for concealing the medicines and forsaking the patient without health care..."

"Be happy that you weren't handed over to other knackers," he did not show proper compassion to the unexpected clash of the luckless friend with the voluntarily acquired enslavement of drug addiction that finally prevailed over the instincts of self-preservation. "Had they sent you for compulsory treatment, you would have definitely turned up your toes. You're already a real druggie."

"Maybe." Bob acknowledged this accomplished fact, pacing around the room and resembling from behind a cowed prisoner loitering around the cell and a sleepy father drunkard with a swaddled baby in his arms from the front. "But there's no sense to live, one way or another: I'm not going to humiliate myself before anyone, and for art, I'm a corpse now."

"Perhaps, life is not worth living, I'm not your adviser," he said, fully aware of the futility of both lamentations over unpredictable vicissitudes of fate and wise maxims about resilience in the face of adversity. "Life is yours, and you have the right to dispose of it as you wish. But your support is yourself, in the end, and it is better that you will proceed from this premise."

"Are you afraid I can involve you?" the distrustful invalid of the rock music immediately unmasked him.

"You'll involve me in it without fail. You won't even notice how you'll become a millstone on my neck," he impartially calculated the possibilities of this mutilated drug addict, who, in the inevitable degradation, like all such winos, lapsed into despair, would begin to convert his pity and friendship into money equivalents and to extort handouts by all ruses of scroungers or to steal. "Let everyone be responsible for himself, I continually din it into Veronica..."

"I wonder by what you din," chuckled his erstwhile chum, obviously frustrated after his egoism confounded all expectations. "There's no denying she is a well-known fuckstress, in this regard, you've hit it."

"I never talk about my women, Bob," he dropped. "Whatever they are."

"You're a rare specimen," the voiceless singer of Russian rock grunted. "But Nica, as far as I know, is only half a woman: she is unable to have children, therefore she can't stand kids... Our whore of Babylon scraped out too many the fruits of her womb in abortions and overdid it. Naturally, she can fuck now to her heart's content."

"That's not why she doesn't love children," he stopped Bob's bawdy comments. "It is just that she herself cannot come out of childhood in any way... But you must quit drugs right now, you must wean yourself off all that dope which you've been hooked on. Later you will lose a chance to kick this habit," he cautioned, nevertheless, despite the futility of such recipes for salvation. "Break your addiction and start something new without performances..."

"It's easy to say 'quit' and 'start'." Bob forced a sour smile. "I wouldn't have such problems without my talent. But it will be gnawing me from within until devours all my soul."

"Don't permit it to gnaw you! You may compose music, in the last resort!"

"I amn't composer!" Bob tried to exclaim angrily, having uttered only hoarse gramophone crackle. "I'm a performer! I'm an instrument! I'm not fit for anything else!"

"What, you have talent, and that's all?"

"Not 'have' but 'had'. The rest is worth nothing," Bob declared. "I'll rather sell my personal transport and go into paratroopers. That is, free fall up to the very ground."

"You're the boss," he sighed, again opening the multi-page "basket" of Buddhist wisdom. "As a certain Berdyaev soothsaid shortly before your birth, 'Man's self-affirmation leads to man's self-destruction'..."

Here, thank God, the very timely arrived actresses of some traveling theatre, familiar with their redhead Casanova quite closely, intruded into the dialogue of the deaf with the dumb and began to fuss around the tragically injured nightingale of the artistic backstage, clucking sympathetically and consoling "poor Bobby", who was glad to relate his tale of woe, with their assurance of the immutability of their love for him and with promises to jointly soothe the fresh pain of his loss. For this reason, his philosophical readings closed down, and, without taking his leave of anyone (except Veronica, who was dozing in her chair, wrapped in her dressing gown, and whom he gave back her book), he slipped away, as usual, before the approach of the main body of the drunken freemen nestled here, in the deserted lair of a zealot of ideological irreproachability who had "burnt out at work," because, beyond doubt, the informers were regularly present in this Thelema Abbey of Veronica, and he had no desire to sin under the supervision of KGB stool-pigeons.

Bob had sold his beautiful Java after all, and, as the omniscient Veronica told him during their dates, the "free fall" of the fingerless virtuoso lasted without interruption and with the increasing failure of the still functioning brakes, which led more and more often to absurd conflicts and to outrageous brawls and scuffles with sudden disappearances of this frenzied rowdy in an unknown direction and with the unexpected returns after in the condition of the utter dopiness, maudlinness, and touchy superciliousness not provided by anything material over a half-month of wasting "the lost life" with extreme intensity, for Bobby squandered what was put by for the future, too, and the unlimited injections of narcotic doses had depleted the bodily strength of this formerly very active participant in friendly "group sex", so that when, enjoying the privilege conferred him, after having read the next volume of her library in Veronica's room, he met with Bob in the hubbub of the prestart excitement of the still small bohemian company taking their seats, the face of this goner looked wan, and its aristocratic paleness was set off by the pigment spots of freckles and the red uncut beard seeming glued to the face.

"Let's go out, tippler, I'd like to chat with you in private," he dragged out the woozy Bob into the empty corridor. "For conscience sake. I heard you conceived the idea of committing suicide in the near future?"

"What do you care," Bob mumbled.

"I'm a philanthropist," he answered harshly, riled by the desperate dismalness of the "friend of youth" perishing before his eyes. "Enough to mope, Bob, drop it. I can lead you to Pete. He has necessary connections, and he will arrange out-patient treatment for you, anonymously, without being registered and without making answerable for drug use... As to money, we shall chip in, you may pay off us when you earn..."

He looked closely at Bob, who scowled at him, and realized that to correct someone else's fate was a waste of time, as it was already impossible to persuade the homunculus limply sliding into the abyss to resist despair and his fruitless self-immolation in opium prostration: henceforward to the very end, the meaning of life for Bob consisted in his departure from life, so by no reasonable arguments he could get through to this freak having such a hang-up about departing.

"No?" he asked Bob a rhetorical question. "That is, you decided to organize the inferno for yourself in reality, with improvised means? Then there is no sense to delay: jump off the bridge with a stone on your neck somewhere in a quiet place..."

"Exchanging useful tips?" Veronica coming out of her nursery intervened in their corridor confab. "You have no chance here, 'life teacher'. Bobby and I are devoted now to the same god, Anubis," she very appositely mentioned the Egyptian jackal-headed god of death.

"The virtuous follow their way whatever happens," he adduced his favorite counterargument, gleaned from the short directives of the Tipitaka.

"Sinners too," Veronica added and sisterly stroked Bob's tousled shock of hair. "He is mine, Hor, and you will never take him away from me."

"Amn't I yours?" he grinned.

"You're nobody's," his cold-blooded Jezebel pasted a tag to him. "You have paternalistic inclinations, so I can hardly get on with you."

"It depends on how you're going to get on with," he mockingly perverted her harmless phrase.

"That's lovely," Veronica pronounced softly, almost flatteringly, rubbing her side against the leg of her probable fellow traveler in her planned farewell voyage. "And leave to us, please, to follow our way wherever we like."

"Are you rejecting me?" he was incredulously horrified in the same playful tone at the prospect of such an unexpected termination of their bodily pleasures with Veronica.

"In no case." With her arms round the waist of the inhibited-indifferent Bob, she fleered at him, and her deliberately empty colorless eyes flashed ominously with a matt ice blink of predatory triumph. "Tomorrow I'll be waiting for you."

"But tomorrow is a day off..."

"And nonetheless," Veronica disregarded his schedule. "I shall be aflutter with anticipation."

"Perhaps for an hour only," he was perplexed by her strange insistence. "For the marathon distance, I must recover."

"What a wiseacre is among us..." Bob, who had been silent until then, stared dully at him. "Why the deuce he hangs about here..."

It cannot be denied, there was some truth in the words of feckless Bobby: his cautious circumspection in the general mutinous decadence and principled cohesive inebriation looked like a kind of conservative conformist dissent and a cowardly evasion of draining Socrates's bitter hemlock cup of "persecution" to which all freethinkers of the counterculture were sentenced; but fraternization repelled him now, whether his brethren were outcasts huddling together owing to their non-recognition, or members of class clans and castes, of criminal packs, of communal herds, and of chosen races; therefore, the boorishly transparent hint at his alleged duality where he was fundamentally consistent cut him to the quick.

"Here I observe insects, butterflies and grasshoppers," he caustically insulted the entire theatrical and artistic bohemian fraternity at once. "I watch you hop and flutter until circumstances pin all of you to some vacant places under the sun."

His exquisitely derisive metaphor was being realized by befuddled Bob as slowly as his exhortations, and Veronica, taking advantage of this gap, quickly hustled Bobby back into the living room, to the drinking and yelling colleagues in the "independent art", accompanying their retreat by conciliatory suasion: "Stop arguing , it's time to go to the table..."

"You are a buzzkill, however," she turned to him after that, employing a popular word from the lexicon of her uncultured guests. "You better go to 'recover', without spoiling the holiday to others."

"The desire of the lady is the law." It seems that he saw through the cause of her strange preoccupation. "But at parting, may I request--don't hasten. You'll never mend this."

"What are you talking about?" Veronica quirked her eyebrow with affected indignation, as if he had convicted her of some monstrous crime committed not by her at all.

"About the same, about eternity. And about us," he patiently explained to her, although it was unthinkable, of course, to prevent the prepared action by the doubtfulness of the starting points of her justificatory cosmogony. "Anyway, I think every man is unique, and re-incarnation is a good image, and nothing more. In other words, it is not our spirit and not our soul that participates in the cycle, in short, not ourselves, but the elements of decay; yet since everything is in us and consciousness is all-encompassing for us like nature, we have fantasized all this..."

"And our fantasies are not groundless," she interrupted him. "Let's trust our intuition, as you say, I follow your principle... You're afraid to fall thither, I understand, but for me there is liberation there..."

His long intent gaze seemed to freeze to Veronica's unblinking gaze discolored by the madness of faith.

"The time is ripe, Hor; now it is the very moment for me to jump out of this skin." She lightly patted herself on the non-existent bust. "It's a pity that you attach such importance to your corporal shell."

"But the shell is me, too..."

With their gazes agonizingly stuck together like magnet poles, they stood eye to eye with one another under the deathly blue luminous wall disk and carried on this semi-delusional decisive dialogue, begun not yesterday and not by them and having little effect on that global natural-noospheric process of selection and winnowing out, to which both differently opposed their accidental exceptional self and in which both differently revealed the inclusion of their individual nature in the macrocosm as a single entity differently modeled in them.

"And I fear our immortality is really unequal, and it is our life that determines it," he finished his thought by her words. "Both retribution and reward are everywhere, whichever of religions you take..."

"You're missing out fate," she took a step forward to him. "Meanwhile the fate is what we differ by..."

After which, for no apparent reason, she threw her thin arms round his neck and passionately pressed her cold narrow lips to his mouth, kissing him with almost cannibalistic rapacity and biting his tongue and lips with her sharp small teeth.

"Well, that's all," she recoiled unexpectedly. "Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me..."

"You already act as Ghost?" he played up to her in reply to the cue borrowed by her from the ghost of the murdered father of the Prince of Denmark.

"Everything happens." Veronica stepped back, and, having clasped her chilled shoulders with her crossed arms, somehow cringed like an inconsolable widow. "Go, thinker, go, you're out of place in my hotbed of vice..."

"See you soon," she added to his back, burring more than usual, but in a fit of temper, he did not respond to her last exclamation sounding as either a plaint or a yawn of "What a bore!".

*

In the evening, he read aloud to his daughter, tired out with running around the May park, her folding book and helped Nadine to wring the washed linen; then, after putting their wayward Victoria to sleep and lulling her, they had tea together at the portable kitchen TV, his graduate student acquisition; and when Nadine went to rest, he thoughtfully pleaded his irresistible desire to "ponder some theses" and remained in the kitchen by the balcony door, left ajar and already curtained with the net from midges awakened from hibernation.

Although at such a time, he would have been supposed to be nodding off, he was consumed with exasperating importunate anxiety, making him highly strung, especially because of the uncertainty of its cause, and it was inexplicable why on earth he was so worrisome and nervous without any special reason when thinking about some cocotte betrothed to Anubis and about that doomed weakling; and while they, his distorted reflections, were getting stoned and blotto, jabbering besottedly in the incoherent raving and druggy floundering of the feast that was drowning in smoky total buzz, he, in order to occupy himself with something, logically dissected with Talmudic meticulousness his relations, sinless for him, with two women denying each other, as though summing up this immoral episode of his own self-disclosure.

Apparently, his liaison with Veronica served him as a kind of lightning rod, as a safety valve and an emergency outlet of the latent bellicosity and aggressiveness which, had he not find a way out for them, would have blown up his unstable family harmony, sooner or later, by unleashing this rudeness and cruelty, whereupon his beloved wife would have discovered in him such traits and peculiarities that both her trust and respect for him would have considerably decreased, and their all-forgiving marriage would have been poisoned forever by the memory of a ferocious beast of prey lurking in her likeable brainy considerate husband behind his prepossessing appearance, nobility of deeds, and impeccable sincerity, the beast which could suddenly show its genuine beastly nature once more.

It meant that by his moral impurity at liberty, he sort of kept the purity of the intra-family climate that might be swayed only by some weak distant vibrations of the eruptions of his "natural-spiritual essence" shaking his soul, not divided, alas, in two, even when such a repercussion sometimes penetrated into his safe haven; but his very duality was by no means generated by his conscious rejection of some "moral imperative", whether it was the Christian Kantian "categorical" one, or the fundamentalist-Islamic "fatalistic", or the Buddhist-Brahmanical "purifying": since he founded himself on freedom, like the religious humanism of the present age falling into phenomenological existentiality, he was ready with relief to follow Sartre's reckless call to "be yourself", yet just himself was who he could neither handle nor get along with, for any limitation and completed format of his spirit immediately excited the demon of dialectics implanting a doubt in his mind and deriving the freedom of all being from non-being, from the fullness of the "meonal" opposition, not to speak of liberating crossing of the boundaries of everything determined; and if even the incomprehensible and indefinable Lord-God was construed by him, the blasphemer, as the "meon" of his human freedom, deprived of His relic divine attributes, and this freedom was the "meon" of his no less incomprehensible personality, then in the sphere of feelings, the "meon" of his true love was his adultery with Veronica, which allowed him to temporarily overcome the crisis of his family isolation that had constrained him, but which brought him anew to himself as an animal, limited by certain properties of the organism somewhere at the level of subconscious vitality being tamed by nothing, with release in death as an invariable "meon" of the mandatory restriction by biological life that, in theory, was picking out a shining nucleolus of the spiritual "self" from the pulp of the individual body and the shell of the biospheric planetary flesh.

True, beside instinct, there was a path of influence of the "higher" on the "lower", probably partly open to him, if he did not want to part prematurely with his earthly self, whereas on the path of too a profound self-knowledge, he foresaw the possible involuntary erasure of the boundaries set by him in himself and the extending of his secret alienation from the world of order to everything he held dear; then, as in the good old days of the Inquisition and the Crusades, the meon of the flesh was his spirit (the formula could be reversed) and the resolution of the centuries-old conflict took place, as it should be, in his soul, whether he called it the struggle of good and evil, or of God and the Devil, or of mind and heart; and thus the external suicidal withdrawal from the lifetime solution and the trivial committing of the body to the earth together with the commending of the soul into the hands of God, were being countermanded as unworthy of his independence and the vital scope of his self-affirmation. Generally speaking, he never felt the squeamishly hostile dislike to his "weaker vessel", full of strength and energy, characteristic of all inveterate self-mutilators, and therefore, whoever he was in reality and in his imagination, he renounced neither the world nor himself, no matter what he denied and eradicated in his personality, taking into account the important fact that all his self--determination-criticism-improvement--preserved his human freedom, while death would have been his last free action.

So, having persuaded himself to refrain from such an irreparable step, he somewhat calmed down, and, after pouring the rest of water from the spout of the cold kettle into his parched throat at one o'clock in the morning, he went at last from the kitchen to the matrimonial bed behind the wardrobe that partitioned off them from Vicky peacefully snuffling in her cradle; but even in a horizontal position in the darkness and beside sleeping Nadine, cozily clung to him, he could not doze off in the arms of Morpheus and tossed and turned sleeplessly on the edge of their narrowish bed with his vainly closed eyes, involuntarily wandering in some dreary mishmash of amorphously smeared phantasmagoric images, rudimentarily bubbling unfinished thoughts, and fugitive aimless reminiscences.

And when the wan light of the dawn breaking outside the night window seeped through the slit of his eyelids, he could stand it no longer and noiselessly left his soundly sleeping beauties to return to the kitchen, where he immediately got chilled to marrow, closed the balcony door, and sat down habitually at the table, as if he intended right now, undressed and unwashed, to read on an empty stomach something from a stack of books lying on the windowsill; but this time the page, which he fixed his gaze upon, was the pale sky, not stained as yet by clouds, airplanes, flocks of crows, or "flying saucers".

His thoughts were racing at a gallop as before, acquiring neither orderliness nor logicality, panickily kicking and bucking and knocking each other down, while the tension of his unbearably painful foreboding increasingly grew within him, like the infinite incandescence of an electric light bulb being tested by someone, and he, shivering, tried feverishly to suppress the unrestraint of madness swamping his soul and gradually obscuring the bright vault of heaven with a nauseating bloody turbidity.

"In short, I have jinxed Bob, I put him instead of me..." the last thought vaguely flashed across his red-hot melt brain.

The incandescent overheated bulb suddenly burst, and the gushing cold flooded the gaping emptiness in the twinkling of an eye--and instantly soared, in the posthumous arctic horror of absolute loneliness, he saw himself from outside, leaning on the table and frozen, but the one whom he felt as himself was not him, and the surprise at the absurdity only just done by him did not appertain to him, otherwise the shadows surrounding him would not have been recoiling at his approach and he would not have been being carried away so imperiously into the irrevocability and desolation of the abyss through which he flew further and further towards, as it seemed, the saving radiance in the outlet of the tunnel darkness that he was piercing incorporeally.

"Why? What for? Why? What for?" he desperately asked himself, whirling away through the tunnel forever from his rapidly receding life shrinking to one last point, but the meaning was awaiting him ahead, in the unpreventable self-appraisal of the motherly attracting light; and as soon as he passed through the dark well of flight and flew out into the light from which he had once emerged--as soon as, having merged with the radiance, he became a part of this all-accepting, all-clarifying whole--he, endowed at once with inexorable all-seeing omniscience, got able, like the supreme judge, to behold all his human outcomes--all his four possible fates--all four layers of immortality, to one of which he had to send himself now: either to the glimmering warmth of infinite participation in human good and evil, or to the peace of serene stay in the righteousness of self-sacrifice and of awareness, or to the star fire all-embracingly creating all earthly light, as a non-duplicated, non-copyable quantum of its dazzling divinity, or, on the contrary, to nothing--into the point space of faceless darkness--into the absolute zero of non-existence--into the infinite inconsolability of non-being.

Precisely so, according to the final value, the spiritual incarnations of the planetary-single luminiferous clot, which were returning through these countless wells-stalks, or rather through the sprouts-solar prominences of the life-giving light, were being sorted here in the radiance; and now he was not even worthy of the human dimensions available to him, while of God he dared not even dream, as well as of the formerly attainable paradise, and save rejection and dispersion into slag, he deserved nothing else.

"Darkness," his implacable motherhood sentenced him.

"Darkness," he repeated.

And ejecting him, the radiance ascended above him everywhere as existence lost by him, eternally alluring and eternally inaccessible; and in hopeless interminable orphanhood, he slipped off the brink into the bottomless center of light, into the depths of icy and soundless darkness, and the darkness engulfed him...

But at the same moment, his immersion in eternity turned into a takeoff; the afterlife mirage of identifying with someone melted without a trace; and the illusory timeless hell spat out him back at the kitchen table exactly at the same four o'clock in the morning, as his electronic wrist-watch said. For everything, thus, he spent that very immense instant, described by the inspired prophet Mohammed, which maybe contained the whole evolution of one of the drops of the universal fire splashed around by the Big Bang of the birth--of the drop that was enveloped in the layered crust of geological strata, encased in the shells of the natural environment, and swaddled in the invisible force fields of the space being cleaved by the flight--of the drop that was gradually animated by the growth of its cumulative indecomposable-fractional spirit; yet now he was not up to deciphering the artless visions of someone's last incorruptible court, for he had to ascertain now how far his recent horror was justified and how far the sentence he pronounced was true.

He shut himself in the kitchen with the telephone brought from the hallway, and dialed the number of Veronica, who apparently already went on a spree by now, since the company of her parties usually got ready to call it a night with the first trolleybuses and metro trains, but no one picked up the phone, however many times he called again; hence, she either kicked the guests out and slept like a log, with the phone call turned off, or there really was no one in her apartment.

"No one alive," his sobered mind added shrewdly.

"Idiots..." he muttered with annoyance, which applied to him as well, and went in the home felt slippers, shuffling, into the room for clothes.

"Where you go?" Nadine asked sleepily, awakened by his early preparations for walking.

"I'll go ride a bit." He was not going, of course, to divulge his secrets. "It is instead of morning warm-up, don't worry."

He rolled the motorcycle out of the corridor, where it stood idle for weeks covered with tarpaulin caparison, onto the landing, and led the Java standing on the rear wheel into the lift to descend from the fourth floor to the exit; then, prepared for an inspection trip, he came out of the entrance into the surprisingly windless morning coolness of the quiet and deserted city that exposed with strange hangover distinctness its asphalt-stone labyrinths, bald patches of plazas, and lush green islands of theatrically lustrous verdure laved with May rains. A minute later, he already accelerated the motorcycle coughing out exhaust fumes down the driveway, brushing on the run against the exuberant bushes of bird cherry that showered him with a hail of cold drops of dew spattering behind the collar of his shirt.

As soon as he steered out to the spacious avenue shining like seal's skin after the night street washing, he stepped on the gas and revved up to the full, rinsing his convulsively hardened face with the head wind of breakneck speed that was blowing his jacket about and slightly cooling the wild throbbing not abating under the ribs. He saw how, like the walls of an expanding canyon, the cyclopean bulks of buildings with the still dark shop windows were rushing past; he heard how his motorcycle was tracing out the sound jet-propelled wake across the sleeping city; and while hurtling it seemed to him that this night madness was being washed away, as well as his fear, by the lashing pre-dawn air whistling in his ears, and that his hideous morbid nightmares were too unbelievable to come true in reality; but riding after his furious racing to Veronica's front door, he crushed some shards crunching under the wheels, and having leant over to them from the saddle, he realized that he was crushing the fragments of broken clay pots with cacti, which were lying broken interspersed with earth under the window of her room on the seventh floor.

Before ringing the bell at the landing of her flat, he pushed the door a little, and both the entrance doors, the one plumply upholstered with black leatherette and the other of bog-oak, were again not locked, though only the cold smoky silence met him inside the house, and the guests had obviously gone home long ago; while beside the telephone on the nightstand in the corridor he found the sole survived cactus-barrel with a luxurious yellow flower, which he praised to Veronica yesterday.

"Yellow is the color of parting," he guessed, and a new wave of chilling dread surged up to his throat. "It is a present personally for me..."

The doors to all the rooms were wide open, but the light was turned off, and, clicking switches, he made the round of the "memorable places" of the carousal abandoned by the drunk revelers, where the carpet was littered with cigarette butts and leftovers, while the empty bottles and full ashtrays were scattered all over the living room and on the untidy bed in the parent's bedroom. He looked, of course, into the nursery of Veronica, and on the love bed unfolded for the night, he saw her dressing gown and an unfinished bottle of lemon liqueur stickily spilled on the crumpled pillow.

All her actions were being so clearly reproduced in his mind, as if he watched her: at first, after driving out the clamorous drunkards and changing her dress, she is smoking a joint in her easy chair and sipping liquor with chocolate; then, having made up her mind, she opens the window and hurls the pots of long-lived cacti one after another through the window to the courtyard ("Let this one bloom, this one will be for him as a keepsake..."); and then, being rocked by the floating happy bliss of soaring in the teetering unreal moment of the unnecessary and ridiculous material world dissolving in a silvery shimmer and losing both its density and plausibility and its former temporal parameters, letting her through the illusory nature of its visibility and tangibility somewhere into the flying non-objectivity and incorporeality, she, throws off her dressing gown and, as though gropingly, glides alone to the bathroom... Well, yes, to the bathroom!--she is there!--there she's most likely tarried, it remains only to check...

There was no sound from behind the bathroom door, so, with bated breath, he pressed the latch handle, and the door unexpectedly gave.

"What if she's gone?" the absurd self-protective indignation flashed for a second in his brain.

But through the narrow slit, in the hothouse steamy fragrance, his face immediately sensed a whiff of the familiar befuddling scent of her French perfume mingled with the aromas of shampoos and toilet scented soap, with the chlorine smell of hot water and with some strange elusive odor of greasy metallic off-flavor, after which, in the muggy haze of the cooling steam mattly settling on the walls, his eyes fell upon the dark wet head of Veronica standing out against the whiteness of the tiles gleaming in the bright light.

With her bloodless chalk face thrown back to one side and with the moronically drooped lower jaw of her open mouth, she stared with the black nebulas of her dilated pupils, not dimmed yet, at the lamp in the corner, and she was lying in the bath, chin-deep in cranberry-red liquid, with her right hand lowered on the blue tile floor. In order not to linger on her horrible lifelessly-imbecile grimace, he shifted his gaze to this hand with a bloody oblique cross of cut veins on the forearm and with the crooked scarlet-manicured fingers, and on the floor near the bath, he saw a cut-throat razor and a ten-gram syringe for injections which lay in a puddle of blood ("But she wasn't a morphine addict..."); and after he slowly moved aside the white-marble door slab obstructing his view, he realized, with a shudder, that it was not Veronica who used the syringe, and that there were two greenhouse flowers planted in the blood solution filled the big bathtub, for opposite the black one, the head of red color was sticking out of the blood, the head of dead Bob: his eyes were chicken-like half-closed, his hair darkened from the water was neatly combed back by someone from his forehead (that is, Bob was ahead of his companion, and she had time to say goodbye to him), his wet beard stuck together into icicles, and a lump of something bloody was thrust in Bob's teeth.

"What she shoved in there?" he thought, feeling faint and leaning his shoulder against the wall of the corridor.

The next moment, it dawned on him what it was there and how Veronica, celebrating her shameless death, had amused herself by the male "scepter" that had been gratifying her hitherto, and that she had chopped off to her insensible bleeding attendant.

By her vengeful jeer, she spoke out as clearly as possible, and her future was known to him now, so there was no need to gawk at the naked corpses in the bath, considering that he might puke any minute from such surprises. Besides, the prospect of being involved even to some extent in their death and in the forthcoming investigation with ascertaining the motives and circumstances of their double suicide would have been fraught with additional indecency and loathsomeness; and the only thing he wanted was to run away from here--to run to his motorcycle, to the air, to the daylight--to run headlong, without thinking, from the plague-ridden flat desecrated by this death, and not to appear here anymore, so as to completely erase both Veronica and Bob and the months spent with them from his memory.

Without touching anything, he carefully shut the door to the stuffily humid warm crypt; then, looking around warily, like a schizo liable to persecution mania, he sneaked along the corridor and, cautiously rounding the cactus with a yellow flower meant for him, went out on tiptoes to the empty landing; and after that, without calling the lift, he dashed at once down the stairs, leaping over flights of steps and hastening in a fit of panic of overtaking madness to bounce out of the still sleeping apartment house before he burst into wild hysterical screams.

But the stairs did not end for some reason, whereas his leaps were slowing down more and more powerlessly, skidding in the thickening viscous duskiness of the stairwell, and the dim outlines of the walls and railings were getting more and more blurred and distorted, so that, barely moving his legs in the air, he was running now through emptiness and into emptiness.

Then the emptiness also vanished; the entirely read reality of his dream suddenly fell off his eyes; and the hot stuffiness of immobility again closed around him, who dozed off near the wiry gaffer with gray mustache in the back seat in the same long-suffering packed bus, whose overheated engine stalled this time in some mountain gorge....

IV

Outside the windows on the left, the wall of clayey rocks, furrowed with crevices, rose steeply upwards, bushy and overgrown with the ubiquitous curly creeping grass; on the right, on the other side of the dark and damp gorge, the rare stunted pines clung to the sheer rocky drop of the mountain; and below, the powerful unceasing roar of the indignant furious river was breaking from the narrow stone gulch.

Consequently, he already missed the transitional phase of their entry into the mountains, and if it were not for the blatant incompleteness of the life being relived by him in his dreams and not for his ingrained habit of going up to the last point of the route, he could have got off here, at the intermediate stop of his crowded catafalque, especially as most of the men traveling with him were making their way to the doors.

"Long shall we stand?" he turned to his elderly neighbor in an urban impersonal manner, whereat the old man shook his gray head negatively in an immense peak cap-"airfield" and asked him, in turn, quite arbitrarily employing declensions of Russian verbs, if it was the first travel of his in "our mountains", and after learning that it was the first time, the wise highlander strongly advised him to go put a coin to Saint George.

What this old buffer meant, he understood when he rounded the bus after the talking locals and approached the roadside waterfall of the stream running down by cascades within one of the crevices from the impenetrable thickets of hazel and blackberry and murmuring over the smooth rocky blocks as a thin transparent water film spreading among the stones: near the stream, on a naturally hewn vertical plane above the road, one could see the slightly faded image of a handsome golden-haired young man in golden chain mail, straddled a prancing red horse, who was striking a dark-blue scaly dragon-serpent with his long spear. This youth was just the aforenamed Orthodox Saint George, the patron saint of mountains and their inhabitants recognized in these parts; and behind the stopped bus that had rolled off the gravel of the earth road hither, on the same natural rocky platform, there was a wooden table with two benches surrounded with batteries of empty bottles, and next to it, he saw a shallow grotto carved in a huge boulder, into which some of his God-fearing fellow travelers were putting small coins, propitiating the saint.

Although he hardly needed patronage and protection, for he rather wanted something unforeseen, he also poured out a handful of silver coins to his namesake and stood by the grotto for some minutes, listening to the roar of the river seething below and estimating by eye the height of the mountain, which, however, he was not going to scale, because he was not used to stop halfway, whereas this peak, as he felt, was clearly not final and not the highest one for him, while he already anticipated that somewhere further there was a summit completely different, sole and existing today for his climb only.

"Sonny," someone hailed him behind his back.

He turned round, and his eyes locked with another old man, apoplectically obese and red-nosed, also in the big flat peak cap, who held a half-filled glass in his rough calloused paw, and to all appearances, from this glass, the old man's tribesmen took communion to the glory of their holy patron before that, having almost emptied the wicker wrapped liter bottle lovingly pressed by the corpulent cupbearer to his impenetrable potbelly.

"Drink a little, sonny," said the old man, handing him the glass. "Drink to Saint George."

"To refuse is not accepted..." a strict addition ensued from someone present, and, in order to avoid offending the folk and entering into lengthy explanations, he brushed aside his inappropriate indecision and submissively swallowed the offered drink, but inquired out of politeness what he had drunk, and received exhaustive answer: "Araka".

Thus, by his unexpected obligatory libation of corn vodka, he enlisted the goodwill of his respected victorious namesake and again got into the bus into the same corner to go higher and higher, as long as this local rattletrap carried him.

Today he acted on a hunch, completely relying on the providence that managed the logic of coincidences both at the airport and at the bus station; and the meaningfulness of his selectively recreated life, not typical, as a rule, of the illogical chaotic kaleidoscopicalness of dreams, seemed to tell him that his intuition was not failing him and that he acted rightly, because what he lived through and experienced while living was reviving now not littered by workaday mechanicalness, without the blinkered diligence of day-to-day tasks, in the consistently built and purified semantic structure of his fate which was being reconstructed at the junctions of reality and sleep and imperatively remounting anew the former scale of values with its notions about "the priority" and "the secondary" by his final "extraction of meaning", as, for example, in these minutes of the lasting present, when he mulled over that gruesome death and his participation in it, looking at the impregnable precipitous slope of the mountain.

The reason resided, of course, in the initial irrevocable-irresolvable paradox: consciousness as such, being the self-consciousness of the planet, manifested itself only individually, in separate human "selves", and all the arising human communities were in fact some similarly and differently charged accumulations of these parts of the many-faced whole compensating by diversity for the potential boundlessness of its components, each of which was capable of extending its own partial "self" to the planetary entirety that gave rise to its variant, thereby destroying this unity without the regulation by the whole and without the restrictive balancing, both natural and humanized in other individuals, nations, classes, peoples, ethnic groups and religious confessions. It was understandable that the regulation (or self-regulation) of the growing diversity was going on simultaneously from outside and from within, through the "life of spirit", sometimes consonant with the external world, through a self-willed soul not obeying the dictates of the reason, and even through the bodily impulsive instinctiveness, and the history of mankind was comprehensively demonstrating the saving struggle of the apparently heterogeneous parts and the seemingly free constant realization of the protective self-preservation of the planet in the dominating here or there needs, moods, aspirations and views of human societies, including the unconscious and the "illumination" of the spirit, which was discovering the universe given entirely at once to everyone as itself, depending on its non-random gift of insight and on the unknowable inner necessity of its revelations for the common survival; however, this indisputable initial predestination of the "servant of God" led inevitably to the total justification of every existence, to the Hegelian "all that is real is reasonable", which was probably ontologically and gnoseologically true, as the indispensable functionality of every element of the global ecological self-adjustment, but denied the idea of death as retribution, while for him, their common future did not come down even to such an idea, and it was not explained by any religious morality, since faith also turned out to be only a means of his separate "realization" of a certain spiritual origin, which was being individualized in him throughout his life and supposed to be honored with the posthumous judgment of his well-deserved fate determined first of all, as he beheld in that terrible dream, by the achieved brightness of this primary spiritual fire and its purity, and only then by the other, merely earthly, criteria.

And the four levels of light, the four gradations of concluding immortality, revealed to him in someone else's death, most likely corresponded to the four levels of the formation of the pre-natural pre-existent Spirit embodied in a person, and in each of its individualizations, in each of the billions of earthly hypostases, this Spirit could either fail in asserting itself and fade away in embryonic non-birth, in its return to spiritual non-existence, or quite content itself with the natural and generally accepted, shedding the warmth of its generic incarnation around, or, provided that the premise of vocation highlighting fate was stronger (for vocation, according to Berdyaev, "always bears an individual character", and this was the key to the mystery of its "God-givenness"), blaze up with creativity (for "personality is creativity" beyond doubt) so as to smelt its uniqueness blossomed out of the original spark in the creative inferno-crucible (for to the maximum of uniqueness in overcoming the equalizing counteraction of the very substance of the cosmos, the Universal Self materializing in planetary formations aspired, because its self-creation, infinite for its earthly glimpses, just presupposed the difference and multiplicity of local bursts of consciousness), or even shine forth in the transfigured flesh of a very few rarest individuals with a truly all-embracing "God's fire", having illuminated all the abysses and heights of the planetary "islet of spirit" with the contact of the personal and the universal, which was "the reunion of God in me with God-cosmos", as he once wrote, so that to leave someone's long-term prophecies and "ascents to me future, to myself-God" to the helpless generations of interpreters, who were comprehending them as the individual enlightenment advanced.

That's why his then extremely risky immersion in his "existence", which was kind of a point of sinking into the non-existence creating his essence--of a point of incarnating "nothing" into something, spirit into the matter of nature, unconsciousness into the movement of self-knowledge--of a point of singling out his "self" from the whole with splashing out the whole into him partial, this attempt of his to penetrate the mystery of the eternal self-formation of the world in the spontaneously rational process of universal self-regulation, not only did not alienate him from the short-lived organism, stubborn in spiritless requests, that fell to his lot, but, on the contrary, the then experience enriched him with deference to his bodily shell and gave him the understanding of the meaning of corporality as the material that imparted individuality to the general, and as the earthly destiny of an inadvertently ignited divine spark, the path of which fit into the four steps of its spiritual growth--from God-chaos, that is, the pre-material potential fullness of His self-unfolding, to God-consciousness, for the indestructible quintessence of the human personality joined eternity as God's fiery immortal particle (naturally, if a personality was worth joining the higher).

But the same lifetime individuality was also in all other modifications of the unquenchable fire, whoever and however evaporated from the body. After graduate school, he taught an elective course in late Hellenism and the early Middle Ages, and he engaged, as they say, professionally in the Christian correlation of form and essence, as well as in the interpretations of Sonship and God's Fatherhood together with the Holy Spirit that linked them a little later into the Trinity, although, in his opinion, instead of reliably testifying, the Gospels rather distorted the real image of Jesus of Nazareth by indistinguishability of the really main and brought by the customs and mores of his time and his country in his deeds and speeches. Already before the defense of his candidate's dissertation, he came to the conclusion that in the life of spirit, and perhaps in any highly developed life, the problem of expressedness and inexpressibility, the problem of the ever relative adequacy of the language, and wider--of the entire "sign" palette of informative exchange, was not merely a problem of means, for language was the same way of incarnating some vital activity, and essentially, it was the achievable corporeality of the self-conscious spirit; therefore, both in intelligibility and in inarticulateness, it revealed only what it could reveal with reference to century, to personality, and to situation, most often grasping and retaining what he was most adapted to and what majority speaking this language made do with.

Meanwhile, the bus had long since started, and now, strainedly growling and jolting on potholes, it was accomplishing dashing turns along the road broken by frequent rockfalls, rounding the mountain ledges and mercilessly shaking up the passengers, accustomed to such riding, when the wheels of their bus was sometimes at the sharp bends on the brink of the precipice with the raging stream below.

It would have been impossible for two cars to pass on some parts of this man-made road, strewn in places with the negligently cleared landslides and screes, but, it must be said, they somehow did not come across oncoming transport, either motor or cartage; and contemplating the cyclopean piling of the rocks cut by fissures and clefts, which were bristling with the girdling shagginess of pine forest, thick like wolf hair and smoky-colored from afar, on the steep descents into the green sunny hollows, and which were becoming the wildly dark rugged multi-layered cragginess squeezed out of the bowels of the earth on the other side of the river, he reverted to his thoughts about the meaning of the shameful self-elimination of that obsessed crackpot who thus had done away with her complexes, masticating the apple found in his bag to kill the taste of araka.

Like other fates, her fate undoubtedly contained a symbolic meaning beside chewing some worldly cud, and, like everyone else, she was one of the words of the language in which the planet was turning to its entire consciousness--to humanity; a pity that few people would and could harken to this speech, so allegedly belittling their apparent universality, and few realized therefore that the meaning of their life depended on a context inaccessible to them, where the totality of answers was anticipated by the polyphony of various voices or by the unison of uniformity and where the range of the significance of a single sign extended from a trifling interjection to the biblical Word-Logos that had accommodated all contexts. As to Veronica, her sexopathological blasphemy masked--and for herself, too--the thirst for self-destruction, which at times haunted human communities, and by which, as by other limiters and regulators (such as eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, or epidemics, immune breakdowns, social insanities and psychophysical deviations from the "norm" that continued the human race, or the disastrous "fruits of human genius" that the Old Testament Yahweh forewarned the unenlightened Adam and Eve to desist from in the innocent paradise), the multiplying whole defended itself from the excessiveness of the reason that believed in its autonomy, being far from merging in a general self-salvation predicted by the mahatmas and futurologists and from fulfilling its planetary mission of knowledge of God in a no longer hostile unity, which meant creating God for the spirit and was tantamount to the creation of both oneself and the universe. Veronica herself, with her uncontrollable weakness for "delicious", with her emotional emasculation by an abundance of "threshold" sensual impressions, and with her untalented infertility, simply proved to be the nature most receptive and vulnerable and, maybe, most susceptible to the mania sometimes reigning in such unviable souls-to the mania of aspiring backwards into embryonic asexuality and unconsciousness, and, in effect, even deeper, into the light from which all and everything arose, and to which one should have ascended as "cosmos and personality", as the author of the "Catechism of Liberty", with his inexhaustibility in aphorisms, qualified "man in his fullness".

"A chain breaks in its weakest link..." he summed up, again feeling how the drowsiness overcoming him sort of softened the bus shaking, dragging him back into sleep, into some new clarification of meaning.

"The pathology had repelled me then, that's why I rushed back to the norm, to 'build' myself... Meantime the norm is different for everybody... you cannot impose the norm on all... the norm is when it is yours, when it is from within..." he finished and, releasing his drowsily fading consciousness, stepped obediently into the alluring lucidity of his resurrecting memory...

*

In one of the ordinary weekdays, after delivering his lectures already as an assistant of the department of philosophy, he sat in the room of their flat, empty for the time being, at the unoccupied writing table, leafing over the notes of his tomorrow's lecture, where he was extracting "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite", canonized later, from the pivotal theme of humanizing the cosmic emanation of the radiating hypostasis of the Neoplatonists in the early Christianity, and looked with a faraway gaze in the window at the interlacing of the black-white branches covered with fluffy stuck snow, through the glittering airily-frosty pattern of which the dazzling shine of the December colorless sun was slightly prickling his smilingly squinting eyes and coruscatingly glistening on the multi-colored glass balls and golden garlands of the decorated Christmas fir-tree in the center of the room.

Until the coming of his "linguist", served now in the literary and archival department, and their six-year-old Vicky, whom he promised to take for a ride on the sled in the park after kindergarten, he could afford to relax, feasting his eyes on the finest snow molding of crowns, whose artsy open-work casting was similar to the masterly cold systematics of medieval scholasticism, and inhaling the ozone resinous odor of the spruce needle boughs that were hung with Christmas-tree decorations, glass beads, and silvery trumpery, and exuded the forest winter freshness of sappy green fir-needles tickling his nostrils; and his thoughts were roving as freely as his gaze that was sliding off the papers to the window, and from the window to the wall above his and Nadine's table with the pinned quasi-antique triumphal arch of the three quotes, which were close to both today: the two side bricks--"Language is the house of being" by Heidegger and "Man as the symbolizing animal" by Cassirer--were crowned with a short and precise motto "The world is name" by A. Losev, and between the two supports of the arch, under a tiny consumer-grade icon of Christ Pantocrator in Byzantine church-pompous version, the foundation of the arch was cemented by the saying of the father of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer from the book "Truth and Method", "Being that can be understood is language", and below, so to speak, in the depths of time, there was a reference to Lao Tzu, "When systems were started, names were founded".

The image of God's face, which drove away evil spirits from the dwelling and sanctified the workplace, according to popular belief, by no means testified to his conversion to Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, or any other offshoot of the Christian dogma, although he would not have called these New Testament values the "exhaustion of values", following Nietzsche, since even his knowledge of the history of philosophy, still far from comprehensiveness, more than once gave him diverse striking examples of discovering an enormous amount of meaning in the documentary fragmentary narrations of the evangelists about the coming of Son of God into the world, and the multi-volume conceptual constructions of monastic spiritualists and modern phenomenologists seemed to be analytically deciphering the fathomlessly profound meaning of the images of biblical clarity and ancient hagiographic writings, unfolding the whole universes of comprehension and the programs of morality useful for the soul from some brief hints and recommendations of the Savior, true, the programs rarely not adaptable in reality to the invariably bodily "natural order of things" and to the temporary cult interests of the church undergoing its evolution. That is, he had no doubt about the reality of Jesus, nor about the superhuman nature of this expert on the Jewish Torah, who was aware of his exclusivity in the Judaic tradition of messianism, but to his mind, the language of Christian mythology, consonant with the period of "atomization" of mankind, obscured the main thing--the very universal essence of the wonderful Mangodhood, which, judging by the echoes of ancient and other myths, wasn't an isolated case of the inclusion of the individual consciousness becoming itself-planet into some higher, universal consciousness, endowing the chosen seer with a new inner eyesight, and therefore, with some new vision of the position of man in the dynamic hierarchy of the self-creation of God-cosmos and with some new, non-tribal, understanding of the meaning and true goals of both his planetary existence and the value of his spiritually separating "self" that still longed primitively for the resurrection in flesh and God's just judgment, whereas God of man was virtually man himself, and immortality, as Christ unambiguously hinted, while speaking of his second coming, was beginning with the end of man's flesh, time, and earthly being, in the resurrection of all personalities nestling in God's memory and seeming to themselves biological bodies in their lifetime within the merging posthumous oneness of universal "Self".

Besides, he didn't much like the naturalistic and theological entourage that was fantasized for greater persuasiveness around the sufficiently symbolic fate of the Messiah, the uncertainty of whose human image seemed emphasizing the universality of the spirit growing in man, which was defining everything indefinable in itself by the name "God" and which only through itself, in telepathic revelations, was penetrating meditatively into the usually inaccessible dimensions of all-seeing clarity and omnipotent miraculousness, not very compatible with the earthly human incarnation because of the constant--tragic for "homo sapiens", albeit not yet crucified--discrepancy between his rudimentary God's chosenness allowing everyone to cognize the world, contained in him and begot him, and the limitations of his available individuality not allowing anyone to really become this world but trying to subjugate the world to such limitedness; hence "Vengeance is mine; I will repay" of Jesus's own meek non-resistance, with his demonstration of strength at the same time, notwithstanding the impossibility of preventing what was destined for him: when you yourself realize the meaning encoded in your fate, then the task is not to evade this fate, but not to miss out anything "sign" and essential in it, which the Galilean has done as an example to be followed by everyone who feels that he is somehow guided in his life, and it related especially to everyone "called" or "chosen", in particular, to him and Bez, with whom, after defending his Ph.D. thesis and acquiring the solid status and the reputation as a "serious scientist", he would meet from time to time at their mutual acquaintances, where he began to go out already together with Nadine, after the lapse of the four years of his postgraduate reclusion.

True, he was unable not only to foresee his fate, but also analyze it retrospectively in a balanced way, since his views on his past continued to change, and now the former rebellion of "unclaimed sexuality" was regarded by him not as a phenomenon of excessiveness, but--by analogy with Veronica, lost her innate ability to feel her lived life--as a self-protective assertion of the sensation of corporeality by gross sensuality, for it gradually decreased in the automatism of the habits, whereas none other than this sensation was giving some tangible-visible shape of earthly individuality to his soul being eroded by infinity. It was just this feeling that the crucified Teacher meant, when slightly revealing to the uninitiated the universal future of all their incarnations, without exception, that entered during the human history into the elemental--mostly latent--experience of the all-ordering Spirit creating itself in the hypostasis of the cosmos, where the moment of renewing the planetary flesh by the stellar fire was not so much the finale of the spiritual baggage accumulated by the planet, as the involuntary selection of some episodes of its cosmic memory by the higher consciousness which only implied the others, less vivid, and neglected the third ones, altogether worthless; and in the future selection, the episodes awarded the apocalyptic "divinity" were to be the points of attracting the kindred ones and repulsing the alien ones, equally eternal, but distinguishable in the enlightenment of their personal immortality.

While studying the travelled paths of past self-knowledge (where apart from the Jewish rabbi, the Delphic oracle urged "Know thyself", too, much earlier, just as the equally ancient Chinese sage with his "Take yourself and observe yourself", or--long before them--the Indian gymnosophists' comments on the antediluvian Vedas with their "He who has realized and intimately known the Atman is the maker of the universe, for he is the maker of all", or--much later than the Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Jews--the Arabian prophet, who suddenly had the divine epiphany and conveyed the voice of Allah to people in the language of words accessible to them, "He who cognizes himself, cognizes God"), he being engaged, like the tireless destroyer of the foundations of the ancient worldview Sextus Empiricus, in the systematic cold-bloodedly-scientific dissection of various philosophical research based on some faith and terminology, seemed to have grasped the principle of forming the human personality, paradoxical in its very nature: potentially containing in himself as in a prototype everything that he was able to perceive and imagine and being all fire in perspective as a particle of fire, viz. having the integrity of an adequate "Absolute" in the spirit that accrued to each, man as a special natural neoformation always represented one or another combination of the expression of this whole in his life realization, reacting to the influences forming him by forming his individual psychological and mental structures, by the combinations of which, he was determined, like, say, by the countless sets and variations of the alphabet unfolding into speech; and into his superbright self-immolations, he could grow into the highest indeterminacy of all-accepting "god-likeness", deceptively similar to "returning to the origin" in extreme old age, when the gradually increasing meaninglessness of the superficial sometimes exposed the initial spiritual dominant of the diversity which was turning out to be some originality at best in a concrete fate, and not the faceless blurriness of the soul drowned in the influxes of something alien.

A person, unfortunately or fortunately, did not notice his inescapable subjectivity for the most part, considering his model of the world, identical with a certain community, true and natural, so the difference in approaches to what was given and to what was being given always began with the difference of the concepts used by civilizations, cultures and peoples or with the dissimilarity of the semantic content of those concepts; it was no coincidence that the desire to understand the mechanics of the connection between a verbal emblem and pre-verbal thought led him to keenness on semiotic currents, to Wittgenstein and Charles Pierce, and "Language speaks and not the human" by Martin Heidegger, whom he read in typewritten translations, was henceforth his motto, because understanding presupposed some degree of verbalizing what was being understood, that is, grasping and fixing it in a symbol of hieroglyph, and the whole history, as the whole person, seemed to him like some changing complexes of semantic structures, subject to decipherment in order that from the transient temporariness he could fish out those coincidences which substantiated his current conception of the planetary nature of the human spirit and his idea about the oneness of humanity that was going through the corrections of Nature from the appearance of the very first zones of reason on Earth; moreover, the realization and identification of a natural impulse in a sign, as he rightly thought, was the Archimedean lever of planetary self-regulation at the human level, while the creation of the world in the "phenomena" of consciousness was predestining the creation of the very reality, with all the external compulsion and predetermination of scientifically explicable conditions, reasons and facts.

However, his bias towards semantics-semiotics did not harm his professional career in the least: the historical material which he honed his analytical skill in did not touch on topical problems, and his conclusions regarding the short-sighted "class approach" that stuck in the intermediate "creaturehood" and in the superstructure "sociality" he kept to himself lest he entered into vain polemics with the smart alecks flourishing on the Marxist Holy Scripture, and was chary of exchanging opinions with the dogmatically hopeless idolaters, completely satisfied with the social hypotheses of the brilliant economist, famous and great in his time, who was prescribed by the narrow-minded Soviet power as the last instance of truth; yet the pharisaically-mercenary and blindly-orthodox preference for one of the teachings of the transition period in the era of Christian humanism already becoming obsolete in the era of the mass-like totalitarianism was an obvious anachronism for him and redolent of the totemism of rational humanity at the first stage in his historical scheme, when no one thought of any separateness and isolation; and foisting the copy-book maxims of plebeian pragmatism and godless primitive religiosity on the agonizing, but still resisting "renaissance" free-thinking would have looked in its absurdity like the restoration of the dead Hellenic cults by the decree of Julian the Apostate in the end of the second stage, if the Areopagus of the newly-minted hidebound Olympians were not a deplorable consequence of the collapse of the third stage, monotheistic and personal, while mass disbelief in either God or man were not telling of the onset of the fourth stage that was equally hostile to spiritual "titanism" and to spurning confessional discord and time after time begot the "one-dimensional" man-function by Herbert Marcuse, whom he sometimes leafed over after The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset, for like everyone else, he should turn into such a man, as a matter of fact, and, for the purpose of protective camouflage, he learned to seem just such when the situation necessitated that, competently operating with political vocabulary, alien to him, and skillfully juggling with needful quotes and references.

"Today is a vile time, I agree with you, but for now, I'm not up to our time," he once cooled down the pathos of Bez who was speaking out frankly, without strangers, after this scribbler had read too many of the testimonies of The Gulag Archipelago by the writer Solzhenitsyn, recently expelled from the concentration camp of the Soviet fatherland, for Bez found nobody either in the high-ranking nomenclature of the family circle or in the politically-loyal editorial surroundings to whom he could have unburdened his soul without consequences, excepting the bosom friend philosopher who stood out from the others both for the father, guiltlessly served a term in the aforementioned Stalin's camps, and for the memorable university rebellious demarches. "The fact that we have a bandit state is not a secret for me, but I don't quite understand what so surprises you."

"But it's a slaughter, it's all the country on the bones," muttered Bez shaken by the flagrant enormities of the appalling "whole truth", looking round the ante-room, where they managed at last to seclude themselves under the branching deer antlers above the coat rack.

"As if you didn't know before," he reminded Bez of their youthful discussions on the extent of the Communist carnage. "Yes, on the bones, so what? The whole history is on the bones."

"But not so senseless, as ours," Bez tried to disagree with his generalization. "Even under the pharaohs it was more reasonable."

"I don't think so," he grinned skeptically. "The country is larger, of course, and the time is slightly different, but the percentage is probably the same. The restoration of slavery is associated with a great expenditure of human stocks."

"In other words," Bez asked indignantly, "such a regime doesn't revolt you?"

"Not in the least," he answered. "I am incompatible with this system in all respects, and I don't expect anything else from it. I'm not inside, you see, so I don't accept it entirely, and to my mind, your indignation issues from impotence, for the simple reason that you feel not very comfortable in slaves."

"I wonder how would you rant were you there..." Bez was deeply hurt by his remark, since his offended friend was also one of the applicants for the self-consoling role of the "people's guardian", very popular among meretricious soviet servile writers; meanwhile, to be honest, he couldn't stomach the false patriotic masquerade in the long-decayed "Third Rome" or the novelties of moralistic "village prose", which Nadine, as an erudite reader, lauded at times and which were actively promoted in the centrally supervised press, justifying the exclamation of the existentialist Fritz Heinemann, "Problems died, long live pseudo-problems!"

"Firstly, no one is safe from arbitrariness in this country even today, not only then and there," he said to the poet editor, who, by the very performance of the official function of a transmission gear in the publishing mechanism, willy-nilly contributed to mowing down the withered field of modern Russian literature and conduced in some measure to trampling down the fertile creative soil and to stripping the spiritual chernozem layer off it. "And it is useless to guess how I will behave or would behave. Maybe they would have killed me, or maybe I would be killing, but at any rate, I wouldn't grovel before them for sure. Besides, let everyone live his own life and be personally responsible for himself. Coercion is and it was always, barbaric or civilized, and therefore the task is ever the same--either to resist as far as possible or try to avoid. Needless to say that submission and participation in coercion cannot be considered such a task."

"Why?" Bez hastened to appeal to his conscience. "The people, by the way, are forced to both participate and submit. You don't feel sorry for the people?"

"Which concretely?" he mollified his sudden irritation by irony. "The people that drove itself into bondage after its great revolution? Or the people that is contented with its wretchedness and endures humiliation? Forgive me, the people such as this is hostile to me, and I don't feel it in myself."

"Then name the peoples you feel in you if the soviet one isn't fit for you."

"I feel no one," he snapped. "Here, excuse me, self-destruction had been taking place, self-liquidation, as everywhere where the mass elements prevails; here a cancerous tumor was with metastases; and you deem that your 'peoples' went themselves to the slaughter and abetted their executioners in executions, and after that they think it has nothing to do with them? We reap as we has sown, because suicide begins with murder... And since the essence of our glorious age is that the quantity of individuals infringes on the quality of each, I don't want to fit into the category of 'the people': no matter how pompous it sounds, but I'm not only a 'native of Russia' and a 'citizen', and there is no need to squeeze me into your 'common fate' again and load your 'sufferer's crosses' on me and hammer your 'historical truth' into my head, especially as this truth calls not for indignation, but for revenge--for overthrow etcetera. Now imagine what will happen here when the decay is completed and when all finally explodes in this zone of degeneration..."

"You see no other way out?" the upholder of the saving "national spirit" sniffed unfriendly.

"Adorno wrote that history is a permanent catastrophe," he cited an example from Dialectic of Enlightenment. "And every perishing civilization is sure that the whole world is perishing with it, whereas, it is the unnecessarily great and obsolete that perishes, as a rule."

"Do you think we're doomed?" Bez didn't believe.

"Certainly. Doomed to death, like all humans," he joked caustically. "Or rather to immortality. And what about the country, I'm not a biblical prophet, alas. But, as far as I remember, empires never recover from collapses, while for us it is a matter of time and various concomitant circumstances... Yet more importantly than the forthcoming general collapse is what we'll be able to derive from this collapse, what new meaning."

"Such a meaning may be really?" dejectedly sighed Bez, discouraged by his prognosis, although as a poet, his friend denounced the contemporary degradation in biting invectives and sarcastic escapades, not intended for publication, for Bez always published prudently not critical heresy but the landscape-love "pure lyrics" that was supported in the two published books by the glibly-"civic" publicistic "hackwork" on the salable theme of "serving the Motherland"; and contributing an insignificant mite to the well-being of the plunderers and embezzlers ripping off the notorious Motherland with impunity, this double-dealer never undermined his own Parnassian success nor discredited his influential father-in-law. "So many people were exterminated, and for the sake of what?"

"For their own sake, as all and always," he flicked Bez on the nose, because this expressing of assumed "civic sorrow" coexisted perfectly with the specious etiquette subservience to the ruling clique of the party officialdom. "And the meaning consists in the change the orientation: standing out instead of merging."

"And what's good in that?" again sighed the singer of "Russian expanses", who gravitated towards Solovyov's Slavophile spiritual "sobornost" and for whom the existence of the population kindred in language and in the way of life was the key to his "needfulness" and fame and to the probable epochal longevity of both his literary creation and his "fate of a man of talent in the years of stagnation and timelessness".

"It all depends on a person," he dissociated himself from the bureaucratic gangs, and from the mafias of "masters of life", and from the roguish "masses"-drudges, and from the wolfish freemen of criminality. "Self-defense liberates someone and enslaves other still more; someone returns to his real self, while other ossifies through and through into one solid shell."

"Picturesquely," Bez unkindly praised his comparisons. "So, whom you'll become is depending on how you dispose of freedom..."

"No, it rather depends on what kind of freedom will fall to your lot, and thus you're dependent on this coordinate system, or on mythology, if you like," he clarified. "And since the myths of 'soil', 'national unities', 'state as a single entity' and other rallying abracadabra have already got outdated through the efforts of their implementers, while the truth which you are fussing over finishes off all illusions and debunks all cults, the result is obvious: the sphere of freedom is now in you, whoever you are in the theater of the absurd given to you and however you try to delude your freedom in anything. I would say that the meaning of the collapse--of empires or realized utopias, it does not matter--is that we become something whole from particles of something and can, if we want, of course, to cultivate our 'self', not spending our lives in marionette impersonality. Therefore, the task of freedom is not to destroy, but to create, and itself above all. Destruction is the destiny of mediocrity."

"And it is you who says this?" Bez was astounded. "With your pride! How can you censure someone's long-suffering after that..."

"I censure brainlessness," he elucidated, referring to the futility of the well-intentioned "reforming" of the unnatural world-wide craze and to the backwardness-preserving "Great Revolutions" (always written with capital letters), which, according to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, were "true as movements and false as regimes". "What is stillborn will die without my intervention, and I shan't put my head under its death convulsions. Really, I have no time to lose my life in the camps as a political prisoner."

"So you want the others to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you?" Bez blurted out, sincerely gotten into the image of a "guardian of human dignity", a "crusader for justice" and a "prisoner of conscience" persecuted by the unrighteous authorities.

"If they cannot do anything else, they're welcome," he confirmed. "As for me, I approach all the current absurd as applied to my own life: when I have the opportunity to work more or less normally, I sit in my niche and create; and in the case that this galimatias will concern me--they will decide, for instance, to interfere in my affairs, so as to compel me and try to drive me somewhere--then that's another matter, then I'll be bothering... But only then. To paraphrase the Romans, 'farce longa, vita brevis', given that this 'vita' exists not for 'farce'."

"Then what for? To crawl?" Bez, inspired by his protest of "Russian national poet", continued to pose as a hero.

"Every life has its own purpose," he briefly differentiated the inscrutable ways of the Lord. "For the majority their life is given to simply live, for the minority--to draw the majority into the struggle, to move, so to speak, 'historical progress'... And for the creators--to create," he particularly stressed for Bez. "To create freely, for your own pleasure, without speculative adjustment..."

"Poetry is always first!

And for millenniums we toil

for harmony at any cost,

like tiny rigs extracting oil!" Bez sadly read out a comparatively recent impromptu. "Pleasure is dubious sometimes... But you've forgotten yourself."

"Reading yourself, Bezel, is the most difficult thing. For others, I am indeed like some hieroglyph that indisputably means something , but whose script is beyond understanding. While for myself, I am both the goal, and the means, and the surrounding reality, and the soul, and everything, in short... For me it is, I think, to ascend to God."

"You believe in God?" Bez was again amazed at his evolution, as this self-taught Slavophile, though wearing a little golden cross around his neck, was more inclined towards the superstitions of home-grown mystical pantheism, due to his theological illiteracy and to the habits of his atheistic education.

"It would be strange if I didn't believe," he remarked, not entering into a longwinded gab-fest about the inappropriateness of the concept of "faith" in his comprehension of God, the essence of whom in his philosophical interpretation was hardly similar to the hazy phantoms of the "higher power" wandering in the brain of this incorrigible realist. "Without God, neither the cosmos nor we ourselves are explainable, and mankind has neither meaning nor perspective, like any man."

"And from what have you inferred that with God we shall have all this?"

"From the Holy Spirit," he dropped, which was the simple truth: while cogitating about the suddenly appeared mediating member of the triad of the Trinity in early Christianity that was seemingly superfluous and absent in other, not God-man, religions both before and after, he understood why such meaning was lent to this innovation and how the colossality of this revelation could be expressed in worldly language.

The first clue was given in the God-forsakenness of Christ--in yielding Jesus's bodily flesh to the power of the earthly forces and in his ascension to God only with the destruction of his human hypostasis; and while passing the entire trinity circle of God's self-creation, he partly disclosed that circling of consciousness, in which the life of individual spirit revolved and which was observed by him in himself and described in detail in a scrupulous analysis of phenomenological self-contemplation: in the emanation of the all-creating Holy Spirit (or some kind of pre-existence total potentiality of formation ordering the bricks of quark chaos) God the Father (or the universal light-consciousness, or "Nous") was incarnating Himself in the material multiplicity of being that was embraced by Him as by the universe, and in the earthly incarnation, He was sprouting as man-god being individualized in natural diversity, that is as God the Son (or individual human variants of one planetary spirit), achieving the cosmic essence of God the Father in someone's highest personal development and ascending as the fire of the divine-human consciousness into the fire of the all-encompassing spirit-consciousness. Self-knowledge was thus self-creation that was getting some kind of incarnation in the Holy Spirit, which, by the way, resolved the contradiction between the eternal abiding presence of God as the self-conscious cosmos and the eternal becoming of God as freedom in the playing constructing-combining of the reality that was being revealed by Him in Himself; moreover, this self-revelation could occur through both stellar and planetary dimensions, and man who knew only his human form of God's self-consciousness could rightfully consider himself the center of the universe he was creating and the crown of God's creation, taking his connection with God for God's concentration on him, on one of the countless myriad hypostases of the universal incarnation, and regarding "evil", which was always the result of self-regulation of matter bringing forth new hypostases of God, as a struggle between the Divine and the devilish, whereas it was no struggle, but self-overcoming of the incarnation of the Spirit by the still weak, growing spirit of separate and relatively independent parts, so that, in principle, "evil" itself was, as it were, the constant "resistance of the material" and God himself did not so much directly control the correlations of bodily discreteness and someone's destinies, as, spontaneously creating Himself, picked out all the most valuable from the experience of his becoming to include it into the awareness of God the Father.

The fate of the Messiah in the history of mankind looked like the key to the riddle of the true role of the phenomenon of "reason", and some people more than once came close to solving the mystery, but the cultic and moralistic aspects of worshiping the earthly God fairly obscured this aspect for a long time, meanwhile, the planetary character of the divinity of the son of the Virgin Mary, as the mark of the highest level of human ascent, indicated the direction of the uncertain development of earthly life, while the relegation of God into internecine strife meant superseding God by the fatal predestination of trials sent to man. Everything was, of course, "in the hands of God", for everything was Him, but, upon closer examination, this "everything" turned out to be no more than some product of His own humanized consciousness and could be changed either by the destruction of the bearer or by the miracle of the supreme correction, and faith sometimes violated the laws of nature, miraculously transforming the visible world into the fruit of someone's imagination, which paradoxically testified to the constant activity of the triune Most High-Spirit-Nous-Brahman-Maker of the universe.

"From the Holy Spirit," he repeated, without acquainting Bez with his innermost reflections on the cosmogonic essence of the Trinity, circumstantially researched in the treatises of the "Fathers of the Church" and religious theologians, with which he familiarized himself rather one-sidedly and lacunarily for the present. "You are so far you as you are spiritual and God to some extent."

"I doubt it," Bez refuted casually. "On the contrary, I am me when I am free from any trammels and must not bridle myself. Anyway, I don't write decent poems otherwise..."

"Do you deem that poetry isn't proof? Mollusks don't indite poems, even doggerel, and monkeys compose nothing, although they are coupling like us... True, you know better: probably, out of some souls God never hatch."

"Or He is being poisoned like a cockroach," Bez added. "It is easy for you to expatiate, you hardly beware of receiving a rap on the knuckles for your work, whereas I am under everyday pressure as an editor, and they all exasperate me at every step."

"It is because you take steps in such a place where you may get bogged down," he said. "Artists should seriously care about the soul, or else they will completely squeeze it out of them--like toothpaste."

"You have any suggestions?" inquired annoyed Bez who was now well established in his career, notwithstanding self-image as an accuser of that state-Leviathan, in the womb of which they had to be saving themselves, like the righteous Jonah swallowed by a whale, by faith in the variously named Creator--concretely in talent and vocation.

"Not a suggestion, but a general immutable rule: a poet must live as he feels, that is why he is a poet. And if you want to supplement yourself with the so-called people, come on, act, expand your horizons... But don't complain that the people will make you depressed very soon, since the people consists of humans, as you understand, while humans have been like this from time immemorial, and the imperial hubris leaves its imprint, too," he couldn't but ridicule Bez's youth fantasies on the theme of the former primacy of autocratic Orthodox Russia in the short age of its Russian Renaissance that had got overstrained under the burden of its own genius and greatness and given rise to a reciprocal crushing wave of ochlocratic grassroots equalization and to elevation of the mean nonentities "who were nothing" to chieftains and dictators, especially as in the stratification and self-devouring of that communistic egalitarianism they were forced to self-determine at present with the Diogenes lantern of not finding man in people.

"It's not necessary even to act anyhow and expand anything if you have roots."

"The roots of a person are in the same God," he enlightened his teleologically unversed friend. "If you dig deeper, national character is the language and culture and some world-view in common as well. In a word, it is what is in you, and not somewhere, here you are indubitably right... But for you it is some material, not your form, for it is you yourself, so there is no point in deliberately highlighting it and bothering about it: nations pass, yet your spirit is eternal..."

"Well, really," muttered Bez, flattered by the assessment of his "ego".

"Eternal, if it is indeed the true spirit not rummaging through the secondary," he incidentally disavowed the natural confrontational division into races, peoples and nations which, together with diverse cultures and religions, was forming the biospheric planetary complex of interaction and self-preservation of a satellite orbiting one of the stars, otherwise the spiritual many-faced fire, disunitedly flashing in the shells of a germinating fiery spore, would have superficially burnt itself out in blindness of premature unspiritual amalgamation (as, perhaps, it had already happened many times), without flaming up to the probable merging of the fire generated and the fire begetting, as it came to pass in Jesus, and without turning into itself-the planet that was originally a spark of divinity and a point of reason.

"Then what about 'Blessed are the poor in spirit'?" Bez recollected the beginning of the well-worn saying of the vagrant preacher, immortalized himself by such adages. "Why they?"

"Because they're like children--not blinkered and devoid of ambition. And their souls aren't cluttered, so they are still capable of believing in the Father without reservations, which Christ talked about not for the sake of talking... Poets are somewhat similar to them."

"You're a great master of compliments," bowed Bez esteeming the "professionalism" first of all, for the poetic "God's gift" was natural for him and did not require excessive sacrifices from him for the time being. "Now you've included me among the blessed."

"You better be among the blessed than a functionary," he uttered a slightly pretentious, but cherished maxim. "Literature and philosophy are the area of freedom, or else self-knowledge is impossible."

"I beg your pardon, but I'm not a philosopher."

"You're a man of vocation, and that says it all. You should listen to yourself more carefully and shouldn't waive your freedom, and the rest does not matter, because the rest will work by itself--until the end of the program... In your 'native speech' you are a new word, not a letter and not a punctuation mark, aren't you? Though, of course, words can be both abusive and meaningless, from which, alas, we are not immune..."

"Don't forget about the rest of the text," Bez needled him. "Otherwise you may be both word and meaning but in the ravings of an idiot."

"Yes, it's possible," he admitted. "However, this does not relieve me of responsibility for my personal gift and for my personal soul."

"No objection," said Bez. "Well then, here's a rhyme for you at parting. Just about your Almighty."

And after that Bez recited inexpressively in an undertone:

"To God my self is displayed!

For life, what cannot He mean?

Here are cosmos and planet,

while I am a link between.


I see the heaven everywhere,

but only this sun--to shine...

I have no God to care

but that who's the soul of mine."

*

It must be said that this conversation of theirs was not the first nor the last, and when meeting occasionally on neutral territory, they found a free moment now and then somewhere in the corridor or in the kitchen or on the balcony--so that without wives and eavesdroppers--for discussions of those "sore points", about which they could speak plainly only to each other as old friends, despite their usual mutual barbs and banter on the overly loquacious confessions: both needed speaking out from time to time, so as to fix their current changes in the speech reflections of monologues, since the very presence of an understanding attentive listener was both an incentive and a stimulating occasion for their self-analysis of spirit and soul, which lasted, naturally, alone with themselves, in notebooks and jotters as well, but there, for the most part, in hasty notes, remarks and comments, in fragments of midnight self-denials or of extolling their genius alternating with clearings of inadvertently erupted poetic texts ("Poetry is the metaphysics of the moment," as Gaston Bachelard aptly defined such lyrical wording of the states of the soul); and the secret affection that Bez continued to feel for Nadine, who was taken away from under his nose, as this self-loving "Fortune's darling" believed, and who was completely happy with the abductor (which, oddly enough, was like the truth), kept up their ineradicable rivalry, imparting the tension of almost loving passion and all-consuming dueling intentness to their candid revelations and prompting them to new self-disclosures and to the maximum jealous exposure of the slightest inconsistencies in the author's self-assessments of the dangerously sincere interlocutor.

Note that, aside from a purely sporting attraction to competition, now they had no reason to vie with each other: in the seventh year of the "bond of holy wedlock", his marriage adjusted by joint efforts and habituation reached the time of the next heyday, so Nadine's female ambition, who was incomparably captivating her tirelessly industrious and resilient intellectual-husband as before and loved spending time with her curly-haired, charming, clever daughter already a little babbling in two foreign languages, did not need, really, extra-family additions, and that made his cheerful self-confident wife a kind of oasis of benevolence and optimism, unapproachable for admirers and not overshadowed by eclipses of bucking faceless Eros; moreover, Bez could scarcely plan any underhand seduction of his fascinating classmate who rejected his "love of a poet", fully aware of how comical it would have looked to amicable Nadenka not forbidding him to extol her as a nameless--under the three asterisks of the title--heroine of the poetic epistles addressed to "Her" and "You" (in other words, her connivance was undoubtedly encouraging this inveterate inventor to augment his contribution to World literature with foppish lyrical defiances, expressive reflections, and unctuous elegies inspired by her enchantment) and what ruthless retribution would have befallen the infidel hubby from the side of the betrayed spouse, who was capriciously demanding just in the proofs of the inextinguishable monogamy of her husband, like all the "faithful wives" that sowed their wild oats before settling down, and who wouldn't have failed to draw on the help of her father climbing the hierarchical ladder of the soviet bureaucracy to call the adulterer to order; Bez was enamored of her simply because, going with the stream and successfully keeping afloat, while many "young talents" being choked with hopelessness overboard drowned and disappeared into obscurity, Bez sought an outlet of real lyricism and of some non-fictional tragedy of his poetic world in Nadine, too, seeing that the others, not personal, tragedies weren't recommended to publish in the sanctioned publications, and what was welcomed in the artificial milieu of the petty establishment surrounding Bez that was a certain inconspicuous ordinariness with polished manners and well-bred refinement, even if it was not very compatible with the independence and naturalness necessary for poetry which Bez sometimes obtained in the family of "friends of youth".

Thus, he and Nadine were in essence spiritual donors for Bez, and by recharging from their harmonious relations this "folk storyteller" kept extending his creative viability in the conditions unsuitable for poetic babble, albeit fit to ensure the "professionalization" of their gifted rhymer who was a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, but could still break out into such puns extempore: "I like to stem/ the common stream/ and I am stern/ in fighting trim.// What is my touch/ I cannot term,/ but I am such--/ from stem to stern!"; and sitting now over extracts from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite at the decorated fir-tree, he thought about the miserable choice that was being offered to the artist by the cadaverously ossified and increasingly decomposing "historical community" of this sluggishly agonizing country, which tried in the malicious infirmity of its senescence to reject, trample, and suffocate all sprouts of living creativity hostile to it: either to subordinate talent to the pettiness of the everyday and generally accessible, or to force him to mutilate himself in lifelong outcastness, arrogantly despising the vileness of degeneration and having no chance to take a place as a glimpse of uniqueness in the stagnant monotony of the state monopoly, where the rise was, as a rule, a win of obliging mediocrity and where, nevertheless, Bez had scrambled, in order not to vegetate in the cold starving expanses of unrecognizedness, not believing, like all the time-servers refilling the ranks of the "cultural workers", in the inevitability of his own reforging in this "working process" of the initial insignificant domination that "devastated the souls of mortals with terrible cruelty" in Aurelius Augustine's words.

In contradistinction to the hapless children of the "harmony" nullified here and to the prostituting fallen "muses", he had the good fortune of steering clear of complicity in power, without falling among the worthlessly-supercilious "failed talents" at the same time; plus he was artful enough to prevent his freedom from being flooded by the quagmire of decaying spread around and to avoid getting on the path of doomed suicidal sinking into drunken abusiveness and unproductive despair; and over the years of his assiduous study of the Latin "primary sources", his pedantic never-tiring mind penetrated the deep dialectic of so many transcendental schematics that his sense of contemporaneity changed radically: the days of the totalitarian Caesarism that had "fallen away from God" were already numbered (the present-day senile bragging was the usual slobbery mumbling of dying dotage), and the ubiquitous swindlers, nurtured on the rottenness of the soviet absurdity and occupied all the floors of management and distribution, as well as the toilers, deadly tired of the senselessness of their forced labor for these gangs and "pyramids of power", had nothing encouraging to boast of, and they only longed for peaceful life of the unattainable "Western standard" in the "consumer society", which they decried and vituperated with envious craving, and for their free access to the leverages and the feeding troughs of "bossiness", whither the carpeted "beaten tracks" could be laid both on the paths of "ideological conviction" of the "main line" of the ruling marasmus and on the roundabout ways of the "national superiorities" which some of the party dignitaries-compatriots pandered to. The actual center of attraction had already shifted, very likely, to the real world empire, to the notorious United States prescribing the rules of the competitive game, won by them long ago, for the almost bankrupt pertinacious ambitious monster which this superpower was pinning down to the ground in the allegedly equal fight; and his "historical moment" hardly boded serenity for him in the future, therefore it would have been much wiser to take no account of such a predetermined intermediate stage and, without lingering on altercation with the present lies, preposterousness and hypocrisy, to extract everything possible in the sphere of knowledge and self-construction of the spirit from the blunders of the feeble-minded decrepitude and the comparative venal liberalism of the inert system.

"The Divinest Knowledge of God, the which is received through Unknowing, is obtained in that communion which transcends the mind," he read the thesis of his tomorrow's lecture, the quotation that echoed both the commandments of the Messiah, and the creed of the Gnostics, like Origen of Alexandria, and the Confucian "innate knowledge", and "The Atman, the Sun of Knowledge" from Vedanta, "that rises in the sky of the heart", and the sayings of other sages and religions, which were denying the human consciousness the primacy on the mountain peaks of thinking and bending in their depreciating self-belittling to the primary sources of spirit cleared of age-old debris.

These words seemingly devaluing his Sisyphean ascent, these resorts of great minds to artless faith repeating from century to century, suggested the idea that the one who reached the limit of speculative cognition passed into a certain dimension of free flight and of soaring into abyss as an abyss, and he was ending the way of becoming, accessible for human, by returning to some languageless and inexpressible self-awareness of merging with the infinite and eternal, and that all the most grandiose constructions of philosophical and theological temples of wisdom, with thrones and altars erected for the Almighty, were in fact only preparation for an unexpected and logic discovery of God in oneself, incarnated in the architectonics of one's temple meaningfulness; and the higher "closing the circle" of the personality by the immediacy of religious consonance meant the doubtfulness of all human experience proper in the face of the initially-final truth of the godlikeness of his spirit; however, for some reason, his earthly existence was given to him, and he unceasingly recreated the routes of his spiritual wanderings and pathfinder roaming in the texts of cultures, and even though all means of defining, changeable as they were, proved to be various degrees of approach to the indefinable, nevertheless, in the change of forms of expression, the change of the ways of survival was seen quite clearly, while, as his contemporary Japanese Hayakawa accurately wrote, language defined the nature of reality (for consciousness itself was a phenomenon of God-given language, realized in a great number of sign variants, he would have added). As applied to him, the analysis of the relationship between sign and meaning acquired particular importance, since he regarded the whole human history as a sign, and the meaning was the role of humanity as a planet in the self-consciousness of God-cosmos and the significance of microscopic human life which would have surpassed the aimless self-reproduction of flesh turning to dust.

The phenomenological substitution of a separate human consciousness for God, correctly describing the subjective vision of the process of self-creating an individual microcosm, did not resolve the main problem of the sudden appearance of the illusory solipsistic fire, because, "projecting to become God" or "existing by itself, without a reason", as it was asserted by Sartre despairing over existential nonsense, the self of a person did not forget for a moment about its origin from something greater, being forced by its memory, by the novelty of its accumulated experience and by some signs of development to recognize the real certainty of something other, not its own, which, through the chain of logical consequences, always led it to the comprehensive concept of "God", or to insist, by means of evasive assumptions, on its divine uniqueness, defended by truisms like "Life is a dream", without specifying whose dream it is; but, nonetheless, he had not drawn his own cardinal conclusion of the comparisons of traces of someone else's geniusness till now, and not because he did not want to.

The honed engraving analyticity of the meticulous "unfolding" and critical dissection of the immense multilingual heritage passing through the filters of his omnivorous insatiable consciousness and subsiding as grains of timeless kinship in his soul, as well as Justinianianly precise summaries of various systems of understanding structured into elaborated schemes (of lectures, abstracts, private notebooks) with their centuries-old retiring into the asceticism of conceptuality and into the formal-logical calculations of some assertoric and apodictic syllogistic, or with their noviciate of unintelligible prophetic ecstasies and with the allegoricalness of sacred books legitimized by Averroes for the parallel verity of inferences that didn't coincide with the letter of the sacredness--all this diverse heterogeneous erudition, concentrated in hundreds of treatises and codes, was influencing his rare re-tuning inspirations too indirectly, losing its purely ideological nature and terminological formalization and being reborn from the wordless chaos of personal subtext as some burning substance of "vexation of spirit", which, completely filling him during the hours of sleepless nights and finding its spontaneous linguistic adequacy by itself, froze in multi-page floods of crystal clarity, perhaps impenetrably dark for outsiders, and hung in his universe as a cobweb of light piercing his consciousness, now clairvoyantly flaring up when skimming the philosophies being understood at a glance, now fading under the ponderosity of former greatness equal in the intensity of the radiance; and, to tell the truth, he did not see any fundamental difference between his own and artistic creativity, no matter how specifically colored was what arose in the refraction of "creative acts" and how much the literary and philosophical lexicons differed by their semiotic separation in what was sounding both in the creator and in the thinker as "God's voice" (which brought them together even closer).

Immersed in thoughts of the polysemantic meanings of self-valuable artistry, as of the primogeniture of the core of image in comparison with the abstractions describing it, and also of the conveying of the spiritual cosmos, which was springing usually as some polyphony of "God's gifts", in harmoniously organized sounds, volumes, colors and lines, he was pensively contemplating the graphic crowns of December poplars, bleached by night snowfall, that were embedded in frosty cloudlessness and effectively molded by the oblique illumination of the sun sailing away outside the window, when suddenly the running film of his memory, as if having been jerked forward, tore him out of the space of the moment he lived at present, and, in a rapid change of shots, the winter poplars on the screen of window pane immediately began dripping with spring melting snow, and their branches swelled with bursting buds, and got adorned with fleetingly-trembling golden catkins, and instantly covered with chickenly-timid sticky leaves that turned green in thick foliage, glossy after a thunderstorm, dusty from the summer heat, yellow waxy in the October leaf fall, to be washed off from the black boughs by the monotonous cold rain of the autumn quickly flashing by, and at once, the crowns got again magically feathered with needles of hoarfrost and densely shaded with whitish hatching of whirlwinds of blizzard, bending under plaster molding of fluffy flakes and being enveloped in glittering ice of the February thaw, in order in the next annual cycle, in the same succession and with the same haste of cinematic glimpses, to thaw, to turn green and yellow, to fall, to bare and grow white with the filigree lace of adhered snow.

*

But only now the snow lay, deathly blue in the light halo of street lamps, on the crooked branches of the spreading acacias under the balcony of the kitchen, where he and Bez were drinking to Bez's third published book of poetry; it was the end of January, and two years of his life, as they sang in the old romances Nadine loved, had irrevocably flown by, without changing anything in his family and university constancy, except, perhaps, himself who was not noticing in the gradualness of changes how the orderliness of the mode of life, necessary for normal systematic work, little by little distanced his everyday "self", abstracted by regularity and habitualness, from his secret "self", being implied, but unknown to himself and accepting neither rules, nor final truths, nor external restrictions in anything, and how, becoming antipathetically alien to one another, the created "self" and the creating "self" began to keep aloof from one another, suppressing the spontaneity and independence of intuition with technical skillfulness and encyclopedic learning and smolderingly gnawing out the emotional nucleus of his fortunate love of life in his short prosperity.

"To me purely symbolically," he warned Bez, who was pouring the brought French vintage cognac, holding a translucent round slice of lemon with a rim of yellow pimply peel and licking the sour juice from the moist odorous pulp. "I don't drink more a wineglass, it harms my thinking."

"I wonder what are you thinking about," Bez chuckled condescendingly, for from the time of his full membership in the writers' union ("the blighters' union", as he was punning, employing also "fighters'" and "lighters'" instead of "writers'") Bez inherited the disgusting manner of high-up literary eunuchs to repeat patronizingly some unaddressed rubbish, which partitioned off them impenetrably, as the cream of the soviet literature, from communicating with some non-elite public, and which the outwardly unimposing Bez cultivated so diligently that the newly-minted member sometimes got inflated with arrogance even in their comradely conversations relieving their independent existence.

"I'm afraid that my apperceptions-accidents-anticipations are too tough for you," for a start, he returned Bez to the sinful earth from the empyrean bureaucratic Olympus. "I am thinking now, on the occasion of a pause in my sessional course, about one aphorism of Alfred Korzybski, but it is doubtful that his name signifies anything to you."

"Since when is he a world luminary," Bez evasively dodged the acknowledgement of his ignorance, more than natural in the age of the information boom and narrowly specialized know-it-all. "And what wisdom he uttered?"

"The map is not the territory," he said, least hoping for any understanding of the global scope of such triviality.

"That's all?" asked Bez, surprised by the brevity and plainness of the dictum.

"As the saying of Chinese wisdom goes, the greatest fullness seems empty yet it will be inexhaustible," he pilloried the blind layman with Lao Tzu's maxim. "That is, if in popularized version: what you have expressed will never express what you want to express--it is more intelligible for you? And further--in application to all statements of the cognizing spirit, such as emblems, symbols, texts and aposiopesis..."

"What's further, we shall omit," Bez raised his full glass. "You're more interested in the 'great fullness-emptiness', while I'm interested in the details, so better let's drink. Let's drink to my dearest freak! You don't mind?"

"Do you mean your book, of course?"

Bez's son turned a year and a half, and the timely fatherhood conduced appreciably to the social respectability of this circumspect lyrist, who adapted himself to be "one of the guys" and "our man" both among the glib grasping augurs windbags scouring in quest of fat sums of fees and royalties with their facetious motto "All want to eat", and among the swaggering conceited literary nobs, accustomed to the nation-wide rapturous reverence for their helpless prolix and insipid prose and their feuilleton-zealous edifying poetry, but, for all that, this already staid "canny lad" occasionally wrote something decent "for the drawer", which Bez vindicated himself with before Nadine for the "locomotives" of his published "ideological" ersatz and which, as a constant archival reproach aggravating the weak-willed compromiser's addiction to high-quality collectible cognacs, rubbed salt into the wounds of the "responsive vulnerable heart of the poet", as it was tastelessly characterized by one eminent celebrity, the author of the laudable preface to Bez's latest book.

"What else can I mean?" Bez did not grasp at once, and then, having understood the humor, he offendedly shook his head with an emerging receding hairline by his thirty. "Well, I'll tell him when he grows up; he'll tear off your ears for gibes... So we drink or what?"

"Okay, just a little bit," he nodded and took a sip of cognac. "Count mainly on yourself."

"That's our basic guiding principle..." With pleasure, Bez gargled his throat with a slow drink of cognac and continued, sucking juicy lemon slice. "Have you even read this collection of poems?"

"If you're talking about Nadine, then yes. She was perusing it, and very assiduously."

Of some of Nadine's unflattering comments, like "It would be better for him not to be a publicist" or "Why he prints such trash", he did not notify Bez as an excessively vulnerable litterateur and too a responsive artist.

Bez believed that a few undeniable successes would exceed the necessary volume of idle ranting on the topics of moral perfection and love for the native penates in the realia of the urban landscapes of the developed socialism ("A poet must be judged by his heights," Bez used to beat off malicious attacks from the camp of envious backbiters with a current philological "absolution", although as an internal reviewer, he couldn't afford to be too squeamish and did not disdain "impartial but hard-hitting" scathing criticism on the sent opuses of a mass inundation of presumptuous amateurs without official status in literature); and in the attempts to overpersuade his stuck-up friend, he would have vainly adduced all arguments about every poetic book as a hypostasis of its creator and, consequently, about the disastrousness of the slightest "punctures" of mannered falsehood for the lyrical "alter ego" being created in books, not to mention mediocre verbiage: self-creation of Bez shifted more and more from the sphere of practically useless creativity to the sphere of the versifications, where he catered calculatedly to someone's tastes and where something harmlessly imitative and average-eclectic was forming universally recognizedly and broadcastingly from the former "secret genius", while the lures of already perceivable success, with the mention of his name in newspaper and magazine reviews, with the inclusion in the literary "cartridge clip" of a new generation of "quiet lyricists"--in contrast to the previous generation, cocky and loudmouthed in their tame "civic" poetry at stadiums--and with his performances at some representative literary evenings and readers' conferences, as well as the opening career vistas of his ascent from a consultant to the secretariat of the writers' union and from an ordinary editor to the chief one, were tipping the scales towards a "healthy conjuncture of talent" and towards "strong professionalism."

"You, apparently, didn't advance further than the dedicatory inscription," Bez poured the second wineglass.

"Nothing of the kind, dear sir," he began, but then their chinwag was interrupted by the appearance of his eight-year-old Victoria, who came out of the bathroom in a toe length white flannel shirt, with her shoulder-length reddish-blond curls combed for the night.

Performing the nightly ritual, his big-eyed, blush-cheeked babe said good night to both of them, gave her dad a peck on the cheekbone, and retired with an independent air which made Bez fidgeting admiringly on the stool.

"Your Victoria is simply a fairy," Bez clicked his tongue like a taster when she left.

"They are all fairies in childhood," he hastened to belittle the merits of his daughter, to avoid jinxing her. "Intelligence combined with comeliness is an explosive set for a damsel, whereas we have a bitchy character even without it..."

"You should be stricter."

"With her? As designers say, it's a pity to spoil the texture," he mentally made a snide aside about the hated "educational measures" and the pedagogical hammering into the Procrustean norms of social standards, too narrow to hold their "anomalous" exorbitance. "That is Nadine who brings up, while I guard, ride, and answer tricky questions."

"My question is unanswered though," Bez reverted to his "Coincidental Evening", as this collection of poems, compact only in format, was somewhat pretentiously called.

"Then I'm answering."

Trying to find some inoffensive, but not false words, he glanced round the white shelves of the kitchen set with colorful decals, and, gazing past Bez at the linen balcony curtain with a design of large red checkers, with the protocol impassivity of a judicial pettifogger, started expounding his--of course, subjective--impression of the obviously impossible synthesis of lyrical freedom and poetic fulfillment of "social orders".

"As to unalloyed art, there are quite a lot of lacunas in texts, and poetry therefore exists as islets, piece by piece, and as a scattering fastened with nothing."

"Maybe that's my artistic touch," Bez muttered.

"I don't care how you do it, I'm a reader, and I want your inspiration, not the nitty-gritty of your craft," he immediately swept aside the stereotypical objections of all the hapless talkers, who were extremely smart in substantiating their innate creative impotence by technological "conceptuality", often, it must be admitted, with the dexterity of conjurers, mystifying educated polymaths by their blarney, for such erudite highbrows were unaccustomed in their learned aestheticism to texts without preliminary interpretations and to the "creative power of a genius" which was previously characteristic of Bez, a little stalled in rewarded humility, and which was reducing the explicable arty handicraft to the tares being winnowed in genuine art. "Since you yourself are absent there, you shouldn't have spoiled the rest of it and should have limited yourself to landscapes."

"Beside landscapes, you noticed nothing?" asked frowning Bez, twirling the full wineglass on the white plastic of the table.

"I noticed, to my great regret. Now you're very eloquent, wastefully eloquent, I would say, but all your speeches are about something impersonal, not about yourself..."

"Then about whom? Such as I am now I am not to your liking, I understand, but that's what I am."

Bez looked indignantly at the wineglass, then, with a look of outraged innocence, he knocked back more cognac at one gulp and without a toast, and reached for the lemon on the saucer.

"Do you already know what you are?" he cast a sceptical glance at the lyric ranter, who had puckered with pleasure. "As Gilles Deleuze said, 'Artists are clinicians of civilization'. Therefore, your task consists in studying yourself more closely and making diagnoses to yourself, and not in rhyming any moral sermons of the regulations. And take into consideration that you are not much of a sage, so you're still too green to go up to the pulpit."

"I don't aspire somehow..." Bez added a slice of holey Dutch cheese to the lemon.

"But you cannot 'stand aside'," he finished by a typical propaganda cliché. "Meantime, an artist is just obliged to stand 'aside' and be 'outside the program'."

"To whom he's obliged?" inquired the gourmet Bez, pressing the cheese to the palate with his tongue, and his question came out inarticulate.

"To talent, to whom else if not to it," he replied to this gourmandizer's mumbling.

"You are not original," Bez simply wowed him with the newness of the categorical verdict of the mediocrity contesting for popularity and puffing up their own worth on the book-magazine markets in their extravagantly scandalizing "pranks" with the aim of having some prominent feature of writings at least or even some bright plumage of the hallmarks of "creative individuality" and the catchiness of some clearly defined role, typification, and matrix skill for the subsequent productive stamping of numerous creations in the similitude of the recognized one, to come up to expectations of critics and the "consumer".

"I don't pretend to originality," he declined such a honor humbly. "However, talent in the era of functionality is the last chance, otherwise there are plans, schemas and rules everywhere."

"Don't you like to live by rules? Then how, may I ask? On your own against all?" Bez steered their conversation demagogically to the social plane.

"Not against, but not together," he rediscovered for Bez the central principle of spiritual freedom, which could be implemented in someone's life, like all ideal principles, naturally, not with sterile laboratory purity and consistency. "More important than the rules is the degree of your dependence on them. That is, you have a choice--either you are entirely determined by the public and the milieu, or you are still a "miracle of nature" and connected to the elements of divinity."

"Rather linked with it, like by a navel-string," Bez modified obstetrically. "It is suitable, but for infancy only."

"You again manipulate words," he screwed up his eyes. "But the comparison is inaccurate and incorrect, for talent is not a property, nor a tool, nor a function of the body."

"What is it in that case?"

"Well, if by analogy, 'the soul is the form of the body,' and here you can't argue with Aristotle, then talent is the form of the soul. It is like levels of individualization--all as elements are one and the same, and everyone is incarnated as an individual, and the individuality is the "soul" as the essence of every self; while talent is even more individualized, and talent shapes even this form, which is why talent seems uncontrollable and intruding from outside, which is why it subjects the artist to itself... And since talent is an individualization of an order of magnitude higher, since it is a certain non-genetic code of the creator, its meaning is in itself, and thus its task is to decipher itself, its hypostasis of the spirit..."

"You're the real trove of wisdom." Desponded a bit from such an abstruse tirade, Bez again moved his wineglass to himself and filled it to the brim. "Have you ever thought that writing poetry for yourself is wasted labor?"

"What surprises me," he said to Bez, "how far ahead of their own mental development are poets in their poems. 'For oneself' is when someone consume or feel something wordlessly, but there is no creation 'for oneself', inasmuch as creation is objectification, therefore, it is always for the 'other', even if the 'other' is yourself. Human does not cognize his soul otherwise, only through its speaking out, through self-alienation, through the incarnation of the soul in his human sign. Which, by the way, implies at least a whit of God in each of us," he communicated the glad tidings to Bez. "In fact, we differ from the 'smaller brothers' in that our speech has grown from a means of coordination and signal exchange into a means of self-creation."

"Not everyone's," the frondeur Bez interjected into his popular science lecture.

"Yes, of course," he nodded impatiently, aspiring to pass to the summarizing generalizations. "Afterwards, perhaps, even our speech will die out as unnecessary, and we shall telepathize directly, as, I remember, Jesus Christ promised the apostles... In principle, language arises as some transmission, fixation and substantive dismemberment of the world, and it is, of course, an exclusively earthly form of reason surmountable for someone since ancient times; and in the distant future, if humanity is fated to live till such a future, in the merging of the spiritual synthesis being predicted by prophets from time immemorial, in the oneness of the higher planetary Spirit, the need for today's symbolic connection will probably disappear..."

"And I, as a fool, shall be scribbling something for some reason, to my own detriment," Bez again got a word in edgeways.

"But the essence of creation won't change," he futurologically foretold the fate of humanized spirituality accumulating over millennia in the supposed continuation of the next cycle of biological intelligence. "Every text is only a trap, and what is caught is as long-lived as man, moreover, something is immortal, in case of some threshold energy concentration-condensation of thought, talent or ascetically selfless sainthood, ludicrous to you."

"With such a stipulation, one must have sound health," Bez peered at the raised wineglass. "Or else, with 'concentration-condensation', he may give up the ghost from overexertion at the entry, and who is he in art after that?"

"'My circle is closed. I can't break away.

The Ocean of history is stilled...

And there, in the depths of that bay,

the springs of music work its way through silt...'" he recollected what a poseur Bez was in poetry in youth.

"So what?" Bez put his goblet down. "In former times, they say, poets were considered intermediaries between people and God, but what does it change? Verses live while someone reads them, and all the rest is written, yet does not exist. And if so, for the sake of what I'm obliged to toil and moil? For art for art's sake, that is for pure narcissism?"

"It would be better to write for the sake of this. In this you are an artist, not a hack, at any rate," not reproaching, but not sparing, he defined the half-accomplished transformation of the quondam admirer of Gongora, Keats, Baudelaire and Rilke, who was losing his former taste for the ornate dark mysticism of the mysterious, for the juicy sensuality of the living nature of the changeable "plein-air" and naked passion, for the violent eruption of the rebellious temperament and for the whimsical psychological spinning of the web of high-flown incorporeal self-comprehension in using the "officialese" of his everyday sociability among editors and bearers of "membership". "Firstly, all is absolutely true regarding 'intermediaries', because that is how matters stand from a theoretical point of view; secondly, in our civilization of the utilitarianism of both the flesh and the spirit, the significance of the zones of freedom is increasing, as a complement, so to speak, and genuine art today is a personal adventure, first of all, since the mechanization of creative work is being inculcated too deeply by artificers and artisans, making the very soul formalistic, not only behavior, so artists have to sacrifice almost everything available for the sake of the unknown; and thirdly, according to my observations, poets are suicide pilots, as a rule, for, in all probability, the payment for the 'supreme values' is higher."

"You have the views of German romantics," Bez became sad, staring at the amber cognac shimmering in the crystal facets of the wineglass, as Bez knew all the pros and cons no worse than he did and could expound all this much more vigorously and metaphorically in the period of their Sturm und Drang. "The end of the eighteenth century. But today we're in the end of the twentieth."

Then, with a sour face and with a contrite sigh, Bez sent the cognac to its destination and dabbed the corners of his mournfully lowered lips with the tips of two fingers.

"Today it is more important than ever. Okay, if I am not an authority for you, then here's your respected Berdyaev," he couldn't calm down. "'True life is creativity, not development'. You live when you create, this is an axiom for an artist, in my opinion."

"I'll recite a rhyme after," Bez threatened, snacking on cheese with lemon. "I hope Nadenka will come out to us later."

"Yes, she promised." As an archivist, Nadine immured herself in the room this evening, proofreading the textual transcription of one of her "storage units", intended for a narrow-profile academic journal. "But you won't give your fate the slip with the aid of reciting rhymes, for, as noted, talent takes revenge for neglect, while in this country, talent and success are most often in hostile antagonism."

"You think so?"

It goes without saying, Bez did not reckon himself to be either a go-getting mediocre rascal, or a rejected "loser".

"I draw conclusions. There was selection here, hard and ubiquitous selection in several generations, and this cannot but affect even after a hundred years, to say nothing of the epochs of 'aggravated marasmus'. Therefore, as Theodor Adorno prescribed, the main aspiration of the thinker is to find spaces free from domination."

"Well, yes, 'to find' and find yourself in the vacuum," Bez assented peevishly. "And to vegetate among the lumpen dregs of society, like Yul."

"Yul? Did you see him somewhere?"

"Recently, I had such a pleasure," Bez admitted reluctantly, smoothing over the awkwardness with distracting manipulations with the bottle and wineglass. "He tried to slip me his stories on prison subjects; this vagabond aims to be writer, too..."

"Anything worthwhile?"

"No, all's autobiographical. Such a raw material, semi-documentary and quease-inducing," Bez categorically characterized the literary attempts of the erstwhile wag. "He was sentenced to imprisonment after his technical school, and he was serving a seven-year term for a fight. True, at first he got four years, but then they added three more for his long tongue."

"I believe it, he can..." Yul frequently contrived to get it in the neck for wittiness and defiant ridicule even in his youth, and as a convict in the "zone", he apparently did not get out of the lockup. "And how is he now, still quipping?"

"Without a break. But all his gags are smutty, in the spirit of camp yarns," Bez twisted his mouth with disgust, being a well-to-do, dapper, spick and span lucky man smelling of Parisian toilet water, who, thanks to the choice of the right beaten path, was dressed to the nines with refinement and in the latest fashion, in a good double-breasted three-piece suit ennobling him, with a finely selected tie, not officially faceless but not gaudily garish. "It must be said, he looks like a hardened criminal even outwardly, so that it was not in vain that he sweated on the bunk."

"Compromised you, huh?" he vividly imagined this meeting in the editorial office. "He barged, grimy swine, in your 'nook of socialism' and blasted all your idyll."

"It's a pity that it didn't hit me to send him to you," Bez remarked. "He is a psycho, you know, with conceit, so I hardly got rid of him."

"And to help him maybe, there were no options?"

"Yeah, to help in order that he will sit on my neck," said Bez. "In my career, I myself wade through such difficulties that the bones crack and the buttons fly off, and you tell me about 'options'..."

"Anyway, you could try for the sake of your conscience. You might show it to someone, for instance."

"There is nothing to show there, for his scribbling is void of art and any decency. Perhaps he'll manage to foist his naturalistic essays on journalists, for using somewhere, but to literature they don't belong."

"Harsh sentence..."

"Harsh but just. They bring their pathetic attempts every day, all who feel like it; they demand, beg, pester, cajole, whimper, insist and threaten, and who, one wonders, they are? Plebeians, excuse me, illiterate louts, ignoramuses and graphomaniacs."

"Put the epithet 'benighted' here," he advised.

"All sorts!" flared up the nervous defender of national literature. "You don't encounter them, and it's easy for you to pity them, while round me they are swarming like midges flying to a lamp."

It seems, Yul having a sharp evil tongue already hurt his friend by some tactless escapade for the intention to ditch him in his outcastness and brush aside his writings which Yul pinned his hopes on.

"You're our luminary, forsooth!" he laughed at Bez's likening. "Most importantly, don't overheat in your service. However hard you try you won't succeed in scorching all the cultural field."

"It would be more or less bearable if something deserving attention emerges, but no!" The profoundly insulted guardian of the aesthetic purity of the "cultural area" grabbed the full vial of his wrath. "Meanwhile art is not dimensionless."

"Art in the sense of 'trough'? It means that you pushed Yul off from your ship and did not let him catch hold of a chance," he summed up without too much emotionality. "He, probably, also wanted to win a place in the sun."

"He can do what he want, but without me."

Flushed Bez swallowed the next drink at one go and suddenly burst into an ardent cutting retort, breathing cognac on the unexpected accuser:

"It's not only that he don't have a command of correct literary language and incapable of presenting anything, apart from the experience of humiliation, squalor and prison shitted latrines, but he is also a boor! He tagged along with me to the editorial office for his stories, and I brought him, as a decent one, to my department, but this bastard cussed all of us out at first, and then hurled a decanter at the bookcase! The glass smashed to smithereens, all the manuscripts got wet, just imagine what havoc was... He made a scene and bolted out, and I had to be answerable for all his outrages and to explain who he was, and from where, and what was my relationship to him... No, thanks, it is not my fault that every rotter throws a fit in my presence."

"But, beyond doubt, you worked out the problem, didn't you? By the way, you don't fear to get plastered, drinking at such a pace?" he inquired from the "master of artistic pouring", who was again empting the bottle, because today Bez was knocking back wineglasses too bravely and purposefully.

"Maybe, that's my goal to be soused," Bez assured, grinning. "And to kick up a row here, like Yul at my work. And then I'll see how you'll react."

"Only bear in mind that, unlike you, I occasionally visit the gym, so you're no match for me in close combat."

"Oh-oh, I'm scared," Bez began to act the fool, shielding himself with the pot-bellied branded bottle. "Brute force and felons are everywhere, what dreadful folk!"

"For poet, 'the folk' is himself," he dropped. "Therefore, question your own soul on this, and not anyone."

"It is if there is something to ask about," Bez got ready to sink a wee drop more. "But what if there are no questions?"

"Accumulate, buddy. Go adrift and accumulate, for in a hurry, poetry isn't arising."

"Your husband is a major specialist in free advices," stopping halfway, Bez complained of him in a pesky tone of a petty calumniator to Nadine, who entered the kitchen. "He wants me to renounce the world and enroll in the hermits, as, I remember, Saint Jerome in the picture with a skull."

"This, rather, is his future, let him not shift the blame to the others..." Nadine cast her attentive tired eye over the wineglasses and the faces of the men, but the state of the drinkers did not seem alarming to her, and, having wrapped her home warm bathrobe tighter, she sat down on a free stool by the white tiled wall near the sink, so that both of them were in her field of vision. "You, Bezik, Orpheus, and you, thus, will be torn to pieces by maenads."

"That is, my admirers?" Bez construed her prediction optimistically.

"That is, your repressed lyrical desires," he offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth of the ill-starred singer, who was pacifying both flora and fauna with the harmony of sounds humanized into music, but did not cope with the primordial Dionysianism of human instincts. "He who encroaches on his own freedom releases the demons of speechlessness."

"Someone's quote?" asked Bez, stroking the bottle lovingly.

"Here's a quote if you like." It would be presumptuous to appropriate the authorship of this thought, for on "the world as a text" and on consciousness as a translator-co-creator, many thinkers discoursed for six millennia, and the temporarily foreign languages of speculative comprehensions, intuitive clairvoyance and hair-splitting introspections did not deceive him at all regarding the true subject of disputes, interpretations and proofs. "From Abelard. 'To vanquish with words what we cannot vanquish with deeds'. It's a recommendation, as though specially for literati."

"How intellectual you are both," Nadine was mockingly astounded, lightly massaging her temples, for she again read until she got a headache. "But I meant your gift of mimicry. Since you are able to do everything, you replace one internal task with many external ones..."

"Which has a pernicious effect on lyrics. He already regaled me with this, your philosopher."

Bez again poured himself mechanically, and only here remembered about gallantry.

"Will you drink with us? My treat."

"No, thank. Maybe it's time to drink tea?" Nadine smiled at Bez's grand gesture.

The majority was in favor, and Nadine got busy on making tea at the stove, and he set to taking off the shelf the birthday tea service and the chocolate cookies reserved for Victoria; meanwhile Bez, taking advantage of the pause in the conversation for arranging the cups and saucers, tossed off a couple of shots more with the same lemon & cheese, so that by evening tea, he reached a new degree of tipsiness.

"Besides, you, probably, are too often forced to read some shoddy," sitting down between them at the table, Nadine resumed her interrupted conversation about Bez's poems. "Instead of Eliot or Wystan Auden. You, I remember, extolled them at the university among the modern English-speaking."

"Verbiage, like all of ours," the experienced "professional of the pen" made a wry face to convey contempt for foreigners as such. "Rhetoric. I'd have borrowed a bit from Robert Frost, but it's also verbiage."

"True, others are no better, whoever you take: either buffoonery and declarations, or petty psychologism and routine," Bez went on caviling at the world poetry, alternating the sipping of tea with slugs of cognac. "Why on earth I must spend time on their bagatelles, if I have little time to write my own masterpieces..."

Bez could have added that he continually spent a lot of time on his reviews of manuscripts, and on acquainting with the literary "verbiage" of his eminent colleagues in the union, and, following the fashion, on that "reading range" which was obligatory in his ambitiously envious milieu of writers, yet here it was not about tastes, but about direct profit and conjuncture, so it would have been unchaste and extremely unpoetic to display his hypocritical and functional self to friends.

"Do you still hear something 'your own'?" Nadine asked gingerly. "Your lyric imitations aren't detrimental to you?"

"On the contrary, they are useful," Bez immediately got persisting in his fallacy. "In such a way, I'm finding out the difference between my own and someone else's."

"Commendable, but hardly plausible," he interjected in an inflammatory tone. "In art, the only argument is the very fact of the work. So come on, do what did you threaten to do."

"I promised him a rhyme,' Bez notified Nadine, stubbornly flavoring his tea with the remnants of cognac. "Won't forbid it?"

"I'll even ask you," Nadine mildly sanctioned the "poetry readings" of her fellow student, and her minstrel concurrently, who waited for her request.

"I never refuse you anything!" Bez uttered pompously, with drunken aplomb, and announced loudly: "Canoe!"

"So it's called," Bez confidentially explained to the slow-witted ones and put down his empty wineglass at last. "But it is unpublishable, alas."

Then, sadly gazing askance through the window at the acacias covered with unnatural blue neon snow and illuminated all night, Bez suddenly began to recite measuredly and gloomy, with a frozen expression of his usually mobile thin face:

"Wherever we row across God's abyss,

at sea, my canoe is alone...

The cockleshells and vast--there's nothing but this;

the rest is your fantasy's loan.


I go ashore--on the next saving lie

that seems real earth and firm ground...

Then, melting away, all the mirages die,

and through their 'good', I gaze round.


By commonness, now my music is rent,

through triteness, my hearing gropes...

The miry pettiness, swamping the land,

destroys all my wishes and hopes.


The continent sinks into life... And in vain

the bog teaches me froggy lessons...

To sea, I put out to wander again,

in quest of the only essence.


In thought I am sleeplessly lost--and at last,

with freedom, I get self-reliance

to paddle my canoe in the middle of the vast

of Ocean of consonant silence.


My talent is still God's recalcitrant pet

and God is a prompt to my bother

which way my persistent canoe has to head--

past transience--further and further..."

Listening spellbound to the reading of this strange new poem, he covered his eyes with his palm, and Bez's voice seemed to flow from outside, from the real kitchen, into his soul that was being eroded, line-by-line, by the whistling surf of the snow and opening defenselessly and permeably to the boundless icy vastness of the snowy night expanse, until the echoes of the rhymes swirling in the blizzard were carried away into the moonless whitish murk and became sounding only in his memory, while the lifeless muteness of the dreary winter desert was decreasingly resounding with the muffled chime and rustle of the poetic lines, and he went whirling away in the whirlwind along the endlessly flat, frozen crust, tearing off the crumbly loose blanket of recent thawed patches and rushing as the fiercely seething thickness of the blind all-devouring snowstorm above the spots of the denuded barren soil, hardened from severe frosts; and when the unceasing eddy of his squall collapsed into the cold as a dissipating cloud of airy silvery dust, whereas the space again narrowed down to the stanzas once uttered by their author and he took away his hand from his eyes, Nadine was no longer beside him, and Bez, sober and cheerful, was sitting opposite at the table, covered with a fresh white tablecloth, that was located near the daylight window half-draped with wavy gauze curtains, in the niche formed by the backs of wooden sofas, in the large restaurant hall, almost empty at this relatively early hour.

*

Today, on his birthday, on the eve of the home celebratory supper and tomorrow's celebration at the work, Bez insisted, nevertheless, on a dinner date here, in this restaurant near his house, where they met after a long break, independent of them, for a new ironic summation of controversial "successes" or undeniable achievements, especially as the February thirty-third anniversary of Bez coincided with the so-called "creative day", free from going to the publishing office, and he was through with lectures at the university by lunchtime, unlike the invited, but busy Nadine.

"You're again bored?" asked Bez, taking down something occurred to him in his little notebook, whose cover was a picture in the vein of Palekh with a bucolic curly swain among pretty lambs and ruddy wenches in sarafans, to beguile the time in anticipation of their order. "After we'll quaff a dram of cognac for a start, all your philosophy will evaporate from you, I think."

"Just as your poetry," he returned courtesy to Bez. "You, I see, are again creating."

"Only incidentally," Bez slammed his writing casket.

"Why so?"

"It makes no sense. Write or not write, there is no one to read now."

"About 'no one' you exaggerate," he doubted out of politeness. "Someone buys your books after all."

"It is really 'someone'. There's no difference for them to read my poems or some of our Old Believers laureates."

"The difference indeed doesn't exist in art. For you, your verses are a matter of life and death, for you it is self-immolation, 'creative feat' and other superlatives, whereas for a normal consumer, all your texts and destinies are a kind of entertainment, commodity, excuse me, and often of poor quality; and he chooses you according to his own taste, while the taste of the majority is not very refined."

"And what follows from this? That I should make waves for boosting my reputation? To jostle my way to a high post in order to inflate the circulations? 'Advertisement is engine of commerce'?"

"There is also a proof by contradiction, in the capacity of a mocker, an avant-garde brawler, a snob and an 'unrecognized genius', such an advertisement is no worse. Or, in principle, you may write nothing at all, the main thing is that your name flashes everywhere. You want to become famous for something, don't you? To remain forever in the history of contemporary art, right?"

"It is a natural desire for an artist, without irony..."

To employ all the borrowed-innovative "formalistic" argumentation in full splendor Bez hadn't enough time because of the waiter, a stocky strong chap with a leaden gaze, a stony mug of a hired killer and a blue tattoo "1949" on his hairy tough fingers of a boxer, who brought a flask-shaped glass decanter with five-star cognac, two porcelain square bowls with intricate pyramids of meat salad, two cold bottles of Narzan and two plates with oily slices of salmon laid out in a three-card fan among grainy-orange islands of red caviar, lemon wedges and black shiny olives-the order of the solvent Bez, which was supposed to be continued by the mushroom hodgepodge famous among the regulars, pork tenderloin, Turkish coffee, ice cream, and their after-dinner relocation to the bar.

"The feeding without exotic delicacies, but substantial", as this connoisseur of restaurant cuisine had prefaced their today Spartan repast, because Bez was an old-timer of similar city establishments, and with his extensive knowledge of the culinary palette of the most fashionable "places of entertainment", he could have earned money as a guide with visiting revelers, if only the prosperous Bez needed gratuitous drinks at someone else's booze-ups, considering that the applicants for literary fame and fees, who were dependent on him, quite compensated for the moral damage from his sycophantic drinking parties with those influential people on whom Bez himself depended.

"I remembered your 'Canoe', for some reason," he said, watching Bez animatedly pour cognac and Narzan into crystal glasses and "goblets", after the unsociably silent waiter unloaded the snacks and left them. "Your foresight doesn't come true, I see."

"Thank God that it doesn't come true," Bez parried, putting the green Narzan bottle, covered with the frosty perspiration tearfully cut in some places by sliding sparkling beads of swelling drops. "Let fanatics be heroes, hardworking mediocrity, but their 'greatness' does not attract me somehow, I don't suffer from gigantomania... Better to live like us--easily and unconstrainedly; inflexibility and intractability are the portion of the unenlightened thickheads."

"So, let's drink to my health!" the birthday boy clinked glasses with him. "May I be loved and live to see my memoirs."

"Fully subscribe to the toast."

The cognac gurgled softly in their throats; the empty wineglasses were put down back onto the snow-white starchy tablecloth with its stiff hanging corner, where one could see a faded restaurant stamp; and the cast heavy forks started muffledly clanging against the porcelain, picking, digging and scooping up appetizing hillocks and pieces.

Since Bez did not intend to carouse seriously, now he was breaking his fast slowly and in small doses, without muddling the conversational episodes of their companionable meeting by drunken shaming of "those who forgo and skip toasts" and by swashbuckling tavern demands to waiters "to change the decanter"; so that during their dinner, they were bandying banters without inadvertent irreconcilable dissension or ostracism of Dutch courage, no matter how unpleasant some manners of Bez were to him, for this "professional poet" had become pretty hardened in siding with pertinent groups, in intrigue and elitist get-togethers, although before the friend, as it came into fashion now, Bez made himself out to be one of the subversives of the "classics", outdated in all respects and emasculated to toothless epigonism, that was disintegrating in a collage-kitsch dump of signs-splinters into bricks of cliché of various cultures and literatures being mounted in surreal-random compilations of quotation blocks and doomed, according to representatives of the next wave of decadence stuffed with undigested informative mishmash, to be crushed by an incoherent computer set of avant-garde lettering dismemberment and combination dissolving in the contemplative tendentiousness of a blank page, or by the automatism of the pretentiously-slovenly "stream of consciousness", or by the deliberate absurdity of the sneering cento and other yesterday's innovations of individualistic-rebellious trends and fads in the art of their age of confusion, totalitarian consolidations and hangover misanthropies, which were being elevated to the absolute anew. Such an overload with an alien past, either cherished in museums as permanent "great paragons" and Procrustean standards for everything new, or being chewed skeptically in allusions and in flaunting neophyte "aesthetic equipment", was caustically called "antiquarian culture" by Nietzsche; while he, stubbornly disputing the allegedly happened transformation of contemporary philosophy into the history of philosophy, drew parallels with the final stage of Hellenism that was just so dismembering and disemboweling any texts of the original "basic" myth of antiquity and, as a result, gave rise to the world meaning of Christianity from the decomposition of the former mythology, which, having disclosed itself both in the Renaissance "supermanhood" and in the godless swarm "communism", was subjected in the era of the next finale to irreverent non-sacred readings, secular blasphemous juggling and sacrilegious denials, to protective-adaptive modernizations and to placement in a previously unthinkable row of other meanings, so as to be sprayed along with them into a certain original philosophical mixture of the future synthesis and of erecting--a person as a word, and the universe as a context of all textual structures of the planetary civilization that was now emerging--on some new "basic" comprehension.

Be that as it may, the "historical conditionality" of the protest against the obtrusive archaism and of the renunciation of the canonical prioritization of "good" and "bad" gradually corroded even his soul, which, true, was not very frazzled out under the onerous burden of the cultural baggage that was being immediately smelted down in his mental reactor and tabularly compartmentalized, and which, in contrast to the captious nihilistic fighters with their own alphabetical elementariness, was accepting the past without exceptions and bilious deletions, as the whole of the Word-Logos pronounced by humanity (remembering in his omnivorous erudition "Reality is created by the mind" by Plato, or "It belongs to the wise person to order" by Aristotle, or "No essence is evil in itself" by Thomas Aquinas); however, although over the years something in him also more and more palpably resisted the mundane and, so to speak, immanent programmed mandatoriness of his university and family "philistinism", nonetheless, the secondary shallowness and self-satisfied "privateness" of this transitional poetic generation irritated him with the discrepancy between scandalously loud self-promotion and the meagerness of the presented opuses, which again willy-nilly broached the same undemocratic subject of the debate about the "genius" that was supposedly ridiculed forever and that, contrary to all theories, had the property of manifesting itself always timely and realizing triumphantly in some life material seeming unsuitable for creativity, imparting the integrity of the living, unacceptable for the pygmy decadence, to all the fragmented and disintegrated reality and filling even desperately discoverable nonsense with the magnetic strange meaning of its giftedness.

"You see, trouvere of ours," he was enlightening Bez in a pause between eating up the celebrated hodgepodge and expecting the legendary meat, in response to lamentations about the deafness and unreceptivity of the "readership". "Ambition and vanity are concomitant factors, I would say, and the choice for true talent is quite traditional--to live either for creativity or some kind of life: private, public, heroic--it is all the same, in essence, most important is the vector of direction, on talent or on something secondary. Banality, I don't deny it, but everyone in miniature is everything and all, and this story, alas, repeats every time. Like in your case, for example."

"I'm combining," said Bez, complacently lolling on the seat of the sofa with a glass of ice Narzan covered with fizzy bubbles from the inside and pensively looking through the large window at the obliquely flying fine snow which, like white hatching, was diagonally shading the asphalt area of car parking, slightly powdered towards the curbs, and the wide white lawn with the figures of pedestrians crossing the distant street behind. "And you're not merely banal, you're old-fashioned. With this categoricalness of yours in our plebeian time, you not only miss an opportunity to indulge yourself in 'pure art', but you also lose your last chances. You are destined to perish, as they say, for nothing, ingloriously, in obscurity, and worse, as a talentless mediocrity. Do you think I would be freer and more productive as an outcast and a beggar?"

"I think, to pander to triteness means to profane talent," he stated the inevitable gist of any regulated art.

"You, thus, for dilettantism? What's sung is sung, there is equality for all in our society!" with arrogant sarcasm, Bez incinerated the other unlucky aspirants to the title of "true talent".

"One is related to the other," he incidentally compared the poles of market. "All is equal as commodity, and therefore all is equal as product, it is the typical psychology of our mass-like period and the typical loss of criteria. There is no equality in art, just as in nature, there are equal conditions there at best. The basis of that is the substitution of God by yourself, and you are not alone in such a substitution," he expanded his review philosophically. "Everyone is on his own; reality is 'the phantom of my consciousness'; hence I am the only one of my kind, matchless and incomparable... Which, of course, is true, but exclusively for me."

He moved closer the plate set by the haughty waiter, with a browned chunk of baked pork edged with golden potato straw, beet-color cubes of pickled cabbage and a handful of green peas, and took a fork and knife, swallowing saliva but mentorically concluding his cursory excursus in the personalistic underpinnings of the democratic equalization of God-chosen and God-forsaken individuals:

"But without unity in the whole, without God in us as in His hypostases and the different potentials of His expression in our talents, the dilemma is insoluble, and a genius is no different from the most incorrigible mediocrity."

While imbibing the undiluted aromatic cognac and enjoying the juicy flesh of a pig butchered to please their hedonism, they were distracted, naturally, from axiological abstractions; and the haunting theme of talent again surfaced from their ingenuous dialogues about wives, children and "actual signs of the epoch" already over ice cream and coffee, when they were relaxing in the after-dinner languor, satiety, and laziness.

"In the Occident, I would have prospered," Bez yawned, breaking off with a teaspoon a part of the creamy chocolate ball glazed with orange syrup and sprinkled with crushed walnuts. "There everything is clear both with genres and with a genuine hierarchy, according to merits, and not due to protection and nepotism, and talent gets the green light everywhere."

"Not everyone gets such a light there, don't idealize their democracy," he couldn't but stand up for talents that did not succeed in taking their rightful place in the rigidly formalized art of the well-organized satisfaction of various tastes, dictating, maybe, more favorable conditions for the game, but being no less indifferent sometimes to noncompetitive "curiosities" and gifted "bankrupts". "Over and above that, independence costs one dear everywhere, and as a rule, it is you who pay for 'free creativity', without any payment to you. Or your understanding of freedom is changing."

"As to freedom, you noticed very rightly," Bez approved of his last logical move, washing down the cold sweetness of ice cream with a sip of thick hot Turkish coffee. "For you, talent is a duty, while for me, it is a gift, and there is no need to lump us together. As we like, so we dispose of our talents."

"In my opinion, a talent for its owner is simply a more or less strong desire to do just that, and not something else."

Bez was undoubtedly a virtuoso of self-justifying maneuvering, but he understood something of this kind of stratagems, too, for they once started in a similar situation, not very favorable for their talents.

"The desire that turns at times into obsession and self-denial, so it is strong," he finished the phrase. "But the point is that there is always a certain non-randomness of its freedom in talent, and the more talented you are, the more obligatory your creativity is, as it were."

"To whom?" Bez asked, eating the ice cream.

"I don't know," he answered. "To the Almighty, probably-in the person of all mankind. Actually, there is no objective measure in art, as well as in the very cognition of man, and all criteria are some derivative of the constantly changing social contract, as the theories dominating in modern philosophy assert. However, if at the average level, any taste gradations are really problematic, then the extremes obviously differ, as necessity and randomness. Truly creative thing is perceived as what should be, while the untrue one-as what is not obligatory, hence our attitude to creativity and the degree of responsibility."

"And you can name a distinguishing feature?" Bez, slightly riled by his merciless division, peered searchingly into his eyes, licking a tea-spoon.

"Presumably it is an energy aura, but this is in art," he dealt the final blow, without suspecting it, to the poet losing his flair for creation in the hopeless prosaicism of getting stuck in success and either squandering himself therefore in his dexterous hack-working wordiness or falling into the fussy restlessness of the schoolboyishly-strained "experiments" and "exercises", whose profitless impracticality compensated for the gradual extinction of the energy of inspiration that was not accumulated, nor replenished by sensitive all-generating silence. "Aquinas once assured that God in being is attracted to himself with all his incarnation, as if in some kind of love longing; and I deem that every talent is a certain charge of attraction, whereas the self-worth of what is created and you as you are today depends on your desire. In a word, 'Hearken yourself,' as Moses said, and I suppose, he knew what was worth preaching."

"Again, you've driven me into my hypochondria," Bez got saddened, leaning back on the wooden back of the sofa after he had finished with the dessert. "What a swinish soothsayer you are, though. 'Desire', 'aura', 'God', and where should I get them if I don't sense them? Cease being high for a minute and listen to what I've written only just..."

Bez reached into the pocket for his Palekh notebook with the memorable black-lacquer miniature composition.

"I'm all attention."

He humbly placed his cup on the saucer and, his fingers crossed on the tablecloth, sympathetically prepared to listen to Bez's newborn poetic opus.

"It's named 'The marsh'..."

Bez leafed through the pages with the numbers of many telephones up to the sheets "for notes" and began to read without his usual acting, quietly and distinctly:

"I bear still my weight! Even if I'm like a felon,

and in this way to trudge, it means 'to toil and moil'...

Since the vast marshland is unbounded and barren

my feet already sink into the swampy soil.


I bear still my fate! Which is untimely rare,

which is a suicidal and hopeless extreme...

The same quagmire waits around everywhere,

but I plod looking at the sun that's so dim.


I bear still my wait! Beneath, instead of ground,

the bottomless morass oozes its fetid slime...

The vapor of the bog is flickering around...

I don't waver and it is my dreadful crime!"

"Very dramatic," he interrupted the fallen oppressive silence. (Bez, with his tragic subtext, was trying to solicit the sympathy that he did not deserve.) "Muse is a jealous lass, didn't you know? She usually punishes the infidels."

"In short, didn't feel it," Bez grumbled, closing his notebook.

"What exactly?"

He drank up his coffee and looked again at Bez's face with the sullenly downcast eyes and sulkily pursed lips, but now he looked with that detached cold intentness with which he scrutinized his own face during the hours of nightly causeless outbursts-landslides of inexorable doubt in all the prosperity built over the seven postgraduate years and in all the impeccability of his systematic selfless labor of rationalistic vivisection, comparative differentiation and commenting on someone's teachings, thoughts and interpretations of previous maxims and categories.

"In fact, you fail to combine your hypostases, and you aren't up to refuse what you are accustomed to," he delivered his verdict. "That's why you are agonizing: the elements haven't calmed down yet, while there is no food for it, either emotional or spiritual... But agony, including talents', is a painful spectacle, despite your embellishment. Especially when the fault is not creativity, but marketable imitations, and not self-giving, but self-plundering."

"Nice birthday speech," Bez nervously adjusted the knot of his respectably fashionable tie. "You reproach me with your 'God', but you yourself have not a drop of mercy."

"The one whom much has been given to, has much to answer for," he got away with his favorite proverb. "I don't hinder your bartering of your soul for something material, since it's your choice and your life, but don't expect forgiving leniency from me."

"I don't expect, I don't need it," Bez replied brusquely. "One might think that you aren't bartering anything in your life, for your peace and for the sake of your family."

"And for the sake of my main occupation. This is in the first place," he delimited their current positions. "You, meantime, turn from an artist into a mediocre artisan, into a 'soviet-writing' clerk."

"Kafka was a clerk, and what?" Bez instantly drew a couple of analogies. "And Tyutchev was. Faulkner was a farmer, and Fet was a landowner in the time of serfdom, although a lyrist."

"I'm talking not about belonging to class, but about your priorities," he told Bez. "In a person, everything is founded on his God, both his whole universe and all his 'hierarchies'. If the world begins with you and ends with you, then you are verily God, like the Roman Caesars."

"And what are you getting at?" the birthday boy, denounced by him, asked grumpily.

"At the eternal verity that for God the goal is Himself. And for you as for a 'private person', art will be always something secondary, a kind of additional innocuous hobby, while for you as for an artist, art would be meaning, selflessness and self-creation, and not your fragmentary 'self-expression' only."

"I don't see the difference," Bez said, pulling a plump wallet from his jacket.

"Nonetheless, it's so. The difference is not in nature, but in us: if you are born a poet, you must remain a poet, and your specific personal mission consists just in this. And if you betray your talent, you have only yourself to blame: aside from absurdity, the soul will not reward you with anything, because you can become God properly only through your talent, the rest is transient, unfortunately."

"At first he scolded me, now he plagues me with his sermons," Bez slapped the embossed leather wallet on the table in exasperation. "Let's say I become God, but how shall I publish my creations, in what way? Or art, in your opinion, is the contemplation of my guts?"

"Technologically, yes. Everything arise from me, and everything is me, art is just like that, no matter how it is perverted."

"Consequently, my art should not influence anyhow?"

"Art as the will to power is left in the tradition of the last century." The question of domination he resolved for himself a long time ago. "Ideas take possession of the masses, brainwashing, popularity of mass culture and such like... No, Bezel, you should not influence, but enlarge man by you, man who is all humanity and each of us. Just create what you can, for to influence there are a lot of barkers without you."

"That's what I mean! Why I'm obliged to waive my privileges in favor of some pups? Why any toadying worm will be able to wangle both popularity and dibs, while my labor will be unpaid and for nothing, for my archive? What, am I unworthy, or am I a duffer and loser?" pronounced Bez, choking with anger and banging his wallet on the table in time with the rhetorical periods of his philippic.

"A certain Yeshua in Jerusalem was more worthy and far-sighted, but, however, he did not dodge his crucifixion," he damped Bez's oratorical ardor. "Of course, on the one hand, you have the temptation of fame, on the other hand, the ordeal of obscurity; meanwhile alone with the imperfect world order, man is weak and infirm, and he himself is the only one on whom he can rely... But, as I told you once, there's one step from self-affirmation to self-destruction, and in our time, this step is very short."

"I don't understand your allegories, be so kind as to speak simpler."

After beating his pocket money-box against the table, like a dry fish in a beerhouse, Bez put it before him on the tablecloth.

"Okay, I'll try briefly," he willingly accepted the challenge to show his trump cards. "Let's project the whole process onto our historical experience, because no one knows anyone save himself... So, in the most ancient initial concept, man is part of God, just as the whole world, and purifying his natural earthly materiality, he dissolves in God. Which is probably true in principle, but completely excludes any sense of your individual incarnation, and if it weren't for realistic corrections, the human race could, in essence, end its way then, without suffering in vain further. That is, as in a separate life, every truth is good when it's relevant, and every wisdom is comprehensible to our mind in due time, otherwise we would have nothing to live for and self-denial would prevail instead of self-development."

"That is what you're nudging me to," Bez remarked.

"To this slanderous demarche of yours I'll reply, too," without wasting time on a petty squabble, he reined in his impatient friend. "After that, we see the first individualization of man, still as some peculiar part of nature and the ancient cosmos. That is, his heathen physicality, his individuality, is no longer happenstance, and he himself is already unique, even if as a unique combination of primary elements... Which, by the way, is also beyond doubt."

"To your mind, they all are right?" his agitated listener caught him in contradictoriness. "How about objective verities?"

"According to Nicholas of Cusa, reason is as close to verity as a polygon is close to a circle. Can imagine it?" he slightly slowed the pace.

In mathematics, Bez was even more unversed, therefore an arsenal of such logistics should not have been used.

"Then, on the breakup of the preceding civilizations and summing up, there comes the second phase of humanization of God, or the second round of individualization, Christianity, the most interesting for us, because, with all its later ascetic extremes, in it man is finally complete, and, being the hypostasis of God, he does not discontinue to be flesh and personality, but, on the contrary, he, so to say, humanizes the divinity in himself and deifies the human... In a word, here man remains himself in God and does not renounce himself therefore, valuing his 'self', his separate soul, above all else, which, according to the logic of intrinsic value, naturally leads to the willfulness of the Renaissance 'humanism' and develops afterwards into mass willfulness, into 'everything is permitted' of seeming godlessness, and at the beginning of the third global round, that explodes with 'people's revolutions' as self-assertions of cohesive mediocrity rising in the name of its own exaltation and imposing itself by outright violence on everything that surpasses it, and with the arbitrariness of the rebellious 'masses' giving rise to all systems of mass-like fraternal slavery. That is, since the former world order is already lived through, the former social structure is disintegrating again and man falls out into a crowd of loners as a typical specimen, unprepared for loneliness and unadapted to it, then grouping together into herds and packs is underway anew, which is somewhat localizing the Hobbesian 'war of all against all'..."

"Now let's revert to your case," he held back his inappropriate lecture eloquence. "It is not a secret for you that the system is organized in conformity with primitiveness, while rebelliousness turns out to be a desire for power and subordination and a change from the dominance of orthodox and obscurant obtuseness to the dominance of unbridledly boorish and aggressively bellicose baseness, so the question of freedom is in effect a question of joining--the system of crowd or the crowd of system. But here and there, freedom is unattainable and imaginary, and here and there you are dependent, whatever they use to compel you to 'orient yourself' towards something-ideology, market conditions, or the 'voice of the silent people'--and try to please wide audience or a narrow circle..."

"In short, freedom is fiction. Discovered America..."

The waiter, who came up again, glanced contemptuously over the windbags concluding their meal and presented the bill to Bez, and even Bez's generous tip did not soften this indifferently insolent guy in the least--he retreated with the same dispassionately uppity air of a owner who deigned to serve some insignificant customers, affording the gabbing "intelligentsia" the opportunity to relish the paid dishes to the full.

"The country of lackeys louts," Bez muttered, fastening his wallet.

"Loutishness is compensation for inferiority," he solaced the poet hurt by the inattention of the serving staff, who had fallen under the arm of this semi-criminal upstart parvenu in a chain of the conceited nonentities taking their nothingness out on others, and who intended most likely to vent his resentment on some amateur "paper stainers", whose manuscripts were entrusted to him for "inner reviews" which, under the pen of such selectively-truthful "responsible" and "objective" specialists as Bez, often turned into a barefaced mockery of the works gloatedly lambasted by reviewers and into the shameless discrediting of naive authors. "And your freedom is in you, nowhere else. In materialized freedom one faces the beginning of enslavement."

"I'm simplifying, don't pout," he reacted to Bez's martyred grimace. "Since on the third round of his individualization, man can no longer be contented by all the former unities, both in nature, and in equality before God, and in human communities, and, losing his qualitative significance in the mass-likeness of the quantity, he hatches out of them, stark naked, into the metaphysical 'every man for himself', while he 'himself' is unthinkable, unfortunately, outside nature, God and humanity, such a man, declaring himself the center of everything at once and comprehensively closing his universe by his personality, is powerless, nevertheless, to get rid of inclusion in these communities in flesh, in mind, and in deeds, that's why he rebels against them, and that's why there are reversions to the past instead of some feasible clarification of his new meaning, new beginnings of uniting, and new realization of the super-task of his own development."

"And in what this super-task consists?" Bez broke in on his smooth exposition. "You, know-alls, love to beat about the bush..."

"If unambiguity was characteristic of the language, I could limit myself to one phrase of Blaise Pascal, 'Learn that man infinitely transcends man... Listen to God'," he grinned. "But my understanding is always approximate for others. In particular, I think that man, besides being a component of the biosphere of the earth, or thanks to this, from the moment of the awakening of human consciousness, is a component of planetary consciousness as well, which, in its turn, is a spark of universal consciousness turning into flame in us, in people. We, therefore, are really 'in God' and God is really in us, and here is the key to ourselves: our relatively individual spirit is the space of self-birth of God in His personal diversity, and our freedom, in contrast, is limited by our planetary rootedness. From which it follows that all the regulators of survival and the whole mystery of the destiny and calling of each of us are in our spiritual self-becoming, free for us. When, of course, you feel yourself not as an accidental grain of sand and not as a usurper of the universe that disappears with you, but as a point in the structure of universal light, moreover, as a point ever growing and illuminating all being anew, as a point of immortality, as a point increasing the planetary luminosity and maybe joining in the all-creating radiance of eternity, in the fire, from which we spring up and in which we live internally, changing like salamanders..." he soared, carried away, to the heights of highfaluting pathos.

"Like scolopendras," Bez corrected.

"And as for the structures which you get stuck in," he ignored this remark, "they are someone's extremely clumsy texts, where you cannot put in your word, however hard you jostle, and where all your insets and all your fire are to be consumed by everyday piffle and balderdash... Meaninglessness is a dangerous symptom, for the loss of meaning is a direct consequence of the substitution of freedom and God in oneself for something worldly and philistine, for ersatz, I would say."

"Philistine is not a swear word for me." Bez unapproachably puffed out his chest with the fashionable tie and proudly squared the padded shoulders of his gray two-piece suit with a steel sheen. "Besides, you hardly have a right to pin labels on us, because you yourself, I dare aver, are like all of us, and not a chieftain of highwaymen."

"I don't argue. But the 'philistine', as I employ it, appertains to a state of spirit, not to a social stratum or way of life."

The clarification was suited to Bez as exactly as possible, since he surrounded his lyricism so prudently and tightly with so many amortizing layers of his protective well-being which allowed him, "poet by the grace of God", to lead a gay life in the semblances of former festivities and former carefree success that the poetic gift had to be partly spent on growing into this doubtfully nourishing environment cushioning the pressure of the mundanity, and the sincerely innermost "spontaneity" conserved for "imperishable" masterpieces shrank in his unpublishable heresy to solitary episodes and optional distractions from routine affairs at leisure. The main and the auxiliary eventually swapped places with each other, while the talent got encapsulated in its "readable" applied emanations, and, imperceptibly transforming, Bez rounded into a no longer "painful" average-normal cell of the putrefactively decomposing tissue of the "social organism", into a floridly superfluous textual appendage in Stalin's Empire style, such as a phallic-dashing exclamation mark absurdly sticking up in a dull narrative amid the asexually gemmating boredom.

However, on second thoughts, even he, seemingly alien to the apostate Bez, was also falling under his own ruthless characterization, and the "discursive worldview" of Ernst Cassirer figured in the succinct "imiaslavie" of his notebook (in translation, this Russian philosophical teaching meant "glorifying God") not for foppish bragging of erudition: outside the more or less established and stable symbols and mental constructions--which, apparently, were both the result of an invention and agreement, and the terminological expression of the semantic structures of the universe being shaped by the human consciousness and discovered by the predecessors, or, if you like, which were the human refraction of the self-knowledge of God--his mind would have wandered for a long time on approaches to a coherent holistic image of the centuries-old spectrum of human visions of the world and oneself in it and could have got muddled in elementary contradictions and in the manipulations of unwieldy-banal and audaciously-ignorant hypotheses; but drilling his mind in assimilating the interconnected basic conceptuality that was not even swayed by Heidegger's exhaustively polynomial, hyphenated phrases in the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, he was involuntarily adopting the structure of the wisdom acquired in the learning, too, and, growing wiser, he could not produce in fact anything of his own, as before, so that it would have gushed out from somewhere inside as a feverish and sensitive verbal fashioning of a sudden "inspiration", because he was thinking, without finding, reproducing all kinds of solitaires of commonplace or over-sophisticated symbolism with a clear knowledge of its origins and historical ancestry.

The paradoxical dialectics of their paths of self-building (in reality for Bez and in the sphere of the spirit for him) were that the active appropriation of what was made and formed before them turned out to be mutual, to their amazement, and, having made a truly Herculean attempt, while infiltrating the appropriated cultural heritage and pushing its boundaries, to humanize the texts of the irreversibly degrading sociality and sufficiently completed and perfect "science of sciences", both of them achieved the opposite, namely the "textualization" of their "selves", which was barely perceptible and not burdensome for their subjective-universal originality previous to that, due to unconsciousness, and which was suppressing their spirit now, forcing them to seek themselves not in utterance, but in the thoughtless silence of meditative contemplation of their numb souls, from whence, instead of the bygone fireworks and waves of insights and revelations, only repetitions and rehashes again and again splashed out, whereas just the smug satisfaction with such surrogates was what he called "philistinism", in contrast to the desire for independent creation that was still stirring and twitching somewhere on the verge of existential darkness.

"But what if my state suits me?" disgruntled Bez attacked him. (He, the "recognized poet", was fed up with such reprimands both in departmental squabbles and in home moralizing-educational dressing-down.) "It is my spirit, not someone else's, and let me be what I am, and not your guinea pig."

"What you are is far from being the whole of you," he wearily leaned his elbows on the hard arm of the sofa. "Man by nature is always much more than he, understood by him and understandable to him, so however much he identifies his individuality with the separateness of a word, or a cell or, for example, a computer chip, the entire volume of the meaning of himself is unobtainable to him."

"Ergo, I need not overstrain myself," Bez deduced practical morality for himself.

"You're at liberty to do what you wish," gazing at the airy-wavy theatrical drapery of the window curtain, he kept indifferently admonishing his friend, probably lost for him. "If you're a seeker after meaning, like some, you must not yield your freedom, but if you decide to assert yourself, like the majority, God help you. Then you can concoct a poetic production novel about a furniture factory, Veneer Sheet, and accumulate a collection of unpublished lyric poetry for posterity under the code name Metamorphoses of Marasmus..."

"I really do such a collection," Bez suddenly said. "Here's one of my unpublished confessions. Hopefully you won't be disappointed this time."

"Apostle," Bez proclaimed evenly and began to read:

"I speak about verity-profound

to the despair of the rotten culture's swears

and to the savages, who brandish clubs around

above the skull of tiny Earth of theirs.


I speak--at the abyss of superstition--

to alter ego that's in this Etna here--

about human kind's enlightening mission

in the twilight of cruelty and fear.


I speak--when words are blood and people spill it--

when firstly you must come into your own...

To pagans I explain what is 'God's spirit',

inscrutable to them and still unknown..."

Bez, who was sitting opposite, went on speaking something, opening the mouth in a visible effort of speech, but no sound was heard, and the nervous bony face of a potential ulcer patient seemed to begin to smudge in the oblique hatching of the snow falling from nowhere and to get rubbed off, melting away together with all the dematerializing surroundings being washed away by this blizzard retouch and disappearing gradually in the measured inexorable flight of snowfall until the blurry interior of the restaurant hall with the last erased outlines of the ephemeral sofas, tables and high window openings was replaced, having evaporated forever, by the meager furnishings of the room familiar from childhood appearing through all that and by the reality of his father's double-pedestal desk and of his ottoman, on which, wrapped up in the plaid, he sat near the shabby sidewall of the old wardrobe, looking at the snow falling in the dark square of the night window of his parents' flat, where, left alone at last, he was passing the night with his stepfather, who was snoring behind the wall, after today's libations of funeral repast and the freezing cold of burial at the out-of-town windswept immense cemetery in the piercing icy wind during the modest, without long speeches and orchestras, send-off of his suddenly deceased mother.

*

Her heart gave out and stopped for no reason, for, in all probability, it was too frayed over the years of her rather hard life that was not some entirely joyless drudgery labor, of course, but included hardship and adversity in difficult times, not to mention the war; and she was taken to the morgue straight from work, so he learned of her death only in the evening, from his stepfather dazed by this misfortune, who reported on the phone: "Mother died; come to me; we must decide about funeral..."; and then he went whirling in some delusionally detailed conversations about the organization of the forthcoming ceremony (a standard set of "ritual services", the last mourning-strict apparel of the deceased, some preparations for the wake according to the Orthodox rite and for convening her friends, colleagues and relatives for the sad event) and in various trips to the requisite bureaus and addresses with listening to someone's heartfelt or sparingly formal condolences, which he could not accept with the due measure of tragedy implied by those who were pitying him, because the death, which dumbfounded him, was not grief for him as yet, but a shock and some irrelevant fact of something that really took place, but that was given personally to him indirectly, in recounting it, being abstract and therefore unconvincing despite all its irrefutability.

In pauses, unable to fall asleep in the neurasthenic excitement of excessively energetic (and, alas, leading to nothing) activity, he incoherently sorted out his not very resurrecting memories of her and her motherly love which he did not notice, like everything familiar and natural, in his childhood and which he felt as her causeless anxiety and importunate tutelage in his youth; in an agony of remorse, he berated himself for his old pranks and mischief so often adding gray hair to her and marks to her heart that was pretty worn out both in her adolescent evacuation privation and tribulations, and in her helpless fear for the fate of her husband for many years; and purposelessly imagining the circumstances of her death and the possible non-lethal outcomes of some timely emergency medical assistance, he again and again provoked the new fits of his malicious rage, God knew to whom addressed, by these variants of chances missed by her.

But her death became something roughly-concrete and really irreparable this morning, in the courtyard near the hospital mortuary, where a wooden coffin covered with black cloth, only just taken out of the basement, stood on two painted white stools; and within the coffin, he saw a woman laying on white satin with her ossified arms crossed on her chest, with her haggard ash-wax face, with the lowered eyelids frozen in the sunken eye sockets, and with the pursed lips, who had only remote likeness to his living mother as she was a week ago; and during the saying goodbye, short due to frost, at the inconspicuous hearse bus that brought the coffin, as well as on the way to the cemetery in the family circle of his wife and daughter jolting beside him, together with his gloomy stepfather reproachfully peering into the face of the deceased on the other side of the coffin, he gazed tearlessly at this dead woman, forcing himself to recognize his mama in her soulless flesh, alien to him who was still alive, however, he did not succeed in that, because her lifeless flesh, already touched by decay inevitable for the body and strewn with scarlet carnations, repulsed him, notwithstanding his desire to pity her and against his will vainly struggling to overcome the inner coldness, while his mama, on the contrary, was always kindredly attracting, as though there was an attractive halo of calm and all-forgiving affectionate kindness round her, whereas her corpse was devoid of what was characteristic of her in life.

He endeavored to surmount this involuntary alienation, which suddenly disunited them, on arrival at the cemetery, too, when he walked stumbling with the not planed rough board cutting into his shoulder on the frozen clods of cemetery clay, carrying the bulky heavy coffin hastily knocked together between the identical fences of graves with the piles of decrepit wreaths of paper flowers powdered with snow towards one of the gaping pits that were dug in a chain of the next row and were being filled with wooden boxes with bodies coming from the city, and when he stood, shivering with cold in the wind penetrating inside the jacket by the earthen heap with the still open coffin placed on top, while the stepfather, halting and faltering and time and again falling silent from the sudden spasms in the throat, tried to deliver a graveside oration about the lifetime virtues of "a wife, mother, grandmother, comrade and faithful friend who left us untimely", as this retiree a bit stupefied with grief spoke in a nonsensically newspaper manner, who found himself unexpectedly in frightening loneliness in his old age and had suddenly felt his helplessness and needlessness, and in the silence of the sobs being suppressed by the tongue-tied orator, one could hear how the dry snowflakes were rustling on the waxed paper of gaudily bright flowers of the large spruce wreaths leant against the neighboring fence with their gilded stereotype inscriptions on the mourning ribbons of black crepe fluttering under the gusts of wind, and how two men in their unbuttoned dirty padded jackets and their boots plastered with mud were quietly talking nearby, preparing the spades from which they were scraping off clay, for their everyday digging. But however much he strained his soul and looked at the mournful death mask of this formerly softly smiling face on which the falling snow did not melt, he could not convince himself that what lay in front of him, in this box, was the one that earlier, while being alive, was his mother.

Like the others, he leant over her, and his lips touched her inhumanly icy forehead; and after she had been covered forever with the lid that had been nailed with inch nails to the coffin, which had been lowered on canvas straps into the rectangular pit with such a knack that the slanted coffin was all but dropped, having scratched the crumbling walls of the grave, he, like everyone else, threw his three handfuls of the earth dug out for her interment on her wooden sarcophagus and watched the grave-diggers quickly filling up the pit and piling the flamboyant wreaths on an oblong mound; and yet the distinct reality of what was happening--his frozen ears that he mechanically rubbed, and the serious ruddy face of his snow maiden Vicky framed by the fluffy rabbit-gray fur of her hat with ear flaps, and the anxiously attentive look of his black-eyed Nadine at him, and the desert field of the cemetery that was spreading around and expanding into the white steppe sweeping windy snow over the space densely studded with squares of fences and with monuments of tombstones, and the black-winged centenarians-ravens, partial to carrion, heavily taking wing at times with a muffled short caw in the distance-either as a whole or individually did not lend any final genuineness to the event itself, in which he participated at that moment.

After the burying of the coffin and the laying of the wreaths, they had nothing to do at the cemetery, so they embarked in the service bus that accompanied them and drove to the inexpensive small glass house cafe booked for the funeral repast the day before, where, having warmed themselves with the indispensable chicken soup with noodles and with the vodka purchased wholesale beforehand, his mother's friends, as usual, started reminiscing about the touching details of their relationship with Claudia, who "passed away too soon" and tearfully praising her, while he, with his stepfather and father-in-law, swallowed glass after glass, which he hadn't been allowing himself for many years, but the drunk alcohol did not blunt that heightened clarity with which he felt all the implausibility of the changing episodes of the life that continued for him. As a result, he was forced to sent Nadine with the daughter home and to transport the soused stepfather to his dwelling-place, and since, after having reached his own apartment, this newly-minted widower became completely limp and, in a weak moment, even asked him to do a service, he had to stay here for the night "for company" in the empty flat with the man not very close to him.

Now that he put the sozzled old man to sleep, after the stepfather had been telling all evening what happy love they had had with the mother and how unbearably bad he felt now "without my Klava", he again was in solitude in his former little narrow room which had served since he moved to Nadine, either as a nursery for the granddaughter sometimes visiting her grandma and granddad or as a storehouse for unnecessary things (because both the TV, and the dining table, and the sleeping sofa of the parents were in the second large room); and he took a book of fiction to read something for pastime, but soon, having understood that his consciousness could not grasp the meaning of the lines running before his eyes in any way, he left his thoughtless reading and put the table lamp out, whereupon he ensconced himself in the corner behind the wardrobe and, lying under his mother's favorite plaid borrowed from the chair in front the TV, stared at the dark window, against the outer pane of which the dry snowflakes falling from heaven were rubbing, as before.

Strangely enough, he never seriously thought about what connected them, and, to be honest, it seemed to him that his whole life gradually estranged him from her: at first, as a kid, he rebelled childishly against her caring control, proving that he, as an independent man, was quite capable of acting without her treating him like a child and holding his hand, and besides, in the primary classes, the mother receded into the background, supplanted for three years by the father who returned from the domestic concentration camp and on whose enigmatic tragedy and cautious tacit tenderness all his secret filial feelings focused--both veneration, and pity, and boyish resentment at the injustice of his father's fate, and hatred for the unknown culprits of his father's suffering and his father's silent fading away in some premature ailments being steadfastly endured by this still young manful front-line soldier; whereas the death of his father, which orphaned him at the age of ten for the second time and switched all his pity to the poor defenseless "mummy", imparted a touch of adult patronage to his attitude to her, so confused and desperate after this death, and made him even more independent and partly self-confident, for he was obliged from now on to rely only on himself and be responsible for her who had lost her last support, which contributed to strengthening his self-reliance in the years of his relatively reasonable boyhood when he had also to be meeting her timid hopes for his discretion and prudence and, at the same time, to be ambitiously refuting the perfidious apprehensions of his teachers futilely picking at him with "fatherlessness" by means of his hundred-percent success in studies and of his exemplary behavior in the school, because he strove to distress her as less as possible with his "feats of arms", not too much known to her, fortunately, and with his cruelty, inevitable in his fights for "vindicating the rightness", that would have hardly gladdened her in her outwardly balanced and courteously polite "sonny". However, her girlishly fussiness in the meetings with his future stepfather, as well as her subsequent marriage with the move of this strong-build vigorous man to them, again engendered his alienation from her in his jealous, balkily-captious dislike to the one who suddenly got marital rights to her and who was tolerable as a model husband only for the sake of her consolation in the new, albeit unequal, successful alliance, but not owing to any merits of this retired infantry captain annoying him with both army jokes and the habit of subordination and unquestioning "execution of orders" which was perceptible in all the overly tactful advices to the stepson.

In addition, the inclinations of his tempestuous adolescence also drew him irrevocably out of the family, and the more zealously he sought freedom for his hopelessly innocent dalliance with girls and for their, alas, rare falls, becoming independent in the circle of his peers and in his studiously detached intercourse with some of the unceremoniously indelicate "adults" that loved to load him with their scant "life experience" as the highest and only wisdom, the further he went from his child confidential closeness with the "mom" who almost fawned on him, reproaching herself for indulging her own love of life and for her allegedly reprehensible betrayal of his father and being a bit afraid of the father's strong-willed character of her grown son. And later, with his independent going out at the liberty of his rocker youth and of the rampage of his student days, their former closeness had been little by little reduced for his part to his slightly increased attention to her on the occasions of celebrations and festivities and to their episodic confabulation at dinner, since at home he did not stay too long and returned, as a rule, rather late; and although he tried, as far as possible, not very to upset her, in his risky scuffles and in his voluptuous love adventures he didn't even remember her, living a completely different isolated life, where the opinion and affections of his "precious mammy" were left out of account, inasmuch as there was no room for her there at all; while his unforeseen marriage also terminated his housing connection with her, who had approved his choice, in spite of everything, and not evinced any jealousy and grudge against the red-haired cutie that had taken possession of her only son.

They were reunited anew by the granddaughter, but, of course, this mutually beloved "work of art" proved to be cause for many a conflict, difficult to resolve by peaceful means, on the basis of nutrition, upbringing, dressing, hardening, treatment and so on, and they too often pulled over his heart sympathy from a certain duality of his family togetherness with the wife and the not very old "grandmother" to the uncompromising Nadine, the mother of his daughter, after all. In short, constantly busy with his own affairs, his family and his evolution of overcoming the excessively rigid mode of professionally skillful "extracting the essence" and household routine, by periodically visiting his "maman" with her malaises, he rather paid the debt, than really felt some strong spiritual need to see her and talk with her about something, complaining of his private failures and parental problems with the stubborn Victoria or frankly expatiating on his inexplicable dissatisfaction with his image of a respectable family man and highly erudite specialist created by his archaeological, without exaggeration, labors in the analytical and comparative excavations of all these peripatetics and epicureans, skeptics and stoics, neoplatonists and authorities of early Christian patristics, considering that he avoided such confessions even in his younger years, preferring to share difficulties and troubles with some of his comrades separately and relying not on someone's tips and help, but mainly on the gumption bestowed on him by God, on his courage and on his sometimes fantastic luck.

Anyway, the "voice of the blood" connecting them barely sounded today in his present, in contrast to her, who was offended by the irregularity of his visits, tending her son that dropped in to see her as if he sojourned till then God knew how many months somewhere in the remote polar regions and she had been terribly missing him; whereas he, with his uninterrupted workload and work schedule of all seven days a week, could perfectly do without her, although she had not turned yet into a tiring burden, like infirm grannies pensioners lapsing into senility; but, as it belatedly became clear, he could it only in that gradually formed "self" which he was conscious of and which quite did without his past self, intractable and emotionally irrational, because this present self of his had showed itself to him now in all its thin-skinned unsteady borrowing of his learned fundamental solidity, based, like everyone's else, on shaky piers of saving self-restraint which were already not once menacingly swayed by the tides of the lawless abyss, while in the strange obsession at the cemetery, this self got suspended in mid-air over the emptiness of the predetermined and inevitable chasm, whither, without saying goodbye to him, after his father his mother had gone forever, whose dumb corpse was hidden today in the clay and whose sudden death, having cut off their lifelong blood connection, transformed his recent insensitivity into a gaping wound of the excruciating pain that could be alleviated by nothing but motherhood, no longer existing for him.

Now, alone with her death and with the utter orphanhood surrounding him, he was not that former derivative of the elusive and endless "ego", external to himself and driven into functional mechanicalness ("Man dies, structures remain", as Michel Foucault diagnosed such a dispersal in the carcass forms of continuously public textual self-realization) and, forgotten about his rational and generally-useful creation as well as about his prestige, reputation and profound sapience, he again found himself within his then self that became entirely his soul which was flooded with the pain of the wound of its core ruthlessly torn out by her death; and dulling the pain with thoughts of the unavoidable death for every human being and of the easiness of so quick and sudden a demise, in comparison with the protracted agonies and disabilities that sometimes fell to others' lot, he was soothing this burning, gnawing, bleeding pity--for her, who had lived too little in this world , in essence, and for himself, who could not be beside her and did not reward her, as he should have to, for her love--with his eschatological prognostications equalizing the living and the dead and with his prayer-imperative incantations to a "higher power" that broke off her earthly life to give her the peace she deserved and more or less carefree immortality.

But with each uprush of his entreaties and with each wave of his fatalistic previsions of the dissolution of mortal and temporal biology, final for humanity, in the planetary coalescence of the eternal Spirit, the anesthesia of his self-hypnosis helped him less and less, and the inconsolability of his loss gaped more and more openly and desperately, driving him to a strangled growl through his clenched teeth and to the tears of indignation at the unreasonableness of "God's will" or some natural arbitrariness; and because his ridiculous rebellion against the death of all living things could move neither the Lord nor Nature in the least and did not contain anything new for the universe in its disagreement, at times he flew into an impotent rage, beating the ottoman with his fists and biting his lips in an inarticulate mutter into the night outside the window, where the louring atmospheric sky was showering the countless crystals of blizzard on the city and the cemetery with her grave.

He wanted--howsoever he persuaded himself--he wanted to be with her once again, he had to say goodbye to her, he had, even if only for a split second, to restore the inseparable connection of their souls, for he could not, simply could not reconcile himself so to the "nevermore" of that infernal raven which had once croaked it in English, as if in mockery, in the phantasmagoria of the genius Edgar, and his soul, rebutting all the arguments of his consciousness sinking into anguish, tried to attract its torn part back with its craving, calling her not from there, not from the earth where the body that gave birth to him lay, belonging, like every earthly flesh, to the cycle of nature, but from the blazing abyss of a void in him that had yawned with her departure from life and that was frantically crying out to her for the mercy of miraculous resurrection healing from the torments of his inner senselessness.

"Man dies," it was throbbing persistently and relentlessly in his brain being washed by surges of pain, "structures remain. Only structures remain from man when man dies, only structures..."

But he saw neither her dead nor her live face, and he could not imagine her, such as she should have survived in his memory, even for a moment, as though the voracious unrestrained self-immolation of the ever-deepening wound in his soul had destroyed even that subconscious subcortical layer in which the imprints of all her tangible and visible exteriors had been accumulating from his birth.

"That is because man himself is something else and cannot die... Or rather, he can, but in what is mortal. That is, he dies just in this, in his manifestation materialized in some way, in structures, in the corporeality of the text and in the text of corporeality... And death is death only in the measure that I am incarnate and need something 'temporary', and this is just what decomposes into elements and serves as material for new structures... But not me, not my spirit, not man wholly! I don't believe we die wholly, I don't want to believe! Man remains, man must remain, man cannot but remain, and not his passing incarnations, but man!"

And whom else did he mean by "man", if not her, if not the one to whom he addressed his desperate prayers and to whom he was breaking with all his thirst through the bloody blindness of descending into himself, into the epicenter of his spiritual hell incinerating him. And it was disbelief in her absolute complete disappearance that fed his faith furiously ramming the fire and breaking through it to her, the faith in a near contact with her, dead, who seemed to be also stretching her hands to him from the fiery abyss through the shining veils of the ever unsolved last mystery which were thinning in their mutual striving; he implored her of one meeting, only one meeting again, albeit posthumously, he endlessly beseeched and adjured her, and this happened, and they met indeed, they again met, they met despite the impossibility of this meeting of theirs and the irretrievability of her interment there, under the snow, in the frozen clay of the vast cemetery field sown with graves.

In the sacrificially violent, martyrically stubborn, self-burningly reckless penetration of his mad invocation into the opening flaming crater of his bottomless soul sucking him in forever, he suddenly breached some deep-laid bulkhead partitioning his own self and the immortal infinity of being around, and, as if fallen down into the space of deafeningly quiet darkness, in the cosmic boundless dumbness of his empty room, he heard the slight creak of the floorboards under the footsteps, familiar from childhood, approaching him.

And the tender curative touch of his mother's hand cooled his forehead and removed the blur of smarting burn from his closed eyes; and the scalding tears of offence and pity welled up in his eyes and started rolling down his cheeks, lightening the unbearable burden of his loss by this puppy trustful bitter weep; and the bleeding wound of the rupture in his soul immediately stopped hurting, cicatrizing from the long-awaited caress of this incorporeal hand stroking his hair and soothingly wiping his tear-stained face.

A miracle happened, and his unrealizable wish came true: she was here, she again was with him; and feeling this presence of hers at last, he, sobbing, curled up on the ottoman under the plaid, basking beside her and whispering "Mamma"; and, lulled by the eternal lulling magic of her soundless farewell lullaby, he sank into a deep peaceful sleep without dreams.

And when he woke up, he found himself sitting in the same back seat of the slowing bus, where, having laid his head in his sleep on the shoulder of the same old neighbor, he was looking over the mosaic pieces of his lived life that were alternating in the bizarre montage of his memory....

V

Following the residents of this tiny village of several small houses in the shadow of a woody mountain, who were leaving the noticeably vacated bus, he got off the bus through the open door to breathe fresh air, since their nimble driver already hurried to the service entrance of the village general store with an iron grid, also having some business, apparently, with the local trade, so the parking was supposed to last about ten minutes, whereas the fumes of the araka exhaled by the passengers had thickened in the cramped bus cabin without airing by head-wind into the stale reek of a barracks hangover, which had a depressing effect on the psyche, meanwhile it was getting darker and a little fresher outside before a storm.

The village situated along the road on a flat horizontal ledge of the sharply leveled steep mountain slope extended down the descent to the river rushing past from under the high stone bridge with a roaring furious speed as tiers of some squat long outbuildings, sheds and barns, yet opposite the brick shack of general store, there was a toy hutch with a signboard "Books" adjoining the butt-end of the ramshackle log hut of the village council, whither he made for, strolling and not interrupting his drowsy thoughts about the then subjective miracle done by him for the first time, for this event had swept off at once that semantic foundation of his stability, with the worldview filter of which he seemed to divide the necessary and the accidental, the orderliness of his preferred humanity and the explosive chaos of the universal all-generating element of God flaming in him.

"I remember Thomas Hobbes used to say, 'Speech has something in it like a spider's web, for by contexture of words tender and delicate wits are ensnared and stopped; but strong wits break easily through them'," he was thinking, crossing the threshold of the stuffy cubby-hole of shop jammed with the shelves crammed with books behind the counter piled with books, too, where there was not a soul, including the shop-girl, although among the books that had been accumulating unsold here for many years, there were really valuable ones: some of them were published during the times of state-issued editions, mainly literary criticism, and some of them were fiction, from the formerly forbidden "novelties", printed at last, of different remoteness of their publications--these ones he noted automatically, from force of habit, sorting with a quick and tenacious glance of an experienced book reader the covers and spines of the jumble of stale socio-political junk or trash of Soviet writers' nomenclature, which prevailed quantitatively in this abundance of books. "But if we consider any sign expression a language, then we break through only into silence, and the meaning for man is solely in the language itself, whatever the sign may be by nature; and consciousness itself, being probably the same sign structure, is likewise the only 'objective reality' for him... ("And what do we perceive besides our ideas or sensations?", he reinforced his youthful conjecture, formulated long ago and developed into the universality of the context, with the question-answer of Bishop Berkeley.) Man, thus, breaks through, basically, only to another language, to another sign, to another text, which he is trying to translate into the language that is universally significant and comprehensible to all more or less. So it is in art and in philosophy, because otherwise, in the depth, text simply disappears and, in principle, we feel no need for it any longer... That is, in fact, both the whole world in me and my human shaping of it in the text of being that is accessible to me make sense as long as all that is a kind of language; otherwise, "in God" so to speak, the world vanishes, exactly as Maya of the Indian gymnosophists, and what remains is the pre-linguistic radiance only, which does not illuminate anything for me, just as, incidentally, it does not illuminate me and my consciousness also formlessly dissolving in this radiance, in the nirvana of its languagelessness-non-objectivity..."

"But the whole point is that the new can arise exclusively from the absolutely inexpressible-as its textual and figurative eruption and the emanation of the primal energy of imagination that creates the entire embodiment of the existential becoming, which is going on as a whole in the fantasy of God and partly in the consciousness of man as a personage of this fantasy, because just through his consciousness, as through other mental images of the universe, real in its illusiveness, there are regulated the coherence and realness of the 'dream of life' given to us in sensations; and the meaning of, say, art is in the creation of the adequate and clear-cut analogues of such 'eruptions' and in ascertaining their volume, contents and elemental peculiarity by means of human creativity..." in parallel with the books, he was looking over his later contemplations being revived again by his skeptical-nostalgic peering into that theoretical shift, also reappraised afterwards, from his keenness on European hermeneutics and structuralism to the ontology of Russian "imiaslavie" of the early twentieth century, which by no means hindered his university revival of ancient authors, but rather favored it at first, for then he viewed antiquity as some model of a two-millennial period, similar to modernity, of the transition from the initial-basic inner realism, rooted in the affirmative perception of the world (which existed merely as aforementioned "Maya", the mistiness of dream, in the previous, overly perspicacious wisdom of the Himalayan Brahmins), to the dispersion of its plastic and self-valuable materiality in the again visible illusiveness of its cornerstone unprovable axioms, in its solipsistic "seemingness" and in its God-given derivativeness of movement, time, objectivity, separately-detailed for man, while in a new religious restoration of reality being run already by God the Creator, the Demiurge of this universe once begun by Him, it had been replaced by a new saving opposition of the human "subject" to the "object" of the world, which had been again eroded in the last two centuries to phenomenological phantomness and the emptiness of infinity instead of the former totally harmonized "creation of God" and instead of man as a cognizing mirror and a pupil of the supreme overseer-patron.

And the way out of the present senselessness of human self-development and of the sobering from the life-affirming self-delusion of the fundamental mythological assumptions of monotheism prevailing everywhere was the same as in Rome and Judea or in Islamic Mecca, i.e. in a compromise prompt of God-consciousness creating both this universe and its human version, which would have allowed the very existence to acquire relative independence and humanity a feeling of participation in creation, equal to its freedom, because, precipitated into his own imaginariness, man was deprived of any guidelines and either fell into the inactivity and despondency of dull indifference or indulged in the wild arbitrariness of a disastrous and absurd 'game without rules'; that's why the extinction of the vital persuasiveness of the former worldview and the transitional dominance of the spirit shining through life was fraught not with the triumph of the spiritual, but, on the contrary, with a suicidal-destructive bacchanalia of misanthropic vandalism and barbarism.

No wonder that the ancient Tibetan "teachers of life", who knew the secret of their origin and their earthly ephemerality and who were able, using their participation in the primary light burning in them, to humanly correct something in the unsteady being of natural creation, always tried to guard their dangerous knowledge and the lore of magical impact from the thirsting crowds, closed in the flesh and in the vicissitudes of the "corporealities" inherent in the flesh, whose creaturehood, being disarmed with verity or armed with some supernatural abilities of partial essential editing of the universal text, would have been catastrophic in equal measure for the course of their human history, given that it was impossible, of course, precisely because the number of such sighted people, able to use their particular sharp-sightedness and spiritual strength was always predetermined by the laws of self-preservation of the biosphere being gradually animated and spiritualized and enveloping the spore of the planet radiating consciousness; and these gaps in "seemingness"--these apertures of clarity in the changeable haze of "naturalness"--these still single peeps into the holes of the backdrop, behind the picturesque scenery of the incarnation surrounding the burst of radiance, rather stimulated the search for the next modification of the basic core myth about God, adequate to the new level of human growth, on which man could have again established the dubious meaning of his planetary civilization and on which he would have continued to circle, as on a continental raft, in the ocean of divine light shaping the rarefied fluctuating fluid materiality of his cosmos in its fiery vapors.

"Thus, in art, moralists enlighteners are as superficial," he slapped the volume of a weighty novel against a stack of books, "as modernists subversives. The former convert the already known trivial texts of sociality into artistic constructions, and the latter very love to amuse themselves with the mocking redesign of these same texts, social and artistic. Meantime, neither the 'pointing finger' nor any arbitrary transposition of jibes does not penetrate to the extra-textual origins of art, therefore the remelting of the entire aggregate literature in shaping the energy eruption of creativity does not occur, and consequently, man does not discover any new perception of the world nor any new accuracy of expressions of this worldview, not yet defined by creativity..."

Despite the solidly authoritative tradition of regarding both the word and any "humanized" sign as a mark of sense, there was no sense outside this sign for the artist, and the watershed between originality and imitations ran precisely along the dividing line of attitude to employing the language of his art that was no more than an instrument and a means in the hands of ordinary artists and that could be the intelligibility of meaning and the self-worth of realization in the creation of talent, and such a dissimilarity brought them apart onto different layers of culture, irrespective of the aspiration of competent artisanship to imagine itself as a revelation.

"And it is so not only in art..." Continuing, with no apparent cause, to put aside separately the most worthwhile literature and the single volumes of some thinkers delivered here by a fluke of the State centralized distribution, he inhaled with pleasure the persistent library smell of buckram hard covers, withered paper, caked glue, and dry printing ink that pervaded the dusty stale air of this book shop. "It is the same in thinking, too..."

However, like thinking, art was scarcely merely ascetic self-denial and an act of self-disclosure, because to a large extent, literature correlated with meaning like the sound of a word with its spelling, that is, like something naturally-capacious and variedly-perceptible with a purely conventional specific symbol of something also varied, or like a full-blooded inner image of some work of fiction being read inwardly with the monosemantic recitation of this text learnt by heart; and judging by the results of the majority of works of all types and genres recognized as "masterpieces", creation itself was being accomplished in many respects in a very unconstrained play with the realities of both an author's own artistry and the rejected extraneous one, so creation was often effervescing intoxicatingly with an excess of vitality which was spilling out onto canvases and pages, onto films and musical lines, onto stages and podiums, onto pedestals and construction sites and inebriating first and foremost with a certain "god-likeness" of unaccountable freedom that differed so life-givingly from the tasteless wishy-washy insipidity of mediocrity and from the rationally vinegarish illustrativeness of exhausted giftedness and secondarily-helpless dystrophic "lost" generations.

Supplementing what he had missed in his rumination, his fleeting travel thoughts immediately turned from the "world-sign" to the "world-play"(true, there was no difference between them either in epistemological genesis or in their dual essence of arbitrarily-indispensable and necessarily-contingent self-knowledge), but here behind him, someone's feet crunched the gravel at the door to the empty store, and at once, in the doorway appeared a stumpy short-legged rural lass of about eighteen years of age, with her dark beady eyes sparkling with undisguised curiosity under her black eyebrows. On her head she had a claret-colored glittering lurex scarf tied in pirate style, and it was definitely the shop-girl of this book depository which was visited perhaps only by schoolchildren and some rare buyers riding past such an outlying village.

"No, no, I cannot take anything with me," he spread his hands regretfully and hurried out into the street, worried lest the bus would depart without him.

But their driver was just lugging a huge cardboard box with some "import" laid aside "for a relative" from the pantry of the general store to the bus; and, having run across the small stony square to the door opposite under the falling big drops of the occasionally spitting rain, he stepped inside, into the kerosene silence of an empty hardware-grocery store, where on the left, under galvanized wash-tubs and basins, rolls of oilcloth and other consumer articles, a greasy iron barrel with a funnel and the bayonet shovels with smoothly turned wooden shafts stood at the counter with tin trays of nails and screws, while on the right, near the counter with the kilogram bricks of gray bread lying on it and with the price tags of absent goods behind its glass showcase, a rusty keg of sunflower oil gleamed greasily as well, and the stink of slimy cheap laundry soap, mixed with the smells of metal, machine oil, and kerosene, seemed to bring back to the times of the post-war devastation experienced by his coevals in some degree in childhood, and where, in the absence of any owner, he put some money for bread onto the right grocery counter and hastened back outside with a softly springy brick of morning baking, for there with threatening frequency it was already spotting with rain and the bus was impatiently beeping.

While he was packing the bread in his gym bag and changing to the seat that had been vacated in front, the bus drove out of the village, and the raindrops went drumming on the roof with the quickening swiftness of the bellicose Caucasian lezginka; and when they were crossing the bridge over the river ragingly twisting its stream into seething white water plaits below, the darkened sky over their gorge was split by a bolt of gigantic deathly-pallid lightning, which imprinted the mountain with pine trees and the rocky slope with small houses for an instant to the smallest detail, whereupon at once it began pouring with heavy shower, and this deluge lashing against the windows being closed in a hurry seemed to press down the blindly moving bus to the narrow flinty road. Nevertheless, like a real horseman, the driver did not wait out the beginning rain and dauntlessly drove the bus forward, regardless of obstacles, through a menacingly growling sheer water avalanche that was suddenly torn by flashes of photographically convulsively freezing surroundings and shaken by the deafening roar of claps of thunder, so that their rattletrap was slowly crawling along the road, muddily flooded here and there with the tempestuous torrents rolling down the slopes of rocks.

From such an abundance of water, he even no longer wanted to drink, and having thought that it would be completely foolish to fly down into a chasm in this iron crate, which might easily slip off a cliff in such a rain coming down in buckets, and that it would be not the most successful joke of his fortune, he again closed his eyes in the hope of the continuation of his parting serial dream...

*

The inextinguishable constellations of the big merry stars, already washed by May thunderstorms, surrounded the waning milk disk of the coldly shining moon in the vast firmament dissolved by the immensity of the cosmos over the steppe, where, having put his hands under his head, he lay on his officer overcoat in the thick meadow grass and looked from the chosen hillock at the tents of their army camp that were translucently luminous through their canvas by the electric bulbs lit inside, smoldering in the meadow as a garland of paper-tender Chinese lanterns or as a colony of grazing large fireflies.

Behind him, the numberless black furrows of a huge ploughed field extended along the roadside forest belt; somewhere on the right side, on the slimy banks of the lake overgrown with willows, osiers, burdocks, and razor-sharp sedges, the local frogs reveled in the chanting of their hoarse croaking; and the voices that were wafted over to him from the camp belonged to the soldiers of his battalion loitering between the tents--the greater part of whom had been called up, like him, from the reserve for a month of military exercises in the "field conditions" of the same semi-camping bivouac life--and did not distract him too much from the rapturous virtuoso roulades of the nightingale contralto, the voluptuous trills of which were heard in the flowering bird cherry thickets of a forest-belt grove adjacent to the meadow as the thinned rows of alder-aspen hedge; so, if we add the herbal fragrances hovering over the still warm soil and the black-earth breath of the fresh furrows near, his lying in the evening languor of this sensually hot May, among the fading webbed chirr of grasshoppers, under the "canopy" of heaven (as his incorrigible "classicist" Nadine would say) studded with starry sweat, was simply implausibly idyllic, notwithstanding that his thoughts revolved, albeit lazily, around the subject of his fate that he again and again unraveled, in other words, around the object that by no means promised him clarity and serenity.

For more than a year that had passed since the death of his mother, outwardly, there were no particular changes in his life either at the department, where, as before, he read his specialized course of lectures and demandingly intimidated the shirking students with the forthcoming passing of the tests and exams on this material, probably inculcating in them a persistent antipathy to the theodicies of such obligatory Tertullians, or in his family coexistence, stable as usual, where all disagreements and tiffs were settled relatively painlessly, and some natural tiredness from each other was softening by mutual compassionate tolerance and by the complaisant disposition of their parental couple, indisposed to excessive touchiness and reproaches for lack of once promised prosperity and caring and for ruining someone's only and priceless life by someone's criminal negligence, which, naturally, implied an immeasurable inexcusable guilt. But, while maintaining the due norms of decorum, in his soul he continually underwent metamorphoses of regeneration or transformation into something much larger than he was before, and in his optimal, almost imperceptible routine of work and daily occurrence, he inexplicably felt somewhat swaddled, as if in previous years he had been gradually winding the space of a certain ideological cocoon on himself, and now he began to stir his inchoate wings within, for the spreading of which the cocoon was too small, as in his youth all the spaces of the morality and speculative "truth" legitimized by him for himself was eventually becoming too small for him every time, when the consequences of his impulsive liberations could be, alas, not local exits beyond the instituted or prescribed limits, but an unrestrainedly destructive global redrawing and renewal of the entire topography of the cosmogony of his rebellious "self", exploded from within, which was, to tell the truth, rather undesirable both then and later, and which had manifested itself at present only in the change of quotes over the writing table, for they were always some intuitive and prophetic epigraphs to new circles of his inscrutable self-creation. The two lower angles of the triangle of quotation were Hegel's "Philosophy is not somnambulism, but is developed consciousness" and Karl Jaspers's "A man is always more than what he knows about himself ", while the top was "Growth itself is the only moral 'end'" by John Dewey, although pragmatism, including American one, the most consistent, he did not love, tracing its origin as a doctrine to the skeptic Arcesilaus, lost among the ancient "whales" and "pillars", with "practical reasonableness" in the rank of a criterion of truth which was transformed with such a basic premise into a result of the agreement, moreover, at the level of a "social man", where it was allowable to equate truth with benefit, especially as this equating extremely suited those who could easily fit in their sociality.

Unfortunately, as always, he could judge the nature of the novelty maturing by degrees in him mostly by his worsened attitude towards the previous pupation being determined now by the remark of the existentialist Fritz Heinemann, surfaced from his postgraduate past, that most of the contemporary artists and philosophers have partially or completely turned into technicians; however, this growth of his today's freedom outgrowing his present self and filling his zones of obsolescence, was little by little influencing his seemliness.

As for his lovable curly daughter, at the age of twelve she resembled "mamma Nadia" both by a proud head carriage and a ballet bearing and by a penchant to predominantly home leisure "with book on sofa"; and, according to his observations, she had no conspicuous hypertrophied inclinations to any future calling, distributing her many-sided endowment equally between school, ballroom dancing and improvement of the two languages mastered from childhood with tutors (which, of course, cost them a pretty penny) and avoiding unnecessary overloads in all her occupations with purely feminine prudence, by which she irrefutably proved her stable "normality" that made life much easier for the citizens not burdened by the compass-undeviating purposefulness of talent, who were unaware of the obsession of such oddballs chained to their obviously suicidal "self-realization"; but, as one of the bearers of this fatal "chosenness" dangerous nowadays, he was not foreign to a certain dislike to her "normality", whereas she, acquiring the initial adulthood, was also somewhat estranged at times from her overly energetic and mocking father, cultivating her femininity under the motherly tutelage of Nadine who fostered her self-sufficiency in that; however, as to Nadine, their established parity of coinciding desires and mutual unexpressed irritation from the long matrimonial living together, of good-natured friendly banter over foibles, faults or some peculiar traits and of a sharply-critical, selectively-carping view on the doubtfully irreplaceable "life partner" in fits of pique--this parity got violated in recent months, if not for both then for him at any rate, and in his long-standing tried attachment to his wife, something dissonant was out of tune now, as if losing its taste, and the former value along with the taste.

Nadine was not guilty of the discord unknown to her, and she rather deserved love more devoted and fidelity more wholehearted for her compassion and tactfulness, rare in women, during his heavy somberness and disconsolate dejection after the then posthumous parting which had mixed up the successful layout of his life game, when his excruciating state of asking questions to the haunting infinity gaping as a grave in his soul and his fruitless oppressive disentangling from the meaninglessness of death sometimes infuriated him to angry tears, equalizing him with any dumb animal and brainless wino, and often pushed him to seek salvation in her pain-relieving embraces which gave him, so possessively unceremonious and panicky defenseless, both the seeming overcoming of the feeling of his own insignificance seizing him and the tenderness of motherhood solicitously enveloping his fear; or, on the contrary, the aftermath of his grief suddenly repulsed him at times by disgust for the physiological nuances of their conjugal relations which seemed endearing enough at the height of their early passionate possession and quite excusable later, and the evolution of perception of which, inevitable in case of protracted intimacy, was no more than a part in the evolution of man's perception of his entirely mortal body that he was perceiving in someone else--from the young greedy sating with the desired flesh to the concealed squeamishness about overripe lust, and then to the senile enviously-infirm loathing for voluptuousness as such. But it was just her motherliness that inadvertently deteriorated his sensual attitude to her, when he was rallying from his grief, for the catastrophe of a newly experienced death, by which his world had been shaken, planted the seed of some possible reincarnation in the void of his soul and again deprived reality of its unshakeability and obligatoriness, having made him feel its randomness and transience with truly hellish sharpness, not to speak of the dependence of its future creation on his every step, while Nadine, intimately bonded with his past, was retaining him with her love in his unchangeability and in the completeness of their connubial felicity, since she was defined once and for all in her nature of a moderately-sublime earthly woman, sound in body and mind, who knew how to "enjoy the delights of life" without overdoing it and to control her impulsiveness, if necessary, and who naturally welcomed the same solidity and definiteness in her beloved spouse in every way possible, which more than once caused his wordless fits of rage on absolutely insignificant occasions this spring.

The month of military exercises was, in fact, his first separation from Nadine, and for the first time circumstances forced him to refrain from reading anything serious, inasmuch as his attempts to brush up on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, albeit in snatches, in the conditions of twenty-for-hour collectivity and with the impossibility of moving away from the environment so as to concentrate on the flow of thoughts ramifying as a many-branched delta before flowing into the ocean, proved to be vain, and in order to have a brief respite from the baloney of their endless officer "talks about life", he had to confine himself to relatively solitary walks around the neighborhood, during which, sunbathing, he could thoughtfully admire the regally bristling thistles crowned with lilac-pink prickly dragonish three-headed pompons and with a bumblebee buzzing in them, and the small field chamomiles or umbrellas of white clover, the azure and yellow buttercups interspersed with lonely bright scarlet poppies, and the purple clusters of cast bluebells or cerulean blots of cornflowers, and the softly flowing silvery strands of feather-grass or flying fluff of miniature balls of dandelions, and the gray islands of dusty stunted wormwood on the bumpy bald patches of tall uncut grass or the languidly swaying leafage of lakeside willows, from where a thievish cuckoo, heartened with the warmth of the sun, cuckooed a deceitful longevity for him. In the odoriferous grass dopiness, he contemplated both these bent grasses with its petals sleepily closed and tucked like skirts and the night polished zinc of the moon buckler, sensing his cheek touching on the coarse cloth of the overcoat collar that was chafing his neck, while his bare heels were resting from the kersey boots on the silky herbage of his gently sloping hillside slightly moistened with the melting train of evening stringy fog trailing down into the lowland, and thought that perhaps this idle month had not passed for nothing, because, in addition to his physical hardening with daily jogging ere the reveille in the predawn damp chilly grayness on the wet meadow grass, heavy from beads of dew, and with dipping "for tone" into the stagnant tepid lake water seeming warm by contrast with the air cooled by the night, their "war-game", together with many-voiced snoring and reek of tobacco in a cold tent, as well as with conducting episodic political information about the international situation according to his "military specialty" (for which purpose he was forced to litter his head with various reports of the central press being regularly delivered here, though, as a civilian, he used to glance over newspaper in passing at best), would furnish him with a lot of unoccupied evenings, not always rainy-dank, when the usual guff over cards or over the hooch, purchased in the nearest village, in the smoky monotonous rustle of the "atmospheric precipitation" pattering on the wet tarpaulin already began to pall and readings in the bosom of nature were excluded because of the approaching twilight, and he, plunging into the space full of some evening sounds and smells of the darkening steppe with the pinkish spectrum of the fading sunset blurrily stratifying across the sky and flowing down behind the horizon, could indulge to his heart's content in building up his retrospectives.

Far from Nadine, he realized, for example, that the peak of their former spiritual consonance had passed by now and that for her his release from his yesterday's self was the destruction of their love, which she wished, apparently, to conserve in its attained ideality, whereas he was unable, with all his experience, to be satisfied only with her body in her personality, accepting her in everything else as "irremovable evil" and paying no attention to the desire, usual in a woman, to subordinate a tamed lover to her understanding of the role of a man in marriage; therefore, notwithstanding the heavenly cloudlessness of his family climate, at times he could no longer cope with the alienation to her arising in him and making the peaceful home coziness of their modest flat constraining and almost suffocating and Nadine herself distant and involuntarily hostile, which was unfair and preposterous, yet could not be liquidated by any reasonable arguments; that's why, pleading his headache or under the plausible pretext of allegedly some purchases, he time after time went to roam the streets until his irritation and discontent subsided and changed to something elegiacally-tired and meekly-humble.

At first it seemed to him that his irascibility was explained by his "shattered nerves" in consequence of eliciting from the eternity permanently gnawing him and corroding his soul the sought-for meaning of an accidental birth, of gradual aging, and of inescapable death of human flesh which combined in itself two equally all-consuming tendencies of vitality and spirituality inducing a separate self-loving individual, who was literally only a specimen of the animal world, to be humanizing their herd instinctiveness with customs, introspection and concepts of "godlikeness"; and later, when the acuteness of his awareness of the tragedy of every personal subjectivity somewhat slackened and the opened aperture into the fathomless truth of the innate partial nature of body and spirit was mantled with a haziness of sadness and coated with an openwork flooring of the impressions of his continuing earthly existence sunnily overlaying the past, he had erroneously assumed that he had entered a period of habitualness and got cloyed with this love which, unlike his other love affairs having their adventurous dynamics and the denouement, did not last but circle in the cyclicality of its ebbs and flows, now predictable, now spontaneous; however, after having been a little without Nadine and re-imbued with the same omnipotence of attraction that inseparably fused them, in the raw chilly dreariness of homeless evening walks in the tedious rain soaking his overcoat and seeping behind its collar along the squelching sticky slush of country road, he understood that he should look for the origins of the crisis not in some kind of "nervous breakdown" and not in the decline of his "hormonal activity", but, one might say, in the very core of his personality, that is in the explosion of the divinity lurking in him, for this explosion had shaken the regularity of his views and displaced all the former ferroconcrete framework of his superstructure orientation, which had entailed some untrammeled mutation of his entire perception of the world, where Nadine, with her closeness, had to take the place prepared for her by the future already in accordance with the hierarchy of the new microcosm of his today's unspoken self-denial.

The abyss that was the genuine epicenter of his universe being created and dissolved by this abyss, from which he had miraculously arose and into which he, lessened to the last spark, was to slip following his evanescing life flying into this voracious vacuum--such was the black gap that yawned in the very heart of his universe centrifugally spreading as its visually-visible, tangibly-smelt and sensorially-experienced reality at every moment of its existence and being centripetally sucked into darkness with the passing of the chimerically transient "present" into some scattered, disorderly reconstructions of the past in his wayward memory; but the light that was radiated by the darkness after his lifetime breakthrough into immortality and almost neutralized by the this-worldly kaleidoscopic play of natural light, again and again suddenly flooded with its radiance the spaces of his night consciousness washed by the cosmic fire, and, subsiding, again exposed all the tininess and artificiality of a happy private-serving turn in his fate, in comparison with the depth of his own incomprehensibility eating up his soul with a presentiment of unpredictable desires and deeds; and this accumulating explosive dissatisfaction with what he was, disturbing the backwater of his prosperity pierced by impulses of fire, once again raised the ever-vital old question: who was he--what was his life purpose--whom could he therefore become later, in the process of his present unpublicized transformation from a "bookworm" into something maybe winged. There was, probably, some more general plan in supplementing humanity by him precisely in his day and hour and in influencing him by something to choose just his own path which was fairly arduous and extremely thorny in the muddle-headed Motherland allotted to him by birth and which often proved to be a dead end for some overly persevering and purposeful wayfarers, due to the fundamental uselessness of such excesses of individual spiritual greatness for the urgent needs of collectivized imperial peoples; and though the essence of their age of democratic and totalitarian equalizations, personal "atomization" and individualistic dispersion in the stereotypes of "public" and "private" was no secret for him, his mission as an irreconcilable loner remained a mystery for the time being, since his irreconcilability extended no further than to "the limits of necessary self-defense" (as he would have described it in the style of a police charge-sheet) and closed this cognition on himself, who was by no means inclined to the educational pathos of preaching or the agitation of enlightening simplifications, and who was not worried in the least therefore about "public repercussion", practical profit, and propaganda of his comprehension, no matter how he was adept in article publications of a concrete-analytical kind, to writing of which he sometimes condescended from the sky heights of his manuscript meditation in notebooks.

Of course, had he been engaged in the same, but, say, as a professor at one of the many universities of the civilized "West" that could afford the luxury of the well-equipped loose maintenance of highbrow humanitarians, too wasteful for the thrifty soviet power, he would, perhaps, have been publishing everything in succession, promulgating and arguing his conjectures and more often getting involved in scientific disputes in unlimited magazine and book areas or somewhere at international symposiums, for, thanks to the availability of the enormous untranslated continent of worthwhile modern overseas philosophy and literature, he exercised in languages quite regularly, like Nadine, so the language barrier wouldn't have been obstructing his advancement; yet while removing the obstacles being erected by the nameless bureaucratic locusts on the way to the scientific information that was buried in the archives and smuggled into the country, he thought not about the advantages of affluence and freedom or about the unbearability of the rotten regime of the total corruption and the dominance of mediocrity and brainlessness at all the levels of boorishly-plundering power--which was initially and completely denied by him and not excluded, nevertheless, from the global balance of interdependent humanity, where the self-destruction of some exorbitance was always conditioned by its danger to the rest of the components, and the degeneration of state's greatness was only the pole of the opposite ascent of some "advanced" and "backward" hostile-related communities in a single conglomerate of their merging into one planetary civilization--but about the aimlessness of such a sporadic concentration of spiritual potential, amazing for man doomed to all-round functionality, in the unique individuals, unsuitable for anything else and rejected by their eras, who usually took their superiority for granted, applying it for achieving some weightiness here and now or going downhill to cantankerous apostasy and into schismatics, because no other use than contact with their God guiding their otiose genius from life to themselves, they had in humanity, both the Old Testament prophets and he, and this needlessness was bringing the very tricky questions into his answer, for the well-known role of the prophets as intermediaries, through whom the Lord himself spoke, thereby revealed the ulterior meaning of their contact as a key moment in the self-regulation of human populations by that higher power which people called so differently and discordantly.

In other words, the spirit dispersed in some nation could get so concentrated in its single child marked by God that this chosen one was henceforth not merely someone, even if unprecedentedly great, but a kind of individual condensation of incorporeal substance of planetarily localized self-consciousness in its national, ethnic and cultural embodiment; and if God, who put the all-receptive, all-purifying power of His fire into him, really responded to human invocations, than only to this articulate and intelligible word that absorbed the experience of the new face of His humanization, judging about the given hypostasis of His by this highest degree which previously deserved now the Mosaic tablets, now The Sermon on the Mount and the surahs of the Quran, now the punishing intervention of fate sweeping away towns and kingdoms and some world civilizations that did not please the All-Merciful and crossed the line of self-preservation, having turned cancerously aggressive in the growth of their precocious dominion; however, he personally did not believe in the prophetically efficacious miraculousness of his uniqueness, although in theory he recognized the proven ability of the legendary founders of great religions to join in an incomprehensible way in the course of the playing of being and to cause a purely local or grandiosely large-scale response of the Creator who could manifest His presence either in a direct miracle or in the logic of astounding coincidences; meanwhile, without faith, he lacked the strength for such an appeal, and, by the way, this state of affairs quite suited him, because he wanted to live to the full long enough, so the denial of his nature rebelling in everyday bondage for the sake of a burden, too heavy for him, seemed the worst solution of his problems to him.

The insatiability of his cognitive gift being both his distinguishing feature among most of his associates, who proceeded from the axiom of the utilitarian use of acquired knowledge, and a property of that core abyss which was creating him, obviously pointed to his chosenness, and something in the turning points of his life time and again turned such assumptions into conviction, but, even though undoubtedly honorable and saving for the spirit, the function of participation in the self-knowledge of the Creator of this universal fantasy--where its very infinity and the difference between macro and micro levels of space-time continuums for attracting the attention of the experimenter required some coordinating signals of fragmentary summations, in the capacity of which seers and saviors acted in human kind from time immemorial--could not but impose on him unquestioning responsibility for the intensity of his spiritual burning and for the temperature of the fire, so as to make him a living indicator of contemporaneity, in whom the sobering clarity of the illuminations of all-seeing omniscience was eating away his peripheral humanity, namely, the enveloping outskirts of his soul, where the earthly needed the earthly and found itself and its reality just there in the human; whereas, with all his meticulous study of the sacred books and codes of theological theorizing, as yet he had not accumulated unconditional faith even for the proverbial mustard seed, implying by "God" rather something planetary, from which everything natural grew, worshiping it as a whole, whatever astral spaces he wandered about in his mental comprehension of the universe as a quark of the consciousness-God and of the quarks of which it was made up as universes of another order, and therefore a messianically active influence on this "something" with previsions of a modern soothsayer or with wizardry of transformations of divine inspiration was not in his competence, so to speak, and did not involve him seriously in self-immolation of self-sacrifice.

In a word, deep faith was incompatible with his freedom and ascetically narrowed the bridgehead for his game maneuvers, while without the unpredictability and lawlessness of the "inner world", he did not feel his life and was ready to "paw the ground" like a stallion in a stall or to kick up a row out of despondency and boredom, naturally curbing himself by habits of well-behaved conduct and auto-training, but losing any wish to continue the game, however hard he assured his soul that his craving for anarchy was the clogging of the Castalian spring of his Parnassus with the rubbish of bodily elemental disorder and that it was here where God-Logos struggled in man with the "satanic" materiality, intractable in its chaotic randomness. That's why, gazing at the bewitchingly alluring starry abyss, ominously highlighted by the reflectedly shining moon, in seeking justification for his primitively rebelled "nature" again outweighing his vocation, he focused his mind's eye on the genealogical background of the cosmos that had engulfed him, and the hastily fabricated vindication of such a rebellion immediately occurred to him.

He suddenly thought that love was rightly considered the primary creative force both in the Love-Enmity of Empedocles or in Eros of Parmenides and in the love-good of monotheism: like man, God loved the world of being, which He was molding out of inertly-amorphous quark clay (in the Vedas there were not quarks, but "the smallest dust"; the forgotten Diodorus Cronus named it "the indivisible smallest bodies and magnitudes"; and Democritus told about the plastic-individual immutable particles-"atoms"; but the differences in names did not change the essence of creating the world from some homogeneously passive material), just because He was this world, while consciousness was self-contemplation of different levels of what was being created and could come to being as self-consciousness of an existential image creating itself only in what was created; and no matter what the solution to the arousing and fading of this all-illumining clairvoyance consisted in--in the internal qualitative transformation of the equally universal-spiritual elements of the quark mass organizing in such a manner into the structures of "existence", cognizable for reason (and then "All things are full of gods" by Thales, mentioned by Aristotle and developed by Proclus, meant the "divinity" for the very particles of the dustily-swirling "seemingness" of the whole), or in the pulsation of their entire boundless universe in some larger structure from the light-darkness of unconsciousness, through an explosion of increasingly-detailed realized self-creation, to the total merging in the radiance of the fiery Deluge and to the beginning of the next phase of the infinite renewal of God who was unchangeable in the development of His visible flesh and always different in His self-becoming; yet, apparently, the same process was going on in man, and his body was such as it was, owing to the same force acting in him and forming his whole physicality, and consequently, resisting this force, he would have lifted up his hand against his sole "self", against the maybe most important love, his love for himself as for a unique creation of God's clarity, while that would have killed any possibility of love for someone or something and driven him completely into misanthropy and heartlessness (at this moment, he had preferred to overlook the itchy reproaches from his spiritual might still not realized by him in full measure).

"Quirk for the soul to everyone!" he invented a pun, stretching himself like reposing Hercules in the sweet-scented, sweet-voiced night fabulously silvering in the moonlight, and, having sat up on his overcoat, began to wind the footcloths, issued at the garrison warehouse together with boots and uniform, in order to be in the camp in time for the evening muster.

And when, after standing through the roll-call at the improvised parade-ground trampled down in the collective farm grass with soldiers' boots, he arranged with the battalion commander for his tomorrow's affairs and, yawning, made for the collective push-button washstand above a tin trough spitted with toothpaste, there at the commander's tent, near the fire of the night sentinel, he saw a motorcycle showily gleaming with nickel metal parts, a racing "Cizeta", whose elegance of a thoroughbred racehorse instantly stirred up all the rocker dissoluteness in his soul, and he felt such a strong desire to straddle the quondam mad speed again that he could not restrain himself: he lazily approached the "miracle of technical thought" standing unattended and lightly patted this beauty on the cold leather croup.

"Who's pawing my babe?" someone said cheerfully behind him, and when he turned to this voice that had seemed familiar to him, he all but collided with a broad-shouldered sturdy man, who had only just left the commander's tent and who wore a pair of tightly fitting branded jeans on the hams of his muscular legs and the unbuttoned beige leather jacket of an ace of motocross tracks with black-metal zippers, under which a sailor's striped vest bulged out on his barrel-shaped chest. And a wrestling crew cut and a mug of a tough thug with a boxer's heavy jaw impressively completed the portrait of the beefy grown-up Sam who appeared before him in person and looked somehow threateningly hefty and mighty in his rhinoceros bulkiness acquired over the past years.

"You're a jealous guy, however," he responded to the proprietary rebuke of the possessor of this "dream of a motorist". "In your youth you weren't like that."

"Hor, I'm right?" Not believing his eyes, Sam peered into the face of the answering lieutenant barely lit by the burning fire. "Where you're from here?"

"I'm at the ordinary exercises, but what wind blew you here?"

"I've arrived for my pupil," Sam explained, examining the friend he met after seventeen years with critical curiosity. "I train him, and he has races soon, while he's loafing at this military training, and I'm forced to go to the world's end to return him."

"I hope you've found a common language with the authorities? Or else I may help."

"No, thanks, I've settled it. True, for a couple of bottles," Sam casually divulged the substantive content of the talk "in private". "Soon he'll pack his bags, and we'll spank along... You're still in form, Hor, I see. You don't look like a puny weakling, though you're probably an intellectual."

"Most inveterate and incurable," he confirmed Sam's guess. "Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, with all the consequences... But you're literally a tank, my apologies for the compliment."

"It's right," flattered Sam agreed. My son, by the way, is the spitting image of his father, only even taller."

"You have a son?"

"Yes, sixteen year old. He's a bull too, I'll tell you. God forbid you would meet with him in a dark alley," Sam proudly described the merits of his offspring. "Even I myself can hardly cope with such a bandit."

"I envy you. We have a daughter only," he sighed. "Your wife is still the same?

"Not a word about wives," Sam pleaded. "Better say how do you live."

"Stripedly I live, like all people." About his life he was unwilling to be frank with anyone, especially with Sam. "Lately my life is pretty monotonous."

"Just so I thought," Sam exclaimed exultantly for some reason. "It's not enough to read books for a real man."

"Who can argue with it?" he politely conceded the right of victorious compassion to his former friend. "But without books I wouldn't be a real man either. If I wanted something, then, perhaps, a smidgen in addition to what I have, and not instead of it. But such options don't turn up to me as yet."

"Then what would you say about working as a stuntman?" Sam asked bluntly.

"As who?" he was slightly flabbergasted with both the unexpectedness of the question and its substance.

"As a member of my team of stuntmen," Sam explained. "To earn additionally by stunts at the film studio. You work not at the conveyor, after all, and you're free in the afternoon and in the evenings, I think... Or, maybe, you already forgot what and how? Not a motorcyclist any longer, not a racer, and nerves are bad? No boldness, no reflexes, something alike?"

"Don't judge by appearance," he replied in the same friendly tone. "Let's second the theory with practice..."

Then he immediately ducked at lightning speed to the feet of Sam, who didn't have time to react properly, and, having grabbed him by the arm and the leg and taken Sam on his shoulders by a quick sambist's "mill", sharply straightened.

"When I'll throw you into the fire," he panted out under the weight of the hoisted body, "you shall find out about reflexes..."

"Well, that's quite convincing," laughed Sam, deliberately sagging like a heavy sack. "Put me where you took me from..."

And having agilely jumped off his shoulders onto the ground, Sam continued: "So you've decided to try?"

"Why not," he leant over for a soap dish fallen out of his pocket. "May enroll me, commander, I agree on additional income, if, of course, I'll suit you."

"Then let's exchange phones, and as soon as you will be dismissed back to the reserve, call me." Sam reached into his jacket for a jotter. "In the summer, on vacation, we have the best time for work at film sets. Cinema is a side job for all of my guys, since there are no stuntmen as permanent appointment in their staff."

Then, having clambered up like a cast-iron equestrian onto the saddle of his sports-graceful "babe" and seated the ransomed pet behind his broad back, Sam hurtled away into the sleeping dark steppe along the light road being paved by the jumping beam of the headlight ripping up the night space and restlessly tossing on the bumps and potholes of the country cart-track; whereas he, after receiving such a curious offer--which was caused, as he could not help but understand, by the constant desire of touchy ordinary toilers to equate too supercilious "intellectuals" with themselves in something generally accessible and primitive: in drinking "on a bet" or in physical preparedness, such as pull-ups, push-ups, and drunken wrestling on the hands, as well as in ludicrous cruel scuffles under a trifling pretext or in bloody battles of mass frenzy of revolutions, civil strife and barracks dictatorships stupidly trampling down everything that towered spiritually above the shut regime vegetation of peoples "fallen away from God", who, with their downtrodden perished "national geniuses", proved deprived of their own normal full-blooded self-awareness and of the paragons of their greatness deserving world-wide significance, let alone any connection with the innermost meaning of its existence--not doubting at all in the motives of this invitation to cooperate , nevertheless, spent the rest of the month in high spirits of some anticipation of both the beginning of a risky and therefore engrossing enterprise and a meeting with Nadine, separation from whom inspired him now to all kinds of extremely bold dreams, which came true immediately upon his return from the army, for the beloved wife was missing him and waiting for him with no less impatience.

*

True, as usual, soon the tempestuous freshet of their famished passion got back from being in spate into the normal riverbed, wherefore he was especially drawn to commit feats of valor; so he once actually got in touch with Sam on the phone and was through with his university duties by July to set at last to testing his aptitude for a new exotic occupation.

Beside Sam, his examiners were two former sportsmen, older and younger, and the older one, wiry, lean, and gray-haired in his forty, turned out to be a research worker at some physics research institute and had, apart from his solid mountaineering experience, a good head and savvy of the inventor and chief elaborator of stunts ("a brainy chap," as Sam assessed him), while the younger, thirty-year-old impassive athlete with the narrow bony face of a refined aristocrat and with the callous knuckles of a fighter, had been specializing from his youth in various types of martial arts and was officially registered as a coach at a sports society, having a significant "perk" at self-defense courses or when staging cinematic hand-to-hand fights and single combats; and as Sam, who had the title of city junior boxing champion and experience in landing training in the Marine Corps, was versed more than anyone else in automotive technics, all the three major areas of stunt work were represented in their triumvirate (the horse troupe was being filmed separately), and this core of initiative group, this think-tank of theirs, was enlarged afterwards with the proper number of needful people being recruited from a reliable contingent of their urgently notified comrades and, if necessary, from some of not very bumptious record-holders. Considering that he did not belong to either category and was classified as a pal Sam hadn't seen for a long time, "slightly oldish, but capable of something formerly", with his sound health, improved in the field at the training camp, and with some not yet forgotten bodily skills, restored at the same time, he was proving to them to the best of his ability that his fighting potential did not diminished at all and that his age and his degree of candidate of philosophical sciences were no hindrance to his fearlessness and dexterity: he was riding hither and thither before them on his motorcycle at racing speed over rough terrain outside the city, flying up like a bird from natural earthen springboards and managing to avoid falling when landing, and on the asphalt near the parking lot, he was turning the front and back somersaults, with which he amused himself in his adolescence on dance floors, dancing rock-'n'-roll; he was tumbling over the hood of the climber's car slowly running into him, and in a suitable roadside glade, he was demonstrating his mastery of Sambo holds on the very dangerous sparring partner, flopping at times only because of the high qualifications of his imperturbable rival; in short, he fain "sold" himself wholesale and retail, feeling the lightness of boyish excitement and the unmistakable liberation of his game, which did not threaten him with anything burdensome and important, either his additional responsibility or the tediousness of his "moral duty", although he was not deluded in the friendly indulgence of the judges examining him, who were for sure scrupulously captious and stingy, like all the "pros", in giving him positive marks.

But, to all appearances, his sprightliness had convinced them, and they liked his easiness of communication with people, for turgid "supermen" and self-satisfied poseurs could not be a member of this team, because their parting after the morning familiarization with his capabilities was not final, and the same evening they met again in the company with the other friends, at the bachelor apartment of one of their colleagues, where their business acquaintance was reinforced by a quite cultured informal party without carousal or rowdiness and validated by exchanging telephones, and where, to the unpretentious tourist twanging of guitar strings and the discordant choral singing of a dozen men who obviously never learnt vocalism, he, being a convivial interlocutor, chummed up both with Vlad, as the physicist Vladislav was dubbed in his circle, and with the invincible intrepid Tolyan, and with all the other members of comradeship, whose associate he became from that day, participating at first in the detailed deliberation and organization of some accidents and murders, ordered to them, and having lived later till his real "baptism of fire" while filming something military-pyrotechnic with the dashing mass scuffles of "ours" and "not ours", with jumping out in enemy uniform from the saddle of an allegedly exploding motorcycle and with plumping into a pile of off-screen cardboard boxes as an SS sub-machine-gunner slayed by an accurate bullet of our invulnerable lads-diversionists.

"You may congratulate me," he told Nadine after the first day of shooting. "Now I'm a movie star."

"You decided to break your neck," Nadine remarked with a sigh.

Although she was informed about his "acting" piecework as a stand-in only in general outline, but from the abundance of bruises and scratches, she could form an opinion of her husband's occupation in his new field. And as to his foolhardiness and riskiness suddenly seizing him sometimes, they were well known to her: in the mountains she was worrying when he climbed steep cliffs for blackberries or dogwood from a bush which caught their daughter's eye; at the seaside she was nervous when he swam far out in the choppy boisterous sea among the surging foamy billows and then, beaten with stones, ran on all fours onto the shore from under the crests of the rolling huge waves dragging him back; and in the city she was jittering when he got into street and transport conflicts, more often exacerbating them with his politeness and wittiness and fearlessly, even willingly, fending off the untenable claims of the brawlers spoiling for a fight to pummel the uninvited guardian of public order.

"You still ought to play at something..."

"But I've lost nothing till now," he exculpated himself for his quirks and whims.

"Touch wood," Nadine warned him, superstitiously as always. "One who puts all money in the kitty, may go bankrupt."

"It is possible, yet that's the interest of the game," he quizzically expressed his credo. "To stake just all, like in the Russian roulette."

"You think disability will adorn you?" inquired Nadine whose feeling for his male flesh were far from platonic love and aesthetic detachment. "However, you need nothing, of course, but an intact head. You, probably, don't plan anything for the future except for thinking."

As they were talking to the accompaniment of evening television news, and their daughter was sent for two months to a pioneer camp, he understood her transparent hint and succumbed without delay to the familiar temptation, whereupon they started an altogether different game which had not been boring them over thirteen years and which ended late into the night, having demolished her undoubtedly erroneous assumption completely.

Thus, although there were no useless prohibitions nor annoying reproaches on her part, she refused to approve of his unexpected keenness on dangerous stunts from now on, notwithstanding that his summer fees were very opportune in the family budget and stood them in good stead; so that, hired by Sam for shooting diverse adventurous episodes along with other engaged daredevils, he continued to tempt fate without her consent and now and then without her knowledge, using the gaps in his teaching schedule for acrobatic jumps from a height or for springing out from under the wheels or for rolling head over heels downstairs; and in the evenings, instead of his usual jogging, he either thought over the feasibility of some planned skirmishes, scraps and other "tickling of the nerves" of the viewers with the directors at the studio, or did his utmost at collective training in practicing some automatic elements of cinematic fights, worked out to the gesture, in a small gymnasium at Sam's motorcycle club or in the hall of the sports school of Tolyan.

For all that, he by no means neglected his philosophy, but, on the contrary, after bucking up and distracting himself by muscle loads and after overcoming his occasionally arising fear by concentration of attention on the action itself, he always felt his brain being rejuvenated by the return of the former youthful thirst for his own original thought, and that apparently depended on the amazing brightness and suddenness of the perception of all his senses, from which his voluntary risk, like emery, was erasing the dull patina of unprepossessing habituality.

When, after the next workout, he was coming out of the sweaty atmosphere of the heavily clanking barbells, dumbbells and weights mixing with the thuds of falling bodies against mats and the thumps of hard boxing gloves against leather punch-bags in the spacious hall with wire meshes on huge windows, with wooden Swedish walls, a steel horizontal bar, a bed-plate of gymnastic bars, a pair of rings hanging from the ceiling, and with the mechanical multi-functional complex of a weight-lifting machine for bodybuilding that was rumbling, like a smithy, with all its joints, pulleys, blocks, levers and iron pigs of descending counterweights; or when he was walking from the film studio--from the noisy hangar of the working pavilion with a two-story construction of the decorative interior of now an Italian-Spanish inn, now a North American cowboy saloon, now a South Russian White Guard restaurant--from smells of size paints of prop and sawn boards of scenery and hot metal of spotlights; or when he was alighting on the way from outdoor shooting from the costumier bus, having left both the bustling hubbub of rehearsals-takes, and the businesslike concentrated activity of sports repetitions and of polishing every action, and the unceasing pop music not oppressing him, as before, sounding as the rollicking or sugary-sentimental background in the autos that sometimes gave him a lift (it must be said, all his present mates had their own cars, albeit not very sumptuous, and all of them were really cool drivers, just suitable for plausible imitations of traffic accidents announced in scenarios), while traversing the park, in the distinct silence of loneliness on one of the alleys, he was astounded, as if he saw it for the first time, at a leafy pattern of crowns, embedded, like black motionless flashes, in the swooning whitishness of summer twilight, suddenly stopping in inexpressible amazement before the disheveled torch of Canadian maple, enveloped in flames of autumn crimson, and before the mountain ash carnivally hung with brightly-orange clusters and shedding the last leaves in the endless cold rains; and soon, struck by the baroque palace luxury of the winter square, he was angelically weightlessly stepping on the softly yielding snow, dazzlingly clean, as though after a long illness, and frostily crunching under his feet on the paths trodden by pedestrians; and then, choking with the thawing spring wind, he reveled in the early flowering of the boulevard lindens, studded to the top with white-pink candles exuding honey-sweet aromas, and harkened at the rapturously restless clamorous talks of the rooks returned from the South.

After a year of such a seasonal work, he became a full member in Sam's team in all aspects (fortunately, he never pretended to laurels of performing arts, having no acting ambitions, because, on closer examination, acting repelled him by constant dependence on someone else's will and by ingratiating obsequiousness at the stage of screen tests and appointments to the roles), without crippling himself and without breaking his neck, contrary to Nadine's fears; moreover, now he even was broader in his shoulders and stronger in his tirelessness, which his spouse, loved by him beyond all measure, could hardly cope with, and which, for applied purposes, he directed to grinding Russian domestic seers and precursors from the Orthodox-conciliar Solovyov's galaxy, whom he dug out in various archives and personal home libraries and who tried, without detracting from private freedom, to reunite the spirit disintegrating into individuals in "people" and "humanity" and were discarded, together with their God, freedom and spirit, by the really happened unity of the grassroots masslikeness that was decomposing anew in malignant decay as aggregations of warring rebellious cells, no longer held together by anything--either by utopian spiritual "sobornost", or by state practical coercion-surveillance, or by some ideas and dreams, realized in schizophrenic reality and proved a cannibal phenomenon of self-devouring of victorious nonentities, which he had found at birth and in which he still lived ever since, looking in the surrounding slough of degradation for islands of not swampy firm soil, where, following the advice of one clever Frenchman, he intended to "cultivate his garden" that was being flooded both in its seedlings and in its prime by influxes of boggy senselessness and sinking, like the legendary city of Kitezh, into the morass of the hateful past, forcing him to move to a new patch of land which he was taking for an undeveloped continent, but which, after the completion of his next horticultural cultivation and after its gradual immersion into the ever-increasing awareness of his fallacy, always turned out to be only a step on his path of involuntary ascent, or rather of running away from the overtaking squeamish disgust to this hopelessly degenerating life, whose poisonous quicksands were eroding the very roots of his zealous industriousness as a gardener and whose noxious putrid miasma were permeating the salutary atmosphere of the reservations of greatness and liberty that he was creating.

In essence, his solitary life during many years told on him not in the best way in terms of his everyday fighting efficiency and infected him with some lack of confidence, typical for anchorites-"introverts" who withdrew from active communication and forgot how to spend their volitional energy on offensively successful external overcoming in long self-overcoming and in non-resistance of passive defense; and his partnership with narrow-minded robust Sam, wholly rooted in this life, was based primarily on his overcoming of the rudiments of his thoughtful diffidence by situations of active self-assertion in their joint male plays and physical exercises, where the psychological nuances of solitary introspections and reflections were completely neutralized by the pre-start or competitive tension and by the attacking purposefulness of the utmost momentary collectedness, and the "fatal accidents" of unforeseen blunders, already past, were a constant theme for their common cheerful recollections and badinage and for raillery understandable only to the initiated, rallying the comrades-in-arms, dissimilar in all the rest, into a strong business fellowship, such as a brotherhood of front-line soldiers welded together by the war or as a teenage street gang preparing to a future war in the tussles "wall to wall", as their "rocker's" crew or as, say, a semi-criminal pack of underage blockheads, slobs and lazybones, in which Sam's seventeen-year-old son Sergey was a ringleader called "Serge", as the henchmen from his retinue respectfully turned to this tall brawny chap, who was proudly introduced to him by Sam at their suburban sports base, where the sonny with his puppies once arrived in the parent's car, and to whom he took a categorical dislike then because of the square insolent physiognomy of a narcissistic bully and the slighting brashness of a local petty Fuhrer.

But whatever were the triumphs of dexterity, sang-froid and luck by which he compensated for a taint of alienation in his soul in order to cement his alliance with the conquerors of mountain peaks and motorways, not prone to any paralyzing generalizations or references to circumstances, that were accepting life as it is, achieving with laudable persistence some ends clearly defined within it, he, literally "playing with fire" and "walking along the edge" at a dizzy height without skills of a rope-walker, unlike his fellow stuntmen, rather maintained the unstable tone of his ambitious life-affirmation spurred on by these rude irritants, the stinging poignancy of seasonings of which teased his dulled taste of living of each of the days measured out to him in the rotation of the seasons, than wasted the excess of his enthusiasm and optimism characteristic of some of ebullient members of their club brotherhood; he could still get along both with them, and with the university milieu, and with his family, and he timely removed his former affects by forcing contrasts, beating the hanging leather bags filled with sawdust to let off steam and nimbly throwing his rival friends on the mat in the training single combats under the refereeing of Tolyan, however, unfortunately, it was beyond his capacity to uproot the incompatibility he secretly nurtured, whoever he hobnobbed with and whatever he reanimated in himself for that.

In principle, his persistent fastidiousness to the dishonorable mendacious slovenly reality of his native penates--imperceptibly instilled by him and by his wife, tired of everyday absurdities and endless shortage of things of various kind, into their organized, defiantly neat cutie-daughter infuriating the poor school teachers, who were dinning some outdated false common truths into her head, with her arrogant erudition and accompanying sarcastic remarks aloud--should have led him to the long-cherished thought of emigration and of resettling with his household abroad into the conditions worthy of a normal thinker in the "normal bourgeois civilization", with its mutually acceptable and mutually beneficial distribution of spheres of professionalization corresponding, albeit not ideally, to the genetic predisposition of human multitudes, sometimes mutually denying, with its, perhaps short-lived, dissonant harmony of the individual and the society that he compared with the prosperity of the ancient Greek democratic poleis--while for the motherland abasing him with its mediocre and brazen-faced swinishness, he was seeking in history the other more humiliating analogies which would have outraged, had Sam learnt about them, all the avowed great-power jingoes, for without the messianic myths aggrandizing each of them, they were preordained to remained face to face with their worthlessness and lifelong deception by cunning unprincipled power-seekers--and also with its direct dependence of "success" on talents, labor and knowledge that were often unpromising and secondary in the country where wily swindlers, crafty rogues, and thorough scoundrels prevailed everywhere. Now it seemed to be possible to emigrate, provided that you had money, and he quite relied on his enterprise and scientific preparedness, but even if he were sure that he would quickly manage to get a tolerable job in his specialty and would not have to contact as "unskilled manpower" with exploitative employers, he would have hardly been jostling in the crowd at the embassy and hastily selling his library and furniture.

Yes, undoubtedly, if he escaped to the West from the soviet baneful muddle-headedness among those who were getting away from here "over the hill" and changed the territory, citizenship and cultural context, he would have probably transplanted himself into the environment of self-sufficiency, technical equipment and rationality, optimally favorable for cultivating his learnedness in scientific studies, and from now on he could have freely broadened his horizons, publicly expounding his views and thoughts on any problematic issues; and from the aspect of expediency, reasonableness and forethought, there were no objections against getting rid of the leash tying him to the womb of the communistic system indolently digesting him, especially as to evade the vilification and suffocation of the culture and spirit, inescapable here, would have been his wisest decision; so it was just one "hitch" that continued to prevent him from doing it forthwith, one vague presentiment, but this insignificant snag outweighed all his grandiose plans of "change of fate" and "exit from the game without rules", at least for now.

The conflict of his "I"--as though pupating into an armored cocoon of official duties, of cognition not touching the soul, of family life, and of aimless prowess on the eve of his new incarnation--and the supposedly objective world tragically deepening in the peoples undergoing a sluggish collapse and ruin was being smoothed over or glossed over by welfare in the peoples that were still in their heyday and self-confident expansion, yet this conflict, which was the main subject of his philosophical studies and the recurring theme of his backstage self-exposure in the notebook, had no resolution anywhere, and his mission was to clarify it, and not obfuscate nor prettify it, hushing up the problems and sugarcoat the reality; as well as it was inadmissible that the emigration hustle and bustle and getting used to the unfamiliar life would have harmed the maturation of some foreseen other consciousness, which the conflict, as eternal as man himself, was pregnant with, that was once to flutter out as his all-seeing inspiration from the liberatingly bursting unintelligibility and mechanicalness and to turn his present self into his future self. He should have waited until some productive finale of the ongoing transformation, and besides, his belief in the providence building his fate feeling no need for any church props continually perceived a certain logic of the unfolding of some force revealing to him in his unexpected summations in the elusive earthly existence, and this force creating him and his world was focused on him as on the epicenter of the spiritual tension and obliged him, whether he liked it or not, to maintain a fruitful maximum of insolubility, the field of influence of which was spreading out, as he suspected, over everything earthly that was connected in one way or another with various similar energy-powerful human anomalies involving all the materiality of the kindred cosmos and planet, thereby subordinating the no longer random destinies to God's will guiding them from within and from outside.

Within the rigid framework of the proposed Western professorship, or, more likely, of his long and difficult settling "from scratch" and embedding himself into the local scientific community, he would have lost the opportunities to drift as before at a venture through life until mooring to the unknown shore not marked on the maps; so, keeping the status quo of an authority on useless antiquity for the sake of the hypothetical concluding discovery, last here, he was slow in real tries, replacing the troubles of a desirable and impossible move to other lands and foreign parts by diligence in trainings and cinematic adventures and in the painstaking sifting of the century and a half massif of Russian philosophy of the "Silver Age", colossal in its previously concealed volume, which, frankly speaking, was not very enthusing him either with the journal-article unsystematicity of loquacious Vasily Rozanov, whose grains of interesting sound thoughts were buried in jumbles of irrepressible rhetoric, or with the reformist ecclesiasticism of Pavel Florensky, who perished in the GULAG and who interpreted in Orthodox tradition the experience of a revolution in the physics of the universe, incomprehensible to the militant materialists, or even with the famous "Sophia-Divine Wisdom" and "integral fusion" of the founder of this peculiar and sometimes original era, marked by the beginning of Vladimir Solovyov's "lyubomudriye" ("love of wisdom" in Russian or "philosophy" in other languages), who, with the flair and sensitivity of a true poet, was imbued with the partial smallness of all world religions without uniting them in the "Universal Church" and with the necessity of the coming syncretism, and whose successor was later such a genius in painting as Nicholas Roerich.

Firstly, he read all this after reading many other thinkers and after his pilgrimages and wanderings through diverse layers and epochs of culture that partly satisfied his former curiosity, that's why he had something to compare with, without yielding to the temptation of the "Russianness" of home-grown borrowings, whoever was overemphasizing such a kind of primacy in the pardonable national megalomania; secondly, this indisputably eminent entry into comprehending the Russian own Renaissance fell on the period of the end of both the European Renaissance and the entire Christian era in general that had been being toppled just then by Nietzsche, already inappropriate in his titanism, therefore the reliance of the born adherents of patristic churchliness, which were the Russian preachers, heresiarchs and rebels in terms of upbringing and sympathies and antipathies, on the religious feeling that was fading in the crowds losing God could not but put their philosophy seeking to unite the crumbling humanity in Christ and in collectivist morality into a position similar, in his opinion, to the position of the pagan church of imperial Rome, archaic in its polytheism becoming a thing of the past, before adopting Christianity; and thirdly, the newly formed school, or rather, a stratum of independent professional philosophers, was crushed and trampled by the ponderous tread of the ruthless boots of the "proletarian dictatorship", without any chance of developing into something in future, and had some continuation only in the person of such great loners, basically abroad, as Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, Karsavin and Sergei Bulgakov, Lossky and Alexei Losev, who were being read in their homeland by intellectuals and polymaths like him, at best, or by some windbags that swanked about their conversance with quotations from forbidden works.

That's not to mention that, in addition to the spiritual restoration of medieval integrality, which the technocrat Father Pavel plainly declared and which in this period of the obsolescence of consolidating church mythologies couldn't be implemented otherwise than in the forms of ideologies forcibly implanted by the ruling state and of rigorous puppet norms of social conduct against the backdrop of mass "swarm" consciousness scraped out by terror, destitution and brutalization to the condition of Locke's "tabula rasa", the philosophers of the "Russian Renaissance" were sinning, as a rule, by an excessive predilection for universalism, and, with primordial sweeping broad-mindedness, they expatiated on the subjects of now historical, sociological and psychological observations, now futurological predictions, now liberal non-canonical theology, intending, apparently, despite the contemporary differentiation of aspects of research and scientific disciplines, to recreate from discretely fragmented "mental activity" the universality and encyclopedism of the Aristotelian multidisciplinary and Hegelian academic archetype of philosophy as the highest authority for all other sciences, wherefore they rarely won on the foreign territory with their surmises and insights as against the punctiliously-system and fault-finding pedants, for, not joining the detachment of "applied popularizers", they, with solitary exceptions, were not often content with a concretely detailed theory of knowledge, and, with all the spunk, proficiency and Atticly-fragmentary genius of the clarity that sometimes dawned upon them, they every now and then fell into two main vices of prematurely, or belatedly, synthesizing thinking, namely superficiality and unprovenness, as if appealing to "If you wont believe, you wont understand" by the biblical prophet Isaiah.

And the very impending dissociation of his organism from the world, whose part he was, haunting him and rankling in his soul, was akin to aching pity for himself as a mortal, enrobed in this aging flesh spending in natural metabolism that was endowed with its own memory and its changing program of participation in the apparent fluidity of life, meanwhile life was always immersed as instantaneity in the abiding of eternity devoid of time parameters that gifted memory to the flesh at first and the anguish of time then, with the only object of engendering its striving to get shut of the torment of continuous dying both in its vain returns to the cyclicity of animality and savageness and in its ascetic ascensions to the timeless incorporeality of its divinity which was getting augmented by the spiritual experience of bodily spending; and however he reiterated that time is fiction, a residual trace of the past in the infinity of the present, the retentive microstructures of his thirty-six-year-old perishable body overflowing with the spring ineradicable thirst for self-disclosure filled him at times before the snow-white lace pattern of the frosted window in an icy trolleybus or at the May apple trees frothing with white inflorescences on the way to the "plein air" with such desires and yearning that he could nowise appease them with the shake-ups of his risky tumbles and truly breakneck speed or of his conjugal debauchery; and this wonderfully complex formation, called "he", this corporality, condensed into "him", this nature, recognized as "I" existed then quite autonomously, in parallel with the commands of his will and with his distrustful listening to the cave calls of his primitive martial blood and to the Papuan rhythms of a savage hopping shamanically in the night.

No longer being a confirmed homebody and a regular visitor of reading rooms, during this mutably fighting, chequered year he stopped a look many a time in such a state of mind at strange women, sometimes playing up to them in their spell and seduction, but without implying anything more serious, and not because he had not a right to transgress the prohibitions of his impeccable morality, for he could not brook thralldom even in this, however, none of the pretty, loveable, and comely-nice seductresses he met attracted him more than his petite wife, and he didn't become enamored of anyone so much, while to collect those who encountered him incidentally in a Don Juan's omnivorous manner was not to his liking, since he too clearly foresaw their further predictable behavior and his boredom in bed with them and the subsequent extrication from their snares that was not worth such pleasure, given that there was no trace of the mystery of femininity in them which he felt in his Nadine and which would have aroused his interest in them as objects worthy of close attention and purposeful courtship.

In short, unlike the stunt brigade buddies that occasionally indulged in passing "sports sex", as was customary among real men, he remained the same true dreamer and overly refined gourmet and turned up his nose at adultery, snobbishly rejecting all the hints, appeals or even solicitation of representatives of the fair sex, thereby inconsiderately missing the sure chances to give himself and others a little of pleasant trouble and excitement, which was rather inhuman regarding the ladies and, alas, removed him, who desired something sizzlingly fatal and passionate, like the miracle experienced by him with Nadine, instead of these friskily lively, skittish, playfully malleable wantons, from the number of the active leading actors of the irrepressible plays of the human flesh into the ranks of the cautious and judicious spectators preaching from their deceptively unshakable conquered positions to the tragically farcical mischievous characters of the eternal bacchanal show, colorfully motley and costumed both by the spectacular setting and props of heterogeneous harlequinades of different races and tribes and by some institutional subtexts of various "usualness" and "naturalness". And Eros that was moving at random the chess figures of individuals, equally subject to their animal nature, did not fail eventually to punish him for his pickiness.

*

Again it was May, and by noon the sun was hot as in summer, especially in the suburbs, where they had arrived at the quiet streets of the decorative countrified cottages of some settlement to shoot their episodes of a police chase after the hurtling car being driven by a bunch of scooting armed villains, into which he was supposed to crash in the guise of a chance motorcyclist at the crossing fenced round for a film set, so as to be catapulted from the saddle and fly effectively over the roof of the car to Tolyan who was responsible for safety of his landing.

In principle, the stunt was not so difficult, and they had only to correctly calculate the speed of the colliding cars and slow down in time, he on his motorcycle and Sam at the wheel of the car, so that at the moment of bumping into the side of the allegedly stolen Volga, he would not have been thrown away aside and his feet would not have touched anything while catapulting; that's why, four of them with Vlad giving the start and stop signals were forced to carefully time and adjust everything and rehearse the stunt in slow repeats, having previously cleared the accident site from blotches of dried mud and all perfidious pebbles; and only then they performed the stunt as it was planned, with a swift approach and jumping out into a somersault over the roof and with landing behind the car on several foam rubber mats that covered the potholes of asphalt at the place of his fall.

Now it remained to capture on celluloid his flight from a proper angle, and today they were all free, whatever the film crew would have filmed here further, for they were invited in this movie to perform a dozen of unthinkable accidents with incredible rescues from hopeless situations and to act the fights, indicated in the script, with maximum virtuosity, and no more. His motorcycle with a running intermittently snorting engine was standing not far from the line of collision with the Volga drawn in chalk, while the usual working squabble continued by the camera; and, endeavoring to calm not so much the prestart "jitters" that were being habitually switched to a desire to do the prepared stunt again as his excessive tension, fraught with small muscle mistakes, glitches and unintended traumas, he was moving his relaxed shoulders, slightly stamping the rubber non-slip sole of his sports shoe on the pavement of the street blocked by steel turnstiles and stretched behind him as two varicolored lines of freshly painted private fences.

And suddenly, among the cinematic fraternity surrounding the swearing director by the camera, among all these ordinarily-typical neurasthenic administrators, ever-smoking elderly girls assistants director and indifferently lazy, remiss technical staff, he spotted a new figure, the supernumerary leading lady, so to speak, a long-legged Americanized businesswoman in a brown herringbone jacket and a matched pleated skirt and in a creamy pale yellow blouse with a narrow lilac tie, who seemed quite tall to him in high heels and probably due to the proportions of her Nordic lean physique. Be this "business girl" not so constrained, he would have mistaken her for an actress, but judging by her behavior and by how uncertainly she sometimes looked around, that casual gesture of hers, with which she was taking aside a wave of her blond hair combed to one side and smoothly flowing onto the jacket shoulder, testified not to her intention to show off, but rather to her awkwardness that he more than once noticed in people "from outside" who were permitted to "sit quietly" in the hysterical din and welter of the "creative process".

"Ah, you my cutie..." he grinned, studying from afar her unremarkable delicately-shaped pretty face with a beautiful, rather hard mouth and firm chin.

But then she raised her eyes, unexpectedly brown, of a wild greenish hazel hue; their eyes fleetingly met and, having gone apart for an instant, quickly crossed again, already openly, as if, while accidentally looking at each other, they saw what they dreamt of seeing for a long time yet couldn't catch so clearly and suddenly in anyone until now; although ere this cursory glance, on sober reflection, he would have found that the girlie was outwardly no great shakes, not a stunning beauty or an irresistible paragon of temptation, and that, with all her youth redeeming her possible imperfections and shortcomings, she wouldn't have attracted his attention in the crowd and he would have hardly stared for no reason into her bewilderingly impudent eyes squinting in the sun.

But they hadn't been allowed to get enough of looking at each other. A gal in jeans and a red golf cap ran out with a wooden striped clapper board in front of the camera; Vlad, who coordinated their stunt, threw up both his hands, giving a signal about combat readiness; a podgy bearded director in black glasses yelled heartrendingly: "Action!"; and his motorcycle trembling with impatience roared at the start line. The next moment, at a sign from Vlad, he, shrunk before jumping into an explosive springy cannon-ball, swept a measured section of the way to the intersection (his drive along the street had already been shot) and, having stopped abruptly before the door of the car that crossed the trajectory of his sprint spurt, pushed off on the crest of an inertial wave from the footpegs of his motorcycle, straightening in his swift flight over the roof of the Volga.

However, when pushing, he slightly overdid it, and his legs went too far forward, which spoiled his entire landing: although he tucked very quickly and Tolyan's support was very accurate, nonetheless, he failed to roll elegantly in the end and his buttocks bumped into the mats as he flopped; so that he did not hurt his back only thanks to the relatively soft covering and the skillful correction of his mate, and he spoke out about his blunder that remained, true, out of the frame succinctly, but expressively.

He rolled his motorcycle to the start for the second take past the popsy who had disturbed his peace and quiet, and, of course, he took advantage of a couple of free minutes.

"You didn't see it, by the by," he lingered near her a bit to share his misfortune reproachfully. "Meanwhile I all but crashed because of you."

"Because of me?" And her voice was also charming, not sonorously shrill and nor capriciously squeaky, but of a soulful chest timbre, and without the intonations of actresses' artificial heartiness that set his teeth on edge. "We are not acquainted, it seems."

"Just that is the reason," he said. "You mustn't so intrigue a stuntman at a 'crucial line'. You aren't from our studio gang, as far as I understand?"

"No, I'm on business. My company has a contract with your studio, so there needs to be some papers and documentation, urgently as usual," she clarified the nonessential circumstances of her appearance here in a purling Moscow patter. "You are perceptive, as I see..."

"And perspicacious," he readily confirmed. "And methinks you won't disappear until the end of the shooting. I mean that we're wrapping it up soon, and we have a car. And in the car, if you want, we'll find a seat for you. What do you say to this?"

"It's hard to refuse you," she restrainedly smiled an engaging white-toothed smile that flashed up as a short blip, in the register of communicative-polite affability as yet.

"Then the last question, and I leave you for a while," he beamed with a welcoming grin of "all thirty-two not yet knocked out". "My name is Hor. In ancient Egyptian mythology, it is the son of Osiris and Isis, a sort of, you know, Egyptian Apollo..."

"I'm called not so exotically," she said modestly. "Merely Svetlana."

"A marvelous name," he disagreed with her modesty. "Well, let's finish talking the rest later."

"If you remain alive," she remarked with irony.

"Now I shall be doing my utmost for that," he promised.

It must be said, he kept his promise, having worked all the takes without visible deviations from the scheme and without undershoots or overshoots, and to the city he was returning safe and sound, with Svetlana, who sat in the back seat between himself and Tolyan, making him feel that such a ride, hip to hip, in close proximity to his elegant independent fellow traveler, did not benefit his chastity, which was already pretty undermined by the recent conversation of their glances. Therefore, when they drove to the firm where she worked as a secretary, and he got out of the car to let her out, while she, with office folders in her bag, got out after him, inadvertently demonstrating the slender legs of a born runner in gossamer nylon stockings, his glance, as short as a shot, again met with her sudden direct glance, and, having slammed the door behind her, he waved at Sam.

"I don't ride further," he informed Vlad who was sneering sardonically through the lowered window. "See you tomorrow, folks."

"Take care of yourself," Tolyan leaned out of the neighboring window. "We need you."

At that, true, the instructions and parting words of the jokers-humorists were interrupted, otherwise they would have given him many useful tips, for Sam, always eager to make dibs where possible, immediately revved up the engine and whirled away, so he and Svetlana were left alone on the sidewalk, in the uninhabited neglect of a lane, at the entrance with the black signboards of the institutions huddling in this building.

"What, you decided seriously to go to the work?" he asked her who obviously waited for him to ask her such a question.

"The day is lost, in effect," she answered, as if hesitating. "But I should bring the documents into the office, anyway."

"And if I watch for you here you will ever come out?"

"Without doubt. I am not going to stay for the night there. Thus, you make a date with me?"

"Yes, I try, at any rate... Or you're busy?"

"No, not very," she dismissed his suspicions with a self-critical chuckle.

"But be on watch at that playground, please, over there," she pointed across the road at a square of green lilac bushes at the back of a multi-storey building, with benches in niches of verdure and with a hirsute wood goblin, crudely carved from a tree trunk, in the middle. "I'll come out for sure, sooner or later."

"If you deceive me I shan't bear it," he threatened.

"Of course, you are so weak-hearted," she nodded and, having darted an intent look at her new acquaintance, went to the entrance.

At the playground he hung about for a whole hour, regretting that he, ready for action every minute, had to waste so much his precious time for such a watchful wait at the observation post and mocking himself for his puerile patience, rewarded, oddly enough, by the long-awaited going out of his delayed "Valkyrie", dubbed so by him for her Scandinavian appearance and for her cruelty in keeping an adorer in hour-long suspense; for, to do her justice, she had the decency not to make off through the back door and, being detained by her boss, by her words, even worried whether she would anger him by reneging on her promise.

"Where, by the way, our date will take place, have you thought of something?" she inquired without a hint of coquetry.

"The choice we have, alas, is not wide, so it is better at your discretion," he gentlemanly conceded her legal right to the lady. "Decent restaurants, I suppose, are packed, while to lead you into some dens is risky, and besides, Caucasian shopkeepers are probably no company for you..."

"God forbid," she acknowledged. "Brunettes are not my type in recent times."

"How I agree with you," he supported her jokingly. "Vile dark-haired types, with mustaches, apart from anything else. Not like us, bright heads, true Aryans."

"You're doubtlessly," she appreciated the sculptural shape of his skull and the Olympian perfection of his torso, not intimidatingly bulky, like Sam's, but also worthy of women's beach admiration. "You're a real conquistador, just as in the 'videos'..."

"No, no, I'm formidable, but kind," he assured this intelligent movie fan.

"Kind to your trophies," she grinned. "And what about visiting youth bars? Or your respectability doesn't allow you? You're a scientist, as I heard..."

"It's true," he sighed sorrowfully. "A proper dried-up book worm, as you see, and I'll remain such unless you can dunk me in your bar."

"It was mine," said Svetlana, saddened. "In youth."

"That hasn't finished yet, hopefully," he added, because the gran was up to twenty-five, no more. "Then it's decided, we go to a bar. Let's try to rejuvenate today."

In the smoky intoxicating semi-darkness of a semi-basement being shaken with tape recorder rhythms and pulsing with multicolored light bulbs twinkling behind the counter, where, after buying the assortment of delicacies available in the bar, they nibbled candied almonds and snacked microscopic sandwiches while sipping champagne and low-alcohol liqueur cocktails, their relations grew much simpler, and the dances in an embrace alternating with their probing introductory talks about this and that successfully shifted their engrossing dialogue to a franker wordless level of communication, at which their bodies, still carefully and incidentally, spoke out what would have been prematurely to say out aloud, because he might scare away her, whereas she wanted to fully enjoy the very process of his courtship and winning her heart.

And both of them, getting pally in the community of the moods and sensual atmosphere during these occasional exchanges of remarks and casual ogles, learnt a lot of useful information about each other. In particular, her dislike to brunettes was explained by her already dissolved marriage ("Our lousy army had broken his psyche in some 'hot spots', and upon me he was venting his rage for that," she told. "And how his weakness infuriated him usually, it was fear and terror! After beating me in a fit of frenzy, he was groveling at my feet, entreating me for forgiveness and pity. That is, it was me who was obliged to feel compassion for him, how do you like it! No, I've had enough of that; why I must ruin my life?"), and fortunately, she had no children from her nutty husband; while he honestly confessed that he was not free, which gladdened her, for some reason ("At least, you won't propose marriage to me, like some," she elucidated her position. "I haven't yet recovered from my first matrimony, and I regained my liberty in order to burst any bonds"). And since none of the frolicking youth, thank God, bothered them and nobody picked a drunken quarrel, the more or less intimate development of their triumphal mutual attraction was a foregone conclusion.

"You are hardy, I see," Svetlana observed, cooling her dry throat with a fair sip of champagne after a prolonged dance embrace. "Because of me, you're without dinner all day."

"You're too."

"That's just what I'm getting at," she laughed. "Instead of starving here, let's go visit to have a snack."

"Like Winnie the Pooh with Piglet," he smiled. "And to whom we'll go?"

"To me, naturally," his temptress innocently described their evening location. "I think I have something in the fridge."

"Plus we can buy something on the way, it's not too late," he assented, prudently putting forward moments excusing his visit. "We won't disturb anyone there?"

"It is out of the question," the divorced Svetlana reassured the delicate cavalier, seeing through his subtle diplomacy, of course. "Now I live alone there."

So, having bought "take-away" another bottle with a long neck wrapped in silver glittering foil from the barman, they left the noisy bash of the younger generation that had a gorgeous time in this semi-basement, and forty minutes later, carrying heavy plastic bags with some victuals, they were already coming into the entrance of her house, whose flatly-worn five-storey facade faced the cement fence stretching along the entrances, behind which, on the back brick wall of some towering monumental administrative building, the zigzags of fire-escapes were rising sinuously skywards, and the high shadow falling on the house filled the narrow courtyard gap with stale moldy dampness, not conducive to strolls before the front doors.

The foregoing was corroborated by reality on the penultimate landing of their lively ascent to the doors of her flat, where on the windowsill of the staircase window they found a gloomy unshaven bloke with dark complexion and chiseled but haggard pasty face and with streaks of gray in his black gypsy hair, who was waiting for the hostess of the flat extremely untimely.

"It's me again," the bloke said crossly, standing up to meet Sveta and turning out to be lanky, though stooped and emaciated.

"I see," Sveta bristled at once with the same hostility. "And why you're again?"

"Perhaps, we'll come into the flat?" the lean guy, obviously vexed with the presence of a stranger, asked or rather demanded.

"Not with you," she snapped.

"What, with him?"

"I'll decide it by myself. But you're not invited today."

"But I've come," the rejected guy kept insisting. "And I'll force you to reckon with me."

"Then I immediately call the police," she warned. "Force others, and leave me alone."

"Ex-husband, if I'm not mistaken?" he intervened in their exchange of pleasantries.

"Who else," his heated runner that was stopped by an obstacle at the very finish line replied brusquely as if cursing. "You again prove God knows what to himself and inopportunely as ever" she stung her spouse who was a bankrupt in all respects, judging by everything.

"Will you let us through, sir?" he amicably addressed the guy who stood in their way. "We want to eat, after all..."

"That means your 'downtime' ended?" Ignoring his appeal, the insulted husband stared at the "free woman" that no longer belonged to him. "Right, most important that the bed is not empty..."

"Young man," he tapped his finger on the denim shoulder. "It's unbecoming for a true man to offend girlies."

"Shut your trap, dickhead," this cad deigned at last to respond to his intervention. "Bugger off before I smash your snout."

"Aha, we are without formalities with you?" he determined the character of the relations established with the guy. "Only such statements should be argued..."

"Valera, don't get wound up," Svetlana, whom they couldn't share, tried to call the nervous hubby to order. "It is you who is a 'third wheel' here, not him."

With equal success, she could try to tame an enraged bull at the corrida by teasing it with a red rag.

"No, then the end of both," Valera foretold maliciously. "Both go away, mind you."

"So what, we have a tournament in view?" he asked cheerfully. "Or a duel?"

"You're an optimist, though," the guy muttered through clenched teeth. "I'll kill you, both you and her, it will be so someday..."

"But not today, I presume? Svetik, stay here with the provisions," he called her by pet name for the first time, handing her his bag, "while we shall briefly discuss our problems."

"Wouldn't you please descend with me to the barrier?" he offered his perfectly stern rival. "So as to avoid breaking the window in the heat of scrimmage..."

"Well, you've begged for it, you'll catch it," predicted the inexorable avenger and went waddling like a browbeating thug down the stairs.

"I'll endeavor to get rid of the fool," throwing off his leather jacket onto the windowsill in order not to tear it, he hastily exchanged a few words with Svetlana. "I'll return, don't be afraid, you inspire me with courage."

"He's stoned today," Sveta, well-versed in her spouse's bad manners, notified him. "And he really killed, he has special training..."

"Hopefully it's not too special," he blithely waved her warning aside and followed the dangerous ex-husband downstairs.

However, he took note of this fact, though with such a trainer as Tolyan they were mastering in detail the army hand-to-hand combat complexes as well, and in a real fight, it was impossible to predict the win one hundred percent, for neither the arbitration control of the referee nor the sports codes of honor limited the vying combatants.

Both of them came out of the house by firm step and equally cast a glance to the right and to the left to check the emptiness of the gap serving as a courtyard, after which they headed not for the arch leading to the street, but for a blind alley with two metal garages, where Valera, who was walking first, turned lazily towards him.

"As to 'kill', it is not in earnest, of course?" he inquired, approaching seemingly nonchalantly, yet not closer than the range of a sudden blow, by which such ruffians loved to begin the beating of their victims, and from which, be a hit accurate, he might not have recovered.

"In earnest," his ruthless adversary answered gloomily. "I'm not a man to be trifled with."

This sinisterly desponded Valera most likely wanted to scare him, but he knew that the militants who had tasted murder could easily fall into the sin committed once if the fight was serious, and he could have coped with the beast, which hungered for the blood and horror of a screeching mauled prey, only by fracturing its spine or sending the hapless brutalized fighter to the forefathers.

"You, Valerian, indeed are simply a funeral parlor," he retorted good-naturedly, sizing up the distance between them and inferring that such a rangy attacker would use his legs first of all, since the guy was as long-legged as an ostrich. "If you're already nauseous by your young life, be a man, grin and bear it. I mean without marring the mood of others. Don't spoil a rare little soiree of kindred spirits and go away proudly."

"It is you who will go away," the ferocious descendant of the hot-tempered Chersonese Greeks and the ox-eyed cruel captive Turks ordered peremptorily, baring his teeth in a leer. "On all fours."

"But you're not right..."

This exhortation he did not finish.

As he expected, Valera attacked with his feet: from below in the groin and in a series, with a turn, with the heel in the face; so if the lightning attack were a little swifter, he wouldn't have bounced back and would have got a kick of the sneaker in the jaw. But, luckily for him, the martial skill of the degraded paratrooper stoner was superficial enough, even though suitable for street scuffles and "showdowns", yet incomparable with the honed inventive art of their invulnerable Tolyan; and, recoiling and dodging, he had managed to prevent the punching and kicking competitor from hitting properly and delivering a hard blow.

"Valera, I'm a pacifist!" having jumped back, he exclaimed in joking dismay, taking advantage of the amazement of the aggressor unexpectedly missed. "Strength is not proof!"

"That's it, you're dead..." Valerian-Valera snarled, then snorted and again rushed at him.

And the cool dude, as Sam liked to say, "got caught like a tot".

Having evaded one of the hail of fist hooks and uppercuts, complemented in the vein of Thai boxing by hooligan knee kicks in the ribs and feet blows in the shin and by chops, pokes and elbow strikes aiming at the throat, head, heart and other "pain points" of army methods of exterminating "enemy manpower" with bare hands, he, keeping cool and pugnacious gaiety, started back and grabbed the wrist of the bent right arm of the instigator with his right hand before his chest, whereupon a sharp blow of his left forearm straightened this arm in the elbow bend, while he simultaneously kicked Valerian with his left foot on the liver, so that the scrawny lanky body flung up its heels and flew up a meter above the asphalt, after which he jerked this body upwards by the wrenched arm, and it crashed flat on the ground, whereas his knee pressed its back from above, and thus the prostrated bully, wrung by his painful hold in a split second, was forced to bury the face in the dried mud near the garages.

But as soon as his rival, deluded by his defensive conduct of the fight, plumped down onto the ground and he pinned the defeated contestant to the improvised wrestling mat, crushing the resistance of this growling man desperately wriggling under him with the risk of breaking the dislocated arm, his carefree dashing gaiety suddenly, without transition, gave place to some furious bloodthirsty ferocity and to the instantly arisen superhuman monstrous strength, from the frenzied pressure of which the bones of the squeezed wrist started cracking, bursting like brushwood, in the vice of his closing fingers, and the breaking ribs of the chest of the procumbent man caved in under the press of his flesh, filled with incredible weight, implacably squashing the flattened flesh of the foe.

"Don't move..." he ordered inaudibly, while his bone-breaking death grip harder and harder squeezed this thrashing, powerlessly wheezing creature which futilely tried to belch out of the strangled voiceless throat a panickily-squealing anguished cry for help, a cry of the still twitching agonizing prey fallen into terrible paws that was being torn to pieces with savage bestial pleasure. "Shut your gob..."

The man under him, scratching the asphalt with the free hand and convulsively writhing on it, threw back the head twisted to face him and hissed out with the smashed lips, bloodily red in the bright twilight of the early summer evening: "Let go..."

"Strength is not proof," he repeated and thrust his fingers into a shock of black hair to pull the not yet split skull back still higher, till the vertebral crunch in the neck, and to sharply stick the face of the defenseless initiator of the tussle into the dry mud with a short poke, but this ordinary phrase contradicting what he was doing and repeated by him for the second time in the cannibalistic delight of the carnivorous mutilating of human living body, like the slammed floodgate, unexpectedly stemmed the frenzy of rage, already gushed into his soul, and the feverishly infectious thirst for murder that seemed to be transmitted to him from the excessively presumptuous militant, and he stopped on the very brink--he did not poke his victim into the mortal facelessness of the distorted physiognomy to smudge the grimace of pain and hatred with an asphalt slap in the face and bent down to the unshaven cheek to pronounce his thought--however, just as he opened his mouth, it dawned on him that he needed no words and that the power, which he was now endowed with, if it were directed otherwise, not destructively, allowed him not to resort to threats or persuasion and not to inspire or substantiate anything at all, for he could simply introduce every necessary program in this consciousness, protected from him by nothing, inserting it directly, from brain to brain, as a wordless electric shock impulse of some internal prohibition, without breaking man's will like bones, but reorienting it non-violently to refusal and break-up with the past tormenting the unlucky spouse.

As if continuing his move with a mental command, without uttering a sound, he sent this impulse, this order of impelling voluntariness, and having asked, in order to make sure of the effect of its influence, "Do you get me?", he heard an obedient "Yes" and released the submissive brawler from his grip, yet immediately weakened so much so that when he, completely depleted after the struggle, hardly got up, the defeated husband lying at his feet would have easily vanquished the winner even with the help of the only uninjured hand.

But Valerian, apparently, was not in the mood for revenge: leaning lopsidedly on his arm, he, crooked, rose to sit on the knees, and only then, groaning and puffing, stood up, without making any attempts to arrange his dangling fractured arm more comfortably, wobbling like a drunken rowdy that received a stroke a champagne bottle on the head and reeled before falling senseless in a shameful blackout.

"It is a draw, agree?" he adjudicated conciliatorily, leaning against the steel wall of the garage, for his knees were buckling out of weakness. "Let's part friends."

His debased opponent did not even want to answer to such a blatant lie and went staggering, looking forlorn and mumbling something abusive, across the yard to the arch, being accompanied by his not very honorable escort. And after following the lurching stooped figure to the exit to the street, to be quite certain that this obstacle had been removed, he hurried with relief to the coveted entrance, albeit still feeling whacked.

"What did you tell him?" Svetlana met him by the question on the landing. "Why did he go away?"

"Did you peep at us?" he asked in his turn, closing the open window.

"Of course. I fretted over you," she dropped, taking the paper bags with some provisions for their intimate dinner from the windowsill. "You were inimitable."

"It's your clout, Svetik. You inspired me," he flattered her, resuming the interrupted play. "Besides, the prize is too valuable."

"Really?" the northern beauty, freed by him from the bloodsucker-dragon, responded to his courtly flirting with a radiant Hollywood smile. "That's why you threw my hubby with such a knack?"

"It was unintentionally," he justified himself modestly, taking his leather jacket, intact as before thank God. "My main weapon is the word."

"I saw it," the half-conquered Amazon agreed, smiling skeptically, since with her young healthy instinct she naturally preferred to have love affairs mainly with strong, courageous and lucky specimens of the sterner sex. "And after your word, he so resignedly retreated, for some reason."

"It is because I told him that this liaison is very serious," he fibbed in passing. "So he probably decided to forbear thwarting our happiness. Which, in my opinion, is noble of him."

"His nobility is quite known to me," she uttered, slightly dimming her white-toothed radiance. "Didn't he hurt you?"

"I hope not." With the leaving of Valery expelled forever, his weakness that had momentarily balanced the surge of supernatural power passed without a vestige, and he did not hasten far-sightedly to put on his jacket. "However, a little examination would be very helpful..."

"Yes, but not here," having bestowed him with a candid defiant look, she no less ambiguously invited him to finish the ascent. "Come on, carry the bags, and I'll get out the keys."

Despite their mutual and not groundless statements about ravenous hunger, behind the door, in her small-sized flatlet, furnished without frills (a beige sofa and a light birch wall unit, a fawn soft carpet and two armchairs to match the sofa, a color telly in front of this suite of furniture and a small refrigerator in a clean kitchenette, that is, in short, that minimal set of a young housewife, on which her youth usually spent), the appetites of another kind prevailed unconditionally, so, having delayed in the tiny hallway for a lingering preliminary kiss, they, as one might guess, ascertained the complete similarity of their intentions, and after hastily washing off daytime dust and makeup under the shower in turn, for Svetik was an adherent of "hygiene in everyday life", they clashed already in the interior appropriately fitted by the hostess, filling the cozy room cleaned out and mopped to the last mote with ardent sighs, industrious panting, and voluptuous groans, inasmuch as their "examination" of each other's finally obtained nudity was going on utmostly efficaciously: with her well-groomed body of a photo model for advertising tights and lingerie and with her diligence in technically competent erotic petting, Svetik was a first-rate filly, and their protracted clarification of the degree of competence and level of skill exhausted them only when both, given their all for such a gripping acquaintance, lay at last side by side and were involuntarily forced to cease their repeatedly renewed lovemaking.

Although the woman giving herself to him was indeed struck by his proved masculinity and he had every reason to feel legitimate pride, nevertheless, his present victory was noticeably different from his premarital youthful "bestriding of wild stallions" by some rather incongruous looking back at his closeness with Nadine, which seemed to be layered with its many years' singleness on this adultery closeness as an involuntary comparison, emphasizing a certain stagy character of this passion and the effort of each of the participants to demonstrate all the merits of a connoisseur and possessor of sufficient sexexperience, and that made their tireless passionate love somewhat showy, because of which in their mutual researching of the sexual predilections of the unknown "half" they still did not dare to use the whole arsenal of their sophistication in order not to alienate the partner with a discrepancy in some nuances of previous experience between them. Especially as both of them awfully wanted to be up to the mark even, pardon the expression, in orgasms for the first time, and the very enjoyment of their coition being created by them with self-forgetful artistic self-giving was perhaps not so important and significant for both, as the approval of their outwardly unrestrained ecstatic actions by the partner, the approval, sometimes grateful and becalmedly tender, sometimes lustfully raging and carrying them away to rampageous climaxes and to gasping happy convulsions of jubilant fusion in apotheoses.

"You're a monster," his disheveled naked "Valkyrie" murmured, opening her dimmed eyes, brightened by her satisfied passion, and touching his thigh with her fingers enervatedly stirring in caress. "And you always do it so?"

Her "so" she accentuated respectfully.

"I do it so only with you," he assured with ironical endearment. "It all depends on the woman, as you know."

"I wouldn't say that it all," she refuted his magnanimous axiom with a blissful sigh.

"Do you mean your husband?"

"As to my husband, he was worthless, that's why I put him out," she confidentially shared the shameful secret of family discord with him. "But I'm talking not about him."

"Hence it follows that they didn't notice something in you," he politely discredited all her egoistically inattentive men. "And they lost a lot. But I think we shall check who's to blame when opportunity offers... Do you mind?"

Instead of answering, she rolled over on her side and devotedly nuzzled into his hairy muscular chest.

"But we should have a bite anyway, ma'am," he stroked her long silky hair tickling his belly. "Otherwise, I'm powerless to get home."

"I'd devour you," she breathed lovingly and bit his skin gently. "Go to the bathroom, and I'll cook for you..."

It goes without saying, she had fed him till he was full, rewarding him with a square meal for his rare amorous working capacity and replenishing his selflessly expended "energy resources" with high-calorie eatables; and although she by no means forgot about herself, but first of all she was pleasing him, her man, incidentally joking at her own servility and enveloping her diligently chewing lover with the long affectionate looks of her enamored eyes. With proper and skillful exploitation, she would have been a wife of the highest grade, for any lazy slatternly beauty was not a patch on such a model of tidiness.

"Listen, Svetik, you aren't German, by any chance?" he asked before leaving, pulling on his jacket in the hallway.

"Why I'm German?" she didn't catch his humor.

"There is order in your flat like in German classical philosophy."

"Even disgusting, you mean?"

"No, no, it's a compliment," he clarified. "How do you manage to maintain it..."

"Very simple. I grew up in my parents' communal flat, in a barn for twenty lodgers with cockroaches," she winced in disgust, stroking with her palms the smooth slippery lapels of her apricot dressing gown silkily fitting her naked body. "Since then, I can't stand any dirt and mess."

"I fully subscribe to it," he said sympathetically, drawing her to himself for the last kiss. "That's probably why you seduced me at first sight--we are both pedants..."

His thoughts on the way home were, however, not about Svetlana, who had so willingly surrendered in the evening of their casual acquaintance, nor even about Nadine, on whom he had just cheated for real, both in soul and body, doing with another woman what he did only with her in the sphere of their secret mutual "craziness" and "oblivion in embraces" and what he seemed to have put today on public display in its repeat with a love-starved young "divorcee", thereby having stirred up the hornet's nest of his former forgotten guilt again irritating him now, as in the old days, with the enslavement of the hitherto not felt bonds of attachment to his wife, who again became the measure of his lack of freedom and his belonging not only to himself undividedly, but also to someone else; he thought not about them, not about his two women, but about that guy with frayed nerves, whose will he had broken in the courtyard near the garages, about that ridiculous psycho Valera and about the omnipotence of the superhuman ferocious might that suddenly burst out at the moment of his attack and evinced itself for this once in the material this-worldly equivalent of the bones crushed and fractured by the vice of his fingers without much effort, just as the angry desperate resistance of this outwardly not crippled invalid of "local conflicts", aggressive, as usual, out of unwept despair and inferiority, as well as from envious hatred for the civilians, never smelt powder and unjustly lucky instead of him, and from his own absolute needlessness in the heartless world of forgetful normal fellow-citizens.

But however much he mulled over the happened incident and with whatever he identified the phenomenal power he had discovered in himself, which had been released for a second, like a genie from a jug sealed with Kabbalistic wax by God knows whom, and equated him with the deity that once condescended to wrestling and, as a warning, broke the leg of the Old Testament Jacob who got too presumptuous in his dream, the bodily mysticism of the divineness unexpectedly revealed in him seemed to defy solution and could be only partly explained by the disclosure of any kind of hidden reserves, and at the same time, this reflections had so distracted him from the fact of his infidelity that the question of how to hold himself, a sinner and an adulterer, with his beloved wife, able to rumble him, he began to decide when rising in the lift.

Yet he did not chance to use his sham, because he did not find Nadine at home, as well as his daughter, and from a note on the corridor side table he found out the reason for their late absence: an ambulance took Victoria with an attack of appendicitis, and Nadine, not waiting for him, went with her to the hospital an hour ago.

"Meantime, I didn't feel anything," he juxtaposed the events of this evening, peering into his aged face of a shamed satyr bearing "the stamp of sinfulness" in the mirror near the wall hanger in the diffused blue lighting of a plafond. "It is, apparently, for my making short shrift of Valerian..."

When he got to the surgical building, Nadine was still sitting with her daughter's things in the empty corridor of the emergency room in wait for the results of the operation that had begun somewhere upstairs, and his suspicious rumpled look, of course, slipped her attention.

"Take it home," she handed him a bag with the daughter's clothes.

"What about you?"

"I'll spend the night in the ward with her, they let me... You drank something?"

"Two drops. We celebrated there with the guys," he lied vaguely. "Tomorrow when to arrive?"

"Early, so that before the doctor's round. And bring me a morsel to eat..."

*

With that they parted, and his next meeting with his "Svetik" took place only a week later, after Vicky's discharge from the hospital. Since his second visit, no less ardent than the first, did not entail any new troubles and misfortunes, while Nadine, who was sleeping off the agitation about her daughter, did not pester him with additional passions, nor did she go into the details of her husband's activities outside the home, their romance immediately gained momentum and the specifics of their secret love affair alliance was outlined quite quickly and with full mutual understanding of the parties: when they made time, say, in some bright June evening convenient for both of them on the eve of the weekend or on the "safe days" of her monthlies (his independent paramour valued her health and did not rely too much on pills) to arrange a rendezvous, it was really a true holiday of the soul, to which they had been preparing thoroughly beforehand (he, in particular, concealed the lion's share of cinematic fees from his family) and to which they gave themselves until exhaustion (that's why, bewaring lest he got into an embarrassing situation, he endeavored, if possible, to set up these dates in the periods of Nadine's temporary incapacity for sex or her coldness). All the more so because her ex-husband expelled by him never visited his ex-wife afterwards and did not remind them of his existence in any way, and he took special pleasure in gratifying her sensuality so skillfully that she forgot about the technique and about all the prescriptions of erotic aids diligently observed by her, and, as if overcoming a certain psychological barrier with his help, was "relaxing", as he wanted, recklessly and fearlessly, granting him the desired self-forgetfulness of parity bi-unity, so that he was becoming partly her in her achieving of blissful liberation, whereas she was getting more and more attached to the man that was psychotherapeutically removing her former protective constraint and teaching her the genuine liberated happiness of self-giving in their love.

As for complications in his family life, they did not arise for the time being. To stay at her flat, even for one night, Svetlana invited him neither then nor later, lest she appeared before him in her morning "negligee", thereby unwillingly bringing some household harmful impurities into their festive mutual attraction, while Nadine either really had not suspected him of duplicity, having overlooked the initial stage of his entering the role and taken his pleads of busyness and fatigue at face value, or put up with his possible backstage "peccadilloes", realizing that being in the dark about the undisclosed affairs of her secretive spouse outside the family was the only salvation for her, for had she demanded the whole truth from him, she would have been a loser in any case: if he had ridiculed her guesses, he would have lied doubly, and henceforth, deceiving her, he would have known that she was forced to endure his deceit, and if he had admitted to such a crime, her surmise would have been confirmed by the scabrous reality, and she would have had to do something categorical and cardinal, which she would have tried to avoid until the last because of their daughter and the happy "life together" connecting her with him and because of the inexpressible deep affinity, not reducible, alas, to any "gamut of feelings", being in essence her dependence on his love for her, which, by the by, again and again flourished with tropical passionateness on the nights that he devoted to his wife, in parallel with Svetlana, who invariably inspired him to such "feats of Hercules", since the contrast of these two bodies, these two differently loving and beloved women, imparted the newness of unexpectedness and unusualness to Nadine, while his guilt only urged him not to save on the old flame of his for the sake of a fascinating debutante.

True, he blamed himself not for unfaithfulness, but for the inevitability of his soul-saving lie aggrieving him, but not infuriating, as it would be with his spiritual bondage, which was tacitly implied by infidelity and against which he would have protested by plaguing his "oppressor" with niggling to spite her, if he had driven himself of his own free will under the yoke of his repressive moralization. After reflecting thoroughly on his own unwillingness to feel remorse for his transgressions, as in his youth, he understood that the first cause was his primary Attic attitude to a woman, characteristic of him, no matter how he tried to prevaricate, both in his temperament and in his initially-carnal archetype of love, and in their closeness with Nadine, too long and constant, this attitude of his no longer prevailed, as they say, being replaced over time by something parental-everyday and comradely-spiritual, which, of course, was quite naturally for them, peers, but which just led him off towards an alluring free "bachelorette", not burdened by anything past, with whom he was returning in love to his former self, as he still was despite his age and outward solidity.

While he so surprisingly cleverly managed to cope with both his "girls", not quite equally distributing the love that rejuvenated him between the two complementary poles of habitualness and festivity of his doubled renewed amorousness, the time came for going on vacation, and Nadine together with the daughter rolled away for a month to holiday in a boarding house, having left the daddy toiler, as he planned, to make cash with his stunt adventures, at which time, it must be said, his already whirlwind romance deepened to a honey-nuptial condition, though with such a tight schedule of summer filming, such a passionate pastime was frazzling enough, even if he was sufficiently prudent not to fish for invitation to relocate temporarily to his inamorata, and she inalterably declined the invitations to visit his deserted abode, not showing, unlike his other curious woman friends, the slightest interest in his family and in his philosophy, almost abandoned during this mad month. Nonetheless, it turned out to be beyond their strength to deny themselves episodic overnight stays together: their July awakenings stark naked side by side on Sunday, when she was in no hurry to get to work and did not smarten herself up early in the morning, were too delightful to lose them.

In August, he was to participate in an expedition with a film crew to the northern ancient monasteries to shoot the combat episodes of the film from the dark Russian history, while Sveta wanted to set out for some sea resorts, so they parted with reasonable fears in the constancy of their passion, slightly subsided in reciprocal slaking.

"You're my Solveig, keep it in mind," he warned her on the platform of the railway station, after having brought her suitcase into the compartment, when filling the empty minutes before the train departure with harmless persiflage. "Otherwise, I don't play."

"How long she was waiting for him, for her friend?" asked his bored interlocutor who was not very fond of reading fiction and knew therefore about Ibsen's Peer Gynt only by hearsay.

"All her life," he edifyingly dumbfounded the frivolous vacationer with the instructive example of women's lifelong fidelity, which, to the great regret of men with their possessiveness, did not become a noble initiative for mass unanimous following.

"Awesome," she tersely characterized this incredible devotion in a word of her disco youth. "She, apparently, was a frigid aunty..."

"She's not you, definitely," he laughed. "But hope dies last; what if you can resist a temptation..."

"You think if the term is a little shorter..."

"That's all I'm counting on. I prayerfully fall at your feet and kiss your footprints--what else is left for me..."

"You kiss nothing else yet?" she asked snidely.

"Unfortunately," he sighed bitterly. "But when you get back, then at once..."

"Okay, we'll check it," she glanced at her wristwatch. "But then it will be necessary to fill in the gaps, so prepare properly..."

And they indeed met again upon returning from their travels, both freshened and tanned, only she more noticeably with her mermaid flaxen hair, especially exciting him with the pristine white areas of intimate places of her swarthy mulatto body, not exposed to beach sunbathing, and both obviously missed each other in separation, so he had no desire to elicit what new was on her conscience and how dissolutely she led life at the seaside, for most importantly for him was that they were again together and he again possessed her, who returned to love him with the same unconcealed genuine voluptuousness that was telling more intelligibly than all her tongue-slips about her true motives in their continuing liaison dottedly lasting since September, which did not lose the original heady desirability precisely because he visited his responsibly business-like careerist infrequently and in a mood appropriate to the holiday atmosphere, whatever they were occupied with between their dates: she--by paving the winding labor way to her business, not agreeing, like many, to acquire capital, protection, connections and cronyism "through bed" and to muddy with mercantile considerations of commercial calculation the carefree flippancy of unregulated pleasures, obtained through the scandalous divorce, in order to choose men not on the basis of usefulness and, with a constant benevolent smile, to boycott the role of a geisha hetaera in corporate-hotel fornication which the male environment tried to impose on her in vain, although her intransigence in this trifling point of friendly bonking, not shameful for a lonely pussy, of course, demanded compensation in outstanding business qualities and not very common punctuality from such a gracious, but unapproachably independent hottie; he--with training and cinematic stunts, his family and teaching, thinking over from time to time in notebooks some aspects of the human essence that haunted him after the then breakthrough of omnipotence in his own nature.

Such a breakthrough could not happen unless some elemental ubiquitous energy lurking in the flesh suddenly overfilled his bodily natural substance, since homo sapiens, like all being, also contained in the planetary and even cosmic materiality of his beingness this destructive first principle which was exploding any formed existence by ineluctable disintegration and which was inherent, according to all views and hypotheses, in the seemingly discretely many-faced and movably multipartite universe eternally fluidly-mutable in time, or rather, in times of different dynamics of mutability; but now his thoughts were concentrated not so on matter with its multi-level total striving for the passive formlessness of quark equality, as on the first origin that was causing the formation of all forms of being and that was determining this process of creation of being from within and no less totally, as the inexhaustible causality of universal becoming, including in the counteraction of the mortal changeability of the transiently instantaneous creations to any eternity, except the eternity of the very act of creating being erupted from the quark depths of matter and encompassing the infinity of the cosmos as the oneness of the whole. If earlier for mankind the beginning of the world was when it appeared on the planet pregnant with reason, and God signified the spirit-consciousness of the nature of mankind, comprehended in abstractions of the "prime mover", "first cause", the radiance of "light-darkness", and the "God's Providence" of the anthropomorphic Almighty, now it seemed to him that the partial rightness of all his various forerunners was converging, as in the needle focus of the correctly adjusted system of prisms of a microscope, in a clearly distinguishable point of all-resolving truth in his soul, which, by his present insights and introspections, was probably not a certain form put in him by someone, or, say, the maxim of his personal forming, but, as it were, the rarefication of his materiality that was being perceived by him in himself to the extent possible, or the zone of the creative principle shining through his creatureliness and endowing him with potential inexhaustibility and boundlessness, whatever localized life content was the material of his consciousness.

Therefore, the stronger the brightness of this zone was, the freer his tendency to infinite diversity revealed in him, immediately making any of his spiritual hypostases different, like the ever-changing fanciful incarnation of a cloud being molded by the winds, and his handwritten "detaching" in self-knowledge was only some catching of the fugitive phantoms of his dissimilarity to his former self, already become a wraith ("Man is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process," he could not but remember Karl Jaspers and others of that ilk with an unkind word); and, unfortunately, the degree of spiritual dematerialization-rarefaction, as well as the innate instinct to achieve differently understood freedom, depended not on an individual of the human race, but on a random alignment of nature too variably showing the spirit through the barely translucent souls of its still imperfect creatures that imagined themselves the lords of the planet whose cognition they were, with their infantile myopic reason seeping through the clay of herd existence, and did not suspect in the conceit of their "free will" that their human enmity was none other than a relatively spontaneous belittling of the extremes of their domination by their struggle within one biological cell-neuron of the universal materialized consciousness that was sprouting God, whereas, had the terrestrial conglomerate of land and ocean happened to avoid self-destructing in an impasse of the next discord of the global ecological balance or burning down in an unforeseen stellar-comet reshuffle, it would have been transformed, according to the logic of the previous growth, from the "I" of the islandly-reasonable, regionally-separate and bisexually-beast-like nature in the "I" of the planet embraced by the merging of the cumulative spirit to be shining all-seeingly as an united self-creation of the consciousness, released from the archaic disunity and absorbed all the multiplicity of the past spiritual rarefactions of formerly scattered human individualities as quanta of radiance.

In the meantime, in the less spiritualized present, the power of the creative light emitted by the soul was, as a rule, not great enough to break through the blockages of the urgency of private mundanity, and the majority, after a short period of dreaming and aspirations in childhood and adolescence, got being forged by the prevalent presses of their lives flattening and squeezing the soul sometimes to insensitivity and to the scarring degeneration of its tightly cicatrized luminosity that never faded forever in anyone and was fraught with tragic surprises of sudden breakdowns, repentance, inexplicable ennui and despair and of crossing out such a normal-ordinary, but such a catastrophically failed, cursed fate; while in him the cluttering of something externally-objective was continuously melted, as if in a blast furnace, by the play of comprehending fire, smelting into intuitions of integral ontologies being again modified by him, nonetheless, and into the meticulously minted images of his personality which was being deformed by involuntary re-creation and fundamentally differed just by this from everyone else, including his responsive beautiful wife not growing younger and ailing off and on in autumn, and his purposeful energetic girlfriend, and his shapely pretty daughter that was similar, with her practical prudent mindset, not to her mother with the archival ideals, but to Svetlana unknown to her, who, like Victoria, did not intend to be content with crumbs from the elitist state table of the establishment and make her living by "intellectual work", unprofitable here, and who, in the hope of a major success and a windfall, as his daughter declared in all seriousness, wouldn't have missed a good match for her future, albeit unequal, marriage either.

"Our kids are the payback for our sins," as he once replied to the parental plaints of Sam, when they were cooling down after a hard workout and a hot shower on the low long bench in the locker room of their gym by the salad-colored lockers. "They are some kind of us, but with the opposite sign."

"Yours is a gal, at least," sighed Sam, lounged near, not very going into such a profound thought and wiping with a large terry towel his reddened wet bull neck powerfully coming down from his wrestling tanned nape to the mighty shoulders. "You'll give her in marriage and you're free. While my scallywag got out of hand in the last time; he is the "king" among his hooligans, you see..."

"I think, he's not to be compared with his father," he cast an ironic glance at the bare bodybuilding squareness of their Hercules. "It's hard to believe that you cannot rein in him."

"There is no cause for giving him a dressing down, that's the problem," Sam exclaimed not too indignantly, rather even approving of the filial restraint of the "cool" offspring. "He's not a rowdy, and he's never rude to us with his mother, but for all that, he's impossibly brash. I would clip him on the jaw sometimes, but it's somehow unjust to clobber the child without any guilt..."

"Yes, the rising generation is smarter than us," he remarked, stretching wearily and listening to the voices of his teammates splashing under the showers behind the tiled partition. "On the sly they do everything, and they firmly know what they want."

"It would be good that I know, too, before he lands in slammer," Sam put aside the damp towel. "He only dabbles in insubordination to authorities as yet, for he is a ringleader, after all, but I'm afraid his roughnecks may drag him into a mess..."

"As I remember, you also did not recognize any authorities, so he's a chip off the old block, as they say."

"If that were so," again sighed Sam. "In March, he will turn eighteen, and he will just get under the spring draft. In the army, they will bring him to his senses."

"That depends on where he'll be..."

"The military subordination and discipline are everywhere, I sure," his friend stood up at once for this educational-correctional institution for the youth, unbridled, lax and cheeky in civilian life, because, as an soldier of the special forces, Sam was always very proud of his military service and had the badge "Excellence in combat and political training".

"I mean not discipline. There he will be taught to kill, and what if he likes it?"

"In essence, war is the most exciting thing for a real man," Sam answered serenely. "You have to know how to defend yourself."

"It's an important correction, of course," he hemmed skeptically. "But the process itself is often too gripping. It happens that man's biology detonates on murder."

"One might think that you committed murders," Sam rose like a sweaty bear from the bench, wet under him.

"In a make-believe world only," he laughed it off, not going to start up a conversation with such a militant as Sam on the slippery topics of the devaluation of human life by service and the rightness of the deliberate extermination of their own kind. "Well, let's get dressed then..."

*

By winter, his festive "trysts" with Svetlana had acquired the regularity of "breathers on Fridays", convenient for both, and after having ordered the schedule of his double love, it would seem that he had balanced his relations in all the mutually enriching confluent ramifications of the single stream of contrapuntally harmonized polyphony of his full life, now mentally-bookish, now reflexively-muscular, now fatherly-conjugal, now adulterously-reprehensible, now respectable, now vicious, which in this influenzal slushy-thaw winter, had really reached its "conquistador" enthralling adventurousness that was fed day by day both by the calculated risk of leaps either from the open platforms of moving freight trains or from the steps of overturning trucks, and by the romance of the next criminally cherished rendezvous that was being appointed as for the first and perhaps last time and expected with the particular trepidation of a gambler going all-in, and by the teasing responsibility of the task at each of their "tete-a-tete" to take his northerner anew, possessing her in his amatory subjugation to her inventions and in his authoritative unleashing of concupiscent craziness so comprehensively that she again and again truly belonged to him, as she was wholly, swimming away into the bliss oblivion of powerless languor and desiring only his caressing giving her this happiness.

And he himself now, in the months of disgusting sleet alternating with rain and street snow-broth and with the suffocating exhaust suspension of urban smog hanging in the dank thickened air and settling on the faces as black dots of soot and small splashes of dirt, could probably say that he was also happy, even if the intervals between his "breathers" were less carefree, and his extra earnings, together with his university income and Nadine's salary, would have sufficed even for not so relative well-being as their present one that, true, afforded him no excess money to fork out for the Japanese Yamaha which Tolyan boasted of, for example, instead of his Java which was being restored by him piece by piece, but that provided the purchases of the more and more expensive rig-out of their fashionista-daughter, who, for the joy of her parents, had excellent health of her dad and no chronic maladies, in spite of all ecological shifts, epidemic viruses and "ozone holes", whereas he, after the incident with her appendicitis, superstitiously feared to jinx both that and their temporary prosperity being gradually eroded by a creeping rise in prices. However, by Sam's favorite adage, one shouldn't anger the all-good God, and, as he deemed, such a statement of his happiness would have been sacrilegious in some way, because, in spite of his infatuation, he did not ceased to love his Nadine, and if in him this affection for both of them coexisted now almost without conflict, then for Nadine his liaison with another woman--which she guessed about by many signs, and first of all by the new patronizing-caring attitude of her husband to her in intimate matters instead of his former ingratiating insistence and irritable dependence on her goodwill--was that sharp knife in the heart and that deep-lodged thorn in her soul which he would casually stir with his touches, hurting her feelings inadvertently by his condescending intonation, or by his mechanical kiss, or by his gaze that she suddenly caught and he thievishly averted, for it was a gaze pensively comparing her with that other woman, who apparently deserved to be vouchsafed not only by this homely friendly sympathy, but by all that was once addressed to her alone and that today was already intended not for her, who got too habitual and too ordinary in his eyes.

In all probability, if Nadine had been younger, with her cult of honesty and explicitness, she would have made him tell the proverbial "truth" and, having ascertained her husband's murderous infidelity quite definitely, hated him with the contemptuous hatred of the meanly betrayed trust and of her unforgivably offended "great love" which turned out to be insufficient and not the only one, despite all the frankness of sensuality and the inseparability of their almost unconsciously subtle mutual understanding during the years of their family life; so the consequences of this egregious example of his extramarital behavior would hardly have been limited to reproaches-quarrels, considering her temperament, and their exemplary family would have been blown up with her straightforward demand for divorce in the first open clarification of relations; but in the fifteen passed years of their love, Nadine was probably somewhat tired of him, too, and the frequent discrepancies between the Rabelaisian hopes and desires of her philosophizing faun and the solitary rare "oases of her passion" that episodically slaked the insatiable thirst of her indefatigable wayfarer, doomed in his long marriage to the increasing blanks of the waterless desert, diminished her categoricalness and inflexibility, because with age her body was no longer herself wholly and lived partly its own life, not controlled by her wishes and prohibitions, dictating her moods and preferences by ailments and hypotonic migraines of magnetic storms. Thus, in psychological terms, she in principle could have understood him (that is, as far as a woman, moreover loving, could understand a man, moreover cheating on her), but, alas, her understanding did not extract the thorn causing her pain; that's why, seeking neither his evasive explanations and noncommittal rebuttals nor his self-exposure shameful for both of them, she fought for her cagey hubby like a woman, helplessly, by dint of her love, proving to him at the slightest gleam of attracting to her that he was very prematurely cloyed with her and that in bed she would not yield to any young harlot or a highly experienced courtesan, whoever he involved himself with, whence, properly speaking, he eventually learned about her unmistakable knowledge of the state of affairs. But although he felt sorry for his non-surrendering petite "Egyptian" and for him she was seduction personified as before with her fondling never palling on him, he still did not stop meeting with Svetlana.

He was not going to rise up against himself, to wit, against the call of his own flesh, because, in essence, he was nothing more than this flesh, which--once singled out by his self-awareness from the biomass producing uncountable evolutionary combinations and permeated by the light of his self-consciousness as some planetarity just so shining through the incarnation of his individual "I" and just so transformed the radiance creating his flesh by a form of corporality--was what he called his personality, albeit sometimes with the dominance in it of a purely internal disembodied contemplation or the speculative operations with an extremely abstract "conceptual apparatus" emotionless for the seemingly disappearing body, whose freedom too many tried to master, not excluding him, but when losing this freedom of concrete action and arbitrary choice, it always instantly came off its hinges and began to deny any necessity being palmed off on him.

To give up one of the women he loved would have meant destroying all his miraculously formed ephemeral Eden with overthrowing like Lucifer vexing the Lord from the narcotic euphoria of the present easiness and zest for life into the boredom of the family coziness without any comparisons henceforth and into the former routine of his rational habitual life without any extremities, while now, in a current of diversity, he was flying through the depressing winter days of cold weather and dreary electric lighting in the mornings, so to speak, on the wings of afflatus and élan, nearly crooning in the flight, for which he was beholden to Nadine in the first place, who did not force him to pay for her love too expensively, patiently enduring his additional happiness, conceived not with her. As to him, he mostly had to pay for it with the comparative ineffectiveness of his philosophical works, which did not often hold him in the kitchen at nights during this "winter of love" and were too desultory to unfold into something truly spontaneous or systematically coherent.

The beginning of the calendar spring turned out to be no less chilly, damp and slushy, and on this day in mid-March there was no shooting on location, so only Tolyan and he were called to the pavilion, as the most suitable stunt doubles for substitution of the heroes of the detective, in the guise of which they had grappled with each other, mercilessly frolicking frame-by-frame in the episodes of a brutal fight: Tolyan, in a jump, was hitting him professionally with the heel in the nose, while he, having broken the railing with his back, was somersaulting from the decorative balustrade, and then, having grabbed his partner by the lapels of a police uniform, he was throwing Tolyan with his foot in the stomach in his fall back over his head down the stairs, whereupon that was flying, spread the arms, over the steps and landing flat on the floor; besides, it was necessary, as always, to prepare, to measure, to check and feel everything beforehand, and they were engaged in all that up to dinner.

And when, after having rehearsed and performed all their jumps and falls, they returned the worn duplicates of the clothes of the dashing characters played by them to the costumer girl and sat down before the trays laden with the food available on the menu in the studio dining room filled with the hubbub of the snacking movie brethren, the usually silent Tolyan, swallowed the hardly chewed piece of boiled beef, lifted his narrow aristocratic face from the plates of salads (between themselves they dubbed Tolyan "Duke") and asked him if he would see Sam today.

"Yes I've intended," he replied. "I go to his base right now; we've arranged with him; he promised me some spare parts... What, to convey something to him?

By the way, he was on his motorcycle today only because of this trip out of town.

"It would be better to convey, for there's not a phone there," said Tolyan. "He may encounter his son and commit follies."

"His son made something wrong?"

"He made a lot of things, if the investigation confirms," absently picking at the carrot cubes of vinaigrette with an aluminum fork, remarked Tolyan, who, as a coach and a major specialist in "breaking the horns" of hardened criminals, rubbed shoulders with investigators in the operational search police circles. "Girlies began to disappear in the city, and then some were found in separate fragments..."

"What it means 'in fragments'?"

"It means literally, as body parts in bags and packets. The tactic is well-known: to rape and cut her still living all over with knives, and after that to dismember and bury in different places," Tolyan reproduced the process of committing atrocities in a few strokes. "In short, one shitter was rounded up in this case, and he's from the team of our Serge."

"Do you think he's involved?"

"Most likely. But the worst of it is that one of Sam's pals has already divulged all, and if our parent is in the know, he may organize his own inquiry."

"So, I must warn him not to touch his sonny?" he specified his mission.

"It wouldn't hurt to warn. Who knows what his Sergey has in the anamnesis..."

Alarmed by Tolyan's information and by the immediately arisen misgivings, he quickly finished his dinner, and after about fifty minutes that were spent on getting out of the city's heavy traffic with waiting at stoplights and with maneuvering among the cars splashing him with the water of puddles, he went out on the road, racing with the breeze on the wet autobahn and overtaking the bulky refrigerators trucks, and arrived in the end at the asphalt patch of the base parking lot, where he saw Sam's motorcycle, the famous high-speed Cizeta, wrapped up from rainy drizzle with polyethylene film, though the familiar car also stood in the impassable clay slurry by the small workers house near the shed for repairs and seasonal storage of technical equipment.

As he by-passed the lot along the driveway leading to the steel gates of the shed and rounded its ribbed wall along the muddy path, he heard voices coming from the clapboard house, and, judging by Sam's menacing tone, he appeared just in time, at the climax of the conversation. Slowing down his steps, he inaudibly approached the open door, and from here, unnoticed, he could observe the whole, one might say, family scene, because opposite Sam gloomily orating at the dilapidated office desk his impudent bully-son, his Serge, lolled with a cigarette in his mouth in a rickety plywood chair with iron legs; and from the text being spoken at this moment it became clear that Tolyan's warnings were already too late.

"It means while your puppies disemboweled broads alive, you knew nothing about it?" Sam continued asking, his mighty chest resting upon the table, clenching the cast-iron fists that were tapping methodically on the faded torn green cloth. "You, their chieftain, you didn't know?"

"Why must I know? I'm not responsible for them," Serge was droning, puffing on a cigarette.

"Then as for yourself?" the father glared at the offspring unblinkingly, straight into his son's lowered eyes. "How about for yourself?"

"I wasn't with them, I'm on my own," the leader, not yet caught red-handed, kept denying reluctantly. "Or maybe you'll drag me to the bullpen to give evidence?"

"I shall deal with you without investigators," Sam promised formidably. "If it is true and you're with them, I'll rip your hands off..."

"Any other poppa would have thought how he could get his son out of death penalty, but mine threatens as usual," Serge muttered, not doubting that the father's promise would be fulfilled if anything cropped up.

"Why cut them, I don't understand," Sam contemplated aloud, piercing his son with a searching furious stare. "What, they wouldn't have given of their own accord?"

"So it is without getting a buzz..."

"You knew!" Sam instantaneously reacted to Serge's slip and so strongly banged his fist on the plywood tabletop that dented it. "Knew!"

"Well, I knew, don't yell at me!" Serge suddenly flared up, unwilling to sham innocence any longer. "Knew and actively participated, if it makes you feel better."

"Don't joke with it," Sam somehow dangerously lowered his voice. "Or you also did this?"

"This and that," Serge flung defiantly in the face of the enraged father. "And everything, everything! I'm not your silly sucker!"

"Then who? Murderer?" After asking his son this question, Sam turned his eyes to his sledgehammers and seemed to be completely indulging in studying the configuration of a large ink spot on the cloth. "Have you any excuse?"

"I have," Serge grinned wryly, waggling the smoking cigarette clutched in his fingers. "I enjoy this, I'm catching a buzz from this. Both when I fuck them forcibly; and when they crawl before me and lick my shoes, bitches, only not to be killed; and when I tickle them here and there with my knife and then through; and when I'm cutting off something from them... What, isn't it a buzz? I'm a predator, just so you know, and I need meat sometimes, raw meat, so to say..."

"I should have done away with you in infancy... Drown you like a kitten," Sam said slowly, not raising his eyes to his sneering cheeky freak. "I defended the homeland, and you..."

"What did you defend?" Serge put the cigarette back into his mouth. "Your cesspit?"

"You're a bastard... Bastard..." Sam snarled, rising bent as an enormous hulk of muscles over the table and still looking not at his son, but at the long-dried ink blot.

"I'm what I was born," the lover of raw meat blurted out, flying in the face of fortune. "I like myself."

The son a bit underestimated his father's dexterity: Sam didn't come out from behind the table, but, abruptly leaning forward, reached Serge across the table and swiped at the grinning lips so violently that Serge flew away with the chair into the far corner of the room and, having changed the humiliating posture supine with a jerk to the sitting one more befitting an ataman, brushed away the smashed burning cigarette from his cheek with his palm.

"Asshole!" snorted Serge, spitting tobacco crumbs and blood.

"I'll kill you..." Sam howled in a whistling dreadful whisper, scrambling outside to his sonny swearing in the corner. "Scumbag..."

The bandit Serge, spitting out bloody abuse, shoved the fallen chair away at the feet of the incensed parent and hastily thrust his hand into the inner breast pocket; the strained broad back of Sam, who obviously did not exaggerate the measure of the punishment he had prepared for his only heir, shielded the murderer driven into the corner from him; and trying to prevent this unlawful reprisal, he took a step forward to stop his friend going to kill.

But here in the room something deafeningly banged, as if the tire of a car wheel had burst, and a scarlet fountain splashed from Sam's close-cropped head, while Sam himself, thrown back to the threshold, tumbled down on the floor, after which he, bespattered with blood, found himself in front of the furiously staring distraught Serge with a revolver in his hand, who had only just shot his father in the forehead.

"What have you done, jerk..." he said mechanically, hearing himself as though through cotton wool with his ears, plugged from a shot, and smelling the sour stink of powder gases with piercing clarity.

"Fuck off!" bawled Serge, aiming at the unwanted bystander obstructing the way out.

He did not have time to step back or rush at the shooter, and the moment of the second shot was for him merely a strong blunt push in the chest, and then darkness and silence immediately ensued. But before the bullet entered him and hit him to death with a shot through the heart, an instant outburst of the same inexplicable supernatural power seemed to block a certain emergency zone in his switched off brain, which started barely smoldering at once as a flash in the murk of the insensibility of his body, so dead that an additional bullet to finish him off was not needed.

And this fiery point, connecting him with the ocean of light seeping into him, began to grow concentrically, turning little by little from a spark-star into a shining aureole of the emerging sun exuding the warmth of life spreading through his body, and the damaged architectonics of his flesh, already slightly rebuilt by incipient decay, was being gradually filled by that miraculous might of the elemental force, which literally cell-by-cell, to the very periphery, transformed his recuperating anatomy, restoring the former interconnectedness and harmony of biochemical functioning, and which insistently, by millimeter, by micron, squeezed out back the revolver bullet stuck somewhere in him along the wound channel cicatrizing without a trace, until the extruded lead, alien in the body, finally fell out and he, feeling only a superficial burning sensation on the skin of his chest, realized himself lying in a roll of tarpaulin in the back seat of the car.

His face was covered, too, but with some other, incorporeal eyesight he could see Serge taking out the rattling bucket from the boot of the car where the son had hidden the corpse of his father, and how, having scooped the muddy water from the small cement pool littered with fallen autumn leaves, he was feverishly washing away the slimy puddle of gore in the room and carefully rubbing off the bloody splashes on the walls and on the door; and how, after having finished with the tidying up, he was locking the door and going with Sam's keys to the car; and how, having got into the car, Serge, sniffling very near his head, was turning the ignition key in the front seat and peering in the mirror of the glove compartment if there were any traces of the crime on his physiognomy. Meantime his bent hand had groped a solid pellet extracted from the revived body under the holed shirt and pressed the warm sticky bullet, killed him, to his stomach, and he, holding his breath, all-seeing, continued to watch his murderer, who was going out from the territory of the empty base onto the highway on his father's car loaded with two "stiffs" and steering not for the city, but in the other direction, so as to turn off the road into the roadside grove before reaching the traffic police post and get rid of the corpses as soon as possible, and only then, after returning (it's clear that not home, where now there was a probability to be caught), consult with authoritative knowledgeable people how better to abscond from the cops and where to skulk to avoid the inevitable cruel punishment for bloodthirsty fun--either by going on the run as a lone wolf, or by going into hiding at one of the foremen of the criminal brigades who would consent to shelter such a felon as a hired hit man.

The most important was not to panic, or else a sheer trifle might betray him, so, squeezing the max permitted speed and vigilantly surveying the drizzling scowling distance of the motorway through a transparent semicircle of the dirty windshield being cleared with shuffling wipers, in order to catch sight of a patrol making money by fining without receipts, Serge forced himself not to speed headlong and not stand out from the grimy cars, bespattered like grubby pigs, decorously riding on the wet asphalt, though his hands lying on the steering wheel were shaking and he felt a nauseous shiver after his mischief, fraught with the death penalty; and when driving up the road along the sloping smooth arc to the upper highway of the roundabout, Serge even slowed down a little; however, all this time, the parricide was in his power and could nowise escape "divine retribution".

At the turn down to the right, the driver's foot instinctively pressed the gas pedal, while the trembling hands clutched at the steering wheel, which seemed to be jammed, and at the command "Straight!" Serge, unexpectedly for himself and against his will, suddenly sent the car obliquely across the oncoming lane into the low roadside barrier along the disastrous trajectory chosen by him, without having to throw off the tarpaulin to rise from the dead and grab this young villain by the throat.

The roaring car with the driver paralyzed by the mortal horror of the imminence of getting his comeuppance rushed forward across the road and rammed the guardrail with such force that demolished its part and flew down from the highway.

From the frontal impact, shards of shattered glass slashed into the face of the recoiling Serge and the rear door at his feet swung open, and when the falling car, after a short flight, crashed into the asphalt of the lower motorway with its crumpled hood and exploded, the blast wave of the same almighty force threw him out through the open door away from the twisted metal and the burst of flame far into the field of the viscous black slush of rain-soaked earth.

Plastered with fertile earthen mud, he stood up, like the forefather of mankind, created from the silt of Sumerian legends, from the soggy clods of arable land, and saw how his squashed hand, lacerated by the jags of the shock warping of the frame of the car, was being washed by the intensifying rain and again born absolutely intact out of the clay sliding from the skin and how high over there, on the road, the smoky torch of the crashed car was blazing around the hood with his burning friend, whom he perhaps could also resurrect, if there was a sense in it.

Meanwhile the bullet, which he had carefully taken out of his unbuttoned soaked shirt, was burning his palm stronger and stronger, like a live coal, and the rain, increasing, was obscuring everything here with its gelatinous stagnant greyness, skinning the rind of the mud cocoon from him; so that, blinded by this pouring rainy hopelessness, he parted the ropy jelly-like curtain of the downpour in one movement and woke up at once by the window of the bus entering some mountain hamlet...

VI

To all appearances, he arrived at the very last settlement of his journey: after turning on the rocky side expanse of the only unpaved short street going uphill, blackened by the thunderstorm, already petered out here, and dotted with mushy cow patties, the bus finally stopped near a shabby shack standing back to the river cliff (judging by the faded blue signboard in some incomprehensible local vernacular, it was a store), whose closed door was crossed, like by a shoulder-belt, by a strip of iron with a barn lock on a bolt; and as soon as the driver turned off the engine, the local residents, gotten to their hearths at last, unanimously took up all the baskets, buckets, bags and hurried to the exit.

While they were dragging out the luggage encumbering the aisle, the cast-iron kitchen utensils needed in the house, food supplies and some bundles, he put on a rumpled orange windbreaker which had once been given to him by Vlad, from whom he heard then about these mountains and about this village-aul with an unpronounceable name, where he came up by the merest chance five years later, not for hiking or mountaineering, of course, as it probably seemed to his rustic fellow-travellers talking in their own guttural language that was sheer gibberish to him.

After he left the stuffy bus with the closed windows and passed by the fence of broken wild stone surrounding the last house in the rarely drizzling rain, rained out somewhere in another gorge, he went out on the country road trodden by cow and goat hooves and set off along the noisy river on the left and the green meadow slopes on the right with a pair of ancient stone towers of the same impenetrable disorderly-fundamental masonry and with the scattered time-bleached boulders, from cobbles looking like skulls to hippopotamus-like cyclopean blocks, towards the opened panorama of the magnificent mountain landscape suddenly festively flooded with the shining of the sun freed from the clouds and revived with all the wealth of its laved recovered colors.

Directly opposite, between two branches of the river, a small forested mountain covered the snowy passes of the distant Caucasian ridge rising behind it; from his side, another mountain descended as a thicket of pines and hazel to the bank of one river branch, and the sparse trees of its foot smoothly turned to the right into the gentle slopes of the again ascending alpine meadows, where, under the supervision of a toy-tiny shaggy wolfhound barking in a stentorian bass at a stranger passing in the distance, a herd of grazing cows, dwarfish from here, wandered about the natural pasture and where the almost empty bed of a stream stealing through pebbles and fragments of stones led deep into the narrow defile, to the rocky spurs of new and new peaks; while on the other side of the rapid current, wide at the confluence, still slightly screened from him by the wooded slope of the gorge ending here, a sky-high glacial diadem of the dominating bare peak towered proudly above this paradisal high-mountain hollow, and the seething white braids of the muffledly rumbling four waterfalls were pouring down from the glacier, replenishing the left tributary of the river might that was arising right now before his eyes.

Now he remembered how he had once seen this peak with four waterfalls on Vlad's color slide, not suspecting then that he would come just to it today, in the day of summing up his life; and the closer he came along the bank to the fork of the water rushing towards him, the higher the dark cone of the peak sticking out of the sugar-white ice rose up and the more deafening the even roar of the meltwater became, and its two raging torrents swelling on the riffles and rolling the huge stones on the bottom were turning after their join into such a mighty tempestuous river that he decided to force them in two stages and where it was narrower, so as not to tempt Providence which had led him here, to this coronated mountain immediately recognized by him.

Ankle-deep in the softly clinging heavy grass that instantly made the legs of his jeans wet through, he headed obliquely down the slope for the riverine edge of the coppice, greedily inhaling the odoriferous humidity of the dense meadow grasses being slightly dried in the sun and either slipping sometimes on the clay or jumping over some brooklets, now as thin as threads now ramifiedly branchy now transparently purling on bald patches of turf; so soon he stepped on the damp springy carpet of withered fallen needles and moldering mossy windbreak into the resinous mushroom shade of low-growing spreading pines with sunny clearings of exposed rocks and with hollow-glades, hidden among the thicket of trunks and overgrown with prickly raspberry bushes, near which he could not but linger to pick full handfuls of bubble-matt ripe berries and stuff his mouth with their juicy sweet pulp melting on the tongue until its hard astringent seeds were grinded by his teeth.

Having treated himself to this gratuitous dainty, he ran, chewing the last bursting raspberry drupelets, down the loose pebbles of a forest dry watercourse to the turbulent stream rushing past him, and after wandering a little on the large rounded boulders grown into the ground, he found two poles for crossing: one of them was a big branch, white as a bone, washed up by the river when rising water flooded on the bared bottom of riverbed, and the other was a long bough which was brought here by a deluge of mountain rain and patterned with snake stains of emerald-gray mold, but not yet rotted.

He prudently washed off the adhered clay from the soles and threw the poles across the river, from the giant snag to the flat rock protruding from the stones, lest the furious stream sweeping away everything and everyone would wash over his makeshift footbridge; and with his gym bag slung behind his back, so that it didn't hamper balancing and swimming out, if anything, he went on the shaky springing wooden rails to the other side, putting his feet very cautiously and not looking at the dizzily speeding slippery surface of water that was slipping under him, disrupting the equilibrium.

When he reached the swampy ground of the almost treeless island adjoining the central mountain, he shouldered the poles and made for the second branch of the river, but on the way he spotted a few black beads in the grass and found there the whole scatterings of ripened wild blueberries, which he began to pick and eat with no less greediness than raspberries, until his palms and fingers turned inky violet and his eagerness for gathering "gifts of nature" slightly subsided, being sated with the dessert that was consumed obviously not on an empty stomach with such an inexhaustible abundance of this berry field. Generally speaking, nothing forced him to hurry at present, for the day was in full swing, while his walking peregrinations depended only on himself, and therefore there was no need to spoil what was most likely a farewell walk and fatigue himself with senseless running about.

To cross in the same way he had preferred downstream of the waterfalls debouching into the far arm through the mountain shrubbery as four gushing tributaries, where the roiling shallow water rumbling higher narrowed into a raging and deep, but not wide stream muddily weaving into the transparent mighty current below the extremity of the island. After he jumped off onto the promised land of the foot of the mount, he pushed the poles from the bank and they were immediately carried away by the strong flow of water, thereby cutting off the way of retreat to the earthly life left by him, as it seemed, for good; and then he started climbing, skirting the impenetrable thicket of hazel with milky-raw nucleoli in the non-hardened peel which he broke in vain to shell them out of the hollow bowls of green petalled miniature crowns, up the not very steep slope towards the waterfalls, and passing through various climatic zones, as he climbed: the hazel bushes gave place to crooked stunted tundra birches and colonies of lilac-colored flowers similar to porous sponges, and then the earthen cover thinned out utterly being replaced by flat plaques of silvery creeping lichens and brown soft mosses oozing its absorbed liquid when he stepped on them, and the same mosses and lichens covered a granite ledge in the shadow of a sheer cut of the mountain, down which the last of the waterfalls cascaded with a roar and clouds of water dust, turning on this ledge into a falling tributary rabidly rolling to the river.

He threw his holdall bag onto the stony terrace drying in the sun's rays outside the shadow of the steep and waded with his flask into the gloomy rock niche which was gnawed out over the centuries by the powerfully fluttering jet flying from above and breaking against the ledges and which was being shaken by the unceasing heavy fall of the water mass, where he stood for a long time, getting drenched and freezing, within a cloud of icy spray and the frenzied bellow of the mountain, enchanted by the whimsical play of the water pouring from the glacial heights and by the ephemeral halo of a never-fading rainbow wavering at the exit from the niche.

After that, having got rather chilled, he scrambled onto the stone of the terrace warmed by the sun, to pull off the wet sneakers squelching when walking and the already damp clothes and lay out them to dry under the open sky shedding the windless warmth onto the rocks, and stretched out facing the hot luminary on his back, basking with closed eyes in the burning caress of heavenly effulgence to the thundering of waterfalls and returning to the thinking, interrupted by his thoughtless stroll, about the nature of the aforementioned irrefutable miracle that had been concealed by him, as an inexplicable fact, both from the investigation, and from his stunt team, and from Nadine, although that polished flattened bullet with a drilled hole dangled to this day as a lead pendant-amulet on a bunch of his keys not taken by him on his trip.

"Faith works miracles" was, of course, the initial postulate, and it was known for certain to all the precursors, progenitors and ancestors endowed with the same impersonal gift at all times of human self-aware reason, but how a miracle was worked and what could concretely cause the omnipotence of an individual who was seemingly entirely bodily, yet sometimes capable of violating the immutable laws of causality and sequence, everyone gave his own answer, conceptually identical to the understanding of the age-era-epoch that begot the expounder; and, basing himself on Teilhard de Chardin's key quote, pinned above his writing table, "The universe is no longer to be considered a static order, but rather a universe in process" (besides the basic Teilhard, there were the new epigraphs posted up there instead of the previous ones: "Everything in everything" by Anaxagoras at the top; "True philosophy does not differ from true religion" by John Scotus Eriugena and "All of our dignity consists in thought" by Blaise Pascal on the sides), he, for example, reasonably assumed that it was he who was right and that the ability to work a miracle directly depended on the impulsive or periodically achieved brightness of the creative light, that is, on the degree of the spiritual rarefaction of the bodily-objective "ego", partly inherent in all, and on the almighty divine energy that was shining through the materiality of the flesh, wherefore the inchoate consciousness of man had a certain likeness to God's image.

If the undeveloped and not free spirit that realized itself only in its corporality, just in it, planetary and natural throughout, could find paradise or hell, liberation of its independence, and salvation from deadness--and in his trials of different ages ending in self-denial, as shown by his first love and his last one, he gradually disclosed some design which more and more manifestly materialized in his fate, rejecting all the guises of his again and again outlived novelty as if burned through by the inextinguishable truth--then the spirit "purified" by the radiance that flared up in it and participated in the mystery of the pre-existent and universal consciousness, could, with sufficient concentration in the affinity of faith, flare up in the earthly space of this consciousness as a thought dominating for a trice and entailing in the next moment of eternal becoming some transforming chain reaction of overgrowing with a new "miraculous" reality, capable of retaining its "miraculousness" no longer than during its dominance, whereas with the extinguishing of the miracle-working seat of thought, the spirit continued to form according to the more general rules of the play of God's imagination. That confirmed both the derivativeness of the entire world that continuously created itself and the multivariance of the seemingly predictable future logically resulting from the antecedent factors and causes, as well as the undoubted responsibility of the seers listening to God for "bringing disaster", and, perhaps, for the fate of human race in the process of comprehending its destiny, had they joined the planetary immortality as thoughts; and that often even more aggravated the conflict between the "people of spirit" and the "people of body" falling away either "en masse" or one by one into the guided herd mechanicalness of booty-lucre and into an evanescent semi-animal living of a soulless life with the gloatingly vindictive extirpation of conspicuous talents who could become their memory, their new meaning, and a sign of their spirituality reviving in some of them.

True, one should have really had regrets, first of all, not about the peoples whose blindly pullulating populations were sticking as excrescences of ethnic choral polyphony to any differently-charged and differently-active parts of the earth's crust and migrating as this or that corporeal clots of the biosphere polluted by them, like ants, all over the planet conscious by their multi-tribal chorus, but about the individuals being exterminated now inadvertently now selectively and deliberately, in whom the incarnated soul of the planet peeped out at times, like the sun in the refracting vapors of the atmospheric shell, the soul barely coping with its young body torn by instincts and scarcely guessing the meaning of these glimpses of spirit in its global self-regulation, yet feeling in being and in gleams of potentiality its universal connection with other zones of the dawning of this sub-base that was effusing becoming in the "gaps" of the total materiality of the cosmos, no matter how fundamentally the invisible luminosity of the self-creating consciousness differed from the countless incarnations of real light and from all kinds of local consciousnesses. For the whole Earth as consciousness was also a thought of God in some sort, and the content of this thought, determining the fate of its planetary incarnation, was determined by the proportion between the instinctively vital limitations of human societies and some personal spiritual outbursts of individual genius changing the volume and sometimes the semantic essence of the earthly entirety, which apparently decided what fate the nature that had grown on the fiery core of a star fragment prepared for itself in mankind: either the "path of the spirit" or the "path of the body", either the transformation into a many-faced whole of the spiritual maturity of the planetary mind or the transmutation of its ocean-continental flesh into a nidus of destruction and self-devouring, subject to be destroyed, as it happened more than once in miniature both with peoples and with single persons. Consequently, the perpetual true task of humanity consisted, probably, in surviving and overcoming the discord of unreason, in order to fulfill its mission predestined by its very arising and finally become its own self-consciousness in full measure, like the planet; which, incidentally, did not imply the loss of personal individuality, on the contrary, could redeem the dignity of man's God-given self-worth that had no need for self-interested ersatz or any "nationwide" and "commodity" falsifications.

But, to tell the truth, with the present aggressive feeble-mindedness and massed imitations of human element proper in the egoism of enmity and the domination of the majority living a day-to-day, all his starry-eyed philosophizing looked like his purely private conjectures not rewarding him with academic laurels of superiority or a triumphal entry on a borrowed donkey of glory into some modern Jerusalem; besides, he did not burn with desire to preach the calling he found in himself to those who were not even able to simply understand the words he uttered, let alone follow the course of reasoning in his inferential process; whereas in a circle where he was understood, such speeches would have been considered glib compilations on the themes of the Hegelian "absolute idea" and the early Buddhist "Brahman-Atman", while now it was not a complex of ideas that was important for him and not the sophistic dexterity in linking them, but the persuasiveness of the explanation for what suddenly sounded sometimes in him in critical situations and was unequivocal proof of his connection with something that, in essence, had neither a name nor dimensions, like any consciousness, directed into itself, and that, nonetheless, filling every consciousness with itself, could incomprehensibly impart the traits of the Creator to the creation and begin to manipulate the world around man through human "I".

"Just as it happened in that rainy autumn evening in the yard at Svetlana..." he thought to the lulling noise of the water, and the muffled rumble of the incessant cannonade became the rustling of the rain gurgling in asphalt puddles, and an alarmingly yellow lantern swaying in the wind lit up as a black shiny cone on the skyscraper wall streaked with wet fire-escapes behind the high dark fence, and he had sensed a whiff of the cold garbage dampness wafted through the half-opened entrance door from the familiar yard that drowned in the murk of the lingering dreary rain...

*

It was inexplicable what was his object in standing here, in the next entrance, and peeking out if she appeared with her very probable escort from the darkness of the walk-through arch, and why the hell he waited not so for her as for her nameless companion: to sort things out with him in fistfight he did not plan, and he could hardly nourish any hope now to take back his stolen beloved, even if he proved his superiority in a "frank men's talk" to elevate himself in her eyes by humiliating his defeated rival. He wouldn't have succeeded in defending his former rights to her in any case, for the regrettable reason that she herself deprived him of these rights and transferred them, like a real emancipated woman, to his successor, who, presumably, had some advantages, significant for her in comparison with him.

He lay in wait for her at such a late hour, thus, out of sheer curiosity, wishing to see with his own eyes whom she had preferred to him and what a paragon of physical and mental perfection her new favorite was, and, if possible, to exchange a few words with this lucky dog in private in the role of a tipsy anonymous party-goer to probe her more worthy boyfriend and test him in passing for the intrinsic main features of character. In short, to be honest, he was driven not by advisability, but by an ordinary offense, which was rankling in his soul and prompting him in this evening to boyishly waiting for his "Valkyrie", who already severed their one and a half year liaison and no longer belonged to him.

For the first time, he noticed something strange long before the meeting of Sveta with her future man, in the time of their passionate dates in March of his resurrection and the bloody tragedy in Sam's family (to the denouement of which, according to him, he was late, having found the base locked): although he exerted to the utmost to give the maximum pleasure together with his girlfriend ready for anything in the optimal use of the idolized pagan flesh, the coition for some reason could not carry up him in the skies of culminating immortality in convulsive feverish accelerations, nor could their lovemaking befog his consciousness with the weightless bliss of fatigue, as before. Or rather, all this outwardly repeated, but did not involve him wholly in the event happening somehow independent of these happy eclipses around the space of his inner sight which, in general, did not yet influenced the course of his life and could be perceived as one of his subjective sensations, if it were not for the burning nerve of that healed gunshot wound occasionally piercing this space, though the bullet had not left a scar either on the skin or on his heart shot through, reminding him of the arisen inner vision of his soul that was constantly present since then both in his secret thoughts, and in his valiant carnal pleasures, and in the business bustle of the unproductive everyday cycle that distracted him from any revelations and was enlivened by some nice family stuff and minor problems or by his rehearsed temerity on film sets or by his polite exchanges of impressions about magazine and book novelties and on the "perestroika" situation in the country.

However, the spring--with its jubilantly dazzling sun sparkling from the clouds and the pink-foaming flowering of suburban gardens, with its sensitively quivering alder-poplar catkins and rabbit-silvery plush pads on the willow branches placed in a ceramic vase, with its green down of the timid leaves of the trees and sparsely growing puny grass, with its excited hubbub, squawks, warbles and chatter of birds in the parks being poured with short violent thunderstorms and in the squares again shaded with the tousled dense foliage of the crowns, with its seedlings of snapdragons, petunias, calendulas and dahlias planted in the flowerbeds to sprout as multi-colored carpet ornament and with its exhilarating woody, soil, river smells--the spring, with its transitional reviving and surge of strength, made up for everything and camouflaged the beginning ebb of the autumn-winter tidal wave, and then they had to part altogether: in the summer he was to go on an expedition and take his girls to the sea holiday after earning some money for their vacation, while Svetlana was forced to hang about in the city, for she already acclimatized enough in her business environment and caught hold of her good job in a profitable company, so that she had no time to rest now.

So they again called each other only in the autumn, and, contrary to his expectations, she did not immediately make a date, conversely, put off his visit time after time until October, clarifying the seriousness of her relationship with another man during this month, as he understood now, and into her boudoir nest he had been admitted only a week before, moreover, for only one evening, but, true, she apprised him of that upon completion of all their passionate huggings, kisses and such like, with lit candles, champagne and Michael Jackson vociferously belting out his pop hits, as it was in his previous visits to her, yet her bomb was already charged and the timer was already set, ticking off the last minutes before the explosion while they indulged in the mutual passions.

"You know," she told him, after their canoodling ended and they recovered a little and sat down, exhausted and gratified, at the scarlet folding table in the kitchen to drink tea with pineapple jam. "Today is the last time, I must upset you."

"The last time for what?" he did not grasp at once with what this sincere dissembler was going to regale him at parting.

"What is between us," she took him aback by the news kept for a snack. "It's time for us to part."

"Why?" he evinced surprise, so as not to spoil her final game, for with his experience, he instantly twigged what she meant from the apologetic hardness of her preface.

"Because I don't want to deceive anyone," she informed the abandoned cavalier. "This is dishonest."

"That is, you have someone second?" he asked her tactfully.

"First," she said straight out. "Already first."

"It's piquant," he muttered and wetted his parched throat with a sip of tea. "Apparently, you didn't feel very good with me?"

"With you very," she refuted his assumption with noble impartiality. "Better than with anyone else before and after."

"After?" he allegedly surprised. "It was while I was away or earlier?"

"Not in parallel with you, no; your love was quite sufficient for me," she hastened to deflect such a groundless and offensive suspicion. "But that's quite another matter."

"As far as I understand, there's a matter of prospect here," he revealed her winning cards. "Who is he, from business, probably? Rich, fat, bald, and with strong roots in mafia circles?"

"What about mafia, I don't know, but in all the rest you're mistaken," she did not appreciate his humor. "And it is not about who he is, but about my future. I place too much on him.

"In contrast to me."

"You're excessiveness for me," she smiled affectionately. "But, unfortunately, I'm already not a young lassie, and I have to live within my means."

"In a word, he is one of your companions," he guessed the status of her comrade-in-trade. "A respectable shadow tycoon, a shark of Russian business? The specimen more or less worthy, I hope?"

"If you mean yourself, then you and he are from different worlds and you cannot be compared with him," she answered evasively, delicately passing over in silence the central issue of property, to avoid wounding the material inferiority complex of her intellectual which might have threatened her promising alliance. "You don't intend to make a scene with bloodshed, I presume? You're not Valera, after all."

"If I were so sure of that," grunted he, finishing his tea, and rose from the table. "So, goodbye?"

"Sorry, but yes," his calculative ladylove sweetened the pill; and, suddenly realized with piercing sharpness that her young body--breathing under the clinging apricot silk dressing-gown flowing down from her open bare knee--this body, known to him by heart, was lost forever for him, he broke off the fruitless dialogue and left the formerly truly heavenly nook of his past festivity.

"Good luck, my love," he magnanimously touched her lips with his before stepping over the threshold of her abode. "Thanks for everything..."

But in his soul, he wasn't such a slightly upset and easily comforted bon vivant, and he felt no cordial complacent forgiveness there; and after suffering this week with the pangs of his unceasing "class hatred" for that unknown nouveau riche, whose creditworthiness outweighed all his efforts and merits which meant nothing to Svetik, of course, in his province of abstract sophistication, he came to the conclusion that he would have no quieting until he met the rival face to face and until he vexed this money-bag, who had lured away his main joy of life, with a mocking confab to make sure of their human incomparability; therefore, unsuccessfully phoning Sveta in the evenings, he decided to call the work number given to him at the time of her happy and undivided love with him.

"Sorry, I can't talk with you now," she replied dryly to his friendly greeting. "And please don't call here."

"Okay, then say when you will be at home, if it is not a secret. Can I call there?" It seemed that her bureaucratic tone did not discourage him at all.

"You can. But what for?"

"On business, and not on personal one," he reported derisively. "Not a word about feelings, I promise."

"I'll be back at eleven o'clock, not earlier," she notified him. "But I have a temporary backlash till twelve only, so don't ring at night."

"It's out of the question," he assured this mercantilist who deserted him so incautiously.

And today, from half past ten, he stuck around in her yard, that, with any luck, to converse with her new boyfriend whom he detested beforehand. But, it goes without saying, after he saw her to the door, on the way back, because, judging by all indications, she had this love affair outside the home, and she did not intend very likely to detain too long her pouter pigeon, whose peacock feathers he couldn't but pluck out, figuratively speaking, taking the opportunity.

The blinding spots of flashed headlights from under the arch suddenly lit up the damp smudges of the fence and the puddles in the potholes of the dark asphalt, and the horizontal shafts of light stuck into the metal garages of the dead end; after which, instead of the expected pedestrians, he saw a car BMW, extremely prestigious among the present-day elite, slowly crawling into the yard from the street and wetly gleaming with the glaze of its streamlined elegant contour and dark glasses; and when, having dimmed the headlights, this luxury auto braked just at her front door, while in the woman alighting after the man in a leather coat and appearing above the roof of the car with a short laugh at the joke said inside, he recognized Svetlana--recognized both by voice, and by silhouette, and by her hair, light against the background of the fence and habitually thrown aside--it became clear to him that the imposing stalwart man who brought her home was a really wealthy and self-confident individual and that it would be hardly feasible to frighten such a serious adversary.

"Such a boss may set the driver on me," he pondered the introductory preamble of the conversation, while a couple of beloved, arrived either from a fashionable hotel or from a currency bar, ascended the stairs, and the driver, whose elbow was sticking out of the lowered window, smoked, without stopping the purring engine, in the "foreign car" being sprinkled by a light drizzly rain. "He is a real boss in appearance, a former secretary or instructor from the party district committee in all probability..."

This purely working hypothesis only exacerbated his dislike to the successful representative of the swindler class prospering on impoverishing the others; and as soon as Svetlana's returning friend came out of the entrance into the rain, he passed round the rear of the car with a quick step and stood in the way of the presumptive "parteigenosse" near the passenger door of BMW.

"You're not in a hurry?" he nonchalantly asked the man who stopped short behind the hood separating them.

"It depends where," answered, frozen, the man following his every movement whose face he could not discern even now because of the shadow of a foppish gangster fedora. "Take your hands out of your pockets, be so kind."

"I'm unarmed," he began with a grin, taking out his hands, and at the same moment he was knocked down by the door abruptly opened by the driver.

"Hey, pal!" he called indignantly to the sturdy bloke getting out of the car and jumped to his feet, rubbing his bruised thigh. "Watch out!"

"So, Igorek," his circumspect interlocutor ordered calmly. "Let's grab him by ass and find out who sent him to us."

"No, no, guys, I'm not one of yours, I'm a lone runner," he exclaimed, stepping back from the approaching bodyguard, but it sounded unconvincingly. "Why man is so willing to be disabled in the prime of life..."

"Willy-nilly," the driver muttered, not understanding through aggressive overconfidence that it was about his own person.

As the professional Tolyan aptly ironized, "every safe has its own lock and it is only necessary to pick up the key for unlocking", while he had no lack of such keys and picklocks by now, but a surge of the monstrously boundless power that again roused up within him at the peak of danger did not beget this time any fighting vehemence, or rage, or the sense of risk stimulating all his valor and prowess, because his infinite superiority ruled out any acceptable variant of their struggle, and he rather was inclined to pity the assailant than wanted to cripple this personal guard, who was relying on his human strength; so he didn't even strike a blow at the thug, ready to a fight, and their subsequent skirmish was not a real single combat: delivering blows with lightning speed, Igorek, nevertheless, was moving the hands and legs exactly as he silently ordered him, whereas he was dodging, for decency, these well-aimed punches and well-placed kicks, allowing the obeying robotic puppet to repeatedly miss, until he considered it timely to interrupt the next useless attack with a light poke of the index finger above the solar plexus and with the mute order "Swoon!", whereupon the attacker gasped and subsided unconscious on the ground at the fence to repose there for the minutes necessary to him for a private colloquy.

"I see, guys, you're overcautious," he stepped towards the man who leant to take something in the car.

"More than you think," his agile opponent remarked, straightening, and, in corroboration of his words, firmly pointed the muzzle of the army pistol Makarov at the unknown fighter. "Freeze and hands up. And without surprises."

"That's amusing," he sighed ruefully, pulling off his leather cap that was still on his head after the battle, and dropped it on the hood of the car, exposing his face to the cold drizzle falling from the sky. "And he is called a businessman, with such manners..."

"It seems, I know you from somewhere," said this not very timorous businessman, who acted with enviable composure and determination, scrutinizing him from under the brims of his fashionable hat. "Could you introduce yourself?"

"With that you should have begun, dearie," he also switched to more a sociable tone. "Your self-defense is too radical somehow..."

"Hor!" the man suddenly hailed him in astonishment. "You're Hor, huh?"

"Hor, of course," he agreed. "And with whom I have the honor to joust?"

"But to my mind, you studied at the philosophical faculty..." quoth the man, yet unrecognized by him, in bewilderment, and, struck with the simplest guess, waved his pistol:

"I'm a donkey! You're probably this philosopher of her, you're not a mobster..."

"I haven't insisted on my status," he grinned at the self-criticism of the man. "The information was got from Svetlana?

"I'm Chris, remember?" With a spectacular gesture, the man took off his hat, as if he was about to throw his headgear into a corner of the yard like a cowboy.

"Holy moly!" he exclaimed in the folksy manner of their youthful habitual foul language. "You, old man, have changed, though."

"And not for the worse," Chris put his hat back on. "How do I look, in your opinion?"

"An imposing man, I would say," he had to admit. "She obviously didn't miscalculate with you."

"Well, we'll chat about her later. Say how you managed to fell Igorek?" Chris reproached him, hiding the PM in his pocket and turning to the driver half-sitting at the fence. "He's a tough boy..."

"It is a suggestion session, Chris. Presently he'll come to his senses," he assured, and the driver, who had been lying motionless hitherto, indeed stirred, snuffling and panting.

"You could be fighting in kumite with your skill," Chris observed and nodded to the bodyguard, who was rising at last from the ground with a discontented grumble. "Simmer down, Igorek, it's okay. We simply took my old chum for a baddie."

"Good chums you have, fuck them all," the defeated contestant responded dejectedly, coming up to them. "I'm all muddy now..."

"Sorry, brother, I had no choice," he apologized with subtle irony. "I was defending myself, after all."

"Sit in the back seat, you 'warrior of the invisible front'; I'll drive myself," Chris ceased their exchange of hostile glances. "And peel back the sheepskin there, or else you'll make it dirty, too... So, let's ride to me?"

This question was addressed to him.

"Have you time? Igorek will bring you home."

"He will bring me--with a crowbar onto the skull," he joked, taking his autumn leather cap from the hood. "All right, let's ride and let's chat, if we have met once again..."

Having taken his place of a guest next to the owner of this comfortable conveyor product of the Western automobile industry and sunk into the soft white wool of the sheepskin covering the seats and into the alcove warmth of the cabin smelling of leather upholstery, of expensive tobacco and French lotion of Chris, and of the perfume Chanel of Sveta, who had flitted away to her flatlet, he rode along the emptying streets with the glints of lamp-lights oily glistening in the rippling puddles bubbling under the glossy flowing of black rain and with the dark trees spreading their bare branches swaying in the darkness and shedding the shadows of leaves and the dripping glass beads of cold drops; with the varicoloredly lit windows of multi-storey residential facades and with the blind bastion bulks of gloomy administrative buildings; with the shining store and restaurant showcases pouring their spectral glow over the glittering asphalt varnish of nondescript pavements; with the ponderous, brightly illuminated arks of trolleybuses floating past and being overtaken by some nimble small cars and limousines looking like four-wheeled swift turtles with shiny wet shells on descents and with the battering ram-like yellow buses bending in the mid-joints of their long hulls at turns and clumsily wobbling at stops; until their BMW turned off the avenue into a side street and, after passing through an interlacing of the narrow alleys, moored at one of the entrances of some recently repaired or restored house with a push-button code of the door and with the renewed stucco monograms and high relief-sculptural waist-high cement graces in the piers between the front large windows.

*

Judging by the custom interior design in the corporate style and by the decor of the comfy living room with the royally pompous dining set for six people standing apart and with two leather deep armchairs in the ensemble with a soft sofa and a floor lamp in the nook for tete-a-tete talks, Chris dwelt in his three-room spacious apartments in bachelor solitude, and no outsider disturbed the dusty peace of small antiques in the Rococo style, such as painted porcelain ladies-in-waiting in farthingales a la the Marquis de Pompadour and courtiers in embroidered camisoles and curled wigs, that were placed behind the glass on the oak shelves of the costly Empire furniture wall; at any rate, he came to this conclusion during the time that Chris was getting drinks and snacks out of the two-chamber roomy refrigerator in the kitchen, whereas he called Nadine on the allegedly old-fashioned phone, camouflaged under the telephone of the decadent court aristocracy on the eve of the First World War and trimmed with carved ivory and curlicues of bronze, but with a built-in answerphone, to warn her not to worry if he wasn't home till late. "I haven't seen him for about twenty years, so there is an occasion for talking," he explained the reason for the night's absence, which Nadine, perhaps, did not believe, but, as always, did not show it.

"You're married, besides everything else?" Chris marked it in passing, appearing in the salon with cognac, mineral water, a lemon on a saucer and a crystal basket with tangerines. He could not help noticing that his friend, already with bald patches from the forehead to the top of the head and in a dandyishly-baggy suit of stylish cut, differed from Chris collecting bottles on a motor-scooter much more appreciably than he differed from himself-student; and it was not portliness nor double chin that made Chris today's, who had not lost his former equanimity and uninhibitedness, but had acquired over the years of "scraping together capital" an authoritative economy of gestures and the involuntary hardness of his face of a dignitary. "How many times you've changed your marital status?"

"Only one till now," he was even surprised at his constancy. "Our daughter is sixteen years old. You're free, I see?

"Right. Recently I had ruptured the relationship with my second spouse." Chris installed himself in the next armchair. "Not without compensation, of course.What else they both wanted to possess but material goods?"

"In my opinion, impoverishment doesn't yet threaten you," he glanced over the furnishings of the room, which was simply palatial by the standards of an ordinary average philistine. "You, apparently, have staked out your gold mine."

"Yes, at present," Chris said, pouring cognac into microscopic goblets of nielloed silver. "But all was different, with varying success."

"I don't think it was on the line of poverty," he recalled the unobtrusive stinginess of the treasurer of their youth gang.

"That depended." Chris carefully took the silver shot glass with his short strong fingers. "However, with my wifeys, I would eke out a miserable existence and beaver away for nothing, because they wouldn't let me risk properly. Well, drink to our meeting?"

"I join in," he politely acceded to the toast.

"And in general," Chris uttered, having swallowed his cognac, "there are too many gaps in my biography, so it's better if you will tell me about your life. I only know about two of our company, but Yul, as a hardened criminal, is frequently doing time in jails from a young age, while as to Sam, I haven't met him for a long time."

"Sam died this March. Crashed in his own car together with his son," he put Chris in the know, and the friend businessman that was lackadaisically studying the tanned strong face of the friend philosopher opened his slightly swollen deep-set eyes a little wider.

"Bob also died, even earlier," he added. "Pete, if he is alive, a pharmacologist; Bez, as before, remains a poet of the Russian land; I am an interpreter of the spiritual heritage in the university. It seems that's all."

"We should get together sometime," Chris said thoughtfully, pouring cognac into the silver wine vessels. "Do you have their addresses?"

"Addresses are not a problem. But for what? To look how different we are?"

"At least that. Plus to compare our real achievements." Chris again raised his tiny goblet. "Then let's drink without clinking, to the departed."

"And by unnatural causes," he made a clarification before drinking, and, nevertheless, responded to the previous remark of Chris, who wanted obviously to amuse his vanity by comparing their "practical results", expressed, naturally, in something material, that is, first of all, in the amount of banknotes, already made literally from nothing and put into circulation, and of useful connections, in terms of which they all could not surpass this bigwig. "But you can compare similar things, while we have something like multidirectional vectors. As Bergson said, the plant and animal worlds develop from one common root, but diverge in their own ways; and so are we: one is like you, for example, another is like me, tastes differ, according to proverbial wisdom."

"The Americans would say, if you are smart, why are you poor," Chris chuckled rather dismissively at his self-justifying philosophizing. "There is a Klondike here, by the way, in our mess and muddle, and you have to be a complete gawk not to make a fortune by fishing in troubled water. Or, forgive me, to be some stupid working cattle which is good for nothing but to plow and endure and which all and sundry can fleece and rip off."

"Do you classify me as a gawk or as cattle?" he asked, propping his cheek on the palm of his hand like a spectator.

"No, you're a dreamer," Chris rated him, watching his behavior with the cold gaze of a naturalist. "True, you can afford it as long as you and your knowledge are bought, even if very cheaply. But I'm afraid your heyday is to end soon enough."

"I'm a simpleton, in a word," he summed up. "Here you have the Klondike, and sharing, and plunder, and social cataclysms are coming, while I am unarmed and unprotected."

"You may laugh, but just so matters stand," said Chris. "By the way, you can drink if you want. I ought to be moderate, for I have a business appointment in the morning."

"No, thanks, I'm teetotal," he rejected the dubious solicitude of the host, who spoke to him in the tone of an experienced older brother edifying the younger naive silly-idealist, which would have irritated him if the motivation of Chris weren't so plain to him in this unceremonious desire to be more main than anybody, very typical for the tricksters risen from the bottom and for the newly-minted wealthy going crazy and imagining themselves to be "masters of life" owing to the omnipotence of the millions that they raked in and embezzled wherever possible. "Then what do you want me, a dreamer, to do? To take a share in your affairs? Very doubtful that you're such an altruist."

"In our days, one should be a go-getter," Chris eschewed explanation. "Dibs are everywhere today, and if you're savvy and tenacious enough, you can turn them into your own property. Meantime they are everything, both the present and the future."

"Yours," dropped he after listening to these antediluvian platitudes proclaimed by the real go-getter as an unexampled revelation, "and for you. That's just what I tell you about: we differ in our self-creation, both in orientation and in the means used by us."

"And each of us chooses his means, just as ideas, according to his character," Chris took up his thought. "What do you think is the difference?"

"The difference is in our ways to live," he concisely developed what he had begun, taking an appetizingly elastic ball of orange tangerine from the glass basket. "Consequently, in our sense of life. We both create ourselves, but I do it in my inner world, while you in the outer world; I in the sphere of the spirit, while you in the sphere of the material and alienated, to put this in scholarly terms."

"I got you, don't bother. I once received higher education in absentia," Chris interrupted his elucidation. "But as for alienation how can we know. For me, what you call 'outer' is rather my additional possibilities."

"Which is absolutely true," he nodded, mechanically stripping off the thin brittle peel with his finger-nails. "You become yourself in this way, I in another, and both of us, in essence, nowise transcend the human dimensions, there is nothing to argue about. The difference between us solely consists in the degree of dehumanization of our means. In thought and in art, I remain as my 'I', whereas in the spheres more mediated--as a big name at best, as a symbol, or as a biography."

"That's not bad either," his attentive listener interjected. '"And a normal life instead of vegetating, you may add."

"I added."

"What, it doesn't outweigh?

"Not for me," he turned the peeled tangerine in his hands. "You see, by my observations, true self-creation needs no destruction, for it is a certain increment, as it seems to me, and therefore it does not supplant anything to the detriment of the others."

"Which, as you well know, never was and never will be," Chris resumed heckling him. "But everyone is always ready to use the others for his own purposes. Everyone and always."

"Let everyone answer for himself," he snapped at once with unctuous humbleness.

"To whom?"

"To God. Or to conscience, to morality, to the law, it depends on what everyone has," he closed the issue. "So, permit me to act in accordance with my dreams, and I don't need more."

"I would permit, maybe," Chris remarked, narrowing his eyes. "Only around, you understand, there are no altruists, nor humanists, but exclusively business people, crooks, swindlers and slackers with appetites. And mind you, all of them are snatching away all that they can indiscriminately, and they don't give a fuck about any 'detriment' of the others or of the state..."

"I have no doubt about that," he broke off a segment from a tangerine. "That's why we are polar--because a cad is always a cad even with loot, and God forbid to give such a cad culture at the mercy of his covetousness."

"Where is it? Where the culture may come from?" Chris cried condescendingly, apparently not taking "cad" personally. "Do you remember in what century you live and in what country? Who was ever before at the head here, if not cads? Who kept the bank in this sharping gambling house? Who elbowed a way to power? No, my dear, no, you won't live here as you wish, in our cesspit, and you'll have either to get along with us, with normal people, or to be culled, sooner or later..."

"You're simply a mouthpiece of the age," he quipped. "Meanwhile the age is swamped with inundations and freshets of masslikeness, such is my diagnosis. The masses dictate their principles and the wretchedness of their spiritual world to the individual, and the individual asserts himself through the masses, by indulging and pleasing them, by compelling and exterminating them, by manipulating and disregarding them, both dissolving in them and obtaining individuality; in short, all life is in the crowd and in the power of the crowd, whoever you are and however high you ascend... Nowadays we have the egoistic consequences of the heroic period of masslikeness: we are still in the crowd, but separately."

"As if you can escape somewhere," Chris sighed sympathetically.

"I do can." ("The logic, most likely, is such," it came to his head. "The smaller the percent of these withdrawals into the inner world, into the spirit, into God, for the mass of the people or humanity, and therefore the more prevalent the orientation towards self-creation in the environment, both in nature and in people, the further mankind is from its planetary super-task, from the dominant of its destiny, and the more disruptive tendencies of self-destruction increase in it, the tendencies turning into epidemics, genocides and unleashed wars spreading around the earth and into some accompanying natural 'deletions', which probably depend on each other, just as peoples and nations globally depend on each other, and as the entire human race, in humanity and in every separate people, depends on the correlation that was constantly equalized by the planet and again shaken by the human community between the 'divine', spiritual-universal, and something other, generated by the demands of biomass formed as individuals and communities...") "I already have somewhere to escape."

"Very poor, but very free." His friend had not forgotten how to wisecrack. "The principle of an intelligent lumpen."

"Firstly, I'm not very poor for the time being, and it is too early to pity me," he answered softly. "Secondly, you are right: how many people, so many freedoms. For freedom is an intimate matter, and its modifications are innumerable, as are the metamorphoses of consciousness."

"I willingly believe that it is in consciousness" agreed Chris. "However, our reality is not consciousness."

"Yours--quite possibly," he didn't argue with self-affirming Chris. "But in your reality freedom is not the main thing, you don't need it."

"What do you know about my freedom," Chris threw disparagingly. "All of you know about really large sums, except that only by hearsay; you all are out of the game..."

"It is debatable. The game is not necessarily money game."

"Yes, in the case that you have a sufficient amount of money. Yet for me, my current sums are not enough; my projects are too large-scale..."

Here Chris fell silent, absently watching with a heavy gaze how he was breaking off another segment from the remained half of the fruit and putting it in his mouth, and then spoke again.

"At the same time, I solve the national question, which is of no small importance today."

"Are you having any difficulty with this?"

"None now, but in my younger years they were. Sometimes I could not keep my temper, although I was quite disguised, being a half-blood, and no one would have unmasked me without a questionnaire."

In all likelihood, Chris would have long wanted to say all that without hiding, but there was no reliable interlocutor in his surroundings to confide such things to, and he had to keep his mouth shut, while now he fortuitously came across an old friend, who was not connected with business circles in the whirlwind of calculated and pulled off combinations, calls, meetings, contracts and consultations both with "small fry" that were cognizant of all the ins and outs and the necessary loopholes, and with bribetakers that facilitated shady deals, and with bureaucratic "key figures", and with bosses of illicit economy, and this friend was an absolutely episodic person and could not harm either the image, or prestige, or business of Chris.

"From childhood, I can't stand anti-Semites," Chris confessed with feeling.

"As spake our Zarathustra, Bez,

'By face or passport, anyway,

your place is auto-da-fé!'

I hope you don't think that I'm crazy about them?" he asked ironically. "I once even dashed off an essay, like Berdyaev's, about the roots and consequences."

"I wonder what does your essay boil down to?" Chris, mistrustful in national aspects, darted a suspicious look at him. "What, how we, damned Masons, had crucified God?"

"Generally speaking, the crucifixion was conceived and staged by God--as an object lesson. Christ knew and foresaw all, and it would be incorrect and disrespectful towards this omniscient author and omnipotent stage-director to condemn the performers," he reassured Chris. "The meaning of the lesson is a vast topic, and we shan't touch on it, but about the disciples a few words can be said. Of course, succinctly, only in outline."

"Who do you mean?"

"Who are the disciples?" responded he. "They are all of us, all humanity, or the Christian world at least. The catch is that anti-Semitism is inherent just in the Christian civilization, in which the very foundations and the cornerstone of culture is the Bible. And the Bible, excuse me, is the history of the Jews, including their long-awaited Messiah, who didn't justify their hopes in this case. That is, whether you like it or not, this people is truly 'God's chosen', and it is a steady leitmotif and a leading voice in the human common chorus, so the vindictiveness of all others, not God's chosen, more temporary and less significant, stems partly from envy. As in the dispersal of Jews throughout the world and in their borderline 'otherness' among various peoples and nations, some self-protective tension of spiritual forces continuously came about in themselves, the level of talent of this 'small people' was very noticeably raised in comparison with the others, which, naturally, sharply aggravated the malice of nationalist mediocrity towards the representatives of such an ethnic group."

"Very subtle," Chris commented incidentally, listening spellbound to the exposition of such a smooth-tongued lecturer. "This would flatter me, if I tagged along for the Zionists, but, alas, I am a Slav equally. And what about you in this sense? Isn't it the voice of blood?"

"The blood has nothing to do with it. Anti-Semitism is not national, for it is rather from the category of culturological Freudianism. I'll explain," he preempted Chris's question. "Mark you, how those persecutions are connected with fanaticism, both in the Catholic Inquisition and in the Black Hundred Orthodoxy, and how this excessive Christian religiosity is transformed into barbarian mayhem and pogroms..."

"And?" Chris spurred him. "Why?"

"Because there is a rebellion here," he said. "Though it is subconscious, shamming the defense of the faith and the zealous service to God, but it is a rebellion against the very foundations of their culture, against its shackles of morality pushing back the savagery, and against the founding fathers, who, as luck would have it, were Jews... And, as usual, the innocents are getting it, especially in the periods of breakdowns, obsolescence of faith and its compulsiveness and inferiority compensated just with fanaticism. As a matter of fact, they again strive to kill their God in someone else, since, unfortunately, such rioting pogromists are unsuitable to be the man-god even in the anthropotheism, and the norms of the New Testament all-human religion are beyond the strength of their nature. In short, it is an uprising of some complex-ridden schoolchildren that do not realize the true motives of their hysterical atavistic hatred for those who belong to the people in which they get a chance to take revenge on their spiritual mentors, overseers and teachers..."

"What about fascism?" Chris inquired in a low voice, whose mother, as he recalled from their youthful conversation about relatives suffered during the "personality cult", had a narrow escape from death in the occupation. Then, true, Chris made no mention of her nationality.

"Fascism springs from the bosom of the same culture," he formulated compendiously. "It is the same overcoming of the complex of schoolboy inferiority, only maximally barbaric, and the same savage rebellion against restrictive archetypes, only open in a Nietzschean way and unable to establish itself without an enemy and without war. Just as Bolshevism, which arises from the same sources and feeds on the same enmity, turning, as a result, into the same dictatorship, whatever blood it is of, racial or plebeian. So, in my understanding, anti-Semitism in its origins is a pagan reaction to Christianity. If you had the pleasure of reading it, there are several places in the Gospels where Jesus deciphers the very idea of the incarnation of God..."

"Utterly useless information," muttered Chris. "But entertaining. Well, come on, uncover 'the mysteries of the universe'. What we Yids have in the Gospels?"

"Clues to answers. First of all, what is God; all else is derivative..." It must be said, he himself was somewhat carried away by his narration. "God becomes a man, albeit figuratively, albeit in the self-perception of Christ, but why? And what does his words to the apostles mean: bread is my flesh, and wine is my blood?"

"Symbols, probably..."

"No, not symbols, but the pure truth. God is really both bread and wine, and man, and the whole world, but only man is both a creation and a creator, this is why he is God-like, and just for this truth the Son of God came into the world. That's why 'Thou shalt not kill', for homicide is in fact the murder of God, for the killing of another man is something suicidal for human..."

"Not for everyone," Chris goaded his preaching zeal.

"Clear that not for everyone. And it is not for everyone, as long as everyone is up in arms against God in himself in his aggressiveness and his 'I' is the highest value for him, while all others are, so to speak, some material at his disposal."

"Are you hinting at me? But you're also rather problematic as a peacemaker, from what I had seen."

"I'm not a victim, it is true," he confessed to his ineradicable sin. "We are the heirs to the Renaissance, after all, and titanism, despite its origin from Christianity, is inevitably one-sided, be it either individualistic or mass: class or national; and the tendency to dominate is always characteristic of it: 'mine' is inflated and extolled to the last degree, and 'alien' is humiliated and suppressed, both in psychology and in geopolitics, both in economics and in religious exclusivity... I must admit, humanity has been being somehow tribally self-regulated by this instinct of domination from time immemorial to the present day."

"And what so crucial happened in our age? By what have we distinguished ourselves?"

"Have grown to our planetarity."

"Yah? How did I overlook it..."

"Nevertheless, we have grown to it, and already physically. But we are late again in conclusions, and again, as before, 'every man for himself and God for all'. Whereas God is in us and we ourselves are God, so that today we are quite capable, through thoughtlessness, of crucifying Him not as a separate man, but as all mankind at once."

"But with the resurrection and ascension, like Christ?" Chris inserted a new gag in his sermon.

"Even if with the resurrection, then without us. All will begin anew from scratch, from an unreasonable biological environment..."

"You're an oddity, though," Chris compassionately clicked his tongue and, at variance with the initial refusal, filled their tiny silver wineglasses with cognac. "How else are we living, if not from scratch, each and all? And why on earth should I think about anyone but me in my life and yield mine to anyone, moreover, voluntarily?"

"You may not yield," the stream of his eloquence immediately dried up. "You're God as much as you're planetary. And as you're free from the mania of domination," he supplemented his afterword.

"Your freedom is freedom from life," his vis-a-vis stuck a label of daydreamer on him, moving his cognac nearer him.

"From surrogates," he corrected. "Different life goal, different meaning of life and different scale of values, as was said. We'll never succeed in overpersuading one another."

"Let's drink to this, to the dissimilarity," Chris saluted him with the wineglass, and they knocked back a little bit of divine beverage. "But one thing is beyond my grasp--why the hell such a righteous man wants to get hold of such an appendage to his wife? The Saints make do without broads, as I remember..."

"I'm not a saint," he dropped, stung by this unexpected unceremoniousness. "And don't start with me about Svetlana, we parted with her long ago."

"It's a great pity," Chris looked into his eyes. "It would be very funny to take her away from you. Then who did you wait for in her yard, you won't tell?"

"You," he answered honestly. "When passing by, I saw her in the car and decided to glance at my replacement more closely."

"Stories are strikingly compelling sometimes," Chris uttered meaningfully, continuing the staring contest with him. "Remember for the future: she is mine now. Mine and no one else's."

"God bless you," he didn't respond to the threat sounding in Chris's declaration. "I have no complaints about her, love is evil..."

"And marriages are made in heaven," Chris ignored his dig. "And our relationship, I think, are much more serious than with you."

"I don't doubt that," he stroked the leather armrest of the chair, without taking his eyes off Chris out of politeness, in order not to reduce the intensity of the struggle of their wills by which his antagonist friend obviously got carried away. "You are kindred spirits with her and tarred with the same brush, while I am a passing fancy and a fleeting whim."

"Most ridiculous is that I am not exaggerating," some inner voice finished saying what he thought, as if emotionlessly registering a fact of the absolutely objective reality with cold detachment. "We are strangers from beginning to end, and sex is something like a joint rest..."

And life inadvertently seen by him from this sober angle suddenly rose before him as an illustration of his thought in its eternal natural nakedness with all its everyday battles for a place in the sun and in the human anthills, where his meaning that needed no external conquests was falling out of the number of topically vital and promising meanings and joining the consolingly sweet-sounding creeds of all kinds of softies-losers, squeamish weaklings and mediocre dawdlers-dependents, while he always stood out from the others not for lack of anything, but for an overabundance of his fortes, mental stamina and fortitude depreciating, sooner or later, any of his victories and making the combat ardor of earthly booty ludicrous, as well as his leadership and business activity; and, as he felt just now, such a depreciation overtook him in his love which subsided at once in his soul, like a seething wave of ebb-tide that licked the shore and left, instead of the former festively roiled depth, only some rubbish of the bare bottom and the gelatinous-jellyfish shreds of melting dislike and rancor. This last love of his was also an unconscious reaction of his pagan flesh to subjection to the spirit prevailing over the years, but the spring miracle of his resurrection from the dead removed such an opposition by showing that the incarnation of the spirit was separate only for his consciousness; and now, already comprehended his dual spirituality and the relativity of carnal animality, he had accidentally stepped over a certain boundary line in his conversation with Chris, and, after letting on about "kindred spirits", he immediately sensed a sudden piercing feeling of loneliness in his still living body, in his human shell being taken by others for his genuine self and perceived by him for the first time as an alien part of the infinitely detailed nature which was him wholly and which, however, seemed just as external for his self-consciousness as the external world for his flesh.

"Well, as the Pentateuch advises, be fruitful and multiply," he slapped on the armrest. "With your permission, I'll return to the family."

But his pliability had rather displeased Chris than satisfied, for Chris would not mind adding a victory on the love front to his assets and taking away by force what he was giving him without objection and without much regret.

"That's why you're spieling about God," Chris chided him crossly. "You can't hold anything."

"Can't and don't want to," he smiled, like a Japanese notifying strangers of the death of a loved one. "I'm expanding myself, not spheres of influence and possessions. If something has fallen off, it means that it is no longer mine, and there is no point in holding it."

"If you like to be a sheep that smart uncles shear, be..."

Chris, as he was now, appertained to the widespread category of high-handed hustlers, the limit on whose greedy lust for power could be set only by a commensurate counteraction of something from outside, because they had no internal restrictions concerning appropriation of another's property and their self-affirmation in the not very honestly acquired capitals and prosperity was combined, as a rule, with a tendency to humiliation of the insolvent common people, now in outrageously unbridled boorishness, now in arrogant contempt, depending on the cultural level preceding their entrepreneurship.

"You have a pretty disgusting habit of using people as a pedestal," with the same smile he put Chris in his place, for the erstwhile friend too overtly intended to flout the autonomous dignity of the know-all unwittingly riling him. "But I'm hardly fit for your elevations in your own eyes, so please don't take out your complexes on me. Especially since to 'hold', if push comes to shove, isn't a very difficult trick..."

And by way of confirming what he said, he stretched out his hand over the black-lacquer table inlaid with mother-of-pearl Japanese patterns, and his wineglass floated upwards from the silver tray and hung upright in the air.

"Rare sleight-of-hand," Chris wasn't too surprised at his legerdemain. "I love illusionists."

In response to this, he slowly moved his hand aside, and the wineglass was hanging now above the table, being held only by his gaze, or rather, only by his will, and although he did it as a debut improvisation, the trick seemed to him not a magic, but quite an ordinary event, considering that he could easily make both the heavy table with the chairs and the entire bulky oak furniture wall with collectible services and crystal on its glass shelves hover likewise.

"Everybody is strong in his own way," he said, and, obeying his desire, the wineglass softly landed on the tray, having tinkled by its bottom on the silver like a fallen coin. "Don't try to be the boss everywhere, nothing will come of it."

"I don't want everywhere," Chris retorted proudly, undoubtedly suspecting a fraudulent ruse in his telekinesis session. "What I have, I have, and I dare hope you will never keep up with me."

"Naturally. You are on personal transport, while I am on foot," he forbore from the competitions of "strong characters" that Chris stubbornly imposed on him.

"It was nice to see you," he conciliatorily finished their juggling of the grenades of subversive barbs and quips, rising from his armchair.

"Wait, I shall let Igor know," Chris got up, too. "You keep your glass, I keep my word."

"Decided to see me to the exit?" he put the last crumpled segment of tangerine into his mouth. "I am not sure whether I am worthy of such an honor."

"Heaven forfend me," Chris dropped condescendingly and again darted a displeased look at him, as the retired pensioners usually looked at the hippie-punk impudent youth that respected neither their regalia nor their experience. "To my mind, the radiotelephone has been invented already..."

*

Lounging at ease behind the gloomy silent driver, who, with clenched teeth, carried out the order of the patron, he again swiftly sailed in the warmth of the car along the empty avenue, on the shiny black skin of the smoothly slipping wet asphalt, among the sheer bulks of the dark quarters towering in the rainy blurry haze and blindly staring into the night space with their solitarily lighting wall-eyes, and drowsily thought about the former passion which had led him to the house of Sveta only two hours ago, but which had been imperceptibly dispelled, seeping through the words, in the strangely sequential experiences of his midnight meetings and conversations, settling in his memory as a torn lace of drying foam. Now he felt no attraction to Svetlana, and she, whom he loved even after the break between them, became worse than indifferent to him, she became unpleasant, moreover, unpleasant not out of some moral considerations or jealous umbrage, but unpleasant by what was most attractive in her before, by her always coveted female body, seductive, irrespective of his mind and their spiritual disparity, whose magical magnetic halo had faded for him, apparently irreversibly, though from childhood, now exaggeratedly comically, now martyrically-hyperbolically, now voluptuously-reverently, this had been enslaving him by the eternal and merciless craving for the opposite sex, by the universal cruel instinct for the union of the inseparably polar and complementary, by the bisexual natural contradiction of the human spirit driving evolution and reducing the very spirit to the "animation" of the suffering flesh given to it from of old, in fact, for rent, thereby weakening the fire which the "self", incarnated in the flesh, was spending on the life of the insatiable body.

Today his long and happy thralldom ended, and from now on, as the miracles he performed without titanic efforts proved again and again, the flesh had no former power over him; but if the love of his reluctantly dissolved liaison, having receded at last, carried away, too, his unaccountable affronted estrangement from Nadine, whom he slighted without cause, inwardly protesting against his moral obligations towards her ("What, besides his lawful wife, he doesn't deserve anything else? No, thanks, he's not going to be content with consolation prizes!", and a protracted internal monologue in the same vein), then the further awareness of the accomplished liberation led him to bitter and sad thoughts: the responsibility for freedom and the revealed power was almost an unbearable burden, since he, man, not being something bigger, could not foresee the consequences of his more or less large-scale interventions in the picture of incessantly emerging reality, and to act like everyone else, at random, being impelled by demands and calls of nature, he already had no right because of his ruthless eyesight that saw the necessity both in the fatal faults of history and in the catastrophic muddle of the "course of things", disastrous for man and for the peoples, so his participation in this so-called world order was permissible only in his earthly self, equal with all nature in the inscrutable "Divine Providence". And presumably, he was endowed with excess of freedom and strength not for the sacrilegious and illusory competition with the Almighty, the planetary micron flash of whose universal self-consciousness he was as a human component of a thinking shard of the primary stellar core (his vying with God would have been like rivalry between a puppeteer and a marionette, as it was in his sham fight in the yard), but all that was for revealing the meaning of his "God's gift" and for finding out the place of his anomaly in the structure of life on planet Earth, which was tantamount to groping the goal inherent in his life and due to determine his entire future destiny.

Now that he finally confirmed his ability to co-create in the self-creation of the world within the area of influence granted to him, he was afraid that the incompetent, petty and short-sighted human rationality could unintentionally harm the mechanism of earthly self-regulation which was being started up not by human, because such "inclusion in creation" presupposed first of all some completely different self-perception of the material knowable to reason, and he would have had all the rights to the cognizable only if he really became what he wanted to freely dispose of, that is, according to the precept and following the example of the not very understood Jesus, loving God's world as himself and feeling everything he created as his own soul and body, for just in this the essence of love in its given meaning consisted, whereas, in the half-heartedness of the struggle with the dictates of physiology and sociality, he was far from feeling a sense of narcissistic adoration to his body, partly hating and denying it for tractability and "auxiliarity" and principally for the temporality of the bodily anatomical form wearing out and doomed to destruction and disintegration into disparate ingredients and elements, which outraged the new consciousness blossomed in him. "Who knows but that this life is really death?" as Euripides questioned in his non-extant tragedy, and even if the "tear in materiality", as he jokingly called the soul, had begun unraveling in breadth, he was still too closed in his individuality to really love the "objective world" as himself, not excluding the humanized constituent of this world that belonged to him personally, in other words, to love just himself, as he was in the flesh comprehended by him for the first time as the last frontier between him and his already foreseen, albeit vaguely, true destination that was not limited, of course, to preserving "spiritual values" and to the function of a pacifist counterbalance in the eternal aggression of man against everything around him and his own kind, which in the recurring madness of his twentieth century resembled some unconscious self-decimation of humanity unprepared for planetarity, wherefore mankind seemed to be deliberately disrupting the precarious natural balance of survival.

Immersed in thoughts about the meaning of his participation in the paradoxical purposefulness of madness and absurdity characteristic of the predominantly corporeal "external" becoming of the human reason, he had strayed unseeingly for an instant in a chaotic welter of formless fugitive images of blankness, and on his return to reality, before him, next to the cropped head of the driver, he beheld Chris's massive bald pate framed by half-gray thin curls. The heavy traffic of the rush-hour started hooting--growling--rumbling around in the din of the bustling city, and two more bleak years of his life eaten away with aging had been irrevocably lived and written off in the notebook archive, while he himself was picked up by Chris in the appointed place this again rainy evening of October, and now they were riding to take with them two other "friends of youth", whom, like him, Chris had sought out previously to assemble them for some reason in his "bungalow" at a "modest bachelor party" which he arranged on the occasion of some extraordinary important event.

Since that night talk, he had never got in touch with Chris, and, to be honest, he didn't have any special urge to communicate with this pal at leisure, for Chris, pragmatically concentrated on profit and lucre, was unbearably dull and not much different from all kinds of dealmakers breeding like greedy locusts--now venturesomely grabbing "grands" of financial windfalls on the fly, now stealthily pecking at grains from a common feeding trough, now impudently pulling their adventurous scams off for all-powerful bribes, now trying to establish a "solid enterprise" on the swampy soil of lawfulness in the arbitrariness of corrupt officials, now splurging the snatched dosh of "income" in the "beautiful life" of ritzy hotels and luxurious restaurants, now investing "net proceeds" from booty in producing new profits, in stable savings of foreign currency accounts and in private real estate, but always remaining equally preoccupied with industrial, commercial, prestigious and everyday problems--and they all, secretly or publicly: in newspapers, at banquets and presentations, and in television interviews, equally swanked about their resourcefulness and success, and were equally remote in their energetic fussiness from resolving the question gaping in each of them about the destination of his personal eternity which was abysmally frozen in the center of the soul littered with the urgent and materially tangible and barricaded with vanity and sanity, and which sometimes poisoned their full-blooded living of a not very long life span, however deeply they differed in origin-upbringing, in education and culture, in spiritual subtlety or callousness, in faiths-beliefs and in branches of activity, some narrow-mindedly settling for the process as such, other small-mindedly counting on church and various ecumenical recipes for salvation, sanctified by spiritual authorities and traditions and paid by not overly exorbitant donations among other bought goods and services, or putting all thoughts of the frailty of life off until, maybe, the philanthropic old age that they were providing today, given that the percipient organ, which the soreness of the unanswerable questions gnawing his soul irritated from day to day, was largely atrophied in most of them, owing to long inactivity. Unlike them, in complete inconsistency with the imperative exigencies of the time, he went deeper and more and more thoroughly into such questions, sacramental and, nevertheless, still unresolved for him, especially after that incident on the set in the year before last, which marked the beginning of his gradual withdrawal from the stunt work lasting with rare fulfillment of pre-signed contracts until the summer, when, pleading slight sickness and busyness in the university, he had broken away from the team and preferred, instead of not superfluous remuneration for his field work, to be squandering the family annual supplies and spending time at the seaside with his sixteen-year-old charming Vicky, frightening away with his monumental physique the young beach wolves trying to molest her with certain intentions, and, undoubtedly, the daughter was pretty sick of his constant control, for the time while Nadine selflessly tutored entrants in the flat vacated without them.

The stunt he had to perform then, in a rather frosty autumn day, was, despite its spectacularity, quite simple: he was to take a running jump from a springboard fixed on the edge of the roof as an ordinary board allegedly falling after pushing off, and to fly over in free flight several meters to the roof of the opposite lower house, so that he would have grasped the horizontal iron bar of a low barrier and hung, like on a trapeze, over a narrow precipice of nine storeys, and the camera would have shot this flight of his from above. But it is understandable that there was a safety net stretched across the alley below, and he with Tolyan wrapped the bar beforehand so as to avoid slipping it out of his hands, and thus, if not to take into account the height, he did such things many times in the acrobatic section in childhood, so he succeeded in performing all rehearsal jumps quite well (except that he once bumped his knee on the ledge, when landing onto the barrier); therefore Tolyan, who according to the plot of the film pursued him but was doomed to stumble against the falling board and nearly fly down after it, having hung on the edge on the opposite side of the alley (onto the roof the actors were supposed to clamber by themselves), blessed him at last for the first take which was no less successful.

However, as usual, there is no limit to perfection, and in order not to be going round from house to house, losing time, he again and again returned to his "starting position" along the springily bending board thrown across the alley by Tolyan, thereby entertaining the gapers below both with his flights and crossings in the skies.

Just confidence was what let him down: when he bounced out onto the springboard on the fourth take and pushed off, his sole slipped a little off the edge, and he, being, nonetheless, tossed up, flew too obliquely, having immediately realized that he would fly past the level of the bar before he could reach it, to which his body impulsively reacted by jerking up from the wrong trajectory, although, in theory, he should have interrupted the jump and landed on his back into the net; and only after grasping the desired steel pipe did he suddenly understand that he had just really been flying, moreover, flying contrary to gravity and the laws of physics, and that his flight was caught on film, that is, his involuntary miracle was recorded, which was the last thing he would like.

He was saved by the shooting angle and by the ignorance of the watching filmmakers, who believed that the "circus artists" were capable of making even his unbelievable bird's jump, whereas Tolyan, extremely puzzled, was wondering alone how he did it, and repeating that the mind boggles to make such an unreal take-off.

"I've somehow applied my hidden talents, otherwise I can't explain it," he prompted Tolyan. "Or it simply seemed to you."

But he knew exactly what had happened, and he didn't need to check whether he would be able to soar again, like a ricocheting flat pebble skimming the water surface, as it was at the moment of his corrected flight; now he had no doubt that all corrections at a critical juncture proceeded from this core of his soul as though emanating the sunshine yet shrinking in the usual whirl of everyday changes and insignificant misunderstandings to a star clot burning through the cosmic darkness of his abyss, and that the star lit in him, like the fetus of light kicking in the womb of eternity in time of danger, would keep protecting him miraculously henceforth from the premature preposterous destruction of its mortal abode, whatever defiant antics he tempted fate by. Meanwhile the knowing of the immortality allocated to him deprived the risk of any interest and meaning: if the appointed hour had not yet come, then perdition did not threaten him and he worried in vain; if his term of earthly life expired, then the fatal concatenation of circumstances would have befallen him even without artificial stunt simulations of jeopardy.

That's why, he had been filming until the end of the season almost mechanically, forcing himself to visit the gym and somersault on the set and overcoming his overpowering indifference to childish competing in the speed of reflex reactions and in muscle strength; and on his seaside vacation with Victoria, the period of his keenness on stunts had ended altogether: Vlad's enticing offers no longer tempted him, and after he discontinued the systematic maintenance of his due athletic form, over a year of unadventurous reflections, he grew more scrawny and more bored, because his conclusions in notebooks about the safe path of fate that was ensured for him and about what he would have to pay for his hazardous "chosenness" (for there were no such precedents in history that mortals got the privilege of their temporary invulnerability without paying for it) took up all his time outside the obligatory distractions for his university pedagogy and family idle talk, while to his daughter and wife he devoted less and less attention.

Generally speaking, the germ of light, gradually swelling in him and filling the yawning void chilling the soul, was squeezing out, as it were, the emptiness from the existential depths into the feelings and sensations of his seemingly this-worldly, established attachments and relationships that were also little by little emptying and dying away, forming around him an invisible zone, a magic circle of insuperable alienation, from where he wanted rarer and rarer to go out, which, of course, couldn't but adversely affect his conjugal harmony with Nadine, who tried at times to reanimate if not the former love, then at least a sensual interest of her overly thoughtful husband: now he loved as he formerly performed his rehearsed stunts and risky tumbles, with condescending automatism and without gleams of novelty; and the worst of it was that his emotional impassivity regarded not only his slightly faded wife approaching the threshold of forty years, but also any erotic fantasies which his unbridled vivid imagination could once whisper to him, for it was no longer excited by anything like that, however strong he was in his purely physical actions even at present. As to him personally, perhaps, it was rightly so, as a reckoning for a year of too cloudless and selfish happiness, but Nadine hardly deserved such a punishment.

In order not to be annoyed by the domestic conversations of his "womenfolk" interfering with his concentration and not to annoy them by the expressing of his displeasure, in the evenings he would go "to breathe fresh air" and wander aimlessly until late evening either around the nearby park or about the shabby back streets lit only by the windows of inhabited buildings and along some endlessly intertwining dull lanes, getting wet in the cold dreary rains or muffling himself up in a scarf in the snowy flurries of raging blizzards, notwithstanding that in the hours of his homeless wanderings he risked to get a whack on the noggin from the rowdy young hooligans and scruffy drunk drifters hanging out in the gateways or near the emergency houses requiring repair, with the breaches of broken windows and with the boarded-up doors of entrances, who would have definitely conked such a lone bloke on the head with a rusty iron rod and a lead knuckleduster or stabbed him with a shiv, for his Canadian anorak, wristwatch and pocket cash (or, in principle, for no reason, for being caught strolling in the wrong place), if it were not for their animal instinct that was sensing the independent confident composure of his intrepid strength and deterring them from attacking such a large predator, too dangerous for their pack to bully him in vain lest they would receive either some kind of mutilation or a tag on the leg in the refrigerator of the city morgue instead of easy prey.

True, when roaming the streets, he did not particularly notice anyone, and warming himself on the way in some cheap coffee houses full of young people or waiting out the pouring indignation of the intensifying rain under the awnings of shining metro stations and under the canopies of trolleybus stops, he thought in his aloofness about the essence of the ongoing irreversible metamorphoses depreciating, albeit not completely, everything carnal and transforming his quondam delights of life into something yesterday's and obsolete that did not lure him today either in muscle joy, or in risk, or in gluttony, or in sexual arousal, or even in the tactile sensitivity lasting in the body of the most decrepit old man, which sometimes granted him a semblance of infantile bliss both from the touch of the sun that had not yet gone out, and from the warmth for his chilly emaciated flesh, and from the soaked bread crust he was sucking out by his toothless gums--all this, previously concomitant now and then, had turned so secondary today that even his health not failing him before wasn't of some fundamental importance for him any more.

In short, he would have compared the withering away of his corporeality with the spiritual necrosis of the exfoliating bodily shell that was actually proving to be either a cocoon or a snake's sloughed skin, only the body as anatomy had nothing to do with it, and all such perturbations pertained solely to his soul: to his self-perception and to his self-contemplation; consequently, his task was not to overcome them (which he would not have succeeded in) but to cognize the logic of these changes in his "I" which were no longer subject to his will. Undoubtedly, one half of this logic was determined by his human nature: hopes for the earthly self-sufficiency of life and for the "extension of oneself" into others were to the liking of the naive maximalist-cynics entering into life and of the practitioners-optimists seeing no further than their nose, however, those hopes were displacing the soul, as far as they could, from its eternity, even if illusory, into the transient temporality of the present evanescing in non-existence, and the soul immersed itself into the world where the society was forming the object-material memory of a person endeavoring to leave a mark on modernity in any way and thereby be imprinted at least in something and in someone, which in effect created the true morality of his era--the morality of clichés, imitation and show, the morality of individualism unified by advertising, indigence and various unities and of standardized symbols of luck, loyalty and opposition, the morality of manageability and purchasability, of politicization and venality, of demonstrating everyday life, spirit and body and of turning a person into a set of stereotype stencils, preferably with standard stuffing, felt by him as freedom and happiness; while he again and again got out from all the traps of such morality, as well as from the myths of his own consciousness, and eventually found himself facing the deadlock prospect of hopes for other people, very deplorable for seekers of greatness and immortality; but apart from the tangibly emerging alienation to the generally accepted and widespread, he probably was again freeing himself today from his studied past self for some still unknown future renewal which was sort of clearing a place in his soul now for tomorrow's unpredictable and unexpected shoots.

Needless to say, now he was debunking times and mores as applied to himself and to his own past, where, still steeped spiritually in the life of the flesh--still carried away by the secrets and infusions of this life--still being revived and exalted by its tidal influxes, he was this life wholly and completely, undergoing many transformations in his insatiable cognition of the existence and being deluded, like the majority of the living, by the consolingly hopeless tautology, "The sense of life is always in life itself"; and his philosophical readings, alternating the Catholic Gabriel Marcel with the Orthodox Ivan Ilyin, were not so much answering his questions as reinforcing his answers. As for the recommendations to formalize his connection with God in no matter what church charters, they were, alas, not for him, because God was already not somewhere outside, where he could turn with confessions for cleansing conscience and with prayer requests for lightening the burden of his soul, but grew inexorably from within, changing in his soul the interrelation between him-creation and him-creator, that is, between his earthly human full-blooded existence in the natural composition of the divinely perfect and humanly meaningless world and the blindingly keen author's vigilance of vision amending the world and extinguishing the heat of his worldly desires and the life-giving brightness of inexhaustibly colorful life impressions with its light, excessive for human being.

That's why his evening dissolutions in the autumn-winter lamppost graphics of the park dark alleys and urban backyards discolored by the dreary city twilight were becoming more frequent, as his soul emptied out, and his self-isolation in the family correspondingly deepened, so that his increasingly deteriorating mental state finally impelled the puzzled wife fallen into disgrace to try to figure out what happened to her husband, who got too often oblivious to his dereliction of so-called conjugal duty, when he once returned home after midnight, as usual, from the February snowy wastelands and thought out his endless thought over a cup of tea in the kitchen.

"Where you were again, may I ask?" Nadine inquired casually, intruding into the kitchen solitude of her "philosopher". "There is a terrible cold in the street, a good master wouldn't kick the dog out..."

"Cold is good for me," he did not condemn the master who had kicked him out into this weather. "And nobody jostles, withal."

"All you want is to be alone everywhere," Nadine uttered, and, with her characteristic frankness, immediately got down to business. "Maybe you can tell me why you're avoiding me?"

"If it isn't an imposition," she added under his icy indifferent gaze, and since he did not answer her, but kept looking intently in her face, from embarrassment she asked him point-blank. "You have a woman?"

In her loose velvet jeans and a gray thick sweater, fragile and graceful, with the same magically shimmering black eyes and copper-red curly hair, shortened by a recent "travesty" haircut, and with her chiseled features from Egyptian frescoes, whose fine wrinkles were indiscernible now due to the distance and weak light, Nadine, indisputably, was still as gorgeous as in her youth, and he, what to hide, admired her as before, both her beauty and her hereditary proud bearing; but his aesthetic admiration from outside couldn't be called love, or, say, affection even at a stretch, for such states always implied a bit of lust, passion, desire to possess beauty, whereas that was exactly what he did not feel.

"Yes, I have," he grinned mirthlessly. "You. And that's all, in my opinion."

Her frozen face thawed out a little, and, having moved a stool to the table, she sat down opposite him and leant on the table, clasping her cheeks in her palms.

"Then what?" she said barely audibly. "What happened to us? You don't love me anymore?"

"I don't love myself," he answered to her anguished questioning in him of all earthly life, so unfairly cruel to its necessarily fading and dying beauty. "Which is much worse."

"So, I wasn't mistaken," Nadine concluded, not inclining, like any unloved wife, to sort out the psychological nuances of his cooling.

"Is it so important?" He wouldn't have let her or anyone into his secret anyway, and therefore he had nothing to warrant his unforgivable culpability, except natural ageing and palling of love, his psychological attrition and fatigue from the years lived together, and the typical wear and tear of everyday life because of standing his ground in the intrusive paltriness and spiritual scantiness of this life pettily claiming power over him. "Well, suppose I'm not what I was. But you're also not the same; life, excuse me, passes... ("Which is more than banal," he added to himself.) Life is like a surf: wave after wave comes from the ocean, and all are heaving, lapping, rolling, surging, foaming, in order to go into the sand... And nothing remains of even the highest billows but a wet place; constancy and eternity are not destined for waves."

"We, thus, are waves," she sorrowfully summed up the obscurantist views of her unsociable hubby. "Figuratively, but hurtfully."

"Why?" he disagreed. "At first, every wave thinks that itself is the whole ocean, just that's why it so wonders at its own depletion afterwards... You and I simply slightly differ in phases: you are still on the crest, while I have a certain decrease in the level. But, believe me, you're my one and only love as always, and I am indifferent to life in general, and not to anyone in particular. At any rate, I'm not drawn to participate in it today."

"And what should I do now?" Nadine somehow cringed in her warm sweater, looking through her reflection in the window at the snowdrift of the snowed balcony colored pink with the kitchen light. "To leave you?"

Yes, regrettably, the eighteen years together had already changed her, too, and without him, on her own, she was not completely independent now, wherefore her once well-founded confidence in her attractiveness considerably waned without the former proofs of his love.

"Or, rather, to chuck me out," he recommended. "I don't know, each one of us has a choice. However, a person shouldn't depend too much on another person."

"But depends," remarked his desponded wife, who, unlike him, to her misfortune, did not fall out of love with her beloved, or life, or love as such. "Everybody depends, and very much..."

It would be unquestionably most reasonable for Nadine to put a cross on the past and divorce him asap for arranging her future with someone more normal and ordinary (suitors would have flocked to her forthwith, especially as her daughter was finishing the last year of secondary school and not going to stay at home too long after that), but, as it happens, there was no serious definite reason to suddenly break for good with each other and with the usual course of the everyday truce between them, and, like many outwardly flourishing families, they lived mechanically by the inertia of the previous marital years, habitually spending week after week and talking only about things not related to love or about their stubborn Vicky, who kept beating her deserved gold medal out her poor teachers, despite their malicious "cavils".

As for determination, Victoria never lacked in it, and her goals were within practical reach as yet: ultimately she fully satisfied her pupil ambitions with a medal and an impeccable school-leaving certificate; besides, she not only communicated fluently in English with perfect pronunciation and with the philological phraseological locutions gleaned from the books swallowed by her in the original language, but also chatted in French no worse than Nadine, with a casual Parisian burr; and on top of that, she corresponded with an American girl of the same age from Boston and with a certain Jeremy Clark from Chicago, legendary in the gangster twenties, extracting a lot of useful information about the life of the country of her future residence from their friendly correspondence and exchanging these reliable details for the exotic survival of Russian natives in the oncoming breakup of the agonizing empire, received as a first-hand account painted by a direct eyewitness.

She and Nadine bantered with her firm decision to move to United States, although they themselves involuntarily inculcated in her this saving idea-fix, knowing from their own experience of the relatively successful life that in their clinically boorish, plebeian Motherland neither hard work, nor knowledge, nor talents guaranteed the decent level of prosperity which they would have wished their daughter, or sometimes even some minimum standard of living, and that it was unlikely such a gifted damsel would find the application of her overly creative endowment and possible vocation in this collapsing culture torn to rags by ideological squabbles and blown to smithereens by sharing of measly fees in the common rat fuss of vainglory, considering the persistent tendency to worsening even the current extreme conditions of the socialist society being gradually destroyed and plundered by looters and to escalating the impending degradation of the despoiled fellow citizens sliding into the next devastation and shambles. Meantime Victoria, with her mind and the childhood experience of her economic disadvantage, such as the lack of her own room, a dog and a video recorder, realized long ago that without solid parental capital and influential connections, here she could expect nothing but deprivation and humiliation, since earnings as a hooker in the street, or as a call-girl, or as a maid servant, or as a saleswoman among hucksters in the flea market disgusted her, and she did not reconsider her adolescent emigration plans, breaking off her innocent romances with local "boys", as soon as her molesting escorts began to solicit something intended not for them, which her parents could guess about only from her brief derogatory descriptions of the friends rashly gotten a bit handsy with her and from her nervousness after rendezvous, still memorable to him and Nadine; moreover, she refused to enter the university, regarding it as a waste of time, because here her education was worth nothing, while abroad her diploma would have been invalid, so she planned to continue her studies somewhere in Harvard, in the world of civilized relations with a free access to world culture in whose textual links and linguistic phenomena she loved to delve when poring over the clever books.

Therefore, having settled accounts with the school, their daughter, as they say, rose into the higher spheres, moving in the semi-bohemian circles of young artists and art critics, where, as a pretty well-mannered interpreter, she helped the Western auctioneers and rich connoisseurs of art to contact with the "non-formals" of the underground, counterculture, avant-garde, sots-art, conceptualism and non-objective painting, who could not go abroad by reason of penury and unabashedly invited her to become a nude model at their studios, but all such enticements invariably ended in a complete fiasco, like the blandishments of her school tempters; and when the opportunity arose, she penetrated without a ticket with someone into theatres and to all kinds of film premieres or presentations, getting acquainted thanks to her prepossessing young sociability with dozens of "foreign guests", gathered to gawk at the rampage of the "epoch-making events" in the soviet country, or to explore the ground for future investments and for establishing business connections, or to buy something somewhere and contribute to the "transition to market economy", or to nick anything that was lying unattended and profit off the sale of someone else's "national treasure" on the cheap.

In a word, like his rationalist Sveta a little earlier, she was seeking her sure chance, and three times in October she brought home a suspiciously young, bearded intellectual from the East coast of the notorious continent, whom she picked up among the participants of some international symposium or conference on Russian culture--that's why this benevolently cheerful lanky Anglo-Saxon with a freckled tanned physiognomy of a lover of sailing races and riding a tidal ocean wave on a surfboard tried in communication to switch from his English that the enlightened host and hostess quite understood to very broken Russian which was the subject of his legitimate pride--and from whom, after spending one inseparable crazy week with him at his hotel, with overnight stays regrettable for the father and mother, she was waiting for a letter from across the ocean, after she had done exactly what all foolish lassies did at eighteen, when falling in love immediately and head over heels; and, in her father's opinion, now, far from her irresistible Yankee, she had perhaps one percent of a hundred on the real fulfillment of his vows, traditional in such romantic episodes, of the uniqueness of this sudden passion and of his return to the sweetheart for the wedding of the "servants of the Lord", Victoria and Bill, already agreed by the daughter with her long-suffering parents, in the genuinely-Slavic Orthodox Church.

"His great-grandfather is an emigrant from Russia, and he is mad about ethnography, he's literally obsessed with everything Russian, my silly," as Victoria explained, informing her relatives about the wedding that was scheduled for June, at the end of his bachelor's semester, though remained questionable; and they had no choice but to agree to all her terms and mentally prepare for the almost inevitable dramatic scenes of the dashing of her betrayed half-childish hopes and for her first desperate disillusionment with the fidelity in love on the part of men who were too fickle in separation.

*

"By the by," already in the present, in Chris's new car starting at the green light, he said to the balding friend sitting in the front seat, who had inveigled him after all into their "meeting with the past" today. "How are you with Svetlana? Are you still seeing her?"

"Often enough," Chris answered dispassionately without looking back.

"We are legally married," Chris added lazily over his shoulder. "And I must say, it's a successful marriage."

"Congratulations," he felicitated the happy spouse dryly. "As our Orpheus, Bez, once expressed it in his brilliant impromptu,

'In all attire you are good,

but best of all if in the nude!'"

"He is a known dab hand at talking smut," Chris chuckled good-naturedly. "Presently we'll see what your Orpheus is, as they say, twenty years later..."

It was impossible not to notice Bez standing on the bustling street corner near the metro station: in a smart oilcloth peaked cap and in a puffer raglan coat, cinched at the waist as an expanding bell and almost reached to the heels, which made the rather plump and not very tall lyrist look like a stumpy coachman girded with a sash from the pre-revolutionary lithographs of the nineteenth-century, the golden age for book and magazine literature, Bez gained a foothold by the station parapet as a living monument to himself, pressing a closed automatic umbrella with a black handle to his stomach with both hands, like a police baton, his arrogant gaze skimming patronizingly over the stream of people flowing underground or over the traffic flow running past, and it was obvious that the usual bedraggled view of both scarcely pleased the eagle all-seeing eye of the artist with its sloppy squalor.

"Hello, lads!" the old chap Bezel greeted them with feigned folksy cordiality, scrambling into his back seat. "You have a snazzy car, Chris; you stand out in our crowd..."

"If you envy, say bluntly, sonny" Chris responded in a fatherly manner.

"I'll say when I'll be envious," promised Bez, who was glib of speech and quick-witted in bickering. (On the advice of Nadine, he read some of Bez's newspaper articles, but this time-serving potpourri of voguish repentantly-toothless accusations, patriotic nostalgia for the glorious past, and vapid moralizing truisms was no less disgusting than the other ideological opuses with which all windbags having entree to the media loved to feed their omnivorous listeners and readers, when fighting for popularity and for cushy places as henchmen of leaders in their journalistic and writer's packs.) "My auto quite suits me, I'm not so swaggering."

"Don't be modest, we won't believe it anyway," he turned to Bez. "Before I forget, Nadine asked to convey an ardent kiss to you. You can receive it from me, if you want."

"You offer it to Pete," Bez recommended to him. "I heard, he consorts with poofters, diversifying the humdrum family life..."

"That's just what we need," Chris hemmed. "I hope, he won't dishonor us with his predilections? Won't disgrace our noble gray hairs?"

"Let's hope," Bez the gossip smirked. "In principle, he prefers ballet boys, we are not the best contingent for him, but, brothers, bisexual is unpredictable, he may be seduced by us, too."

"There is nothing to laugh about here," he intervened in their facetious discussion of Pete's vicious propensities. "The heart wants what it wants, as you know."

"He'll have bonked you first of all as his advocate," Bez guffawed and slapped his sidekick on the knee from an excess of feelings. "Where is he waiting for us, our sexual-democrat?"

"Soon we'll drive up." Chris's bald patch again appeared before them. "So, citizens-sirs, it would be better to shut our mouths..."

From afar, Pete waiting for them also looked like a very imposing handsome man, however, with a rollback to the times a certain number of years earlier, when he easily hooked up with cuties and rated high as a trouble-free stud among his countless girls in the rank of a visiting boyfriend, while the weaker sex en masse had a crush on him and swam by shoals into his net to instantly fall on the back because of these foppish dark small mustaches and his Tyrolean hat of green suede in combination with a fawn demi-season raincoat and a colorful silk scarf of a golden tone; but today Pete's extravagant getup smacked of old-fashionedness, not fitting in with the again voguish "retro" of the fifties, and the stamp of sinful inanition on his prematurely aged, wrinkly phiz of an incorrigible voluptuary, as well as the feeling of some inner manginess not squaring with his ironed dapperness, completed a not very pleasant impression from their comrade looking spruce enough as before, though. With his mannered habit of holding his cigarette somewhat aside, as if displaying it, slowly bringing the amber mouthpiece to his mouth and contemptuously blowing smoke out of the corner of his lips, and with his sleepily-clinging estimative lascivious look mechanically undressing all the comparatively young women passing by, Pete strikingly corresponded by his appearance and manners to the caricature image of a hardened molester and lecherous fornicator, as this unmasked type was presented by the literature and press castigating him in the time of their moralistic youth.

"I welcome you," Pete greeted them restrainedly, squeezing into the car to Bez, who was making room for him, and cursorily glancing round the recognizably new faces of the company. "Will there be anyone besides you today?"

"You mean anyone from our magnificent seven?" With a patrician movement of his little finger, as stubby as a stipe of boletus, Chris signaled to the driver to get under way. "Alas, we are the only four who have survived these years. The rest, my friend, already punched their tickets, so to speak."

"Why so?" Pete politely expressed surprise.

"An unlucky generation," responded Chris, whose materialized luck was an ocular proof which excluded him, of course, from the number of lost and miserable peers. "We have been elbowing our ways too long, swilling too much cheap vodka and other rotgut and having too little positive emotions with that, only many stresses..."

"Why the deuce had you counted on luck?" Bez butted ruthlessly into their dialogue. "A strong person builds his destiny with his own hands, so he doesn't shift responsibility for it to anyone and doesn't blame anyone for his bad luck."

"Especially to the Almighty," he stuck the atheistic ending to the principle proclaimed by Bez. "A strong man has no need to build himself, Bezik, for he already exists as himself since birth, and his problem is to use his strength rightly."

"Rightly it is how?" Chris asked sarcastically.

"Not for destruction." Everyone could interpret his answer in their own way, like all aphorisms, and everyone, naturally, put their own meaning into "destruction". "At least not for intentional one."

"Which contradicts the first law of free competition," Bez patted him condescendingly on the leg, "and the immutable law of nature, by the way."

"I'm talking about spiritual strength," he said, regretting that he touched in passing and in vain on such a personal topic and involuntarily getting involved in his approximate and unnecessary explanations of the essence. "Nature, you see, is always limited by itself, and in order to create, nature must destroy something, so that there is an endless cycle here..."

"And we, not endless, in it," Pete sighed, guardedly joining the conversation. "Strongmen--on the scale of one five-billionth."

"Scale is your voluntary matter," the aggressively attuned Bez opened fire on the right flank.

"If you want to be a genius, be one," Chris treated them to a naphthalene joke in addition to what was said, dialing a combination of numbers on the radiotelephone buttons. "Sorry, guys, boxing without me..."

However, the lack of quorum without the unceremonious host immediately damped down their sociability: the caustic introductory sparring, as if on cue, ended, and, separately staring through the windows of the car at the sidewalk pedestrian crowd streaming-flashing by and at the nondescript rainy quarters with the multicolored luminous honeycombs of facades and the shining shop windows changing each other between the interspaces of dingy concrete fences, all three fell silent, absently listening to Chris's talks about the par value of some stock and the percentage of some license quota, which were lasting until they arrived at the reconstructed mansion with stucco bare-breasted muses that was squeezed by the subsequent development in a continuous row of the fronts of this quiet lane in the center of the city.

They were met, to his surprise, by Svetlana, who was just about to leave her dear guests and got all dolled up like a Christmas tree, in an iridescent short tight-fitting dress with her open olive-tanned shoulders and an unpretentious diamond necklace sparkling between her thin collarbones and costing about three hundred thousand at the current exchange rate and with a slanting hairstyle "a la Patricia Kaas" which exposed her beautiful neck, as well as with a full evening cosmetic make-up and an aura of dizzyingly fragrant subtle perfumery; no wonder that, with her shapely legs of a fashion model lengthened by the high-heeled pumps and with the lithe plastic of a languorous lizard, slender and white-toothed, she was resplendently spiffy and stunning in her finery, like a real princess of some world beauty contest, who was suitable for any advertising cover.

Whether she indeed waited for her royal carriage, that is, the vacated Mercedes of her husband, or the most likely that Chris was eager to boast to them of the posh young popsy he had got and properly dressed up, having supplied his gorgeous babe with bucks in sufficient quantity and various modern amenities and bedecked her with high-priced jewelry; and on parting, his friends were struck on the spot by a chic chinchilla coat thrown over her seductive shoulders, for, fortunately, she didn't ride the subway and didn't use public transport, so didn't be afraid to get caught in the rain.

"You look great," he told her, lingering in the hallway as Chris proceeded with Bez and Pete into the living room.

"Classy, I would put it this way," Svetik accepted his compliment, employing a former buzz-word and also not coincidentally still preening herself in her fur coat before the mirror. "Unlike me, you look a bit wilted."

"Yes, I grew thinner a little," he admitted. "As I'm getting old, I'm losing my former dimensions... Are you happy?"

"Of course," she answered without batting an eyelid. "Even if it is a hurtful fact."

"Then something was hurtful," he parried her sudden attack. "When I loved you."

"Oh really? Do you think I don't deserve love anymore?" she darted a withering glance at him from her mockingly narrowed eyes, feline green with evil fun.

"But not mine. However, I deem this fact won't upset you," he managed to insensitively bore her playful clawing, with a view to picking off the scabs from his healed heart wounds with one wordless hint resurrecting all his suffering.

"Don't worry about that..."

But nonetheless, the green sparkling in her hazel eyes vanished, and the hardness of her gaze turned them into two wood cuts. She was a true woman, and it was not enough for her to have prosperity and luxury, so now, after acquiring the necessary "material base", she would like to enrich her life by collecting the broken hearts of her admirers with unrequited passion for her, because in her nature, the desire to conquer and capture always prevailed over the sensuality and hedonism of unambitious pleasure, and so the despot Chris was in for not quite a serene family happiness with this brilliant imperious lizard.

"I have no reason to be upset, since everything I need, I get. Everything," she accentuated, so that, God forbid, he would not interpret her talkativeness as regret about anything. "Even much more."

"I can only condole you," he sympathized with her. "Excesses are detrimental to the soul and digestion."

They would probably have crossed swords again, but Chris, disquieted by his being too far behind, was already with them.

"You're a slowpoke, though, my darling," Chris shamed his indecently tarrying wife with affected grouchiness, looking extremely unkindly at her gabby interlocutor.

"I hear and obey, my king," the unusually tractable "Valkyrie" smiled charmingly at her hubby. "Please, don't carouse excessively."

"Go, go," Chris gently pushed her, and Svetik, having waved her manicured hand, flitted out the door on her thin heels.

"If you are a king, Chris," he teased the portly spouse in retaliation for the expulsion of his kitty, so captivating in her furs, "then a king of beasts."

"You're, too... John the Baptist in dungeon," Chris riposted. "Let's go to the folk, it's not good to split off from the collective..."

*

The memorable table, shifted into the middle of the room and served for four persons, was heaped with food, as befits Lucullan feast like that, with foreign and domestic delicacies in abundance, such as red salmon caviar and black beluga caviar in crystal shallow bowls, or crabs on the silver platter and anchovies in mustard sauce, or salami, boiled pork and ham, smoked meat and hard sausage with delicate rose flecks of fat, or cooperative meatloaf stuffed with dried apricots or golden grilled chickens on the collection dishes; and among this crystal, porcelain saucers, and ceramic vases with amber sauerkraut bought at the market, with pickled cucumbers and gherkins and marinated milk mushrooms and yellow chanterelles, with selected lilac-pink radishes, scarlet tomatoes, and with many picturesque salads, cold appetizers and seasonings, there were a lot of various different-sized pot-bellied bottles of imported aperitifs, whiskey, cognacs, vodkas, gin, white or red wines for fish and meat, and of icy mineral water, as well as the big plastic bottles of coca- and Pepsi-Cola and orange juice; therewithal, to complete the picture and for greater effect, about twenty packs of canned Bavarian and Danish beer were in store in the corner near the shining furniture wall with antiques (probably, it was the pedantic hostess who had lent a hand to everything here). And an uncut pineapple towered as an epically huge grenade on the inlaid tea table between the armchairs, surrounded with bunches of ripe Cuban bananas, waxily juicy pears and heavy clusters of grapes of contrasting varieties, now smalt-emerald, now claret-violet tints.

"He decided to make us dead drunk!" exclaimed Bez, rubbing his hands in anticipation at the table and, without his coat, in an official three-piece suit, looking like a spry paunchy scamp with a blond wavy forelock which did not so much made him young-looking as slightly foolish. "Keep in mind that a real Russian poet does not stop the spree until he drinks everything..."

"Unless he gets sloshed earlier," he reined in Bez, taking a free seat opposite. "You all are masters of drinking, you're right; our scribblers showed themselves in all their glory already at the Kremlin banquets of Grandpa Joe."

"I laid out all at once, lads, so as not to go to the kitchen," the host apologized hypocritically for the hospitality. "That's the best I have to offer today..."

"Well, let's uncork and charge our glasses?" Chris invited those present, sitting down last at the table, and immediately all four of them livened up and began to briskly fill the glasses and plates, passing each other bottles and dishes, until their goblets and wineglasses were brimful, and the plates were loaded with the initial portions of the preferred snacks.

"And why did you decide all of a sudden to shell out on us?" inquired Pete across the table, who, in a coffee suede blazer and a white turtleneck sweater, with his graying black hair, smoothly slicked back, looked either like a film director chasing the "starlets", or like an Italian mafioso from street pimps. "The legacy of the late aunt?"

"You're surprisingly close to the truth," Chris, slightly relaxed, broke into a smile, and he suddenly realized what exactly served as the source of the rapid enrichment for this newly-fledged businessman of the "perestroika" kind.

Since all the political gabbling was no more than a smokescreen disguising both the overt legalization of the plundered during the absolute power of the patricianism of the party apparatus and the conversion of the lawlessly appropriated "nobody's" property slipping out of the hands of the state into a "laundered" hard currency on foreign accounts, Chris, most likely, labored in some joint company with foreign accomplices for pumping "raw material resources" and "illiquid assets" out of the soviet country to flog them off cheap yet with benefit for the guardians of "people's welfare", who were cursed and vilified at the allegedly spontaneous rallies and demonstrations, and who were underhandedly embezzling what they could behind someone else's back, hurrying, individually at their own risk and in conjunction, to worry in time about their personal savings and about the maximum weighty share of the government pie which they were hastily dividing and from which they might be driven away, despite the seeming indestructibility of their decaying regime or the ostentatious democratism of their forced concessions. The following words of Chris strengthened his suspicions of the underlying causes in the felonious, in essence, activities of the "free entrepreneur", who got mixed up with the powerful thieves and, under the self-seeking supervision of the special services, could scoop plenty of "filthy lucre" for himself and for his high-ranking partners in the turmoil and mess, arranged just for their scooping with impunity from this new Klondike, where Chris had climbed from the grassroots prospectors that were sifting some slag-heaps and "barren rock" and multiplying in the obvious senselessness of "honest labor" as swarms and hordes of intermediaries, dealers, distributors, controllers, "responsible persons" and racketeering "tribute collectors".

"Soon I am to move somewhere across the ocean," Chris said. "Perhaps I shan't see you later, while I would like to look what you are now."

"He, capitalist, must be sure that he has got the better of us all," Bez winked at the friends. "Naturally, how we can keep up with you, if we're the lousy intelligentsia. Even to play preference we can afford only for piddly stakes."

"Where you want to decamp, to what state?" he asked Chris, taking his wineglass. "To Miami, to Los Angeles, to Manhattan? Or to Las Vegas? Where there you're investing your capitals? Do you vamoose to America, don't you? To the 'lair of world imperialism'?"

"What do you mean by 'vamoose'?" Chris resented reproachfully. "By the Declaration of Rights, I have freedom of movement, just as you. Besides, I have some real estate there, to lay my head on far from the Motherland, as they say."

"Man, you're devilishly Massachusettsy in choosing!" Bez injected a pun, having tired of waiting with a full glass. "It's time to wet our whistle in honor of our meeting before parting. Let's drink to us!"

"Today we may drink without proposing toasts, as we like, at an arbitrary pace," Chris instructed his boon companions after quaffing a shot of whiskey, and they also knocked back their first glasses and set to convivial repast, especially as he presciently assured them: "I guarantee home delivery."

"Then, my dear friends, we shall never beat him in this either!" Bez, chewing something, again grabbed the bottle of vodka Smirnoff. "He shirks equality even in such a vital question!"

After that, like a genuine toastmaster, Bez skillfully and quickly poured drinks to them all, except for Pete, who kept communing with the French cognac of "Napoleon". Judging by the energy of the onset and a knack, Bez devoted a great deal of time to the bountiful feasts and achieved a certain professionalism in this kind of libations.

"Aren't you sorry to abandon such a luxury apartment?" Pete asked Chris and raised his glass with a mannered gesture of his hand, the hairy little finger taken aside.

"Why would I abandon it? I depart not forever, and I will visit here regularly on business," Chris mitigated the pain of loss. "True, not often, but I will."

"In order to be nibbling on the local impoverishment," he commented on Chris's plans. "Who would refuse the possibility of filching what's valuable in this place, so ideal for profiteering and easy pickings."

"We won't refuse, believe me," Chris confirmed. "A pike lives in the lake to keep all fish awake."

"Here's an arrant cosmopolite before us, but he still remembers our proverbs," Bez pointed his glass in the direction of his rich friend who was leaving them to the mercy of fate. "As an outstanding representative of Russian literature, I appreciate it."

"And now to our health!" A little warmed up, the "remarkable poet of the second half of the twentieth century" clinked glasses brotherly with each of the feasters. "Come on together..."

The four of them again took a sip--a slug--a swig of whiskey--vodka--cognac--wine, and repeated that more than once, but neither drinking the elite beverages nor eating the available viands could stop their chit-chat, on the contrary, alcohol loosened their tongues and spurred their causticity.

"Why you're interested in geography?" Chris reverted to his provocative question, when cutting into pieces a slice of the delicately flesh-colored ham with his silver knife. "Maybe, you also intend to bunk off to the States? Between you and me."

"Who needs me there..."

"And who here?" Chris got distracted for a second from his thoughtful surgical manipulations. "Do you savvy at least what all that is heading for, for what discord? This country, my dearie, is not up to your philosophy, now it is to shovel its shit off for a very long time."

"You could have assisted in this sewage disposal," the restless Bez, again with a bottle, reproached the unpatriotic pal. "We, for example, have chipped in for commercial edition in a narrow circle, and now we churn out detective and adventure stories on a shared basis. The reading for the public, and profits to us, so everyone are happy."

"You have one niche, and I have another," Chris judiciously brought to reason the agitator for the "public consent". "If it will be profitable for me, maybe I'll take part in it, but my rule is never to spend money on slackers, bunglers, slobs and spongers."

"Especially because you have a wide field of activity ahead, and you will require funds," he approved of Chris's thriftiness.

"No doubt," Chris switched over to his neighbor on the right. "There's the metropolis in the United States, the center of the world, my friends, while here we have the province for now and the outskirts, here a black hole and only thieves everywhere or dupes..."

"The center, in my opinion, is not there nor here, but in me," he objected. "And in everyone who feels himself the center, wherever he lives and whoever he is. That is, you're fed up with thievery, too, when you've made a fortune? Very symptomatically. Morgan, they say, was pirating before becoming a banker."

"Quite a normal work biography," Chris quipped, leisurely consuming his pork. "He is the center, isn't he? Like me, for instance."

"The question is, what you're the center of," Bez sniggered, pouring appropriate beverages equally to all and persistently inciting the heavyweights exchanging light blows to grapple with each other in serious way, but without skipping new toasts at the same time. "He doesn't even believe in God, I think, as a pragmatist."

"Yes, I don't. I have no time to believe," Chris honestly confessed, and it was evident that the conversation about his person gave him enormous pleasure. "And faith changes nothing for me: whether your God exists or not, I still have one life, and it would be too wasteful to deny myself anything in it. It's better to atone for all my sins sometime subsequently, on my deathbed."

"But I'll fork out for church donations, of course, to avoid an irreparable mistake," the staunch atheist somewhat inconsistently stipulated the terms of his pious religious contract. "Even if there is no God, I'm always ready to light a candle for him, only don't make a fool of me and don't demand disinterestedness..."

"How similar we are, dudes!" the book publisher-boozer exclaimed in a fit of nostalgia for the past, lifting his wassail chalice. "Titans, damn me! Geniuses of the Late Renaissance!"

"Or of the Early Restoration," he questioned the accuracy of Bez's historical analogy. "That it doesn't matter."

"So let's drink to our greatness!" Bez solemnly proclaimed the idea, matured in his gin-addled brain. "To everything that has come true and will come true!"

"You've completely gone barmy with your greatness," muttered Pete, saddened by something, who had been listening silently to their perky nonsense, sipping his cognac. "You're like all people, except that with a greater aplomb."

"You don't count, you're a philistine," the cocky exponent of national consciousness branded this deviationist without delay. "You're a middle class, the backbone of soviet society."

"Thanks for the good word," Pete again aloofly turned his gaze on the plate that he was emptying melancholically.

"Well," Chris shrugged, having drained his glass in passing, continuing the emigrant theme of their dialogue. "If you don't want to, then as you wish. That's you who will fare worse."

"For me it's worse everywhere," he acknowledged indifferently, chewing after icy vodka the juicy salty strands of fermented cabbage crunching on his teeth, with the bitter-sour berries of frosty cranberries that were found from time to time in this amber-yellow tangle. "But, apparently, I am not a nihilist now, and godlessness is rather superficial for me."

"I cannot catch your tricky logic," Chris smiled a wry smile, meticulously cutting off another slice of meat. "I quite admit that Bez has a reason to entrench himself here. He, as you see, is indigenously Russian, with his ancestral home and antediluvian Ancient Rus. To add only a beard and caftan, and he is a downright new herald with a motto 'Hey, Slavs of all countries, unite!'"

"I ask you, sir..." Bez gasped with laughter. "Don't touch Russian bears, they are touchy, as it is..."

"But for you, it is not difficult to understand," the "capitalist-internationalist" finished the phrase, without digressing to extraneous issues. "Whether Renaissance is here now or decadence, but if some freaks patch holes by you all your life, perhaps it's time for dignity to awaken."

"In you it presumably has already awakened," he grinned at this clumsy and rude attempt to demote him, an independent and irritatingly undeferential polymath, to an ordinary ambitious "loser" grumbler. "It seems I once said that you and I have different ideas of a sense of existence: you very like to rule and boss, and I like to be free."

"And besides," he anticipated an arrogant remark of Chris about the impossibility of real freedom in the local outlying dump with its break-up and ruination, in which the pushful Chris willy-nilly participated, "unlike you, I am such only here, only in this 'black hole', because there will be some other spiritual energy overseas..."

"Too moderate, right?" Bez backed up him, again skillfully handling the next bottle.

"I don't know, I wasn't there. But here there is a zone of catastrophicity today, and I am somehow connected with its high voltage. ("As a point of ultimate compensation," he ended mentally. "And philosophy as thinking alone is, unfortunately, a passed stage.") There, even if I'm lucky, and I'll get a job in some college, I shall lose this connection in all likelihood, and no longer be what I am."

"Which will significantly facilitate life for you," Chris assured him with unconcealed mockery, as if they both set a goal to kick and pummel each other all evening, like two pugilists.

"Not every life," he answered vaguely. "The Bible was created in the provinces, by the way."

"You have really grand ambitions," Chris praised him, "just fit for your job in the West. How you, geniuses, love to make mankind happy with your creative discoveries, given that nobody is in want of them, in essence."

"I don't foist them on you," he said politely, without entering into a debate with his sufficiently ignorant antipode about the "lofty matters" of his vocation. "If you're capable of being satisfied with your business, okay, God help you, reap your laurels in it. As for me, I should, first and foremost, beware of jumping out of my own fate."

"Something new, old man," Bez chuckled, continuing to tuck into the food being literally swept away from the plate by him. "However, I got it, your thought is clear..."

"Two lunatics," Pete heaved a sigh, scooping Olivier salad from the crystal salad-bowl with a large silver spoon and remaining reserved and taciturn in the verbal battles of their company.

"Easier doesn't mean better," he concluded after his seemingly inoffensive rebuff. "Not always means, and not for everyone."

But he failed to propitiate Chris with his conciliatory ending, for Chris did not acknowledge any rightness but that of his own success and sought recognition of his achievements from the others, especially from the "aristocrats of the spirit", who were indifferent to his phenomenal take-off in the business career and whom he would have bought without problem, if they, talkers, were fit for something worthwhile.

"Fate is mysticism," Chris summed up the worthless philosophical rantings. "Your fate is what you've done. And keep in mind that in the world there are many nerds besides you who are adept at justifying doing nothing. True, they usually tear their hair afterwards, in old age."

"Some even earlier," he disputed this verdict of Chris. "You, I suspect, would have become a good dictator and would never have tolerated any connivance. At uselessness, I mean..."

"Let's, brethren, toss off a full bumper in honor of uselessness!" Bez interrupted them. "In our country we have it in spades. Why on earth did you pitch into him, Chris? Maybe he prefers the native marsh, but what of it? You personally aren't going to flounder in our stagnation, you're a free bird."

"He is a falcon, I suppose. A hunting falcon," he christened Chris in a trice. "Alaverdi, Bez. Let's drink to our right to depart and arrive when and where we want, and to our freedom of choice that must be determined only by our desire..."

"It's somewhat abstruse and intricate, but cheers!" Bez clinked with him.

"Although this toast doesn't apply to you, because you have got ahead of us a little, you can join us," their master of impromptu flattered the frowning Chris. "For freedom and for the full development of capitalism in Russia!"

"The ravings of a madman," Pete classified Bez's mutually contradictory toasts with Latin lapidarity. "The land of fantasts..."

"Your freedom is from the realm of artistic exaggeration," Chris said after taking a sip of his whiskey, not addressing anyone in particular. "When you haven't a penny and don't answer for anything, you consider it freedom. But the one who lives life to the full, he pays in full, and such a full life is dearer to him than any freedom with pittance on vegetating in a dog's life."

"Payment is just what we're talking about," he remarked, fortifying himself with the dainties, by which Chris was regaling them royally. "Perhaps I would like sometimes to pay in full, but it is too troublesome. Why have I to sacrifice my most important matters for the sake of success and prosperity, even if these matters are not always profitable?"

"Do you think prosperity and success aren't most important?" Pete rejected his unselfishness with a phlegmatic half-answer, taking a pack of Marlboro out of his jacket and, like a well-mannered guest, raising his eyes inquiringly at the host who lolled opposite in the chair.

"Please smoke, I don't mind," Chris allowed, loosening the knot of his peacocky-rainbow tie. "You and I are the only sane ones at this table."

"Who is sane here, in our loony-bin..." Pete fitted a cigarette into the mouthpiece and lit it from a transparent disposable gas lighter.

"Madness is not forever!" their inspired lyrist foretold life-affirmingly with a glass at the ready and already in the condition of a sprinter's spurt.

"You, too," the skeptic Pete tempered the historical optimism of the prophet imbibing the plentiful freebies. "You live only today, and tomorrow even earthly paradise may come, but without you."

"It is indeed sad," Bez chortled and cheerfully gulped a dose of his high-quality tipple.

"About 'tomorrow', one might demur," he enlightened Pete as Bez was ravenously devastating the eatable undulating landscape of his refilled plate. "Come to think of it, no human disappears completely, that's why it's so important how he lives..."

"Okay, go on with your wise thoughts, I am all ears." Pete carefully moved a massive crystal ashtray closer. "Counsel us, benighted, how to live."

"I cannot advise anything," he mildly put the atrabilious friend in his place. "However, in brief the conception is as follows: our entire planet with all its nature, as it is obvious now, is a kind of one organism, and humanity in it is like one consciousness, as, say, in the human organism. And each of us is a certain thought in this consciousness, a certain image in this planetary natural memory, and as long as there is this whole, this accumulating aggregated memory, we, naturally, exist in it, although in different ways, just as in any memory..."

"Did you think of it by yourself or read it somewhere?" queried Chris.

"Fifty-fifty," he answered modestly. "Cognition by its very essence is the rediscovery of what was primarily given. It is about the same as in the life of every individual: you build your own fate lifelong, and in the end, you understand that it was inherently destined to you and that you cognized yourself in yourself, and nothing else."

"That is, you again foist God on us," Bez slurred, munching with his mouth full.

"God is much more; we are only one of His hypostases, one of His levels," he explained his theory away sparingly, so as not to start the flywheel of the comprehensive ontological metaphysics. "And to us God is approachable only at this level, at the human one. In other words, for us God is ourselves as the comprehension of God of our universe given to our planetary consciousness, both to macro and micro..."

"This is called 'the gift of the gab'," Pete, spell-bound by such a flowery language, blew smoke through his nose. "Humanity, thus, is its own God?"

"It depends on what you call God," he slightly elucidated the subject without going into transcendental subtleties. "Just imagine, to make it clearer: the whole world, including us at all its levels, from atomic to universal, is one continuously arising being, some of the forms of which we are able to cognize. What exactly transforms everything accessible to us, we, of course, do not know, but the sending of the transformation can be perceived by us, as some general regularities and as the fate of something..."

"Well, let's leave such elements," he paused his reasoning habitually ramifying as an explosive cluster of thoughts ad infinitum. "The heart of the matter is that memory is the level at which the sending of the whole creation can be changed, and we, as a soul and as a spirit are akin to the primary force creating us. From hence, while supplementing the planetary consciousness with ourselves, we're changing the future fate of humanity as a planet at least a little bit. Or, in your words, we become God a little bit."

"What does it matter whom we may become?" Pete rejoined, tapping the cigarette with his index finger and shaking off the long ash tip into the faceted ashtray. "Firstly, why, one wonders, I ought to be guided by such an unverifiable hypothesis as yours; secondly, am I God or not God, I do want my earthly life, whatever happens after it with me, or with the world, or with this crappy mankind... I don't care a damn about the future, do you understand?"

"It is very ease to understand; it is the most widespread stance. ("With whom I argue?" he thought.) Only this future is partly your future."

"And what if he depart this life?" Chris interceded for Pete. "There was a boy and vanished, gone, buried in a pit..."

"Oh, excuse me, you negate immortality," he came round. "But in this case, what is your contribution, such is the memory and the influence; what you managed to become during your life, such you are in God. Hence, probably, fate: today you weed out shoots of greatness from your consciousness, or, as the people, mow down and uproot geniuses, and tomorrow dejection and ennui gnaw your soul for some reason, and hatred rends your heart, and meaninglessness festers in your mind, and everything within is mangled and deformed, and all is nauseating..."

"Don't poke around in your soul so zealously, and you'll be fine," Chris gave him a wise advice. "You never know what have been done here before us, we are not historians."

"You can consider I'm telling not for you," he returned an advice to Chris, seemingly without spitefulness, but with unexpected antipathy to the self-satisfied go-getter, who sat here, on the ruins of the flouted and looted culture, once great and worldwide, and boasted of his acquisitiveness and pirate achievements, in comparison with which even the commercial "churning out" of Bez, apparently, not without the help of the high-ranking father-in-law, was rather a boon bringing something over and above what was already available. However, who knows, perhaps it was also in prejudice of someone's creative activity and instead of someone's life in art, for here creation was most often fraught with ousting. "Why can't I afford a little reflection on abstract topics aloud?"

"Not very abstract," Bez disagreed, flushed with vodka and red in face like a festively revolutionary banner fluttering over the columns of demonstrators chanting "Hurrah!". Unlike his abstemious companions, Bez kept taking his "nips" without long pauses and with automatism of a seasoned drinker. "Here is a living example of this. On the occasion of new trends, I published my old verses in print as a collection, and what? And no reaction. Then all were prohibited; now no one notice anything in our present degeneration and with such a dog-eat-dog mentality..."

"Don't hurt dogs, they're not people," Pete shamed Bez, smoothing his mannequin-smooth hair from the temple to the back of his head with his hand holding a smoking cigarette.

"I don't remember somehow that you were too prohibited," he added. "Nadenka keeps all your books of poems on a separate shelf with your old manuscripts, as a literary heritage."

"And this last one, too?" Bez perked up, tilting the figured bottle of Smirnoff over his wineglass. "In the past, she provided me with worthwhile reviews of my versification; I wonder how she likes my Hidden Freedom."

The title of this poetry collection had been borrowed by Bez from the celebrated lecture on the poet Alexander Pushkin delivered by the poet Alexander Blok at the very beginning of the Bolshevik dictatorship and before the untimely decease of the aforenamed poet, who unfortunately turned out to be a seer and predicted the future of freedom of creation in the Soviet system; and the verses of this somewhat belated multi-style book, composed from the lyric wastes remained after Bez's professional writings acceptable for censorship, were spoiled here and there either by the amateurish artlessness of direct speaking out with the lines negligently fastened together by hackneyed primitive rhymes and with the raw sound architectonics of heaped stanzas, or by the strained pretentiousness of exercises in vers libre with the triteness of thoughts and the approximateness of metaphors being exposed in their disorder, or by the outdated stilted allusiveness of mythological decor with flaunting the names of the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon and with various concealed quotations from popularly famous authors; so that, in his opinion, the genuine, not borrowed, not verbose, not affected inspiration would visit Bez only in his really hidden and therefore really free confessions about his own loneliness, such as his The Private Request:

"Thou art not my notion, but soul!

The galaxies of brain can't go out

as long as I can see Thy sky and goal,

my voice is able to say Thy thoughts aloud!


Doomed to be son of God in word and action

(What gift and greatness would I have to mention?),

I cherish one and only connection--

with the eternal light of Thy attention.

Even if I am sophistically clever,

after I'll finish this--in Thee--creation

let me be lost, the Most High, for ever

in murmuring my last realization..."

"If you mean the content, it for the most part appeals to her," he as usual flattered the author's vanity of Bez, who pretty squandered his talent and whose lyrical pearls in the published books Nadine, especially finicky about such poetical self-expressions of her troubadour, had to pick out from his multi-line, pseudo-profound and falsely confidential verbiage bit by bit, like raisins from a bun. "As you like to say, a lot of things are the 'true masterpieces of the true master'. When you don't profane your 'holy art' too shamelessly with your 'hack-works', you're usually charismatic enough even in the unintelligibility and incoherence of your recondite imagery."

"Yes, there was charisma in the recent past," the tipsy Bez beamed with gratification, effervescent outwardly as before and scintillating with sparkling wit, if we used all these cliché-ridden epithets of the former obsequious pathos of this enterprising litterateur; and, after a dram, so to speak, "parenthetically", he could not but begin to complain with a pickled cucumber in his hand. "Only in my family nobody is interested in my poetry. My son has an aversion to poetry as such, and all that he wants is to watch action movies and horrors on his video..."

"But your son is still small, about ten years old," he reminded.

"Not small, but just like his mother," the "great artist of small forms" lashed out at his offspring, who couldn't appreciate his greatness as well as all his relatives. "At his age, I was reciting Yesenin by heart, and Igor Severyanin, and Tyutchev..."

This omnivorousness was demonstrated by Bez, inter alia, in his retrospective Hidden Freedom, where the literary devices and manners of what was unpublished over twenty years were changing with kaleidoscopic variegation in some places, not coalescing into either a stylistic unity or a holistic image of the writer; though, to be honest, he preferred such an impulsive disorderliness of sincerity to the monotonous and prudent posturing of a soullessly faceless poetic small fry trying to be original and craftily planting, as the most valuable innovation, the technology of vague compilation and a welter of scrappy collage, yet having nothing artistic to offer readers but this catchy advertising label.

"You should have married one of your groupies, why did you choose this matrimony?" Pete, enjoying cognac, Jesuitically denounced Bez's light-mindedness entailed the creative unproductiveness of his youthful marriage that determined both his writing career and the comfortable family life of the not miscalculated romantic, which the libertine Pete, alas, could only dream of.

"Lay off and get lost," Bez snapped as a former hooligan, resuming his "pouring" for himself and those who wished. "My doggerels are outside your province."

"Phew, how vulgar," Chris admonished their relic-rare rhymester. "Aren't your rhythm too frequent, by the way? What's the hurry?"

"If I go to a skid, I'll brake," the restive member of the writers' union reassured the alarmist-host. "A Russian truly lives only when he is woozy; and just when he is sloshed, he evinces both his generous nature and his best spiritual qualities."

"And his unimaginable foolishness, too," Chris prompted, contentedly watching his friend grow younger with each drink.

"Yes, and foolishness, yes!" Bez yelled patriotically. "But openly, but with the broad soul, and not on the sly, like some, and without being careful of one's health..."

"Are you challenging us to a fight?" Chris leaned back against the throne chair with a sneer. "Your thrust is addressed to me, my nestling?"

"To you, to you," the presumptuous "nestling" spat bravely. "What, weak are you, the wealthy, against us on the battlefield?"

"Well, with you, kid, I could have competed," Chris threatened jokingly, for his Scythian faction of blood had been already boiled up and belligerently murmured against the impudent attacks of Bez.

"Problematic," Bez gurgled, swallowing his Pepsi-Cola before outdrinking such a dilettante as Chris.

"Okay, taster, then pour me some drops into this glass so that I catch up with you," Chris, wound up by the forthcoming struggle, pointed out imperiously at a tall tumbler. "I invite you, gentlemen, to join us. Let's hark back to days of yore."

"No, no, I don't participate in bullfights, you may butt without me," Pete politely declined the invitation, although he was exactly like an elderly caballero-matador with a gold ring on his third finger and with his mustache and sleekness.

"Excuse me, I drink what within my power," he circumspectly dodged their gladiatorial tournament. "I haven't the proper qualification."

"Then trudge behind in the rearguard," Chris permitted them, taking his brimming tumbler. "Come on, versifier, let's drink like real men. Long live winners!"

In paving his way to the top, their "boss", apparently, for a long time did not carouse so uncontrollably, with cronies whom nothing depended on in his life and whom he did not have either to keep at a distance, or to take down a peg, or to force to toe the line; that's why, after breaking the fast with a fair amount of vodka ("The first step is the hardest!" Bez bowed clownishly to him), Chris proceeded to the "consumption" of their tournament closely and so effectively that soon his priggish standoffishness vanished as if by magic, and he with Bez indulged in a real classical revelry, dashing, reckless, rackety and rollicking.

Intending to drink Bez under the table, Chris was doing everything to make them drunk until they got plastered, and perfidiously incited the intoxicated cupbearer not to delay the pauses and not deprive the laggards of the attention, while Bez, jabbering and drunkenly bursting out laughing, was playing the first fiddle in their garrulously-clamorous quartet in the spotlight, ardently perorating and showing off his wit or declaiming impromptu some school classics perverted by him; in short, they were kicking up a great din and jointly got soused in the course of this witty incoherent chatter and uninterrupted drinks, being loaded, as Chris called it, "up to the waterline", and having become more or less closer again in the friendly atmosphere of their freewheeling conversations, bawdy jokes and sudden recognition in each other of the jaunty dauntless swashbucklers from their rocker boyish gang.

"How long can you all guzzle?" Bez panted, surveying the havoc made by them on the table. "What, this pineapple is here for decoration? A fragment of interior?"

"Not at all." Chris glanced at his wristwatch. "Fruits contain many useful vitamins. If nobody minds, then you may free up space and set it, and I shall call in the meantime..."

To call Chris went out into the hallway, away from prying ears, and left to them to place a huge fruit platter on the large table cluttered with dishes and bottles.

"It'll take a lot of time from his bimbo to wash all this," Pete observed compassionately, putting the empty plates and vases one into one.

"Ha!" Bez dragging the pineapple grunted like a drayman and plonked the platter on the liberated bridgehead. "There's a washing machine in the kitchen. And a microwave oven," the expert on "elitism" immediately ascertained the level of well-being of this family.

"You are observant, however," he was amazed at such an envious inquisitiveness. "It's dangerous to invite you home, or else you may condemn us for outdatedness."

"For that for sure. You could keep Nadenka in luxury, as she deserves," Bez took a dig at him vindictively for the old, but still unforgiven triumph. "I'm also leaving you for a minute..."

"What, inspection of lavatory magnificence?" Pete sucking on the mouthpiece lit another cigarette. "Go, go, get acquainted with the local sights, satisfy child's curiosity..."

"Could in luxury," he mimicked Bez, who had left the room. "I could if they paid decently for the mind..."

"What's up with you, by the by?" he abruptly changed the subject. "Why are you so crestfallen today?"

"I am so only among you." Pete sat back down and filled his shot glass with Napoleon, the bottle of which Pete single-handedly almost finished. "Youth has flown by, and all of us bald and pot-bellied."

"Not all, say," he disagreed. "But we rarely see ourselves from the side; so if you don't want to get old, don't change company."

"The cognac is super," Pete smacked his lips, apothecary examining the shot glass against the light, as if he were conducting a spectral analysis of the content. "Such meetings, I must say, are the stupidest occupation, and I have always avoided them until now, both school's and institute's."

"Your wife is from a new generation, I suppose, like Chris's?"

"No, she is rather from our one, second-hand," Pete assessed his unloved spouse quite ruthlessly. "If it weren't for my daughter, I would, by God, sign up again as a bachelor."

"How old is she? Daughter, I mean."

"Fourteen. She hooked me just after you, about two years later." Pete carefully, like medicine from a beaker, drank down cognac and drew at his smoldering cigarette. "And I knew, cretin, that I shouldn't have married..."

"Maybe you simply missed the mark? It is always how much you're lucky: sometimes one woman can replace all of them, and sometimes all women are as one."

"As for 'replace', my vixen did me a good turn: all broads make me sick now," Pete incidentally substantiated his extramarital penchant, and only this sad detached confidentiality testified to the stage of his intoxication. "And then my daughter also played a dirty trick on me, my Alice in Wonderland..."

"Her name is Alice?"

"Uh-huh, Alice, child of vice, our punishment for our pranks."

"Cannot find a common language?"

"What 'language' can be with her," Pete sighed bitterly, blankly looking past his interlocutor at the tightly drawn, either morocco or brocade, portieres all over the wall. "She's a freak from birth; I have been pulling her out of dens and brothels since she was twelve. One procuress lays them under men, schoolgirls, and what they, youngsters, understand in this? Give them some imported duds or count off a couple of bucks, and they are ready for all; for them it is adventures... And it's useless to beat her, this slut, otherwise she may go away from home, as well as to try to shame her or exhort. The genes on both sides let her down, both mother and father..."

"There are other factors nowadays, not only genes," he generalized the misfortune of the inconsolable parent. "Now such a breakup is everywhere, and the whole history goes awry, just as in the era of the great migration of peoples, so what to expect from a person? Now you have nothing to rely on, except on yourself, whereas in yourself there is a vacuum or chaos, especially in children..."

"They don't give a hoot about your history!" Pete sent a cigarette butt with a flick of his fingers into the ashtray and threw the mouthpiece onto the tablecloth. "They are brainless whelps; they are from the animal kingdom; they don't have even an elementary instinct of self-preservation! No, old man, I know them better than you, because to your university the cream of the crop is surfacing, not some dregs... No, I must either kill my brat or endure her with all of her quirks as mentally retarded. What can I do if I love her alone from all their bitchy breed, only my silly hussy..."

"The Rembrandt's painting!" barging into the living room like a drunk huckster, Bez, already relieved himself, went on with his buffoonery from the doorway. "The return of the prodigal son of a bitch!"

"At least you are a merry fellow," Pete, somewhat maudlin after his monologue, reacted to the boisterous conviviality of the exhilarated poet. "Who else can improve the mood of the fallen and falling..."

"That's because I have nothing to lose," Bez notified cheerfully. "I am empty, brothers, like a drum."

And, having drummed his palms on his waistcoat which was tight around his belly, Bez flopped into his chair and grabbed a glass of "refreshing drink."

"Did you cease writing?" he peered across the table at their irrepressible jokester. "But now you have no problems with the publication, haven't you?"

"If at your own expense, then welcome." Bez took a greedy gulp of lemonade and rinsed his mellifluous throat with evident pleasure. "True, there is no one to read now. With the exception of our Nadenka, of course, long years of married life to her..."

"I have nothing to write about, and I need not to write," Bez responded to his attentive look with studied serenity. "Earlier, my friends, we should chirp, when all this giftedness was boiling from within by itself, and not when we're literary impotents to remember belatedly about 'free creation'... Yes, yes, now it is like that: I can and know how, but I don't want to, feel no desire. In our soviet graphomania, I've scribbled reams of poetical trash by now, and as to a high art, guys, I've pissed away my talent, like a hack and press mercenary..."

"You're an attaboy," Pete, mellowed with cognac, praised the conformist, who had written himself out so fast. By then, Pete settled down at the exhibition case with porcelain bucolic figurines from the boudoir of the absolutist nobility in the times of pastoral Mannerism, and was sitting in his usual ballet pose: his legs crossed, his bony right hand with an unlit cigarette in the mouthpiece clasping his right knee and his limp left hand laying on the high back of the chair. "It's noble on your part to make way for the up-and-coming youth."

"Fuck them all, these puppies," Bez swore briefly. "For whom must I make way? For such imitators? They've simply overeaten the world culture, that's why they burp from indigestion..."

"He is harsh, though," he pointed with a nod to the zealous custodian of the untouchable cultural heritage, who, like all poets, would like to remain in literature, of his era as a minimum, in the proud solitude of his indisputable genius which was reputedly subject to no revisions of any young poseurs or some knavish deniers booing the old-fashioned quaintness and occupying the proscenium of market-clowning art in the ever-accelerating turnover of vogue and popularity.

"Not all of them are hoaxers and nonentities, this cannot be," he upset Bez. "If they have decaying in them, they do paint their decaying. Especially as the technique of painting is not very difficult, and it doesn't take a genius to paint such stuff; besides, to filch something is not a sin now, but an artistic device... However, in the end, somebody will surmount all this discord, too, and surpass all his contemporaries, be sure; somebody will surely fuse all this heterogeneity and fragmentariness into his own holistic world..."

"Then, I agree, pure lyricism will be needed; meanwhile, notwithstanding that they are all lyricists, for the most part, and subjectivists, and talented in some degree, they, nonetheless, are feeble as yet, and too puny for creating the worlds," he condescendingly ran through the "creation of the young" that had percolated through the publishing barriers and filters. "That is, they seem to draw some inspiration from their talents, but speculatively and superficially, in textual floundering, not in creating, but in recasting what has been created... Hence their mockery, otherwise they cannot cope with someone else's, and the former culture enslaves them and makes them realize their true scale, while which of you poets will reconcile himself to the fact that he is mediocrity and a zero among figures."

"You should be a literary critic, with your silver-tongued prolixity," Bez began.

But here their polemic about Russian poetry desecrated by nasty postmodernist scoffers was interrupted by Chris who vigorously entered the room with a weighty ammo load of imported cans of beer from the refrigerator.

"Why the feast doesn't go on?" Chris asked indignantly, having found the fruits untouched and the glasses empty. "I warn, beer today may be consumed in unlimited quantities," he unloaded the cans on the table. "Coffee will be later, when we shall finish with dessert... Well, celestial, are you able to crack a bottle more with me?"

"I'm still standing on my feet," Bez, sitting, drew himself up. "What are we going to drink?

"If with a pineapple, then we partake of rum. A touch of the exotic, as they say."

With a sharp scimitar knife brought from the kitchen, Chris slashed the tropical fruit with a slightly withered crown of hard leaves sticking up and, after removing the top, began to cut the pineapple across in layers, chopping the juicy butter-yellow slabs into triangular segments and apportioning these pieces on the knife edge between the guests.

With unyielding Bez, Chris "cracked a bottle" so exotic that very soon they got drunk as real Caribbean pirates in the tavern, having liquored up Pete at the same time, who was more sensitive to alcohol and took a nap with a slice of pineapple in his sticky hand over a half-drunk cup of his cooling Arabic coffee which was delivered by Chris to the table in a heat-resistant transparent coffee pot, whereas the roisterer businessman was swilling Jamaican rum like a weather-beaten salted sea wolf, instigating the "creative intelligentsia" to follow him, while Bez, inconsiderately flavoring the seventy-degree strength with the bitterness of ice-cold beer, was eliciting which of mafias Chris represents, now and then gleefully bubbling with laughter and calling Chris "the godfather", "foreign invader", and "gravedigger of world capitalism".

Then generous Chris went to fetch them another batch of beer, and forsaken Bez, having disposed of a huge orange-red persimmon from the additional treat of this lavish reception, stared at him, spitting the pebble-smooth flat pits into the fist.

"What do you watch me?" Bez tried to pick a quarrel forthwith. "Nice to revel in the degradation of talent?"

"That's you who revel in all here." He, relatively sober, was somewhat tired of their unbridled spree. "I'm afraid you'll become a pretty fanged monster in about five years."

"You may be not afraid, I've already become. I can already stand in the panopticon, in the museum of wax figures," Bez estimated himself with a cracked chuckle. "But I'm on a horse, as you see. Though not on Pegasus, of course."

"And if joking apart?" he asked softly, like a doctor asking a seriously ill person. "You really lost voice?"

"Almost," the lyricist swaggering all evening suddenly somehow fizzled out and poured out a handful of brown pebbles onto his plate. "But I shall read you a poem from my autumn ones, for I still remember those conversations of ours sometimes. And it is perfect for the occasion. 'Memory', as I called that."

"How, how? Repeat!" Chris, loaded with beer cans, butted into their dialogue.

"Please!" he slammed the cans down on the table before Bez. "Carouse, brothers, everything is paid for!"

"Hush, you!" Bez barked out, half-rising. "Sit down, you, bourgeois despicable, and hark! Poet will read poetry!"

"Oh my God!" Chris threw up his hands in horror. "Come on, come on, burst out like a May thunderstorm and pour on us like a refreshing downpour..."

"Memory!" Bez announced loudly, holding on to the back of his chair because of his obvious unsteadiness in a standing position. "Lyrical, I beg your pardon, divertissement..."

And, having collected himself, he read out distinctly, clearly and firmly:

"Loss of self is just what you should fear

dissipating the past for a feeling!

Human being is memory here,

all the rest is a moment of living.


In your youth what is most full-blooded

if not such a spontaneous passion?

Self, meantime, in genetics is flooded

with all joy and ordeals in succession.


Be sagacious you, be empty-headed,

every step is a scrawl to the future.

Would the former impressions get faded

if 'bygones' are your healer and butcher?


To your land you, even being alone,

always bear a fatal resemblance.

Streaming through both hope and groan,

Time makes you of the sand of remembrance.


And in God, everlastingly blinding,

this eternity comes into action,

realizing your cosmos as lightning

in all-seeing of your recollection..."

After he finished reading, Bez bowed shortly, with dignity, and, weakened from such an exorbitant effort of will, slumped into his chair like a bag.

"Well, what can I say," Chris gave a review of what he heard. "Decadent tosh, I'd say... You're all right, decadent? Or ready to surrender? How about a drink?"

"Only one for the road," Bez mumbled exhaustedly. "I retire from the race..."

"Broke, reciter?" rejoiced the winner of the drinking marathon, deftly pouring rum. "Don't vie with adult men lest you be knocked off your perch..."

"Won't you join?" Chris inquired assertively from the main teetotaler of the company, shaking up the bottle with the remnants of the filibuster hellish hooch so heady with Caribbean mirages of tarred sailing rigging, thick cigars at the hacienda in the midday siesta and chocolate sweaty mulattos dancing naked carnival samba. "Want me to outdo you in this, too?"

"You're a champion, as it is, you've got enough of this," he refused not very friendly. "Besides, it's time to pack up until they puke on your carpet."

"We're despising..." Chris concluded with hostility and put down the bottle to clink glasses with Bez, who was overcoming the influx of drunken prostration. "People like you shouldn't despise us now and put on airs in front of us..."

"Yes, we should kiss your feet," he replied with unexpected harshness, "and glorify in thanksgiving hymns."

"It's not necessary to be rude," Chris scowled at him threateningly. "Okay, if it's time, let's wake our 'faggot'." Chris meant the "gay" Pete, dozed off in the pose of Rodin's thinker. "We drink the last one, and I call the car."

Bez was coming downstairs staggering like a drunken sailor and, trying to break away from his hands, shouted out in a slurred voice, "The people and mafia are one!" and "Long live Great October!"; while emphatically decorous Pete, stumbling on the steps, was wheezing in parallel to these yells into his ear, "You need a feat, but I need my life, so forgive me...". Since Chris, angry at him for the disrespect, did not deign to see them off, he had to drag both his loaded friends down on him to the car at the entrance.

"The poems are good, by the way," he told Bez in the pause arisen after pushing the vociferating rowdy poet into the back seat of the new Mercedes. "Don't abandon writing despite everything..."

"Do you know their addresses?" he asked the driver.

"Naturally," Igorek dropped unkindly. "You with us?"

"No, I can on foot."

Having banged the door, he stepped back to the sidewalk, and when the Mercedes smoothly cast off and sailed away as a fleeting smart vision of unattainable luxury on the tarry-glossy wet asphalt of the flowing pavement, he crossed the alley in the dismal drizzly rain and turned to face the house with the busty aonides walled up in the piers between the windows.

The anger that had flared up in his soul up there--where behind the window of the third floor, the dark figure of Chris watching the departure of the guests was silhouetted against the room light in the chink of the slightly parted curtains--was surging within him as white-hot lava of rage, and he again felt filling from somewhere inside up to the smallest pores of his tensely vibrating burning skin with the former superhuman star power turning him into a breach of omnipotence expanding to the very thinned boundaries of his body. And there were no other regulators and limiters of this power anywhere save his consciousness blinded by incomprehensible hatred, while the one whom he was about to vent his righteous wrath on stood at the window with his lifted hands, holding on to the edges of the curtains and looking down on him standing in the rain below for some reason because of his ridiculous hubris and undue self-conceit.

"Marauder..." he snarled furiously into the cold rainy rustling of the deserted lane, and the formidable immense power that overfilled him splashed out as an explosion of instant eruption there, outwards, into the reality of this October late evening.

The man in the window started and jerked his hands away from the curtains, as if burned his fingers, after which in the impenetrable black background of the drapes, on both sides of the recoiling figure, the ugly torn increasing fiery rents, burned by his inner fire and edged with flashes of tongues of flame, became visible everywhere, opening some parts of the furnishings of the festively lit room already smoldering from all corners at once with the fieriness that was awakened by him in the depths of matter; and the white cleansing flames of this strange smokeless conflagration was just about to engulf the whole room, embracing the floor, walls and ceiling in the closed circle of its flaming hugging, in order to lick up without a trace both the table with the leftovers of the feast in the respectable interior and the frightened helpless man who had fallen into a deadly trap of fire in his apartment becoming a blazing inferno.

"We know ourselves just when we are omnipotent," he suddenly thought. "When everything is permitted and you are like God, then you face yourself as you are..."

"But what is human must be overcome by what is human," he inferred, gradually sobering. "I'm not God."

And immediately the holes in the riddled drapes ceased enlarging, and the fire, extracted from the room not incinerated by his retribution, burst out and, returning from the outside, hit his soul with redoubled force, and a puddle on the pavement, having dazzled him by a glaring reflection like a magnesium flash, dashed into his face, as if he flopped face down into this reflection.

But instead of the cold dampness of rain water, he felt a wave of hot dry warmth lapping on his sleeping eyes, and when he opened them, he was blinded for a second by the piercingly clear blueness of the sunny high sky, under the cloudless vault of which he sprawled on a stone flat ledge near the organ-roaring waterfalls to dry after crossing the river and laving in the water dust of the waterfall stream crashing down from a glacial nimbus of the mountain....

VII

"That's why people pray to the heavens, with their worship of the sun and with the most ancient cults of fire," he resumed his then three-year-old musings, waking up with his still closed eyes. "For man, the Lord is indeed in heaven, for earthly life is a derivative of the sun and just the sun creates it; and humanity as part of nature knows this by the very flesh, given that this is primarily intuitively given to consciousness, regardless of how mankind interprets the Almighty... But the Earth itself is primordially a drop of star matter, one of the splashes of the initial explosion expanded into the cosmos, one of the neurons in the stellar structure of this universal consciousness, closed in itself and infinite for us. And we, as the spirit sprouted in the Earth's ionic-magnetic and atmospheric-biological shells, are reaching up into the infinity of space from our own naturalness, because we are, as it were, the living axons of the fiery neuron of planet, that is, our human consciousness is akin to the radiance of starriness, and we are thus included in the light creating the being of the entire cosmos, or, in other words, into God, since God in the becoming of the universe reveals Himself both to the senses and to the mind, first of all, as some luminiferous beginning of the universe, while the universe is entirely and completely, to the infinity of the microcosms, a gigantic energy-exchange, or, rather, as Einstein discovered in the unified field theory, an exchange of various forms of one transforming energy of self-consciousness--self-creation, where the Earth is an energy clot charged from the sun in an all-encompassing--like any consciousness for itself--energy field of changeable incarnation, and where the reason, being the center of the 'translucence' of the higher--creative--forms of God's energy, at a certain degree of concentration, is capable, like the centers of the stellar radiance, of causing the activation of lower--natural--energies, which he often cannot curb, for, even endowed with divine power, he, according to his fair remark, was not God, but only an earthly spark of the fire that once shone forth from timelessness, incorporeality and pre-existent unconsciousness as a flash of thought within the expanding, relatively young, and still fragmentary consciousness called the 'material world' and 'cosmic space', and consequently, as an individual human version of the planetary hypostasis of the infinitely diverse God, he was incomplete like life and the awareness of life..."

"And God is conceivable for us only by analogy with our divinity, or otherwise with our consciousness..." he put an intermediate point and rolled over to his stomach on the heated stone, getting up on all fours and shaking his head vigorously, like a wet dog, to drive away sleepiness.

His wristwatch had already ticked away forty minutes from the moment of his floating away into the past, and he should have acted faster to avoid scaling the mountain in the dark, although he still had six hours before it came.

Having donned his damp shirt and jeans and put on his sneakers wet from the inside, he was not too lazy to go to the seething gush of the tributary spouting out of the waterfall niche and swiftly cascading to the river and to fill the warmish flask with the cold fresh water; then, on returning to his observation deck, he packed his belongings in his go-bag along with the bought bread to get fully equipped for a hike and couldn't but linger a bit before his climb to survey from above the expanse of the natural paradise surrounded by wooded mountains, with a fork of the confluent river branches, foamy turbulent among boulders and rapidly glittering with the slippery wildness of glacial water rushing furiously past the pines on the banks; but, while viewing the picturesque landscape, he suddenly imagined how day by day the endless autumn downpours were deluging all this paradise, and how the colors playing now in the sun were fading in the dully-ferocious fall of lashing rain, and how the swollen torrents were flooding the grassy berry island, while from the undermined slopes the raging mudflow was carrying down, into the blustering vast basin, clay landslides, fallen trees, and huge stones rolling in this tempestuous spate and being dragged along the overflowing channels of the former streams from the gorges into the frenzied muddy river gnawing into the rocky shores of the bed in its speedy rampageous fury; and after he imagined himself in some leaky tent being swept away by the whipping thunderstorm amidst such a merging of the boisterous water elements, he said goodbye with a light heart to the splendor of this barely sipped high-altitude bowl beckoning him back, and, to the receding guttural rumble of falling water, set off on the way, bypassing the foothill that was rising to the treeless bare saddle and choosing a place convenient for climbing, whereas the chilly wind blowing more and more strongly in the gorge as he ascended had dried his shirt very quickly and forced him again to clothe himself in his bright windbreaker packed in the gym bag.

Soon, the mountain slope descending to the confluence of the arms of the river opposite the village obscured both the verdant alpine meadows on the other inhabited side of the valley and the ant dots of the grazing herd, and far to the right, he heard a thin mewing, as if a hungry kitten wept plaintively there in the rocks. "Maybe, a snow leopard?" he supposed imperturbably, but here, a clay-gray bird, not very large from afar, swooped down, gliding on its broad wings, from the sky to the sound, and he understood that there was a nest with an eaglet there and that it was better not to approach this nest, and went further, skirting the mountain intended for him, to the uneven ridge of the saddle crowning the gently sloping part of his way, until, crossing the vast scree of some gully, from the crag, as gigantic as a whole granite plateau, he espied a seemingly suitable route to reach the top without clambering up the steepness of all these stony slopes, ledges, bluffs and cliffs. Having estimated the possible trajectory of his ascent to the glacier narrowing here and buttoned his windbreaker more tightly, he slung the bag behind his back and headed straight through the dump of heaped mountain debris towards the towering rocky summit of the side slope furrowed with crevices and fissures.

Probably, he might desist from climbing such a height, or could find himself on the chosen peak in the twinkling of an eye by a miracle of the sometimes arising power over the part of planetary existence that was pervious to his radiance, but today he should not have wasted his strength, even though he did not want to dodge the risk of the last challenge; and, for the last time, he resolutely mounted an assault. However, as usual, the mountain turned out to be much higher than it seemed to him from below, and he was forced to alternate long brisk walking up the stone declivities with scrambling up onto some scarps, inaccessible at first sight, where, without mountaineering equipment, he was clinging on to the edges of the cracks, breaking off his nails and groping a foothold with his toes through the elastic sole, so as to pull himself up, thus moving diagonally in bizarre zigzags, like a crawling fly, to new cracks and footholds on seemingly sheer steeps towards the next pedestrian slope; small wonder that, despite the piercing wind, he was sweating from the constant exertion of unforeseen gymnastic exercises and from ascending all these inclines, and after especially intense physical strain, his heart was pounding like mad as though inside of his throbbing brain.

But this did not stop him, only slowing him down before the spurts of steep ascents to take a short respite and recover his breath, and he made the first halt when his knees began to buckle. Half-reclining on his empty bag, he was breaking off hunks of bread with a porous gray crumb and a crispy crust, and, washing them down with the sweetish well-water from his flask, from the already conquered height, he was contemplating the fantastic relief of weightlessly white endless peaks surmounted with snow and trimmed in some places with airy fluffy candyfloss of clouds and so shining with the sunny whiteness of their icy otherworldly aloofness that even the eyes were watering.

After taking a rest and having a bite, he continued his journey, but as he got closer to the glacier, precipices and vertical walls occurred in his path more often, and because of that, he moved up more and more slowly, since his haste in one of the risky episodes all but ended in his fall, while he was categorically against hanging like that on the brink of a drop, with his legs helplessly seeking a ledge or a tiny recess at least. In the meantime, the evening twilight was gathering below in the gorge, so, apparently, on the other shady side of the mountain, it was getting dark now, whereas he by all means had to outrun the luminary that was setting behind the mountain range; and even the beauty of the sunset, enchantingly marvelous in subtlety of colors, hues and tints, with the peaks gradually becoming charcoal gray in their light-blue lower half and gently reddening in their pink upper part sinking in the rising shadow, made him admired very cursorily, after he climbed on to one of rocky shelves and could have a little breather, greedily gulping the increasingly cold rarefied air.

Then, little by little, the sky turned dark-blue, too, and the darkness shrouded both the foot of the mountain and the crest of the saddle, while the thin sickle moon hanging above him, as luck would have it, hardly gave any light; therefore, realizing that he had nowhere to retreat, he kept on clambering at random and virtually gropingly under the black dome of heaven studded with sparkling stars, getting exhausted from his ceaseless movement and nearly dropping with fatigue, when suddenly, from some conquered stone overhang, at a fairly close distance, he discerned vaguely a tongue of the white ice of the glacier girdling this peak, and, fortunately, the ice was neither being piled up as impassable ice-hummocks or cyclopean strata nor beetling as cornices over the ice-covered rocks sticking out of the firm snow, but rising as a spectral winter bumpy hillside in front of him for several hundred meters.

The climate here was decidedly unlike summery weather, and he felt the cold coming from the glacier, but he could not do without a short rest, so he again lay down with his legs up, leaning against some stone, on the leatherette of pilgrim sack warped from sub-zero temperatures, and, chewing the last crust of the eaten bread with the water already smelling of polyethylene, was indifferently admiring the night panorama of the cosmically surreal mountain kingdom with dark billows of countless peaks and with abysmal quagmires of blackness in gorges and chasms; yet, feeling that his feet began to go numb in the sneakers shrunk from frost, he overcame the desire to doze a little and got up with difficulty, as if beaten half to death, whereupon he swung and hurled the empty flask against the wind into the ocean of these frozen snow waves unfolding before him as the chaotic-harmonious pyramidal gothic of a stopped storm to the crenellated line of mountain cardiogram bordering the horizon barely visible at the base of the starry dome from his observation point. Sending the mountains his farewell greetings, he shoved down the unnecessary gym bag from his eminence, and it rolled on the stones with a slight rattle like a tin can, while he, unencumbered by anything, stepped onto the sloping thickness of the glacial tongue that breathed winter coldness.

To be strolling along the glacier he had an opportunity not very long, because the compressed layers of snow frozen around the upper tier of the mountain formed such a thickness of ice that without an alpenstock he would have slid off all the time; and if the ice cover had not been sucked out by the sun in places and marked with many bumps and potholes, he would have tumbled downhill sooner or later, with fatal consequences for himself. That's why, further he crawled on all fours, abrading his palms on the scratching rough crust and slipping on his stiffened knees on the ice, or even prostrating on his stomach on the chilling immense skating-ring, which he was crossing somehow centimeter after centimeter, gouging out shallow pits with his folding knife to hew out a kind of steps for the toe of his sneakers or for his scraped fingers, numbed to almost painless insensibility, scrabbling the icy slope.

It is quite understandable that he trailed along at the snail's pace, and from exhaustion, hypothermia and lack of oxygen, in the midway he had fallen into a semiconscious stubborn indifference, no longer perceiving the passage of time, or the night sky with a lunar crescent, or the surrounding beauties, only automatically groping for what he could grasp at and hold onto or rest his foot on, scratching his hands against this damn glacier and shifting up higher and higher without respite in his almost unconscious mechanical advance towards the goal of the ascent somewhere beyond the desert of ice; and when ahead, behind the edge of the whitish slippery surface, along which he was crawling forward like a wriggling worm in the boundless silence of the night space, not hearing his own panting and swearing, he descried the dark cut cone of a stone hill plastered with stars, his will was just enough to haul his numb body in the last effort to the edge of the ice and still got over onto the lower rocky ledge of the cone.

"I must be there," flinched his frozen consciousness, devastated by deadly fatigue, still resisting in vain the irresistible sleepiness pulling him into the abyss. "I must get up..."

The rock which he nestled his head against suddenly dissolved in the light of his reviving memory and became transparent, and he pressing his forehead against the glass wall of the upper hall of the airport again saw a huge Boeing standing on the airfield and his daughter climbing up the gangway to fly away over the ocean, and again Nadine, who had been holding back emotions until then, wiped away a tear with a handkerchief beside him...

*

However incredible the successful outcome of the hasty love of their headstrong Victoria seemed, nevertheless, it were not the gloomy forecasts of her wise parents that came true, but her precarious naive expectations of the happiness promised her in the heat of the moment: at first, she received a long-awaited letter from her lanky Russophile Bill, wherein he confirmed both his not yet cooled feelings for her and his intention to abduct her and elope with her from his "historical homeland" to his "university backwater", as he wrote about his higher educational institution with the faculty of Slavic studies settled in the suburb near a big city; and then, having established epistolary contact, they began to bombard each other with lengthy epistles at intervals connected with a poor postal service, compensating for the impossibility of their closer communication with narrations about their impressions and experiences and practicing the languages, foreign for them and mostly colloquial, to mutual advantage.

Since the spring, the correspondence of their nervously-explosive "sex bomb", factually affianced thanks to her epistolary genre, was accompanied by the systematic and sufficiently expensive preparations for the wedding that this international couple decided to celebrate here: having borrowed a few thick catalogs from acquaintances, Nadine and the pernickety fiancée were designing a stunning wedding dress which was to be tailored by a prestigious and costly dressmaker; through some specific female channels of both were obtained both white pumps of the desired model and openwork elite lingerie under the dress and replenished stocks of French perfumes and cosmetics; besides, to be up to the mark, he expended part of the family savings in advance to reserve a wedding table in a luxury restaurant, by which, together with further unforeseen expenses on the occasion of the marriage of his only daughter, he exhausted all their financial resources and, for the first time, got into debts, albeit insignificant.

But at the altar, Vicky was dazzlingly beautiful in her ethereal splendor of a cherub descended from heaven, next to the tall fair-bearded bridegroom in a black tuxedo with a boutonniere in a buttonhole and a bow tie (the costume was brought specially for the forthcoming nuptials, on hangers in an oilcloth case, like a concert suit), and they constituted an amazing marriage duet wonderfully harmonizing with the carved gold decoration of the iconostasis, and with the wax tufts of burning tapers in massive multi candle stands before the icons of the hosts of saints in the side aisles of the recently restored small church, and with the Byzantine-lush gold-woven embroidery of the ceremonial vestments of a not very old priest, who, holding the two glittering filigree replicas of the royal crown from the Diamond Fund above the heads of the bridal couple, was conducting this somewhat amusing wedding ceremony with almost cheerful enthusiasm and with the assistance of a young altar boy, strictly according to all the canons of the Orthodox rite commissioned by Bill, except perhaps the choir singing "Many years!", whose function was performed by a bearded deep-voiced deacon belting out his solemn stichera and "Hallelujah" with a doubtless conservatorium vocal schooling. "Like a lone buffalo in the Arizona prairie," as the American son-in-law remarked admiringly, having fully enjoyed the Russian churchliness, when getting into the old-fashioned bulky glossy-black "Seagull" after the white-foamy charming newlywed-princess, for just such was the celebratory vehicle from the Wedding Palace, where their company, though compact, but heterogeneous in age and gradations of kinship, had popped in to preliminarily formalize the conjugal relationships of the newlyweds according to secular laws.

The restaurant sumptuous banquet that followed the riding around the city slightly flabbergasted their foreigner with the scope of the event which not very squared with the rather meager housing conditions of the organizers; but the custom of kissing his captivating bride to the cries "Bitter!" fell to the liking of the inquisitive philologist, and the evening "folk festivities" being in full swing soon after in the spacious hall filled with profiteers and ragtag crews of bandits sent the virtuous Yankee into raptures, all the more because most of the invitees, loosening up in unlimited libations, were celebrating such a momentous occasion no less noisily and recklessly.

And if at the beginning of the feast, Bill sometimes led out his angelic wife to limber up in the decent foxtrot and modest tango, then in the midst of the celebration, he, like a real reveler, again and again handed out to the sweaty musicians dollar bills with a request to immediately repeat what they had only just played, in order to dance robot-like rap with Vicky and already without his tuxedo and to cavort, gamboling, to African tom-toms, after which, completely Russianized, he went doing the Russian squat dance before his laughing partner.

"Not bad for a bookworm," he said jokingly to heated Vicky, when she stopped near the table in a pause between dances, swallowing the fizzy water from his glass. "He's our man, even if not pure-blooded..."

"Normal guy, indeed," his happy daughter laughed. "If there won't be enough money, whisper to me. He is ever ready to loosen the purse strings and pony up required sum."

However, he managed without her humanitarian assistance this time, and after the end of the restaurant carousing that passed without persistent drunk invitations to dance from the neighboring tables, scandals and scuffles in the toilet, notwithstanding ingurgitating strong drinks in large quantities, the newlywed couple departed to the hotel to Bill, who was seemingly conquered by the genuine Russian rollicking prodigality of their wedding celebration, but who drank only champagne and non-alcoholic Fanta, just as his young wifey; and there Victoria resided until the impending departure to the country of her husband, while her spouse arranged the necessary formalities at the embassy or was seeing the sights of the city of her childhood with her as a guide.

So as a whole family, they saw their daughter mostly in the evenings and invariably in the presence of her freckled bachelor, therefore before the send-off, he had a conversation in private with her only once, in the afternoon, when Bill had an appointment in his university with a familiar scientific colleague, whose work their American found very curious.

A lazy hot dusty breeze ruffled from time to time the slightly twitching sensitive croup of the rectangular city pond, strewing the rippling grey surface with brilliant sunny spangles; the white ballet-proud swans glided with marble-statuesque stateliness on the glistening smooth mirror to the midday shore, where some schoolboys loafing around during the summer holidays were throwing bread crusts into the water, and where the birds, instantly losing regal posture and pride, rushed with their wings wide open, cackling and stretching their necks, at the thrown pieces of crumbled loaf; while he and the already married Victoria were sitting on a bench in the shade of one of the lime trees of the horseshoe-shaped alley ringing the grassy slopes of the pond bank and absently watched the indecent hustle of the swans opposite.

"What to say, Vicky," said he. "Apparently, you have taken all our luck. At any rate, all your dreams come true."

"This means I deserve it," replied Vicky, who had spent the honeymoon week on the eve of her flitting away from the one-room parental nest in the nervous excitement of unbelievable happiness, all strung up in expectation of a flight to another life, unknown to her, but so alluring and frightening with its novelty that the parting with the parents was equated in her soul most likely with separation from her native city and from all that familiar unpresentable way of life of the middle-income everyday routine, in which she grew up and which she was changing with alacrity, yet still with some apprehension, to a more established and prosperous one.

"It's probably so. And that's what you always aimed at..."

"Would you prefer something else?"

"This is your fate, so I don't interfere..." The impenetrable ice of his steady alienation that detached him from all people, including his daughter, had noticeably thawed and grown thinner in the days of her last visits home, and now, sitting side by side with his independent cutie, who did not need her father very much in her present state, he was realizing that, when merely conversing with her, he was in effect also happy, and happy only because she was near him in this world, whatever she felt towards him and however she behaved; therefore, he could not edify her or give advice, simply wishing her what he wished for himself, so that his wish for her happiness, as well as his suddenly awakened paternal love for his "bright girlie", were truly disinterested and demanding nothing in return. "If you can't live closer to us, there is nothing to be done."

"Do you deem it possible to live normally here?" she asked, fiddling with the fringe of her denim miniskirt on her sharp girlish knee. "Don't you feel sorry for your grandchildren?"

"Not only for them," he breathed out, as if having sibilated old man's "eh-heh-heh". "Yet we live somehow."

"You've got used to live so. But I don't want to," his balky filly bucked. "And I shan't regret this country."

"The country will reciprocate you. Who regrets whom here, in our temporary hardships and difficulties? Everyone for himself, this is the sign of the times," he appreciated their historic stage with bitter sarcasm, though his bitterness was addressed not to his daughter, but rather to himself. "In essence, you're right, only there will be a certain diminution of brains without you in this society."

"I never noticed that this system encouraged too brainy free-thinkers," she repeated one of his remarks. "Yes, of course, if you hook a billionaire-sponsor and become his girlfriend, then it is quite acceptable even without brains and among poverty... But I hate to sell myself," she uttered with disgust. "As well as to kowtow to someone and fawn on someone or wag the tail in front of them for handouts... I don't like it, I'm not a puttana from Intourist."

"To your mind we live in poverty, too?" he interrupted her.

"Almost," she answered with careless daughter's cruelty. "You, as far as I remember, always write and write, and what have you achieved?"

"You know, dearie, if to look from such a point of view on everything..."

"There's no other one," his daughter self-confidently nipped in the bud his abstract reasoning.

"One still is," he made an attempt to confute her youthful maximalism. "Mine, for example. Everyone, you see, has their own ideas about luck and success."

"Very familiar, daddy," she dropped condescendingly. "Don't rock the boat, be a good girl, and console yourself with your spiritual superiority, we've been through this before... Meanwhile, excuse me, normal is not to console yourself and constantly sacrifice something for the sake of something, but to live having this and that, without such a compulsory choice..."

"You may try. Perhaps you'll succeed," he grinned, not denying her rightness, though. "For freedom people usually pay."

"But not like us."

"It happens worse, that depends. As one post-war philosopher named Sartre used to say, 'Man is condemned to be free'. That is, to be himself and no one else."

"You decided to teach me a short course in modern philosophy?" Victoria gave him a skeptical smile, exactly his one. "About Sartre I heard something."

"It's not about philosophy, it's about you and everyone who is not entirely an animal or a beast," he clarified. "Initially, everyone, as a variation of diversity, is attuned to his life self-disclosure, but only a few foresee what it will be like in reality, while others live at random, at the junction of 'I want' and 'I can'..."

"It's natural," she put in impatiently. "That's why I want to move where there are more of these 'I can'. And everyone wants, I think, for themselves."

"Yes, probably. To the extent that their desires depend on their possibilities. But as a result, all want only what they can, and any freedom, whether internal or external, reveals this individual 'I can' of yours just to you first of all. Because freedom for a person is the cognition of one's 'I', moreover, spontaneous cognition, and prosperity sometimes impedes freedom, while impediments, on the contrary, paradoxically conduce to it. Buddhism, say, advises to overcome obstacles in order to be elevated. It is to the question of my understanding of luck."

"Well, yes, as my mother's favorite saying goes, 'Genius is always born in time'. In the case that he survives and becomes a genius," quick-witted Vicky needled her old-fashioned parents. "'The disintegrating community', so you call the soviet people, right? No, I don't argue, disintegration is liberation, of course, but for whom? As I already understood, I shall get zilch from this freedom, and it is all that will accrue to me personally, for I'm not a currency speculator, not a racketeer and not a salesgirl in a commercial kiosk; I'm not a broker or a banker, and I don't love shoot-outs from Winchester rifles in the spirit of the Wild West... So I'm not going to endure the adversity and destitution of your ineluctable course of history all my life, let alone the obtuseness of the ruling rabble..."

"I dare hope, you exclude me from the number of the obtuse rabble?"

"Both you and those like you. But you can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and those who have remained are on the verge of extinction, like mammoths in the ice age... And besides, for you, the struggle is an incentive, while for me, it's a waste of time. No, our dear 'older generations', if you have built this reservation of marasmus for yourself, it is you who must reconstruct this erection. We have our own plans for the future, and we are not your building material."

"Self-sacrifice is what I have never called you to," he said, looking into the distance, at the coruscations of ripples of the pond not defiled by the noisy bird commotion. "All ideas aren't worth it, except for one."

"Which exactly?" she asked, not without irony, shaking the collar of her half-opened denim shirt for ventilation of her tanned young body.

"To be who you ought to be."

"To whom?"

"To yourself," he formulated briefly. "I don't dissuade you, no, I grieve."

"For me?" she was astonished at his sentimentality. "Then don't waste your kerosene, since I am ok now, without corrections and footnotes."

"That's just what scares," he sighed. "Whether good or bad for you, anyway, I worry about you..."

What he unexpectedly uttered with such sincere frankness was terrifyingly trite, yet moved him almost to tears: for no reason at all, he suddenly again imagined a tragic misfortune, always probable for every human being, which might happen to his carefree sassy daughter and which haunted his imagination at times from her infancy, and the piercing pity of fatherhood, powerless to save its child from the destructive unpredictable impact of this life concealing death, got fluttering like a living halo of suffering around the radiant stellar epicenter of his formerly insensate clarity.

When standing with Nadine at the glass wall over the concrete field and watching their daughter, their Victoria, in a snow-white trouser suit, a gift from her husband, go up the gangway to board of a wide-winged Boeing looking like a crucified unwieldy bumblebee, glancing back at the airport building, cheerful and completely happy, and talking about something with smiling Bill who was carrying his young "Russian wife" off, far away from relatives and friends, he still felt such fear for her, as if he was losing her and leaving her without his protection and help, that, pressing his hot forehead to the cool thick glass at that moment, he tried not to think too much about his daughter flying away from him lest his love and excessive concentration drew too close attention to her by chance from Destiny willfully steering the fates of the world since antiquity and his prayers for her further luck brought anything fatal and inexorably accidental upon her.

Meanwhile, the hatch in the hull of the airliner that had swallowed Victoria was hermetically sealed up with a patch of oval door; the gangway drove off; and the Boeing with its more and more powerfully roaring turbines and with its wide-spread white wings began to move heavily, taxiing to the landing strip.

Their long parting ended, and her take-off meant the beginning of their life without the daughter, again alone with each other, as once in their youth, but after eighteen years, having crossed the forty-years milestone, and no longer being linked by the uniting constant concern for their "joint production", their "birdie", "sunshine", "tomboy", "adult damsel" and, finally, "American", adored by both of them at any age, however often they worried about her traumas and pranks in childhood or over her psychological surprises and vagaries in her youth.

"That's all," Nadine said beside him in an undertone, putting the handkerchief into an ultra-fashionable handbag made of scraps of leather, a gift from their affable son-in-law. "We are alone now..."

And instantly, both the flat expanse of the airfield with the motionless white breakers of tailed fuselages, and the glazed cubic space of the airport hall buzzing behind his back seemed to be swept away by an influx of instantaneous time shift, and, caught by the intermediate rapid stream of his subsequent existence, he hurtled through all the ups and downs of his accelerated everyday life as a flaring all-seeing meteor, having skipped half of a year, whereupon he found himself at once in the snow-covered January street, along which he was slogging late in the evening, aimlessly wandering around the frost-bound city that was here and there covered with hoar-frost from the steam of underground vents of the metro or with the roadside trenches of frozen dirty snowdrifts, and remembered the six months, elapsed after the departure of his daughter.

*

The battered folding divan bed, on which their daughter was once conceived, and on which, having exceeded the cradle dimensions, she grew up behind the wardrobe partitioning off it from the double fold out sofa of her parents, was moved from the room into the corridor, to his Java, encased in tarpaulin; they, thus, could return to their alcove nook, while the round dining table with chairs was shifted to the vacated space under the bookshelves, and the place of the table was occupied with Vicky's favorite armchair always hampering to pass to the writing table and standing under the chandelier in front of the TV in the corner formerly encumbered with her great-grandmother's sofa with a shelf for the family of marble elephants and a mirror with a tarnished amalgam on the pseudo-classical-straight uncomfortable back (this junk had been sold by them later through a commission shop); so that, owing to the rearrangement of furniture, the room became more spacious and more suitable for silent evening readings in different corners or for his objectless meditation in the notebooks in the circle of light of the table lamp under the quotation clippings, adhered as white patches on the wall near the window: from the ancient Upanishads, "By knowledge of God all the bonds of ignorance are destroyed", and from the notorious Jean Paul mentioned in the conversation with his daughter, "I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility". But now his night notebook reflections were not caused by his inner boundary barrier from the family environment alien to him or by his foreignness to the cocoon of his flesh totally conditioned by Pushkin's "indifferent nature", and now he again loved Nadine, although his current love little resembled his former passion and was transforming into a strange all-forgiving compassion and soft-hearted leniency in the timid haze of dawning pity returning his world to him, as if Nadine was not only his wife-concubine enticed by his tenderness and gratified by his love caresses, but also his adopted ward, whom he knew and loved paternally patronizingly when she was still a little girl and whose inevitable aging plunged him into some touching sadness, instead of prompting him, as it used to be, to thoughtless voluptuous using of her imperceptibly fading body and of her episodic desire and to sailing with her from the daily fairway flow of time to the coves of their quondam oblivion, erotic friskiness, and serene languor of fully satisfied sensuality.

In his attitude to both Nadine and strangers not affecting him, a new sense of his world more and more made itself felt--not as an external accumulation of some natural and therefore made objects, opposed to his "I" incarcerated in the casemate of body, many of which encroached upon his self-worth and the uniqueness of his infinity, but as himself who was expanded by the imagination of consonance and sympathy beyond the boundaries of the sparingly allocated anatomical shell, that is, as his own corporeality, which was enveloped in the starlight humanized by pity, and which was turning from a spiritual mold of a biological individual closed by itself into the zone of self-contemplation gradually accreting to the stellar center of his soul; and in such expansion, his spirit perforce equated this part of the seemingly external life perceived by him from the inside with the consciousness of flesh beginning to pity and love this life more and more strongly, putting up with its animality and perishability, albeit with some disgust sometimes, and suffering from its endless pains and anguish. For that reason, he seldom watched television news and did not read the newspapers slandering, bickering, competing for superiority in cruelty, exaggeratingly playing up the information about calamities and cataclysms and chewing over human misfortunes and atrocities, which perhaps were tickling the nerves of some thick-skinned spectators craving "bread and circuses", but adding only disastrous confusion of feelings to him, because he was not able to truly change what had happened and what was happening, and nobody could rid him of this resonating prescient vision, but one who had kindled this light in him and endowed him with this paradoxical love belittling him by augmentation and granting possession in self-renunciation, as if he were indeed a source of luminous emanation radiating itself through self-immolation into objective reality appropriated by such illumination.

To be among people and feel all of them within his expanding consciousness even in a random crowd on the way to work or home was not an easy task, considering that the embitterment prevailing in souls, in mores, and in relationships, as he could not but aware, was caused both by the intensification of struggle for survival, and by the widespread malicious vindictiveness, and by the suicidal crack-ups of irreparably ruined destinies, while the planet itself was entering the phase of tectonic and human elemental excitement, shaking it (and also him as a seismographically sensitive and responsive spiritual membrane of naturalness thinned with his radiance) by epileptic seizures of still local geological catastrophes and by a fever of bellicosity being fueled by speeches and actions and bursting out of the fissures of the collapsing imperial monolith of his soviet country, whereas the fiery deluges of the stinkingly-cadaveric jingoistic savagery and sadistically-punitive militaristic frenzy were flooding the "hotbeds of tension and national conflicts", where some indelible bloody boundary-strips of hatred were again and again laid and deepened, and the eternal explosive substance of ethnic-tribal and socio-religious polarity and division of the human race sporadically falling into such self-destruction again and again detonated.

But, however excruciatingly all diametrically opposed points of view with the accumulating ruthlessness of their enmity coexisted within him, he was defenseless against the uncontrollable intrusion of a single conglomerate of their extraneous chaos into his consciousness, for the omnivorousness of his love and the susceptibility of his planetary flesh, as if recovering sensitivity after a long-lasting anesthesia of whole life isolated in his subjectivity, were dooming him to an arbitrator's perceptive but passive empathy with the world, and not because the ability to make his human corrections to the incessantly arising reality had withered away or disappeared from the arsenal of his possible influences, where he would have hardly vouched for complete disarmament and helplessness, yet now, while discovering his new "I" after the demonic temptation by omnipotence, he already discerned in the unbridled cacophony of seeming meaninglessness some leitmotif of crises of discord and dissonances passing through the chaos like a thread of the Hindu spirit with stringed beads of incarnations and finding its resolution in disharmony; and not knowing the full scope of the intent of the true creator for this many-voiced chorus fraught with hysterics of bloodthirsty cries, he had no right to change the game plan by supernatural interventions, since the very criteria for his analysis and assessments were, whatever one may say, humanly limited and historically given, however prophetically he foresaw, based on the past, the universal perspective for that human reason which the planet was emitting since the advent of mankind and which would have had in the future either to cross out itself by the narrow-minded egoism of the general detuned self-adjustment and return in the apocalyptic agony of its global self-devouring to the starting unconsciousness of the next attempt, or to achieve a certain united spiritual polyphony in its many-faced rationality, which in effect constituted the human self-salvation of this celestial body.

Besides, with the current perviousness of his soul to his surroundings, as a judge, he was so impartial that he was practically not guided by any code today, for all variants of the spirit, even underdeveloped and distorted, were now accepted by him as having the right to exist and variously revealing their all-human task of individualizing God, consequently meaning something in the self-realization of the earthly natural image; and although much in them repelled him humanly, nevertheless, in the truth that was slightly unveiled to him, they were neither better nor worse, but miscellaneous and tuned not in unison with him, which is why they incredibly tired him during the day, accustoming him again to seclusion and hermitage, including less frequent visits with friends and relatives or to libraries and cinemas and reduction in travels by metro that were replaced by walking home from the university. It must be said, the debt payments for the wedding would have gone much faster if he had been more sociable and returned to his craftwork on repair of radio equipment or to movie stunts, but, to the great regret, he devoted not a minute of free time to such activities, relying only on dividends from philosophy and already barely holding out to the required minimum in the continuing depreciation of earned money.

In philosophy, true, he also gradually disappointed. His "science of sciences" was in essence a phenomenon of rational deciphering of intuitively given knowledge, both in its history forming up periods, epochs and eras with their differently correct interpretations of the initial inspirations and mental images of ancient myths sometimes being ahead of many later discoveries, to the surprise of overweening technocratic descendants, and in his fate which time after time unexpectedly presented him the key revelations and turning points of his meticulous cosmogonic self-explanations, reducing the entire previous perfect analysis to an episode or stage of cognition by a sudden flash of insight shaking the impeccable structures of scrupulously thought-out metaphysics; so in actuality, all philosophical constructions of the universe imagined by mankind were founded on spontaneous breakthroughs of that truth into the human consciousness which civilizations, ethnoses and cultures were worthy of and which was confirmed by their illusory partial domination over the "forces of nature", that is, over some of its levels subject to human form-creation; therefore what invariably underlay any available modifications of worldviews, concepts and opinions as the fundamental basis of thinking was faith, the assumption of an axiom, unprovable according to Aristotle, that was creating all universes of speculation by its "God" as its all-creating light, and the question of this basic faith was a question of fate both historically and individually, because the spontaneity of its changes was in the power of Providence or of Destiny gradually guiding human awareness and growing the seed of meaning in man in conformity with his readiness for the truth and with the properties of the natural soil of his spirituality.

Even unbelief and godlessness, denying the obsolete God, overthrew only their own superstructural mirages of decipherments, not getting to the bottom of the intuitions of the luminous source, always the same and eternally new, and again and again fell into the superficially-impenetrable idolatry of socially-impersonal "programming" and into the impasse of inextricable materialistic despair, from time to time forming in humanity the ulcers of destruction that consumed the unenlightened spirit, like the peoples that had "lost God" and were being burned out by internecine strife, since nowhere but in faith, in the abyss of his spirit, he, man, could come into contact with himself-God, and just from there, from the suddenness and inexplicability of his insights, might originate his human "universality" and versatility in creating; and, as the examples of particularly chosen individuals testified, the transition to faith was a transition from their human rationalism and from the state of a person explaining to the state of contemplation of God in oneself and to the self-knowledge of the immeasurable light embracing their consciousness, where they existed indeed, and did not only project their spiritual being analytically, just as he wanted to exist, already too versed, apparently, in following the "path of reason", by no means capitulating at the behest of the church clergy before the divinity that had once given birth to him, but understanding that the fulcrum found by him was the permissible limit of human cognition, and that there where was deeper he would plunge as one of the molecules into the ocean that splashed him out, in which not the philosophical creed and the harmony of the abstract schematization of the world were decisive, but the affinity of the "I" comprehending its cosmos to what was being comprehended by it.

In short, in the radiance of his new clarity, the sense of professional philosophizing also lost significance among other meanings: laying out the metamorphoses of the self-perception of humanity in the world as if for theoretical solitaire, he again made sure that after the totem-indissoluble existence of savages in nature and after the subsequent separation of tribes and individual mortals, subject to the pagan-supreme synclite of gods, but having their own destiny, to replace the third--human--period of monotheistic faith, which comprehended the connection of the individual soul with the "Lord", still too fixated on a microscopic crumb of the planet and humanized by complicity in the vicissitudes of the earthly spirit, there came doubt in such an understanding of the Almighty, too, wherefore today the former God-patriarch, God-guardian, God-judge was either inconceivably moved away into the astral infinity of space inexhaustible for man, or entirely relocated inside the consciousness of a completely isolated individual, whose universe God was for every believer; but all theorizing on this score was based on the logical premises of the antecedent dominance of the human reason, which imagined in the natural conceit of a new dimension of freedom that its purportedly reliable cornerstone axioms of rational mastery over the world of reality were indisputable, while all the discovered and successfully used laws were nothing more than some phantoms of self-consciousness of mankind who believed in them and some regulators of its adjusting and subjecting itself as a planet and spirit, or otherwise itself as the planetary consciousness learning the flesh of its detached corporality and merging into the unity of biosphere-diverse human populations, so its power from outside, the power of "subjects" over "objective reality", was rather a kind of intuitive confrontation within their comparatively young "earth ball" which was resisting the arbitrariness of the infantile-local and destructively self-harming reason that now and then incurred the reciprocal energy of the crushingly suppressing restoring of random forms of materiality by such incautious and unreasonable self-cognition.

As he had the opportunity to verify on his own experience, to transform being without this reaction it was possible only by becoming what created it from within, influencing the gaming fatality of the incarnation not indirectly, but through the code of the universal Demiurge, being included as a spiritual co-creative overtone in the sending of self-creation of God, which, of course, presupposed a certain "enlightenment" of the personality, whether it was prophets-messiahs or matured humanity done away with infighting and arrogance, whereas the enlightenment, which befell him in some degree as well, was making all pretentions to human absoluteness ridiculous; and retrospectively leafing through even geniuses, like Plato and Hegel, now he did not agree with a single argument and a single starting point of their reasoning that was premised on too a human assumption of the existence of emergence and disappearance, and therefore time and motion, in God-consciousness abiding in the eternal now and remaining all-encompassingly undivided at any point and in any sign, which invalidated at the root all differentially definitive calculations and "scientific" knowledge as such; however, he was prevented from adhering to the "refraining from judgment" of the ancient skeptics by the same duality of his position in the world humanized by himself, where all this "seemingness" disproved by the immortal radiance were present and determined the reality of his life that was called "Maya" by the overly introspective Hindus, and "God's dream" by contemporaries Neo-Thomists. As for him, he did not divide sleep and vigil in God as a consciousness, and he would have compared the sparks of human focuses of the diffused light of their planetary hypostasis with images of a fantasy being played in God's imagination, given that its performers-characters could have known the plan and sequence of this fantasy only if their super-gifted representatives would have risen to a higher level, from where they would have seen their entire existence and the meaning of their spontaneous development as a perspective of the Lord's providence, arisen in a short instant of clairvoyance.

In addition, the society, where he had the misfortune to tarry too long, less and less needed philosophy, and if earlier, at the time of his soulless alienation, aloofness fenced him off from the all-conquering mercantile squalor, now, not of his own volition, he was letting countless throngs of the afflicted in the circle of his pity, although they hungered for something else, not for some "meaning", peeled from the husk of conceptual categories and built by his light, or his answers to the question "What is man?" to their era, too; and the horrifying dimness of the obscured, almost quenched light of their nascent spirituality was so rudimentary in the coarseness of their joyless individuality corroded by acid insipidity of everyday life that, with all his love, he sometimes felt an unconscious loathing for them, as for mental defective children, not guilty, alas, of their defectiveness and vices.

Feeling them, he studied them as some whimsical combinations of a certain natural continuum and grieved, seeing how a fraction of spiritual omnipotence bestowed on them by God was being dissipated in their draft variants, along with their wasted talents, which failed to glow at full brightness so as to turn into a microcosm of their genuine freedom and did not develop into their comprehensive personal "divinity" of the earthly human planetarity, even if that undoubtedly depended both on the innate sending of their birth and on their places in humanity not of their own choosing, as well as on shaping their personalities by circumstances, by the functioning of the planet's organism, and by the arbitrariness of the fantasy of the consciousness thinking up them and not loving repetitions. All that remained for talents and nonentities was to follow, first of all, the imperatives of one's soul often still groping in the dark of forcedness and philistine pettiness, and thus clarify one's mind about one's personal destination, with the caveat that people were differently gifted by the ability to hear oneself and by the intelligibility of their core inclinations-callings or by the persistence of purposefulness in following one's nature; and while those men of gift who were opposing the overall tendency to waive the essential principles had to slog through non-recognition for the sake of exhaustive self-realization and, despite everything, achieved the possible artistic completeness of meaning of their destinies, incarnated in the continents or atolls of creation, individuals more compliant, primitive and amateurishly many-sided lived for today and went where the wind carried them, crumpling and crippling their spineless "I" sprouting into the world, and in their irresponsibility for themselves, they were little by little dropping out from the adventurous independence of co-creation into the controllability and constructedness of "human material" being formed according to the drawings of the human rationality, which itself, in all its immensity and usefulness, was nothing more than a tool for manipulating them and a means of humanizing the "light of wisdom" seeping through billions of consciousnesses.

This definition of one God by Aurelius Augustine was quite apposite here: true, unlike one of the founders of Christian doctrine and the author of Confessions, the way to the rank of bishop was closed for him, but he similarly got blasé about the speculativeness of various lengthy reviews of local knowledge and about the casuistic subtlety of the dialectics of hypothetical universes no longer corresponding to the keenness of his spiritual eyesight and to the experience of his self-readings, and he likewise imperceptibly outlasted his former rapture over understanding someone else's thoughts and explaining his own ones, denying the right of such secondary mental activity to be called his "true vocation" from now on, yet incapable of figuring out another, real, meaning of the unique gift discovered in himself by him; that's why, on the threshold of new self-disclosures of the main meaning of his fate, he, one might say, voluntarily stepped off both the path of his scientific career and the high road of mass entrepreneurial excitement to the wayside into the public life that was already breaking out from the rotten bonds of soviet power and bolting madly ahead at random, where, withdrawing into himself from the fuss not saving him and from the dead-end beaten tracks of the way out of "crisis situations" and the "transitional" (no one knew to what) decline--of quality of life, of level of culture, of economy and of spiritual needs, of morality and of other "baloney", "hogwash" and "bullshit" of this formerly totalitarian country splitting and crumbling into heterogeneous parts without its prison camps, he whiled away the empty months of his mechanically registering and disappointingly unproductive love together with his again beloved wife, who indulged his obviously unprofitable eccentricities, receiving detailed letters from the daughter living in the New World about the prosperity there, with the color photographs of Bill embracing her against the background of their nice two-story cottage in the suburbs, and regularly went out for a constitutional in the evenings, mostly along the deserted alleys, for "airing the brains" after the hustle and bustle of daily chores.

Meantime, walking along the streets festively decorated with blizzards quarter by quarter, he turned into a lane, graphically neat in the camouflage of snowdrifts covering abandoned dumps and sidewalk potholes and in the filigree snow finery of peeling cornices and crumbling socles, and went further, crunching the brittle crust of the unremoved frozen snow in the same measured rhythm and enjoying the soft creaking of his lonely steps on the snow in the lunar frosty silence of the seemingly uninhabited stone gorge, when suddenly the still web of invisible light around his solitude wavered, and someone's indignant fear, having reached his ears, started beating about in panic in his soul woken from memories, mixing with someone's cruel butcher's triumph; and, immediately hurried to the sinister dark low arch of the corner gateway, he realized on the run that there, under the arch, some robber, putting a knife to someone's throat, was empting his pockets.

And when he burst into the through-passage of the courtyard under the damp arches, at the wall, near the garbage cans, he saw the shadow of two men in poses unambiguously expressive: a man pressed against the wall in a whitish unbuttoned sheepskin coat was already standing without his costly muskrat hat, knocked off into a strip of moonlit snow at the exit, while the other, tall, in a sports knitted cap to the eyebrows and in a short puffer jacket, fumbled in the inner pocket of the unlucky reveler, whose chin was turned up with the pricking tip of the dully gleaming knife-blade.

"I wonder what we are doing here?" he inquired cheerfully, stopping before the men.

"What are you, cop?" the bloke with a knife, not very scared by the unbidden stranger, squinted at him, without releasing the pressed man, who stirred in his hands at the appearance of the possible rescuer.

"Don't fidget, goof, or I'll slit your throat," the mugger warned the twitching client.

"It is wrong to kill people," he exhorted the robber, whose brazen insolence seemed strangely familiar to him, just as the stooped gangling silhouette of his strained figure.

"Really?" the bandit chuckled unperturbedly. "Then buzz off and don't push your luck. It's our own showdowns."

"Let him go, and with him I shall go," he promised to the stick-up boy, caught in flagrante delicto, so to speak.

"With him you shall be transported someplace. Under a white sheet," his opponent tersely outlined his hopeless future and, after clearing the throat with a long deep wheezing cough, barked brusquely and rudely at the passerby interfering in his "job":

"Fuck away, dickhead, don't awake the beast..."

"To humiliate is wrong, too, it is human being, after all," he continued to conscientiously admonish the irascible thug. "By the by, you could have switched to me and ceased squeezing a defenseless victim..."

"So, you're cop," the unrepentant villain wheezed out, and before he had time to answer, the knife, having left the chin of the decently dressed "victim" for an instant, slashed him right in the face.

Hadn't he foreseen every deed and action of this predator, successfully clawed hold of the street prey, he would have lost his curious eyes for sure, but at present he was slightly ahead of any movement of the attacker, and the blade that all but gashed his eyelid cut through the air a millimeter from his skin.

"You nimbly brandish your cutting tool, I see," he said quickly recoiling. "With such wielding of cold steel, you may cut off my head."

"If you insist, brother, I'm ready... Don't move!" the cutthroat shouted, coughing but not losing humor, at the man attempting to grab him by the hands and again stuck the point to the folds of fat on the carotid artery of his big game struggling in his paws. "Well then, after I'll pluck this turkey-cock, I'll deal with you," he firmly assured this "cop" in civilian clothes, who was not attacking him for some reason. "May smoke in aside."

"I quit smoking, Yul," he unexpectedly called the skinny criminal the forgotten rocker nickname.

"What a friend of 'the dawn of my boggy youth' showed up here?" On hearing that old name, the robber even interrupted the seizure of the valuable contents from the man's pockets. "Who are you?"

"Memory like a sieve. There were only seven of us then," he shamed his former friend, for it became apparent that there was no mistake.

"Of the seven?" Judging by the outlines in the arched opening, Yul, frozen, also peered into his face without a single scratch of the imposing knife. "Then Hor. Hor, right? I've hit it?"

"You never missed," he remembered the biting apt quips of this sarcastic wag, who hunted now in the most ancient and barbaric way, in the streets with the flick-knife. "Maybe, let's hold off this expropriation of yours and go somewhere to gab about our life?" he suggested to the armed "proud eagle", or rather jailbird, pretty plucked over years.

"Reasonable thoughts come into your head sometimes," Yul remarked mockingly and thrust the knife past the ear of the gasping man to the wall, so that the blade of his cleaver would come into the handle. "Don't whine, tubby, today you're in luck. Take it." Yul slapped the man on the bald head with the unopened wallet. "Pick up your furs and beat it."

The released "goof" grabbed his muskrat hat powdered with snow and instantly darted away through the passage into the street, spewing out some impotent obscenities inaudibly, and a moment later he already skedaddled at full speed along the desert carriageway in his sheepskin coat flying open from running, swearing in hysteric falsetto.

"We better evaporate, too, or else the fuzz may nab me," Yul notified his friend of potential hazards. "I hope you're not planning to hand me over to the patrol?"

"Why should I do others' work? There is law enforcement for catching criminals," he refused the dubious honor of detaining a dangerous recidivist. "So today you, as I understand it, are persecuted under the serious articles of the Criminal Code. Armed robbery and so on..."

"Yes, that's true, we are ripping off peaceful citizens little by little," Yul agreed with him, looking out from under the arch, if there were any witnesses of his punishable act nearby. "Of course, it would be safer to do the job with a tip and on a large scale, but sometimes even a simple hold-up is quite lucrative..."

In the light, while they retreated from the scene of the crime through some back streets and courtyards, he could examine the grey wrinkly-shriveled face of Yul, whom, in case of encountering in the daily bustle, he would have mistaken for an aged deadbeat out of football players drunkards or for a decrepit hooligan rowdy, who had been brawling to old age at beer stalls and in police stations, and he would hardly have recognized him at first sight, whereas Yul, having glanced at him in passing under the streetlight not yet broken by local punks, probably also noted his present unrecognizability.

"It would be nice to pop in some boozer, but it is too late for the public houses," Yul pondered aloud on the way to the metro. "Wait, I'll check one haunt, if you aren't hurrying to hit the hay..."

In the lobby of the metro station, Yul ordered some "Nyura" into the receiver of the public phone to bundle away any small riffraff and wait for their arrival, and he called Nadine to tell her not to worry in vain; then, after an hour of shaking in the subway and in the shuttle bus that was riding according to its own schedule, they wandered some time around the former outskirts of the city among some old dilapidated buildings and finally stopped in front of a faceless erection resembling a cheap tenement house or a rented barracks with a gloomy passage through the dark courtyard and with small windows of three stories on the facade, mostly extinguished or drawn with curtains.

"Couldn't you saunter to the back door to look, if there is anyone there," Yul asked him, attentively glancing round the empty alley and the one-story houses of this settlement, white under the moon as if in the limelight.

"What, are you being hunted?" he took note of this fact of Yul's criminal biography.

"I am not on the wanted list, but to get caught is not recommended to me," his hardened and highly experienced thief friend justified his request. "They can hang on me what they want, as on a recidivist, and when I'll be sentenced to prison or camp terms, to whom to appeal?"

"Why they cannot bust you here?" he observed circumspectly.

"They can. Then what to do, you cannot escape your fate," concluded the rigorist Yul. "Then climb onto the bunk and improve your undermined health on state-owned grub..."

*

Nyura, who opened the door for them, the hostess of this utterly neglected squalid two-room den of winos, was a blowzy fat slattern of about fifty with a stupid puffy face swollen from frequent drinking bouts, and because of her low stature, she was of equal size in height and width in her worn dirty woolen jacket and in a crumpled gaudily-motley short frilled skirt which was presenting to intoxicated male eyes the pale bare stumps of her edematous cyanotic calves braided with a network of thrombophlebitis veins; and her thieves' hang-out was entirely congruent to the fallen mistress: the floor was spat and littered with cigarette butts; the tattered wallpaper was covered with obscene inscriptions; and in the air was the stale wine-tobacco stench of a drinking establishment of the lowest and filthiest sort.

"Come on, receive us, shorty, today I will stay for the night with you," Yul informed his old moll, pawing at her wide-arsed stern, but got alert at once and froze in the hallway, having thrust his right hand into the side pocket. "Who is here?"

"Two freaks, fuck it, barged in for vodka, and I cannot chuck them off..." the half-drunk Nyura began to vindicate herself. "They are sitting in the warmth there, someone's sidekicks, and aren't listening to me," she snitched on her visitors. "No bullshit, by golly, I tried to get rid of them..."

"Cut the crap," her strict guest coughed. "I shall give them short shrift..."

In the room where he entered after Yul, two young lumps sitting at an rickety table without a tablecloth were finishing off a half liter bottle only just bought at the nightly rate, not first for today, as one could easily guess from their drunken smirks and noisy disjointed conversation; so Yul struck up a heart-to-heart talk with them without preamble and euphemisms.

"Children's time is over, kids. Please to vacate the service premises," announced Yul, weedy in comparison with these hulks, pulling his camouflage beanie from his completely gray head and shoving it into his left pocket. "Gulp the last one and scram."

"What the fuck?" the tough who sat by the window curtained with old newspapers defiantly asked his pal with the usual readiness for drunken fights. "Who is this to command?"

"Shut up," the second one in an Adidas tracksuit hastily stopped the ignorant bully. "Let's drink up and go."

"Someone opened mouth," Yul said without expression with ominous pensiveness, looking through the toughs with his faded bulging eyes into the space that did not promise them anything reassuring, "or there is interference in the loudspeaker?"

"Okay, Scraggy, okay, no problem..." the one in the tracksuit started apologizing, getting up, who knew Yul under the nickname "Scraggy" and did not dare to collide with him in open conflict, with all the superiority of the muscular build. "He doesn't know who you are, I will explain to him..."

"Be so kind," Yul dropped with cold irony, neither threatening nor frightening the interlocutors. "And clear off before I rip this wanker's balls off."

"Well, sorry, we're already gone," the connoisseur of local rules muttered, gulping the vodka from his glass and pushing the discontented neophyte towards the door, and both of them rounded the far end of the table and got out without visible indignation, though the pugnacious chap, dissatisfied with the peaceful outcome of confrontation, cast angry glances at the overly puny and gaunt offender.

"I see, you're an authority among them," he appreciated Yul's weight in criminal circles.

"No, I don't need power, I'm a loner," Yul rejected the inaccurate characteristic, for since childhood he could not stand dependence on anyone.

"So, Thumbelina," Yul ordered Nyura, who appeared immediately after the end of the expulsion of the stubborn guests. "Remove this pigsty and set the table for us properly: three bottles and chow in plenty."

"Isn't it too many, three?" he interjected tactfully. "I won't drink much..."

"Then I'll drink instead of you," Yul replied, unzipping his jacket and shifting one of the chairs from the table to the wall opposite the door, although near the window there was a sofa, fashionable thirty years ago, with its torn tattered barracan and bumps of dirty foam rubber in holes.

"Actually, Scraggy, I'm flat broke now," the tipsy flabby "Thumbelina" ingratiatingly shared her financial hardship with him, clearing the dishes. "Maybe you have anything to drop into my piggy bank?"

"You yourself are a grubby piggy," the habitué of this dingy dive reproached the avaricious owner, flopping down on the chair and throwing off his threadbare synthetic wadded jacket from his sharp shoulders on the sofa in anticipation of a well-deserved rest in a shabby sweater in the bliss of the warm room. "When I conned you even once? Don't be a miser and unpack your stash. I'm skint today, but you know I always pay according to the price list, to everyone and for everything..."

This passing but sufficiently clear hint was like a cold douche for Nyura's cupidity, all the more so because Yul apparently repaid debts together with percentages of thieves' ostentatious generosity; and soon, on the tabletop cut all over with knives and carefully wiped with a wet rag, the hostess enlightened by Yul lovingly organized an acceptable snack from marinated canned green tomatoes and cold boiled potatoes with pieces of salty salo in tin bowls and slices of slightly dried black bread, while Yul was pouring vodka into the not faceted glasses that Nyura gave only to especially honored guests: full up to a golden rim for himself, and, without forcing, a hundred grams in a comradely way for him and the same for the diligent "shorty", however, into the usual faceted glass, smeared with greasy fingers and with traces of caramel-lingonberry lipstick.

"Only, beauty, let's you drink it and go to sleep," Yul categorically enjoined the hostess not to be too importunate, taking a specially washed guest glass with his weathered bony paw, the back of which was covered with a blue prison tattoo. "It's not a simple booze-up, it's a serious conversation."

"So cheers, my dearies," Yul flashed the steel dental crowns of his unsmiling mouth. "Let's fill up our fuel tanks..."

Having lingered a bit, he watched how the sharp Adam's apple jutting out on the long bristly neck of a plucked gander began moving up and down in time with the throat, and joined the drinkers.

Then the trollop unwanted in their company obediently proceeded into the next room, and, without eavesdroppers, they commenced a leisurely rambling night dialogue, whose subtexts he either read or pre-empted involuntarily with his acute internal hearing, along the way imbibing vodka with Yul, naturally, in uneven proportions, and snacking with what God sent. Moreover, alone with him, Yul regaling him on credit strove, as far as possible, to civilize his through and through idiomatic camp vernacular of an experienced convict by book and magazine phraseological turns ennobling his seedy scruffy appearance and testifying to the remarkable intellect and indisputable originality of his personality as well as self-respect that he did not forfeit in his sordid life with robberies and years of imprisonment.

"You know what I'll tell you," Yul confessed in the ensuing clarification of "who is who" and on what exactly they spent more than half of their years living. "If I'd croaked then, like Jack, young and handsome, it would have been better. You probably have family and some diploma for an official food trough, and others from our band, as you say, are also either drudges or wheeler-dealers, only I can't get along with collective, I'm a lone wolf. Free artist, in short, with a steel quill..."

"Don't envy me excessively, I'm an urban madman in this country now," he defined his true social status in the cynical "revaluation of values" that belatedly befell the communist empire. "Marginal, so to say, and with you I am approximately in the same category."

"Really in the same?" Yul didn't believe. "You don't look beggarly outwardly, you are sort of a toff in such raiment."

"The remains of luxury," he nodded at the aviator-black leather anorak jacket thrown near Yule's cast-offs. "I once slightly enriched in a sideline job, indeed. You're thief-in-law, as I understand, you get rich by the loot from robs?"

"You understand rightly; you always were clever..." Yul pulled out a crumpled pack of Belomorkanal from his trousers pocket and took out a papirosa, but did not light it and was tapping it against a box of matches some time until set it upright on the table. "I didn't labor for their state even under duress."

"It is a mass phenomenon here, so you are simply one of blatant extremes," he sighed. "When your labor is depreciated and meaningless for you, why the hell would you drudge."

"Just so," assented Yul, who was usually not inclined to ideological justifications for his criminal risky life and whose initial Robin Hood's romanticism of the defiantly daring revolt of "unlawfulness" and the caste cohesion of the underworld brotherhood according to the thieves' concepts had burned out long ago in the deprivation of liberty for many terms of incarceration and camp isolation. "Worms may grovel before the jailers for their rations, but I shan't forgive them slammer and camp barracks, I'll get even with them yet..."

"That is precisely what it is all about: war as a way of existence and as a solution to all problems," he classified the motives of the more and more widely spreading disillusionment, feeling lost, disorientation and vindictiveness seething near the critical explosion point and finding their outlet, as usual, in aggression on the battlefields with some immediately discovered sworn enemy, which was freeing those who got involved in the hopelessness of mutual murders from their everyday burden, from the bondage of labor obligatory in peacetime and from their own downtrodden vegetating in the stodgy tediousness of dreary insipid lackluster petty life. "The people of losers assert themselves, as a rule, by war, for all other paths, unfortunately, are cut off. You, as I see, have your own war, too."

"Yeah, class warfare." Yul uncorked the second bottle with his teeth and spat a torn tin cork on the floor. "I'm derailing their armored train."

"What about the passengers? Don't you feel sorry for them, at least innocent?"

"If I feel, I stroke their heads before I bump off them," Yul said, clearing his throat hoarsely and pouring vodka, which seemed to have no effect on him.

"I don't feel sorry even for myself," Yul raised his expressionless eyes drained of color by deeply ingrained old hatred and stared at his compassionate friend. "God knows when I had shed the first blood and how many my sins I could have counted by now, so cut it out with your priestly expostulation..."

"No, I'm not a priest," he turned down the conferment of an undeserved ecclesiastical rank. "Howbeit, man is man, no matter how lost and fallen he may be."

"And you don't care what a monster I am?" Yul asked, staring at him with an unblinking gaze of a pop-eyed polar owl. "It's nobly."

Yul uttered the last word with overt mockery, for such an arrant outlaw didn't give a damn about someone's forgiveness and about the severe sentences of the grave articles of the Criminal Code until the moralistic "hassling" and condemnation became capture, detention and punishment, with handcuffs and machine guns of the convoy, with an overcrowded prison cell of bullpen and with a cage in the special train compartment of the next transportation to the next colony of strict regime somewhere in the marshy forest-tundra or taiga.

"Yet don't delude yourself too much. I am also only man as you, and my leniency is not limitless," he brought his pan-human clemency, too assailable for Yul, down from heaven to earth. "Were I present at your bloodshed, believe me, I wouldn't be idle."

"Would you stick up for them?" Yul bared a row of blackened steel fangs as if in a soundless snarl. "Better thank God that you didn't chance to be there, dove of peace. Otherwise, your relatives would have played a funeral march to you."

Apparently, in order not to lose his temper inadvertently, Yul lowered his eyes to the glass of vodka and continued indifferently in a hollow voice, not browbeating nor bragging his impenitence, but rather sharing his impressions:

"Those whom I crush are not kids, don't worry, nor weak lassies, it's solid clientele, and they themselves can dispatch anybody."

"Brothers in spirit," it escaped his lips.

"Not brothers, but vile scumbags." Yul's hoarse voice got quavering with a growling ebullition of rage, which, however, was immediately replaced by the previous narrative intonation. "If I cannot but cut someone's guts out, when I'm unable to contain myself, I show my character to murderers, to the ones who rape and kill children... Or, if necessary and there's no other way."

"How it is? Lost at cards for interest and went out to stab the first comer with a knife?" he imagined it very vividly. "Well, I'm not a judge. You committed atrocities, consequently you will have to answer."

"Before whom?" this unforgiving hardcore misanthrope glanced at him with the deepest contempt for all judges, courts, and chastisements.

"Before yourself, not anyone else. Not always you will prowl with your knife, and some day you'll have to sum up this life, since neither you nor I shall eventually escape death."

"Only don't tell me about death, I'm in its clutches from my first wet work. There are too many who want to get back at me."

With his atrophiedly-withered tattooed hand, whose leathery skin, brown from frosts and winds, tightly covered its bones and tendons, Yul raised the glass to his lips, and the unshaven Adam's apple above the greasy collar of the sweater again started leaping greedily with swallowing spasms.

"Curious to know, how can I take stock of life, if I have neither roof over my head nor inheritance in money-box." After having refueled, Yul thrust the stored papirosa into his teeth. "I'm hobo, and I'll die either from a bullet or from battle wounds, most importantly that not in a lockup and not in their isolation cell..."

Having lit up his fag, Yul drew several times in a row, with the insatiability of a smoker who endured for too long, and shook convulsively at once in a fit of coughing rending his sunken chest so desperately that he was choking with smoke, straining agonizingly and expectorating lumps of mucus onto the dirty floor.

"Damn this shit, it all fucked me already..." the exhausted inmate of the prisons and barracks cursed everything, somehow overcoming the attack of convulsive cough, and angrily crushed the smoking butt on the plywood of the table top, wiping the sweat off the grey haggard face. "Smoking is harmful to health..."

"What is it? Caught a cold?" he asked when this confirmed criminal, hawking and swearing, recovered himself a little after coughing up and spitting out all the phlegm.

"It is lung contusion after all their beating in the prison coolers," Yul grumbled in response. "They, bastards, were pummeling me for disobedience everywhere and bludgeoning to death; I would strangle all of them, assholes, one by one... Now even smoking is baneful for me," Yul complained, pouring marinade from a bowl with green tomatoes into the glass. "So I'm insured against old age, because I'll kick the bucket much earlier."

"To my mind, your life is eternal youth, irrespective of how long you live." Though on the face, this washed-up mugger looked twenty years older than his forty-plus. "The same views and interests, and, in principle, nothing changes, because there is nowhere for anything new to arise from."

"What do you call new?" Yul, enervated for a while, interrupted him, sipping the marinade. "This pottering in your paltriness and baseness?"

"The new, you see, is a matter of self-feeling," he ignored the dismissive tone of the former jokester, the fibers of whose soul irreversibly coarsened in the thieves' dashingness. "Man initially wants everything and is open to everything, only don't press one key all your life, for the music will be too monotonous."

"The music is such as it is," Yul snapped. "You perhaps was strumming your suites on your keys of your own will, but on my piano those fucking sadists were pounding with their boots and batons..."

"That's why you go in circles and can dispense with all the rest that you perceive as insignificant? It's kind of a nihilistic stance: if I don't feel it, others have to feel nothing, either."

"Which of you gave me all the rest?" asked Yul, hunched over the table, like a hundred-year-old geezer, looking at the turbidly green dregs in the glass. "Wouldn't I snatch pieces out of your jaws, I would be begging near garbage cans without pants..."

"Yes, yes, I heard from Bez," he answered the unspoken thought of this failed writer-realist. "Now someone could print your stories, probably, now your topics are relevant."

"My stories are all in the latrine." Having shaken the marinade, Yul splashed out the lees on the wall and turned the bottle bottom upwards to pour the next horse dose of alcohol into the glass. "Were they published then, I wouldn't have dived into a tailspin nor gone off the deep end in my misdeeds... But he spurned me, his bosom friend; he chucked me out then with a kick in my grimy snout; he bade me to sod off for good, he a shitty bouncer of their crappy literary window-dressing!"

Having switched to the typical abuse lexicon, Yul, presumably from resentment against his friend-Judas, drained his glass in one draught, getting not so inebriated from these two-hundred-gram portions as more embittered and ruder.

"Among you, I'm always unlucky, and whatever I write all is untenable, as he put it, this lousy hack," Yul went on haranguing about his haplessness, alternating the vodka with salo, a pickled tomato and a cold boiled potato. "You, burghers, are my fiercest enemies; it is you who egg the fuzz on me, for fear that I'll tear your throats, law-abiding citizens..."

"And for that you invited me?" he said, saddened by Yul's drunken degeneration being aggravated with every passing minute. "To confess your inextinguishable hatred?"

"What if I diddled you?" the double-dyed felon cheered up jeeringly, for he already invented what a dirty trick he could play. "Maybe I decided to expropriate your parka gratis..."

"I appreciate your English humor." Their gazes met, and in Yul's cruel colorless eyes there was no shadow of laughter, as before. "However, it's time to go, I already overstay your welcome. In such a dangerous district, I'll hardly catch a taxi," he moved back on the chair from the table that prevented him from getting up. "Then I'll be forced to hoof it."

"It is true that this shanty town is dangerous," the unkindly transformed crony confirmed his fears and, having rocked back abruptly, removed his tattooed hands from the table somewhere. "If anybody went missing here, how to find him in these slums..."

"Why do you tell me about such horrors?" he grinned. "I'm at a loss."

"I hit on an idea. Let's swap jackets," the master of impromptu hold-up outlined the scheme of an extempore action to him. "Put on my reefer and get out of here alive."

"Indeed, it's funny, well done," he praised Yul's wit and rose from his chair to step towards the sofa with their outerwear. "Thank you for the meaningful conversation..."

But as soon as he touched his anorak lying on the edge, Yul sitting near it quickly pressed his jacket with the foot to the floor.

"Could you not wipe your shoes against this garment?" he politely asked the enraged robber. "The thing is expensive enough, and I cherish it."

"All of you cherish your rags. What else do you cherish, fuckers," Yul muttered with hatred, and immediately the shiny blade of the opened knife jumped out of his right fist, from behind his leg, with a click. "I'll cut your duds into shreds-you naked will be hopping in the frost..."

"I see you can be rabid," he was compassionately surprised at Yul's fury. "So you're able to send me to kingdom come, like others? Or you're too weak, after all, against real strength, with your yatagan?"

"Don't tempt fate," Yul warned, slowly moving the switchblade up and down like a barber with a razor. "It's a knife for a bear..."

"Please," he unexpectedly held out his unprotected palm. "Stab, if you want."

"That's all, you're dead," Yul said with a frosty smirk of his metal teeth. "You infuriated me."

Yul brought the hardened taiga knife to his palm and began to unhurriedly stick the sharpened point into the line of life known to palmists.

"I'd sprinkle you all with kerosene," Yul kept saying, pressing harder and harder, "and set all on fire with one match..."

But the blade, as if bumping into something, could not pierce the skin however hard Yul tried, while his palm, solid as stone, as if pushing forward the invisible wall, insuperably shifted the hand with the knife closer and closer to Yul's face, dark from the exertion and from the nauseating horror.

"No, not a wolf," he said in an undertone, as he was pressing on the blade. "Don't exaggerate..."

And realizing that Yul, no longer able to endure the strain of this educational experiment, was about to rush at him in blind panic consternation of a beast confused in the face of an unknown terrible enemy, he sharply and strongly threw Yul back together with the chair to the window, so that his vis-a-vis toppled over and banged the gray back of his head against the rusty cast-iron rib of the central heating battery, having dropped the frightening knife in the ensuing insensibility and sprawled clumsily on the cracked floorboards.

Yul fallen into a deep swoon was supposed to regain consciousness no earlier than he would have retired along the deserted winter streets at a considerable distance and ceased the forced preventive remote control of the unfortunate accident that had smitten the rampageous hobo; therefore, he picked up his jacket with his gloves and ski cap thrust into the pocket and, rounding the table, so as to avoid stepping over the lying body, went out of the room into the darkness of the hallway.

But no sooner had he crossed the threshold than he stepped into some fleeting shift of temporary layers that had ruptured the space by their displacement within him, and he, broken out of the linear flow of the petty present into the instantaneous nine-month time interval which suddenly split the future and past, came, already with his wet autumn cloak in the hand, into the room of his stepfather, who called him on the phone for a meeting on "a very important matter for all of you" and now shambled to the kitchen to make tea for a dear guest too rarely visiting him.

*

"Yes, no doubt," he thought, settling down in the wobbly armchair, where his late mother loved to sit so much in the evenings, and again falling into the dimension of this self-focus, as holistically episodic as continuous thinking, which was never being fixed in events or in any time constants. "Yes, no one disappears without a trace, the difference is only in the meaning of the spiritual essences of individuals completed by bodily death in the planetary memory of mankind as a hypostasis of God, and Epicurus, who said, 'Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling', would be right if man would not be anything else except a biological organism for himself and if death, as he saw it in his imagination, would destroy him really wholly, without the rest, nullifying the meaning of the specifically human phenomenon of non-evolutionary and non-programmed impulsive creativity that distinguished him from other earthly creatures and that often gushed forth the novelty, regrettable for short-lived mortals and subordinating them, which, in the self-regulation of the human race, explicable by instincts, tribal egoism and the mobile balance of ethnoi, would resemble a kind of self-elimination of mutants, not committed to the normal living of the only earthly life, with some excessively developed hypertrophically-spiritual property, to the detriment of total predetermination of self-sufficient flesh, if their evocative discoveries brought into the world of natural patterns did not constitute all the cultures of the earthly civilization and did not serve as fulcrums in the upheavals of consciousness transforming human history and redistributing the roles in the action of a planetary-cosmic scale that was acquiring new coherence and aspiration of the spirit for the participants. However, in this case, without God in us, without the first principle of our nature, without a personal spark of universal light, man would be inexplicable, since his main distinction is the gift of infinite cognition in all manifestations of his mind and in all the personifications of his essentially syncretic consciousness, of his light molding the universe of his soul from the primordial chaos, while cognition, by the way, is none other than the realization of the inner germinal identity between the cognizer and the cognizable; and what determines the sequence, the systematic logic of the correspondence between knowledge and the spiritual maturity of humankind--what reveals itself in insights and intuitions and what, with global leveling cataclysms, cuts off the dead-end branches of the excessively egocentric arbitrariness or stagnant souring in the finality of any absolutisms--what is the plan of our aggregate self-knowledge, our gradual self-disclosure in the world, our building of the Cosmos that is always human for us and the Almighty who always creates us--that is the question of questions from time immemorial, the answer to which is we ourselves with the sight given to us and the element of light, and with the perishability of our overly demanding mortal flesh dulling the premature divinity and, in general and in particular, setting natural limits to our suicidal, as a rule, omnipotence, wherein we also cannot but see some complex implementation of God's design for incarnating in us a holistically unfolding image of consciousness ascending to itself..."

It was clear that in its, perhaps, cyclical becoming, humanity discovering this plan in all epochs comprehended only a part of the design and in general outline only, in the contours of human perspicacity, denoting such new awareness in varying degrees adequately to the worldviews prevailing in individual souls and either separately many-sided or uniting similarly minded populations and communities into focal groups of co-religionists and into gigantic religious regions, as well as either opening the gates to the soul into the saving meaning of its birth or plunging the spirit into the darkness of doom and into the automatism of animality; and the holistic coordination of interactions within the human race, just like between its dependent reason and the planet, including the genus "Homo sapiens", was by no means carried out by people, though, naturally, through them. The lot of man was his freedom, which, as Jaspers said, could not be known, because, he would add, freedom was God in him, and in order to fully become what God intended him to be in his potentially all-human individuality, he had to follow, as much as possible, his own self, taking into account, true, two indispensable important conditions: the uniqueness of the lived life and the probable immortality of each variant; whereas death, destroying the natural "pupation" that shaped the spirit and fixing the final meaning of the "life path" forever by the last detailed illumination of the interrupted life with the erupting fire of the all-seeing memory, was presenting personality to be judged already in God, already as a formed quantum of light of a burnt star, as a spiritual cast of the disappeared original, existing henceforth only so, as this immortal "I" remembering and realizing himself from the point of view of that higher planetary "I", whence he originated and where he returned as the experience of a partial individual incarnation, in the memory of the planet creating the future of its "image of the universal fantasy", the completion of whose fate that they all incessantly realized was supposed to resurrect in the all-illuminating fire of the Last Judgment all the constituent individual variants of the planetary spiritual space in their true meaning correlating the fate of their whole for the earthly hypostasis of God which was turning into a quantum of the memory of the entire cosmos and distributing the energy clots of spiritual results, immortal as the consciousness of their universe, according to the gradations of their light intensity.

But the most important thing for man was still his posthumous complicity in the fate of the humanized kindred spirit, and here, descending from God back to man, he also always found that his memory, as the imprinting of his perpetually ongoing present being on the entire structure of corporality, was the matter of his consciousness, from which, like God, he was creating both time, and the worlds accessible to him, and his personal uniqueness, never ceasing to be amazed by all this in himself from the first glimpses of his own reason. And as in man all his memory, genetic, subjective and bodily, was shaping his fate, so his fate partly shaped the fate of the planet and its humanity, while the victory over his physical death, which man so inspiredly dreamt of, would have led to perpetuating the transient and to liquidating the future that would not have had the opportunity to germinate in the cycle of life, where all naturally conserved spiritual variants, exhausted themselves, would have been equalized and the "divinity" of outbursts of genius and talents selected by continual self-renewal and cull would have died down, and where the time allotted for ascent and self-creation would not have been making him shorten life with the reckless self-immolation in his calling and the search for truth, offering the creator, who was a seeker of God, instead of his future participation in the elemental-deep creation of new being, some bad infinity of purely this-worldly handicraft "improvements" of everyday life, mired in the complacency of the reification of the mind and limited by his current incarnation, and the soul, bereft of requital and retribution, breaking away from the cosmos, was doomed to circulate within the primitive-permanent reality of the "I" that was sick to death of itself.

However, neither the resurrection of the dead expected, say, by the Russian dreamer Nikolai Fedorov (for they participated in the process of creation with all their corporeality preserved in the spirit without such galvanization) nor the "sobornost" as a reduction to the togetherness of uniformity (which would have paralyzed self-adjustment of the planet driven by contradictions of conflictuality, including of consciousness) seemed to figure in the plans of the again rediscovered God, just as there were no chances for the time being that humanity could suddenly achieved a genius-level in its entirety, having merged together into one planetary personality, actually being it in its essence, programmed to encompass itself and reconcile its conflicts perhaps only in the final flash of the summation erasing it from the Earth (the experience of which was transmitted bit by bit to the next rounds of earthly nature possessing reason, as, apparently, the experience of the previous round was inherited in their strikingly contemporary and insightful archaic myths, glowing in the depths with the innermost mystery of the meaning, single for all human history).

In other words, on the scale of the original design materializing from the generally completed pre-existent prototype of the Creator's imagination, he wouldn't have denied anything in the world at all, as it often happened in the magic circle of his compassionate love, but being an episode and an element of creation, he, at the same time, could not but adhere, like everyone else, to his human version of "verity" and "falsity", giving both preference and sympathies to spiritually-manifested and creatively-viable variants, as opposed either to the wretched inarticulateness of superficial mass subordination to the dictates of external duties, temptations and dominations or to the fecklessly-unbridled waywardness of misanthropic obduracy and chronic hopelessness mauling the dying forlorn goners, like Yul, who were writhing in the desolation of their talentless contrariness and fruitlessly wasted life, in contrast to the rare terminal lucidity of "God's children" that fulfilled the mission of their calling. And even the obscuration of self-torture and malicious contempt for themselves occasionally haunting the "outcast" nations could be explained, in his opinion, by the despotically-corrective imbalance of the reproductive and creative beginnings in them fatal for the very nations, when the continuity of spirituality and giftedness being the root connection of the subsoil life-giving radiance with flora and fauna of human evolution heretofore was to be ruthlessly uprooted for the purpose of autocratic selection to leave all so-called humus after tearing out the spiritual supports to hang like a sagging brittle crust over the yawning emptiness and to ulcerate on the surface by the enlarging areas of erosion, either lifelessly arid and barren, like saline and sandy deserts, or boggy and swampy, like quagmire with slippery tussocks sinking under foot. Yet he, of course, had to accept that the imbalances were not accidental, too, as was his perseverance in overcoming the current agricultural consequences of such "weeding of weeds to the contrary" in his country.

In a word, salvation for him consisted in going his own "way of the spirit" to the final prepared for him, which, naturally, was not to be philosophically calculated in the abstract, but to be experienced in reality; meanwhile, his memory played cruel jokes with him: from his daughter's letters, he learned that everything was going well for her there and that she was accepted into Bill's family and environment, and since September, as she planned, after the diligent assimilation of the mountains of necessary information during the previous year, she attended the prestigious university of her husband as a full-fledged student, but in his dreams he saw her for some reason as a small and defenseless girl getting into all sorts of troubles in his morbidly macabre nightly serials, and he, who was stoically reconciling himself to the inevitability of his own death, from a piercing understanding of the inevitability of the same lot for her as well and from the powerless pity to her, who, like him, should die someday, was shedding real tears in a dream over her imaginary troubles and over the instantaneousness of her seemingly happy life, whose bustle still obscured the humanly tragic mystery of the transformation of man's God into the world of his flesh, with a final flash of retrospective clairvoyance, all-encompassing as the fate of everyone, with the irreparable immortality of the humanization of light that happened once and for all, and with the lifelessness of the perishable body, formerly so living and demanding and turning into some soulless remains now; plus, at night he was pursued at times by some ghastly yellow mug with goggled cadaverous eyeless eyelids, and he, with a sacrificial sinking of his pounding heart, was hiding in vain from it, knowing that he would be found and helplessly feeling that the omnipresent hand was about to reach him, and recognizing with disgust the features of his own face, already alien and terrible, in this ugly mask looming as if without a body.

In real life, he noticed both in himself and in Nadine some, alas, irrefutable signs of impending aging, which foreshadowed with gray hair, ailments and fatigue from passions, the dreary time of imminent withering, depressingly boring and aimless with the loss of the taste for systematic philosophizing, and frightened him personally, frankly speaking, more than the night Guignol by the specter of destitute decrepitude, naturalistically illustrative now in the loneliness of infirm old men and old women, the number of whom grew exponentially in parallel with the number of vigorously proliferating firms "for the rich" and who poked about among the rubbish of garbage cans and the food waste of grocery stores, where they stood in queues for available inexpensive products from the shrinking assortment of goods, most often for gray bread in empty bakeries, chewing their pension chunk after that on the benches of railway stations and parks or humbly asking for alms, without professional extortion and begging, from their employable compatriots hurrying through the underpasses and along the streets, for, unlike them, they were forsaken by the present time ("epoch-making" in the words of high-flown newspaper oracles) of openly permitted cheating, fleecing and sharing the loot in their "inadaptable" senile worthlessness to live from hand to mouth in indignant humiliation in front of the newly-minted triumphers that were trampling rancorously on their habitual symbols and sacred stereotypes thrown down from the pedestals. The emphasis here should rather have been placed not on the gradually weathered and emasculated sacredness, but on the familiarity of what was instilled from childhood and absorbed by their human memory, in which the content of their ill-defined worldview, labeled "soviet ideology", or fallacy and deceit, had grown together with all the myriad lifelong associations with some perceptions, impressions, experiences of the fates they lived in other times, wherefore, with all his aversion to these unrealizable "tales for simpletons", he was still not predisposed to accuse them of special absurdity, since history knew many examples of similar departures into self-destruction of everyday bigotry, and only a few succeeded in rising over an epoch, whatever it may be, far from completely, though, due to the relativity of freedom of even the most brilliant forerunners and seers, equally dependent on the universally elemental energy of the "God's gift" and on some concrete human experience sculpting all the inhabitants of the planet one way or another, given that it was sometimes absolutely godless and chimerically gruesome.

As if complementing his thoughts, the hurried old man's shuffling of a typical "fragment of an empire" was heard in the corridor, and his stepfather with cups and teapots went briskly, grunting and mumbling something under his breath, across the room to the table covered with the oilcloth cracked on the folds and patterned with cerulean rhombs and cornflowers, to put a blue teapot with black spots of broken off enamel and with a smoking spout onto one of the newspapers piled on the table and on the back of the sofa or lying as yellowed dusty piles on the windowsill behind the nylon curtains, gray from many years of unwashedness.

A porcelain sugar bowl with chipped edge and a packet of cookies had been prepared on a saucer in advance, and a well-fed glossily-brown specimen of a cockroach army already sauntered on the packet, while its brethren scurrying about everywhere inhabited both the paper heaps, and the creaky furniture, and the stained threadbare carpet on the floor; and in combination with the stale reek of tobacco pervading the stagnant air and with the chicken odor of unlaundered clothes, of mustiness and moldiness, inherent in the old multi-family communal flats, all that made the room where he spent his childhood a cluttered derelict fetid lair with a lonely neglected widower in an utterly worn-out tracksuit, once presented by them to him for an anniversary, and in torn slippers for the house, bought personally by a granddaughter, mindful of her granddad before.

"Come on, sit at the table, tea is ready," his stepfather invited him, placing the cups. "I'd have offered you something stronger, but there is nothing to drink but water..."

"Why didn't hang your coat on the rack?" After turning to him, the stepfather immediately noticed violation of the order in the unnoticed room disarray. "You're not at the railway station."

"Take a bundle there in the pocket," he advised the convinced champion of discipline and subordination, who grabbed the wet dust coat that he did not leave in the corridor. "It is a present for you from Vicky, a parcel from Uncle Sam, so to say... Only you save it, all this is for you alone," he added, shifting from the armchair to a chair while the old man messed about with the parcel. "You should economize now..."

"Yes, it is true, with my pension I have to economize on everything today," the stepfather readily began to complain, taking out a gaudily catchy, cellophane-shiny box of overseas chocolates. "These scoundrels want the country to reach the end of its tether..."

"It's not the first time for this country to be at the end of its tether," he said, without specifying exactly which of the vast category of present-day scoundrels the sclerotic retiree reviled, touchedly studying with watery eyes a bright color photograph of the adult granddaughter from the American parcel. "And here is our Vicky near the university where she has entered. So you can admire..."

"I'll stand her onto the sideboard," the stepfather mumbled feelingly, and their conversation was resumed only after the photo of Victoria supplemented the gallery of her portraits of all ages that adorned the sideboard and her gifts were securely hidden, whereas the stepfather, after banishing the dust coat thrown in an inappropriate place from the room, calmed down at last and proceeded to tea-drinking.

"You could have called me more often at least, to check whether I live or dead," the stepfather reproached him for a start. "It is good that I'm still spry enough, and the neighbors buy something for me, out of the kindness, otherwise, I would have rotted alive here in loneliness..."

"Twice a week, if that's fine with you," he put the relations on a practical footing. "Besides, if anything, we have a telephone, too, and you may call at any time. Further, as our unforgettable leaders of the proletariat liked to say, 'the issue of food'. I cannot promise you a horn of plenty, but we're quite able to allocate some additional subsidies. A kind of monthly allowance to your pension."

"But you yourself have enough? It is somehow uncomfortable..." His unexpected altruism somewhat embarrassed the stepfather. "I more or less scrape along as yet; I'm on state support; they must allocate all that is due to me..."

"I'm afraid you'll be waiting for their bounties until you conk from starvation on such 'oodles noodles'," he quipped meekly. "You all have been rewarded already for meritorious service-by throwing on the scrap-heap in your old age. But don't worry, by now we fully paid off for the wedding and managed without going on vacation last year, and our salaries are to help to tide us over until better times..."

The social system, yielded to bourgeois decay and mammon, was the sore spot of the stepfather, and it was more humane not to rub salt into this sore, because in the end, it was the toilers who were requited with poverty for commitment to a cause, and not parasites, bribe-takers and embezzlers holding sway with impunity over working people under the banner of the new "justice", and just they, who didn't make any fortune for a rainy day, were intended today as logs for laying in the foundation of another "bright future", which spelled only losses for them and the inability to live out their lives with dignity, though these lives were rather hard, as it is. By this, in fact, their hysterical indignation and passive rage were fueled, of which the new generations of ambitious and self-serving political loudmouths strove to take advantage, as of old, in order to dictatorially straddle the real "tomorrow" of the apolitical fellow citizens with this soviet "retro" and drive them again into the revamped barracks of the familiar tyranny.

"In short, I episodically bring you something, and you dispose of it as you like. What 'important business' is that you urgently need to see me?" he hushed up the awkward issue about the humanitarian relief, rendered not out of great love.

"Oh, by the way, you reminded me just in time," the stepfather, who had forgotten the main thing, remembered suddenly and began to fussily rummage in his desk for some papers. "I wrote a testament in your name, so you and Torie are my heirs..."

"Torie" was his pet name for the little "piggy Vicky".

"Look here," the forgetful homeowner produced him a sheet with the last will. "You will own all the property after me, only give me a proper burial. Quid pro quo, as they say," the stepfather joked, apologizing for the future troubles and expenses. "Is everything correct there?"

"Now you have to certify it at the notary. I'll go with you this week," he said, returning the sheet with the horrendous sentimental mishmash, where "my dearly beloved granddaughter" was mixed with the transfer of existing property rights and with pompous instructions to the stepson "to love your Motherland" and "to work honestly", despite the fact that this dishonest, shameless regime of plebeian boorish "party-mindedness" took away Motherland deserving love from them from their youth, while the work under the rule of omnipotent communistic shepherds and greedy swindlers among the ranks of obedient populace could not provide true well-being, as they knew from their own experience, however, having drawn dissimilar conclusions, as usual. "Re-registering your flat on Vicky is not a bad idea. Having housing, she perhaps will visit us more frequently to sojourn here a little longer..."

"Or she even may return to her homeland," the stepfather readily subscribed to his optimistic vision of the future.

"She won't return," he objected sadly. "And thank God that she won't return, or else here she would always be a frustrated would-be humanitarian scholar with all her talents and in all her professions. Here she is to reap the fruits of your enthusiasm until the end of time."

"You simply cannot do without telling me some nasty thing," the stepfather was miffed. "Anyway, about ourselves we thought in the last place, and our idea of social justice was right..."

"For you it was right," he refrained from vilifying the heroism of collectivist selflessness that absurdly rejected any not applied value of an individual who, in his total expediency, was undergoing amputation of himself as freedom, that is, as God and as his genuine "I", and becoming a kind of docile tool of general fate and an easily replaceable instrument in the hands of various puppeteers, which, on the one hand, significantly weakened the qualitative power of the human spirit in the quantitative bodily overpopulation, but, on the other hand, engendered the devaluation of human personality that was exposed in periods of wars, unrest, mass repressions and apogees of unrestricted mafiosity and that sounded distinctly both in the parade fanfare of his stepfather's duped-uniformed youth and in the pillage of the current charity of his social security. "But the idea in its true form is its implementation. Whatever whoever conceived at first, but its inner meaning lies in this realization and in nothing else."

"What, are you blaming me for something?" His stinging words cut the stepfather to the quick, though such a long complicated phrase was scarcely understood by him. "I can't blame myself for anything."

"Well, don't blame, spare your nerves..."

What irritated him in previous years was the incapacity of the then extolled "veterans" to judge themselves not from the standpoint of their "services to the party and the state", yet now he was rather inclined to grieve for this self-defending "irreproachability", because for them both reward and wages of sins were concentrated forever in the all-powerful idol of their "socialist fatherland" (just as for their cynical antagonists running the system--in the idol of all-powerful capital, preferably in hard currency and in foreign banks), and the blindness of their "ideological conviction" did not allow them to see all their lives at least once in its true God-given meaning in all-seeing repentance, as they were to see it at the moment of the last insight, the last glance of the soul at itself; meanwhile their overthrown idol being replaced right before their eyes by some other ones, less slavish and inhuman, was subjected to scoffs and desecration, which is why today they had nothing to rely on, except for their preposterous "ideas" that were unbearably false in the practical application and debunked by its own history, taking into consideration that they, for the most part, were almost unable to rely on their souls, in other words, on God in themselves.

"I don't deny your ideals, I only explain..."

Denial, so popular everywhere, was, from his philosophical point of view, a property of the consciousness subordinated to the negated inside it, and the more zealously and uncompromisingly something was denied, the more clearly emerged this spiritual dependence which to a large extent likened denial to worship, as, say, happened in the obtrusiveness of the kitschy "communistic" symbolism of the essentially corpse-eating "SotsArt" or in the obsession of the bleak domestic "postmodernism" with the cluttered and littered memory for the soviet garbage dump with the abhorrently absurd realities of the "shitty" everyday life; whereas he, as if "coming out of the stream", perceived everything that he had lived out as a fact, as an object, as a phenomenon to be explained in the unity of its necessity and contingency and in the interdependence of its episodic uniqueness, not at all new in the sublunary world; and without reaching Attic ataraxia or Tibetan transcendent detachment, he excluded himself with such a comprehensive approach from participation in something being explained so as to be among "objective observers" somewhere outside.

"Then explain what is going on in the country?" the "relic of the glorious past" cried out demandingly to the stepson-thinker consonantly with his unspoken thoughts. "What have we been toiling for, and overcoming all adversity and hardship?"

"What does it matter," he answered sympathetically, sparing the irreconcilable retrograde who got stuck on the "achieved historical milestones", in the constants of the understandable and close, but collapsed ancientness, and not finishing off the old toiler with documentary illustrations of the blood relationship of different phases of depersonalizing the human personality that was being narrowed by now terror, regulations and ranks, now triumphant cupidity and money-grubbing, now swaggering vainglory and chauvinistic obscurantism. Especially since everyone was overwhelmed with that aspiration which he was worthy of and in which the spiritual sending of his accidental birth manifested itself as the meaning of his existence in the world, even if he himself sometimes did not realize this meaning nor believed in it, but was going adrift like a ship without a rudder and plunging into dissipation, crazy from lack of steering. "In former times, too, there were such goings-on that it's better not to discuss them; besides, walking in the same circles for so many years gets people bored. You were happy in your time, and enough of you. We, for example, lived in another time, while our children, it seems, will get even less: only continuous 'consequences' and social costs of a way to communism."

"Sooner or later you will regret repudiating us," the stepfather suddenly foretold, pursing his parchment lips ascetically sunken from toothlessness. "After banging your heads against your capitalism you will come back to us in any case..."

"Firstly, I don't think that the repudiation has already taken place," he was not slow to appease this socialistic Jeremiah. "Secondly, your experience is invaluable, and it won't soon pass into the past. And thirdly, returns never lead to any good, because time hardly lend itself to resuscitation, even in art and in memory. Therefore, let's live each in his own way, in accordance with our desires, means and age, and enough with didactic edification. If you like your past, you may cherish it and preserve, but as a sample it is very controversial, don't take it amiss."

"What an eagle was I in my youth, it's nice to recall," the stepfather heaved a sigh, lulled by the smooth and long period of the speech and fatigued with brain efforts, because of which the last derogatory remark was missed in all likelihood; and then, as ever at their infrequent meetings, the lonely retiree proceeded to the repeating detailed narrations about the telling examples and instructive milestones of his military-work biography; and he was forced again, as usual, to hear these true stories without interrupting, with resigned boredom and with an expression of genuine interest on his face, for at least an hour, so that the old man could speak out to his heart's content.

"Is it possible that I will live to be such too?" he thought, turning off the sound of the rasping voice by withdrawal into oneself honed from student days and looking unseeingly at the moving lips lisping about the past.

And the invisible millstones of the strata of time again displaced by a passing shift of consciousness instantly erased this tiresome miserable decrepit pensioner, and the heaps of newspaper trash, and the dim dilapidation of the barely lit room encumbered with some junk; and a cursory blurry sketch of transitional splash of memory suddenly recreated around him the unassuming furnishings of the familiar kitchen, in which, on a thin line of the evening December reality and the surrounding timeless space of thinking, where he was about to step for the coming months of endless self-immersion, he was sitting at the table near the gas stove with a copper turka put to brew coffee and continued the inadvertently arisen conversation with Nadine who had distracted him from his thoughts and spoke as if from the unsteady darkness of the surrounding blurriness, and who was the same nondescript nebula as other long-familiar objects in his present alienation.

*

"If not about religion, you think of something?" Nadine reproached him in passing. "You're simply some homegrown cleric now."

"The path to God is not necessarily through the church," he dropped, closing (from curious eyes) his notebook and laying his ballpoint pen as bookmark on an unfinished page. "Actually, every path is to God; the question is what exactly and with what luggage."

"Whenever you open your mouth, it is always about God," Nadine complained sadly. "The topic is not very interesting."

"That's depending on what you mean by God. If he is the grandpa Sabaoth from propaganda pictures, then indeed..."

"Then who is he, to your mind?" she interrupted him. "What is God?"

And here he saw her again, not only from the outside, as a woman beloved for over twenty years, still graceful and still charming him with her terracotta-ancient sunny beauty and the matte black glow of the night glimmering magic of huge almond eyes, but also as her soul, as herself with her only life melting day by day, with her hopeless stubborn resistance to aging gradually creeping into her and washing out her former youth and attractiveness cell by cell from her perfect body, and with her lonely fear of defenseless childish abandonment sometimes overtaking her in the fall into darkness which more and more frequently haunted her with age and was final and meaninglessly impenetrable for her simple-hearted, life-loving unbelief, because the flesh that she felt herself to be and that caused this icy dread of non-existence in her consciousness, could not remain living forever and reconcile itself to the inevitable disappearance.

"God is everything: in man He is the soul, for man He is the world. Everything that exists," he disclosed to her the primordial truth of human self-consciousness, repeatedly rediscovered and altered in every way. "Therefore, He is different for everyone, depending on your nature and on your forms of His humanization: as you interpret your involvement in something greater and your connection with it, such is your God. In fact, our God is our sense of affinity between our soul and the world; while what is the soul and what is the world is always conjectural and problematic..."

"But you, however, spend a lot of time on this," Nadine incidentally stated the insoluble contradiction of his behavior, which no longer increased either the income or the scientific capital of her whacky spouse. "The question is why."

"Because our cognition is the self-discovery of God in us, I can't explain otherwise. For others, all this is different, as it falls to their lot with their fate and talent, and, let's say, I was just unlucky to be born unable to meet someone's requirements."

"Yes, bad luck," Nadine admitted his rightness. "So, you are more interesting for yourself now than any life experiences. Many thanks for clarity."

"I am self-concentrated not completely, don't ascribe to me the attributes of an absolute deity, for I'm still a beginner," he disowned. "Well, if it is boring you to hear about God, then henceforth I will be silent when I'll again feel drawn to such monologues. And Lao Tzu, as I remember, taught us fools: 'Those who know do not speak'..."

"So you take a vow of silence?" Nadine needled him subtly, and in her causticity, as well as in her more frequent intrusions on his solitude by very abstract tirades aloud, he again felt her weariness from a long attachment to him, who was, to tell the truth, a big bore in their somewhat impoverished and eventless "private life".

"As regards God, yes," he promised. "From now on, I swear to remain an unutterable mystery. And if I shall be forgetful, please remind me."

"Now you're not forgetful, by the by?" inquired this inveterate mocker, casting a sidelong glance of her black headlights at the stove behind the husband oathbreaker. "Coffee won't boil over?"

"Drat!" he jumped up from the stool, hurriedly turning to the stove.

"If you have lit the burner, of course," Nadine smiled ironically.

And already leaving the kitchen, she added:

"You could have opened gas, for variety, Chinese sage..."

He really didn't light the gas under his coffee, and he had no reason to react so nervously and jump, but when he grasped the turka forgotten on the stove, he swore once again and jerked his hand away from the metal that burned his fingers. And having looked into the copper vessel heated by God knows what a miracle, to his amazement, he saw there the settling foamy head of boiled coffee grounds.

His expectation and his unconscious belief in something not occurring in reality turned out to be stronger than the slip-up he had made, and he had to take cognizance of this strange sign from above as a new confirmation or refutation of his understanding of his calling and chosenness, which, apparently, did not fit in his human limitations and either unpredictably intruded into the inviolable regularity of self-generation of planetary existence being not subject to living beings, or displaced his erupting excessiveness beyond the earthly creativeness into God's radiance that chose him and that was always pregnant with impulsive splashes of almightiness.

He raised the turka by the curved hot handle, and the millstones of time budged and drew him onward through the space of some vague and insignificant daily routine flowing around the almost hermetic cosmos of his consciousness as an amorphous external stream and grinding, like corundum, the facelessly merging weeks of both the barely perceptible winter with the cold radiators of the switched off central heating and the gray spring virtually unnoted by him; and this stream carried him, thought after thought and layer after layer of the vision of the world which was clearing up anew in him and exploring the immensity of its own volume, past the financial props of his relative everyday stability fractured by the next sharp reversal in policy and swept away by the avalanche collapses of the ramming impact of the "reformative" upheaval on the whole rusty mechanism of the soviet economy that immediately started crumbling with dismantling, burying along the way the agonizing, completely exsanguinated culture and the crushed cheerless life of the population with blighted hopes, thwarted plans, and unexpected indigence, whose labor savings "for a rainy day" and "for retirement" were reduced to dust, which, of course, forced the survivors to collect bones and, elbowing other victims aside and trampling the falling ones, to get out of the wreckage individually, by artels and joint-stock associations, starting again from scratch, from the "cruel laws of the jungle" not so encouraging people to create something useful for this plundered country as recruiting gangs of ferocious gluttonous ruffians into the ranks of a metastatically swollen army of marauders, from high-ranking corrupt officials to ordinary extortionists, from bribable functionaries and thieves out of necessity to the resellers inundating the streets and to the stockbrokers driving up the inflated prices for products of curtailed production, for all of them had somewhere to profit in the crisis-setting leapfrog of lawlessness and the right of the strongest, or better to say, of those who were rich and influential, no longer draping their omnipotence with rags of the former ideology, whatever some plebs gossiped about their arbitrariness in the near-bottom accumulation of the critical potential of social privation flaring up in places as outbursts of aggression foreshadowing the future bacchanalia of havoc and mayhem.

To put it shortly, here, in the splitting of the vast territory into its heterogeneous "sovereign" parts, which was shaking one-sixth of the earth, humanity was going into the next circle of self-dissolution and hostility, where the bursting abscesses and foci of spiritual destructiveness were forming on the site of deep chronic inflammation, oozing the herd coercion of degeneration in the lumpen stinginess of the physical survival and in the looting of mafia mercenaries, against the backdrop of new civil and other wars bloodily exuding ichor of nationalist pathos; while he, having neither extra hours nor the desire to sort the fairly obvious reality of decay out and collect in vain, for chewing over in conversations with colleagues and friends, some information details of the current "transitional moment of history" (as if there were moments not "transitional"), was passing the next round of the spiral of his ascent to the truth of his spontaneously god-like self--to the truth, already tangible as a sudden clarity of sight inward and as a planetary broadening of his introverted outlook--to the truth that was gradually worded as it got verbally identified.

As it often happens, it all started accidentally with a mere trifle: when briefly expounding to one hair-splitting student the scholarly opinion on the topic of the again popular belief in the transmigration of souls, which rightly did not exclude the natural lower forms of the human spirit from the age-old circular redistribution of planetary flesh and from the complicity of energy clots weighed down by biologicality in naturalness akin to them, he suddenly thought that the main principle of preserving and transmitting any information, as was well known, was the coding of something smaller inside something larger, that is, the entry of a part infinite in itself into a certain whole in a qualitatively defined contracted form of some integral element of the program, and consequently, such coding was establishing the limits of penetration: for the larger--in the impenetrable integrity of the minimum, and for the smaller--in the insurmountable inexhaustibility of the maximum; and if for the elements of some level of integrity their whole, their "God", was the source of their infinity and freedom, then for "God", for the whole, its components were particles of memory about the "unfolding" of his program in the local independence of partial projects and functional tasks. And the obligatory inclusion of any level of being in the structure between two limits not only gave substantiation of both the phenomenon of great-memory as the discovery of one's own potential openness of a part in a whole, for example, and the syndrome of the awakening of the experience of another deceased person's life in one's consciousness as the getting of the ultimate memory codes of the highest level into the universe of individual memory, but also explained the miracles of someone's prediction of the future and other breakthroughs of the spirit into the dimensions of some larger structural volume, where the pieces of human history, colossal for those who participated in them, were presenting themselves to consciousness as the likeness of that panoramic, from end to beginning, posthumous glance-meaning, which was the very mankind and all the instantaneous time of the earthly mind for their intelligible cosmic God, and where the linearly orientated scientificity, finding itself in the opposite vector of reversibility of the events that had not yet taken place in the present, was coming face to face with the ubiquitous cross effect of the abiding of the seemingly emerging and moving world proving to be at every point the intersection of a bundle of differently directed vectors of creation, incalculable as the diameters of a ball.

However, what mankind was for God did not interest him as much as what God was for man, and not for some theoretical man conditioned by the fatal task of his corporeality and by the ciphers of computer modeling of social and geopolitical determinism, but for himself, with his arguing of the secondariness and derivativeness of the flesh and with his constant involuntary discernment of what was seen through the alluvial stratifications of public and animal influences molding every "I", namely, of some withered germs or the initial spiritual sprouts which had freely developed into the personality and were innumerably involved in the predetermined self-regulation of the biospheric layer of the global energy field of the planet that was accumulating the energy of the embodied spirit transforming this layer from within into its living shell which was gradually humanized and eaten away with reason filling it.

Therefore, by a fortunate coincidence of the very critically shoveled Russian spiritualism of the "Silver Age" and his own appropriate spiritual attunement actuated by the pertinent question of that young wiseacre who was keen on retellings of "esoteric mysteries", he beheld, and not for the first time, the unfathomably profound distinction between the homogeneously linear infinity of thinking absolutizing itself and the hierarchical structurality of the world order highlighted by his intuition, and now he had to get to the bottom of the meaning of this portent, which meant committing to paper the semantic content of his intuition in order that the unexpected prompt of the whole sounded for some reason in his consciousness was conveyed in its exact sign expression; all the more because this prompt kept on sounding in him, persistently stirring and stoking the fiery epicenter of his mental vision; and in the ontological harmonious architectonics of being that he was writing as a fair copy, without any drafts, painstakingly recreating it with his small handwriting in the text of his manuscript, no longer in notebooks, but on the snow-white expanses of separate sheets of coated paper, under the title "Theses of the myth", he again and again recognized his former conceptual revelations and analytical approaches which were smelted into artistically visual formulas of direct meditative contemplation and turned from the relatively firm, logically verified scaffolding of his foundationally-stable speculation erected as a temple of thought into some scrap metal of tentative sketchy constructions and terminological ore feeding today's elemental cosmogonic fire; and his "Theses" were, in essence, one multi-page formula of his afflatus, final for him, as he felt, so even he, the author (or co-author) perceived them in the process of detailed elaboration as a clot of all-seeing energy flowing over line-by-line onto the sheet that was all but burnt through, and embracing his entire image of the world.

He saw, naturally, God, since the world of human consciousness could not be anything else, for, as consciousness was for itself both an ever subjective microcosm and a self-creating beginning refracting everything "objective" into something "its own" or winnowing out it into non-existence, so God in His invariably hypothetical conceivability, accessible to humanity and confirmed by the miracles of each sufficiently strong faith, was for His human variation some consciousness cognizing its infinite from within "I" in creating forms of cognizable materiality, in which the reason seeking the last limits of cognition recognized a person as a paradoxically dual "incarnated thought" of self-knowledge of God by the human definition, and the structurality of which he strove to comprehend, trying in the theses of his obsessive perception of the world and in the illumination of faith to find God equal to his faith and true not owing to denial and limitation, but the meaning of the freedom given by Him.

But in the God of the former monotheism the inevitable analogy of humanization always exposed a purely human establishment of the completeness and perfection of the maximum by canceling-liquidating the dialectical contradictoriness in God's abiding, which was hypothesized as antinomies and triads maybe only in the reasoning of the interpreters of the world, who mainly interpreted the logic of their consciousness, but upon careful consideration of the abyss of both matter and one's own "ego", by no means in God himself that was not divided into the world and the creator and existed for himself everywhere, as everywhere He created the forms of himself for man, like man himself, existing as a single entity, undivided into "internal" and "external", considered the phantoms of consciousness he created as reflections of the extremely hypothetical "reality" that was changing for him along with his state of health and mindset, while to others he made himself known only in the forms of his life activity; meantime, there was no need to attribute some positive and negative superlatives to God who was again and again postulated by mankind, nor to specially prove His existence, because, as a rule, those were the religions striving for the dominance that needed proofs, whereas God was multifariously present in any person as his unconscious inner faith which suddenly coincided with some symbol and creed of the preached and planted church hypostases.

God proving to be a universal consciousness for man was infinite, closed and completed precisely as a consciousness, between the limits of its structural level, and in a cognizable minimum He consisted of the equal "bricks"-quarks (apparently, representing the abiding-becoming cosmoses of universal "selves", whose diversity generated the inexhaustible potentiality of freedom for the total self-realization of the God of their universes both in their incomprehensible individuality and in the stages of their self-awareness that was pulsing inside likewise from a primary clot exploding with starry-spatial materiality to the final all-embracing radiance compressing its realized being into the initial spark of the core, just as the freedom of each quark was generated, in its turn, by the unknown and unknowable self-creation of its "bricks"), while in the all-encompassing maximum of the self-sufficient "I" that could not but be itself, He constituted the quark matter of some metaexistence, conceivable as external beyond, which did not in the least detract from the absoluteness of God's free will and the limitlessness of His omnipotence, but was placing the Creator of this universe of his into the fathomlessness of the humanly immutable context of the spirit's self-determination.

Besides, his divine inspiration did not penetrate there, into the darkness of God's potentiality or beyond the boundary barrier of the corpuscularity of cosmic self-consciousness, for he possessed his vision only because, being one of the forms of being, inside God he was part of the entire light structure of the universal reason at the level of its earthly individualization, the brightness of which he was to supplement upon completion of the life-long lightening of his version of the world, as a separate spiritual energy quantum of the planetary structure of the astral-interconnected luminosity; and the whole multi-level structurality of the universal imagination gestating his immortal spark resonated in him in the diapason of human adequacy as in an instant glimpse of an thought, almost subconscious for the Almighty. For man, as well as for God, just he, realized, was a world, and he could find God only in himself, wherefore the seemingly spontaneous coordination and correlation of gradually transforming polyphonic views and epochal basic myths of consciousness in human kind discordantly polemicizing in word and deed were occurring in the alternation of faiths and unbeliefs in proportion to humanity's significance and role in the episodes of a single scenario for the self-disclosure of this incarnation, this human hypostasis of the Spirit glowing as co-creative-omnipotent corpuscles of the noosphere in the swarming of lower energies, which was probably destined, like his personal shoot, for something else except for the reproduction of progeny, self-preservation and the satisfaction of the enslaving-general desires for domination and the enjoyment of possession.

That is why even if the structure of the dubiously new myth described by him did not answer the fundamental primary question about the meaning of his spirituality corroding life, still it partly enabled him to understand in a human way his place in the parameters of some non-traditional God, too incredible for reason, and the essence of human exclusivity as a source of light creating both the world and itself. And most importantly, the "vexation of spirit" stirring the soul from time immemorial and superfluous, in principle, from the standpoint of concrete benefit and functional application received, thus, its super-task and pivotal aiming in the ascent of the spirit, global for God, through incarnation to awareness, from the partial bodily-subject scattering to the level of greater light coverage, where the ephemerality of the delimitation localizing the spirit was becoming increasingly visible; and just the enhancement of vision, the enlargement of the primordial spark expanding in cognition into a kind of luminary of individuality, was the dominant of spiritual aspiration, although in the mass of all mankind this growth was accompanied by backsliding to herd sameness and by renunciation of burdensome personal uniqueness, inasmuch as such counterbalance quelled the premature dominion of a planetary oneness of historically polymorphic human tribe as a bearer of elements of higher spiritual integrity structured by merging within the unconscious whole enveloping the neuronal-fiery core of the planet of natural flesh.

In the eagerness of consciousness to surpass its clarity that was driving the evolution of cultures and civilizations and inducing man to needless self-giving and gratuitous self-immolation in obscurity, ridiculous for "public" idolaters, lurked the ultimate aim of any individual spirit, viz. an exit from the intermediate forms of creation into abiding of contemplation, which would have been achievable, perhaps, at the moment of completion of the very creation by the all-embracing consciousness of the Creator, in the total radiance of the last knowledge of being about itself, but which, at the levels of becoming, only added the experience of the partial and the knowledge of the created to the impact of the higher on the lower, or, if in the extreme limits, to the impact of the entire ascending structure of the clarity of creation on the pre-existent unformedness, and the true meaning of spiritual self-realization lay here, in giving one's direction of the new by one's experience. True, in the course of such an "expansion", the spirit sometimes went beyond the bounds of earthly individuality, thereby likening a genius grown from himself into all humankind to man as such and concentrating in him the spiritual essence not only of a separate personality, but of the experience of his century or era and his people or his planetary period individualized by him; and those co-creators of man as spiritual light who especially beneficially and deeply determined the future were most often alien in their times, just as, undoubtedly, he himself was alien with his unpremeditatedly heretical "Theses of the myth" incidentally explaining the sacred postulates of world religions in the interpretations philosophically modernized by rethought truth and unacceptable for the faithful.

Be that as it may, starting with self-consciousness, he came to himself-God, having ascetically climbed all over the floors of this grandiose meaning, visible to the mind, in his ascent-return and written a pretty thick stack of pages; and then, when the sculpturality of his clairvoyance froze, hovering as the structure of a sophisticatedly accurate text vibrating while reading, within several evenings he carefully studied the "theses" that unfolded into such a titanic work and, after making sure that he needed to add nothing to them, inscribed a summary commandment of self-awareness as a memento in his notebook with jottings to the completed treatise: "The mission of the spirit is to become an individual sign of humanity in the design of God."

Then the passed space of thought suddenly opened up, and, again feeling in his palm the hot metal of the handle of the turka only just removed from the fire with coffee grounds brewed for the second time, he seemed to have fallen out of a many-month dream of his working imagination into the reality of a bright June midnight, coming to himself from the swooning insensibility of life's mechanicalness and immediately smelling through the slightly open balcony door the elixir smell of dusty foliage drooping during the day and cooling asphalt, and on the table near the cup, instead of a pack of sheets, plowedly blackened with dense furrows of handwritten lines and hidden in a cardboard folder with ribbons inside the desk drawer, he again saw his notebook for scattered notes, where he was about to scribble habitually something clever before going to bed, at the most productive time for brainstorms and far-fetched ideas.

In essence, everything was said, and now, summing up his quarter-century speculations, which were distributed proportionately in the indivisible, like consciousness, voluminous text of his revived cosmos, he realized that his subsequent concretizations would henceforth be only comments on the revelation of this result, and that therefore further research and observations, relegated to the category of developments of a given topic, lost all interest for him, freeing him from the previous mysteries of the origin of phenomena and facts and from the desire to be disassembling the nakedly-transparent mechanics of the universal conundrum into philosophical schemes. Meanwhile, this freedom from the unknown and mystery meant the final circularity of his circle of cognition, and if there was a way out of his present omniscience somewhere, then not back to life and not to the charades of logical equilibristics, but, most likely, to another stage of ascent, to a dimension of something greater than the fleeting individuality of his incarnation; but thither upward, too, the way led through the soul that was narrowing to more or less human dimensions from the radiance of divinity building itself by illuminating, and that was already devoid of its former indiscriminately compassionate sensitivity on such an earthly scale.

*

However, he did not have time to figure out all the nuances of the spiritual changes that had befallen him during his work: it seemed that someone suddenly stabbed a piercingly sharp red-hot needle into his heart, into the very epicenter of his contemplative sharp-sighted intentness, so hard that from the thrust he all but dropped the turka with the coffee risen in price many times over, which he was wont to save for a weak wife because of today's scarcity; and this fiery arrow, pierced his heart, this vibrating string of message from the outside, from the vast and dangerous world, stuck in him as a point-resonating sprout of pain burning his soul with convulsive dying currents of someone's agonizing call, someone's hopeless heartrendingly-mute cry for help, a cry heard in this city and on the whole planet by him alone.

He put the turka on the stove to close the notebook and hurried out into the corridor: fortunately, in summer, he could change his clothes very quickly.

"I shall go out for a little while," hastily putting on his shoes, he reassured Nadine reading in bed. "There is one urgent thing..."

He himself could not yet say for sure what a cause pushed him outside and who called him, but when he bounced out of the entrance into the gray twilight of the June night to the lilac bushes that was growing rank on the lawn, he somehow felt with his heart and the despair of a frantic call connecting the two souls that he would not have enough time to cover the distance between them by any means of transport in the remaining few minutes, while he had to be now near the dying, whatever his compassion might cost him, because there was nobody besides him in this world to accompany the unfortunate who so frantically called out to him, and because this arrow, shot at random, still hit the target, for some reason, as the only voice in the silently dissonant waves of someone else's suffering penetrating his soul.

As if grasping at the bare contact wire of the desperate cry excruciatingly twitching in him with his concentrated, pin-focused consciousness, he screwed up his eyes and, jerkily pulled into the fiery pain, suddenly dived for a fraction of a second into his nuclearly blazing soul, and immediately, instead of the delicate garden aroma of lilac, he caught an intoxicating breath of languid cloying sweetness, and over his head he saw the foliage of the disheveled crown of a gnarled old acacia hung with pendants of inflorescences densely white in the thickness of leaves pinnate along the outline, which were stirring mysteriously anciently and terribly in the starless mistiness of the not very dark night sky.

The acacia grew in front of an office-looking squat building with the front doors boarded up crosswise and with the gaps of windows without the frames torn out, and this unenclosed wreck looked like some moldering post-war ruins, but just there, inside, in a room of the first floor, lay the one for whose sake he, instantly shifted here, to the opposite end of the multi-kilometer metropolis, found himself on this corner of the desert crossroads, in this back alley of the quarter targeted for demolition.

He scrambled onto a crumbling low ledge of the building socle and jumped through the window down into the stagnant duskiness of an empty ruined room, into the musty mouse stench of rotten floorboards, cement dust and fungal dampness of plaster, and at once, from under his feet, several caudate shadows whisked across the floor into piles of garbage with an indignant squeak, having frightened him to death, whereas behind the aperture without the door taken off the hinges, in the next room, in the silence, he heard the suffocatingly gurgling, wheezing, intermittent breathing of a man muttering incoherently in delirium.

Keeping away from the disfigured whitewashed walls with holes of torn switches and sockets, he crossed the room on the crunching construction debris, his steps echoing under the high ceiling, and on the ominously rustling scraps of discarded office papers, and sideways, so as not to get dirty, went through the aperture to step hurriedly to the wheezing body crooked on the heap of forms, orders and archival registers near the wall, to his former friend Yul dying far away from prying eyes, in the desolation of his last refuge, who had turned, judging by the flattened outlines of the fetid rags, into an atrophied skeleton. Twitching his helplessly bent legs and jerking his head hither and thither on the floor, Yul, panting, hoarsely drew in the dusty stuffiness of the frowsy nook and inarticulately gurgled something similar to "No, no" in the putrid stench of heavy sputum exhalations, indignantly protesting, like most dying people, against the inevitable--and inadmissible for the vainly floundering "I"--slithering into the crater of lifeless darkness yawning around and sucking in the whole world of their earthly existence, which was sinking forever as the perishing Atlantis that was being irresistibly engulfed by the space of the soul.

On the go, he raked some thick paper sheets of fallen documentation with his foot to the deathbed and knelt down on them, bending over Yul and putting his palm on his forehead, wet with sticky sweat. Ejected from the unconsciousness by a vigilant animal instinct, Yul stirred at his touch, quaking with inner cold, and he, having groped with his free hand the monastically thin wrist of the hand powerlessly lying along the torso of this poor wretch, said to him in a muffled voice: "I am here, I am with you, I shan't leave you..."

"Drink..." Yul whispered, chattering his teeth and shivering from an attack of chills, whereat, stroking the stubble of the sunken cheek with his hand, he answered, "Drink", and raised his cupped palm to Yul's mouth, while Yul dipped the lips into the imaginary water pouring into his parched throat and greedily gulped the hypnotic beverage from the scoop of palm, having drunk his fill with the first gulp, after which Yul gratefully poked his lips into the palm that had slaked his thirst, trying to utter either "Thank you" to his savior or some parting swear-words, very important for him, who was departing this world, to this sordid lost life nowise letting go of its sinful waif.

"What? Speak, I listen..." he encouraged Yul, wiping the bony sweaty face in the dark, and heard two words exhaled with difficulty in a hollow gurgling wheeze: "Knife... To you..."

By that, as one might guess, the criminal pal bequeathed to him the main personal property--the instrument of getting his robber's haul and the most faithful comrade in his wanderer's scrapes and inmate's conflicts.

"I'll take it, don't worry," he said into the darkness, where was seen the pale patch of face trembling under his fingers. "I shan't abandon you..."

"No... no..." Yul slurred voicelessly in a futile attempt to budge and draw near to him and, as if choking with the puppyish whining sob, gasped out indistinctly: "Not so..."; and he, shielding the again closed eyes with his palm that delivered from the delusional visions of lifetime humiliations and atrocities and kneeling, maybe for the first time, before the one to whom he mentally addressed, began silently and wordlessly praying, asking the one who was them not to abandon this lost forlorn robber and murderer forsaken by people and fortune, who ruined his own freedom for the sake of freewheeling independence and burnt out the embittered unrestorable soul in the incessant overstrain of confrontation, alone with his despair and senselessness, but to grant him at least a spark of his wasted fire, at least an instant of light that would have returned him to his original self, worthy of his genuine freedom, as he would have become if his charred soul had not been reduced to ashes; and the more ardently he offered this unaddressed prayer, the less often Yul's body shuddered, writhing in mortal convulsions, the smoother and quieter the hoarseness of frequent breathing became, and the more abundantly the warm tears flowed from under the trembling eyelids under his fingers, until, at last, the eyelids stopped trembling at all and the body stretched out in the last death rattle of a short agony.

"Forgive me," a distinct fading whisper sounded in his brain, and he removed his hand from the face of the deceased.

"He's gone," he briefly noted, not feeling the disappeared pulse on the wrist, and his fingers stumbled upon the smooth plexiglass handle of the knife opened in Yul's fist.

When he took the knife out of the flaccid grip and put it folded in his pocket, he thought that Yul's arms should probably be crossed over the chest, and laying them as it should be, he found that the decedent clenched one slippery hard thing in the other hand. As it turned out, before collapsing in the last shelter, Yul stocked up with a stearin candle-end, and as soon as he extracted it from the ice bony fingers, the wick of the candle caught fire by itself as a shred of real flickering flame, splashing the light around and lighting the wall with a big hole of the chipped plaster and lattice lathing and a terribly gleaming grin of steel teeth on the face of the dead Yul, the senile emaciated earthy face with dry skin tightly stuck to the bones of the skull, with gray stubble, and with an expression of childish blissful smiling and serenity that was strange for this repulsive disgusting mask, but that, despite everything, had alleviated the painfully hopeless parting of his friend with the world of ineradicable hatred.

Having put the burning candle on Yul's lifeless chest, he got up off his knees and, after standing over the dead body for a minute, walked away from here--from the again empty room left by him through the window, from the ruins of the dilapidated building, and from the ramshackle quarter living its last days--to the nearest inhabited street and to the nearest pay phone, repeating in his mind, as an axiom, "Suppressed giftedness turns people into monsters, both people and nations..."; while behind, in the tumbledown three-storey official edifice staring eyelessly into space with holey eye sockets, the quivering timid glow of candle flame was smoldering as a fading lonely last look.

He, of course, phoned the police and, having got through, explained in detail the topography of the location of the dead body to the officer on duty and specified Yul's personal data, in order that Yul would have been buried at least under his own name, if the law-enforcement agencies would not bother to establish the identity of such a notorious criminal in their special database, because of which Yul's corpse either would be interred as nameless somewhere on the roadside of cemetery necropolis, or it would be handed over as the teaching material of visual aids to the department of anatomy of the medical institute.

"Please hurry up lest the rats would devour him there," he warned in the conclusion of his anonymous report and, after hanging up, went along the night street past the unlit shop windows, immediately plunged into the timeless influx of contemplative thinking and into the autonomousness of his own movement; so that, striding alone along the endlessly stretching street with the swaying facades of high-rise residential blocks that were floating past and looming further as some blurred formless protoplasm of unimaginability, he already walked as if through the illusoriness of summer days and nights which he was living through by inertia and which were now unbearably sultry, with sweltering heat, softened asphalt and the city suffocating in gasoline fumes, now thundery and rainy, with the cold of jet-black wet night pavements and with damp chilliness, when with his feet he warmed in bed Nadine's "frog legs" rheumatically aching in dank weather.

*

The tiny tongue of flame, ignited there, in the room, above the dead Yul, seemed to have fluttered as a residual spark onto the candle wick from his fierily spilled soul which he felt as exhausted its divine power on saving a particle of the spirit that was winnowed out in God's cull to sink into oblivion in the hell of irredeemability, but that was resurrected by his spirit-transfusion to be lifted up to the heaven of light of memory; and now the epicenter of his radiance had shrunk to a needle point, surrounded, instead of a zone of all-seeing love, by the numbness of foreignness completely estranging him from life into the closed otherness of his alienation and extraneousness to its importunate muddle and welter claiming different shares of dominance during forced contacts, given that he had no desire to be overcoming this vanity of vanities either by adaption and participation, or by counteraction and rule, or by comprehension and understanding, or by sympathetic meddling, and could not find a place for himself or application for his discoveries in such a life, moreover, didn't even try to find anything, after the summing-up in the theses of his myth and the completion of his personal fate of thinker and human by that intra-spiritual shifting into the dimensions of this myth.

As a connoisseur of wisdom, he almost lost his former taste for professional inquisitiveness, for argumentation of academic scholia by quotes, and for popularizing preaching; true, in the pandemonium of haggling, bargaining and greediness, self-seekers, money-grubbers and grabbers-graspers that prevailed everywhere and in the havoc that was jointly wreaked on the culture--which had already grown on some wastelands of private-ownership outsiders and inner misfits not cultivated by lazy party apparatus selectionists, and which was equally hostile to both all servile loyal henchmen and the frenetic bustle of prostitution and venality--the very occupation of philosophy became an unaffordable luxury and an anachronism of excessiveness, like any non-superficial and therefore unprofitable (that is, not needed by anyone) creating of the "liberal arts", which, naturally, considerably narrowed the circle of those who were eager for useless knowledge and able to partake of the mythology of his "Theses" that he was typewriting in the old fashioned way during weeks of vacations at home, when, like many, because of the unprecedented rise in resort prices and the instability of "sovereignization" escalating to guerrilla skirmishes and frightening away visitors, they were forced to be content in fine days with trips on his motorcycle outside the city to unfrequented riverside lawns under willows and to river sand banks with mother-of-pearl fragments of small snail-striped cockle shells and bitumen-black strands of algae rotting in the sun, and which obviously called into question his unjustifiedly optimistic hopes for "continuation in people", who could hardly perceive his verity, embodied in words, both for purely technical reasons, perhaps, removable, and by virtue of the imperviousness of a pragmatically oriented mind to any distracting side information that required some brain costs and was indigestible not only on a prudently calorie business diet, but also on the stuffing of thoughtless brain with lifelong catering show-artiness.

And as the focus of spiritual excessiveness, moreover in this fragmenting ethnos, already used up the former "passionarity" that was petering out with its multiple dormant faculties (employing the terminology of the ethnogenesis of Lev Gumilyov, who died this summer), to be honest, he did not expect to "continue" himself in such indirect influences, since everyone was what he was, and therefore everyone perceived vicarious experience only by inner affinity, very selectively and incompletely, while to invade the mental space and souls of others directly, as an arbitrary judge, ruler and selectionist, he was disinclined, understanding all the non-randomness of self-restriction of his freedom and all the inevitability of the eremitic self-withdrawal of his soul, liberated in rejection of disgust from the Lilliputian countless fetters of earthly corporality, to lead him by the withering away of his former human dependences out of the life stream into the loneliness of realizing his true mission as a spiritual sign-signal to the one whose prerogative was just changing the world by the energy of all-round becoming and whose elemental will he felt in the imperious directivity of his destiny.

But what was the ultimate goal of his now ordinary, now miraculous metamorphoses--to what was the profound semantic logic of his liberation from life itself rushing--and for what, if not for the dominion of his "I" and not for the healing of foci of spiritual necrosis, or filling cavernous spiritual voids at least, his supernatural gift of co-creation was intended, he could not yet comprehend, even though all the manias and seizures of collective and mass insanity raging as dust hurricanes in the dismembered vastness of the defunct superpower did not cause his surprise or indignation today, as if all this was happening not in the surrounding reality, explosive as a minefield, but somewhere in the distant history of the agonizing Ancient Rome that was being torn by the then separatists into independent provinces before the invasion of the barbarians, and any future old age ahead was absolutely indiscernible, even in his presentiments. And what was worse, quite far-sightedly predicting the probable variants of course of events, mainly fatal for their "post-empire" generation, he was unable to look further than the vacation season into his personal "tomorrow", and he was not sure of his seemingly indispensable return to the university teaching routine, just as, by the way, of his former love for Nadine, the overly happy marital affair with whom, which protracted by chance till such an advanced forty-odd age of both, was regarded by him in his present alienation as appertaining to the category of "mistakes of youth".

And although, as their twenty years together proved, there was no mistake either on his or on her part, and they, rather, were astonishingly lucky in a chance coincidence in youth, nevertheless, Nadine, it seems, was also liable to the same aberration of memory in her abandonment and to the same feeling of some erroneousness of her unaccountable past choice that had connected her with him and led, in spite of the ardor of passions and the strength of attachment, to a lonely sobering of disappointment and belated regret about other possibilities of her freedom, the possibilities exhausted by choice, already missed and unreal, and therefore seemed especially vital and alluring.

"What are you busy with all the time?" she asked him one day during their out-of-town trip, lying in a swimsuit on a terry towel in the dappled shade of spreading lindens and eating a large pulpy apoplexy-red tomato at the noon hour of their "breakfast on the grass". "It feels like you're kind of not here..."

"Still here, as you can see," he answered, leaning with his bare back against the thick trunk while his five flesh radars were picking up all the lusciously verdant and multiplying outer world of plants and insects: hearing the industrious chirping and tweeting of feathered married couples in the neighboring grove and listening to the quiet speeches of his wife accompanying their lunch; inhaling the river silty coolness woven into the odoriferous grassy sultriness and squinting from the knife-like cheerful glitter of the sunnily melting narrow river overgrown with reeds by the banks and partly seen in its sluggish course behind alder and willow bushes; savoring the slightly astringent sweet taste of cold cherry compote from a capacious Chinese thermos painted with dragons and flowers and sensing both a hard pattern of tree bark pressed on his skin wet from sweat between the shoulder blades and the tickling of an ant crawling on his shoulder.

"Are you going to disappear somewhere?" his big-mouthed "Ginger" asked incredulously, disposing of her bloodily lacerated "Coeur de boeuf" tomato sprinkled with wet crystals of salt. "You decided to change your profession?"

"It is not me who decides," he remarked casually. "Besides, the profession is not a panacea, no matter how you change it..."

"So what should I expect from you, what surprises?" Having finished with the carnivorously mauled tomato heart, Nadine took away the cup plastic lid of the thermos from him and, after drinking his compote in one gulp, returned it back. "Maybe you will go into a monastery at last? A cowl of monk would look good on you."

"You're sick of me, I know," he self-critically agreed with her. "But my monastery is in me, like everything else. So if I'll go away, then only as all of me."

"I think you've already retired from the world, and now you only occasionally visit here," she said. "On urgent business, so to speak."

"We are different people, what can I do." He put the lid-cup on a cloth napkin with the supply of food for the picnic. "Soon I finish typing it, and then you may read my scholarly notes. If, of course, you want to peruse this philosophizing."

"And what will happen when I read it?" she looked into his face from below, from under the curls of the graying fringe. "I shall convert to your faith?"

"I hope not," he smiled at her perceptiveness. "Please, believe in what's closest to you, and in what you're capable of. But perhaps you'll realize something."

"How can I match with you, with the generator of 'crazy ideas'," she disowned such a questionable gift sarcastically. "Why do you need my understanding--not to be so guilty?"

"Yeah, probably," he nodded in surprise. "I don't want to leave ruins behind, especially in your memory."

"That is, you prepare the ground for retreat," Nadine summed up his hints in a feminine way. "To whom a retreat, do not tell?"

"Except the Lord God, I have no one to go to, don't guess in vain," he flatly rejected her jealous assumptions, with a clear conscience this time. "And who knows when God will call me."

"Besides, you have Victoria, and she more than once invited you," he extemporaneously outlined her happy future without him. "You will move to America to nurse your grandchildren, when she'll have them, and at the same time, you will pick up some playboy millionaire there, instead of me..."

"You know how to reassure," Nadine smiled, putting on her mirrored sunglasses with white rims and with an oily iridescent sheen and as if hiding behind them the velvet nomadic eyes of a shy gazelle, the eyes overly sad and too attentive for harmless bantering, that were sung a thousand times by Eastern voluptuaries, from the Old Testament King Solomon and desert dwellers in caravan burnouses riding camel humps to ecstatic Sufis of nascent Islam and whole pleiades of dervishes majnuns dying of love, who even in paradise could not deny themselves the enjoyment of the beauty of their black-eyed houris.

"Wouldn't it be better to go swimming," she added, adjusting the straps of her swimsuit. "The sun is not every day now, let's seize a moment. Carpe diem, as your namesake Horace put it."

"In essence, turning into oneself is turning toward God," he thought, impassively gazing at how, with the tantalizing harem grace of a roe deer going to a watering place, his beautiful wife cautiously steps barefoot on the grassy stubble, from her back from afar looking like a miniature figurine, still thin in the waist, but already preferring on the beach to wear a moderately closed swimsuit of a not very defiant style, which concealed some plumpness in the hips and some withering in the breast, noticeable only to her.

By this thought that had detached him from the ravishing sensual perception of the hot afternoon on the shady grassy glade near the river, into the blinding shining of which his red-haired heathen goddess was descending, bathed in radiant sun bronze, the movement was again continued, and again the long unanswered foreshadowing of the approaching solution drew him further through the days of tapping the typewriter keys, and evenings of notebook soul-searching and questioning, and nights of sleepless peering into the spiritual waste land of his alienness, where, as a fiery constant reminder of his stellar kinship and as a portent of his imminent insight-birth, a burning needlepoint of radiance smoldered piercingly, and this high-voltage filament of nerve-ray ingrown into the soul was trembling in the bottomless darkness that begot him, directing the course of understanding by its attraction along the azimuth of his guiding spark.

*

Apparently, his soul became free just for this unimpeded movement, but as yet he tried futilely to elicit from himself what was the goal towards which he was supposedly advancing, for now, as it always happened at the peak of his spiritual transformations, he was to commit an act testifying to the verity of his preliminary conclusions from an intuitively formed view of his own nature, meanwhile such acts, as a rule, were committed spontaneously, due to an unforeseen conjunction of circumstances unexpectedly forcing him to act almost impulsively and opening to him, beyond the suddenly transcended limits, his new scale and a new hypostasis of his spirit. Judging by his today's utter incompatibility with the environment, he was about to overstep some last frontier and become a new meaning entirely, not only in theoretical considerations, but also in action, and therefore to neglect everything that held him within the former limits, even, maybe, obligations to Nadine, too, and to leave her in not the most successful "moment in history" of her retrospectively beloved Rus-Russia writhing in the attempts of its hysterical confrontational "national revival" and decreed obsequious "Americanization" which were driving the exhausted bloodless country with the equal ruthlessness into mass fierceness, ravage, destitution and provincial third-rateness, whereas the "humanitarians", unable to readjust and take a place in the commercial ranks, like his wife, into the inferiority of unemployed vegetation or into the hopeless everyday drudgery of eking out a meager livelihood.

And yet, he had no other way, not towards his inner light, and he would not have been able to escape his fate, so he fascinatedly glided, with his mind's eye riveted on a starry twinkling point, through the steadily repeating authenticity-genuineness of the unfading mirages of the reality grazing past his soul, typewriting the next pages of his "Theses of the Myth" and sometimes taking the bored Nadine "to the plein-air" to have a dip and sunbathe far away from all street and spiritual "flea markets" shamelessly teeming primitive self-interest.

Then, after having finished the typewritten manuscript and the proofreading of his "Theses", he put the copies in separate office folders and hid them into the drawer of his writing table, and somehow immediately, without transition, emerged from the stream of instantly stopped movement already in the morning, again in the lane, near the white-washed white-stone church with golden five-domed domes and with the freshly painted cast-iron arabesques of the black old fence, where his Victoria got married a couple of years ago.

"Why am I here?" he came to himself, having found himself in front of the open church gate. "What have I come here for?"

And as a response, the text of a short poem The Depth recently gifted by Bez to Nadine with a dedication "To Your Thinker" sounded in his mind: "Cult is insipid if its spirit dies/ whether the cross or crescent is salvation.../ As someone's self, God shows in this wise/ through a corporeal abyss of incarnation.// You may be good or bad, it's all the same:/ Life flows down, weak to hover higher,/ and vanishes in soul, wild or tame,/ to rise to Heaven as God's immortal fire.// Interring you in superficial fuzz,/ obedience grants paradise about.../ But just a seed of self in each of us/ is God descending as a spark to sprout."

However, when asking himself the question, he was already close to understanding why and what for, and he nearly realized the lesson that was once taught to humanity by the one to whom, probably, he came for confirmation.

The divinity of Jesus, humanly accessible only as a planetary-saving morality, as a view of the Creator humanized by the incarnation (albeit in the Messiah) on earthly creation, could not really change this world while he was alive, preaching and teaching in his Judea, for as part of the world, it would have changed only the created, intervening in the globality of God's will with the criterions of the supernaturally sighted, but still human reason; that's why, in order to fulfill his mission of salvation and actually use the spiritual power overwhelming him for its intended purpose, Christ, as a quintessence of human self-knowledge, was doomed to want to completely purify his spiritual essence from earthly physicality and reunite with the radiance of the all-creating memory already as a completed inextinguishable quantum of immortality--as a superluminous thought of the experience concentrated in it that was changing the sending of the Demiurge--as a new enlightening beginning shaping the fate of the earthly "created" consciousness and blazing a trail to God, the beginning embracing all souls and all the element of the creation of this image of being. This meant that the Galilean had no right to evade his terrible shameful death by crucifixion, since even his teaching was taking root in people's minds and hearts, first of all, as himself, and only after the crucifixion and merging with the universal source could he acquire the ability to enter consciousness from within, as a meaning and an answer and as an insight of the own likeness of every convert to him, the God-man and the Savior.

Just such a path, a path of sacrificially inevitable liberation, the path of throwing off the cocoon of creaturaly existence and the shining of the quantum of divinity contained in his spirit, lay ahead of him, too, as he understood now, and it was not so important what kind of Golgotha Providence was preparing for him, because his imminent departure from this life was a foregone conclusion in any case; therefore, having slipped through the metal wicket, he crossed a small asphalted courtyard shaded by the white-trunked novices-birches placidly swaying the many-tiered airy flounces of green leafy coins of their apparel, and proceeded up the chipped steps under the entrance overhang into the wide-open gates of God's temple.

The church had become considerably prettier in two years, having supplemented the ornate splendor of fanciful Byzantine gilding with icons of previously absent saints glistening with oily fresh varnish and enriched its interior with some polished and gilded utensils necessary for services and needs; but after buying several thin long candles in a plywood booth at the threshold, he headed not for the central altar luxury or for the magnificent grandeur of the iconostasis, but for one icon in the side aisle, which caught his eye at the wedding of his daughter. It was a cracked icon, darkened over time, depicting Christ not in glory, not as the Pantocrator-Almighty and the "King of kings" and not as the dovelike baby blessing the world with an olive branch in the hands of his mother-Madonna, but as a bearded martyr, blackened in suffering, with huge dark eyes intently staring from his charred haggard face, rudely and energetically painted on the board; and just in front of this icon, in front of this sufferer comprehended his fate, he stuck his wax thin reeds into the lead calyxes of a big round floor candle holder, lighting them one from the other for the repose of the souls of his parents and the four dead friends of his youth: of Jack, knifed in a random scuffle, of Bob, cut his veins in someone else's bath, of Sam, shot by his own son, and of Yul, coughed out his lungs eaten by prison tuberculosis.

And while these burning memorial straws were melting in the semidarkness of the incense silence of the still empty church, where in the distance he heard a rustling of the praying whisper of some emaciated crone in a white chintz kerchief barely audibly mumbling under the painted high vaults and bowing time after time, crossing herself, before the canonical iconographic crucifixion in full height, hung in the left aisle, he stood in front of the icon and looked steadily over the burning candles into the eyes of Jesus, the servant and son of God, as if asking and as if foreseeing, in the increasing tension of the denouement of the miracle again blurring the reality, whereas in the core of the washout, on the bearded face of Christ being revived by the magical fiery-sensitive quivering brushes of the burning wax columns and already hovering over his shortening pillars of self-immolation, he seemed to begin to discern a hidden glow of a living reciprocal look arising from the depths of colors dissolved by fiery strokes.

The slender candle-stubs being gnawed by the life-giving fire, as if sinking into the misty translucence of the floating lead earth of the globe hemisphere of the museum multi-candlestick holder not smelted into bullets, kept effusing their transforming sacrificial light on the gradually brightening icon-painted face, and the again resurrected, returned look of the eyes, all-seeingly directed at him, reflecting his soul, was glowing more and more brightly and clearly in the cosmic darkness of the pupils, again shining through the soot of icon-lamps, through the schismatic crudeness of painting, and through the firewood notches of the board that had escaped both the peasant's axe and urban potbelly-stove.

And when his candles completely burned down and guttered out, smokily hissing as the last flame somewhere below, in the flickering haze of the reality receding into non-existence, the eyes looking into his soul suddenly opened with the radiance of two saving suns, and in their sense, instantaneous as life, in their silent "yes", splashed out like the space of last clarity, was both his answer, and his justification, and a guess about how he should have acted.

"Yes," he read, shaken, in the radiance of look enveloped his soul.

"Yes," his soul echoed.

And at once there were neither those iconic suns, nor that church, nor all his former life around, and on his chest, he felt the chilling hard granite edge of the stone of the peak, on which, freezing, he lay near the glacier, awoken by someone's incorporeal push from inside on the cusp of the never coming reality, finishing to ponder over the almost traveled path...

*

That is why he was so empty and unreceptive this day: today, on his long journey to the top, everything external was dispensable and secondary, for today, in summarizing the meaning of what he had lived and understood and of what was being assembled as a mosaic-kaleidoscopic structure of memory in his dreams, he was for himself his universe in all hypostases accessible to the earthly reason and similar to those levels of the humanly-constructed God that were described by him as a microcosm of faith unexpectedly arisen in him, the uniqueness and harmoniously natural incompleteness of which engulfed, absorbing into itself as partial and artificial, the past tentative hypothetical concepts and theoretical models; and today, in his fate revived and comprehended by him, he also existed both in the "raw" reflex-instinct of his abiding in the naturally changeable being of the quark of individuality, which had not yet known itself, and in the semantic montage of the retrospective result of his eventful lifelong unpredictability revealing the framework of its essence by means of memory, and in the awareness of all the aggregate of his individual variant of human incarnation--as the ultimate extraction of the meaning of earthly existential self-cognition in the return to its original potential planetarity.

But although any of his levels contained his whole soul and his whole world in one way or another, and although his main task, finally not useless and worthy of his original gift, was in his visible life, outwardly ordinary and unremarkable, without any doubt, to become--maybe, if he managed--a new spiritual sign of consciousness, a new self-creating signal of humanity to itself-God, or, in other words, a call of the image of God's imagination to the Creator who was detailing it artistically, yet he could learn the true meaning of his basically accomplished vocation and his entire "I" only in the luminiferous rebirth of his fourth hypostasis, last for a person, which he strove for after that look of the Savior, taking advantage of Nadine's visit to the suburban dacha to her bestie in order to fly on an airliner across half the country to a randomly chosen southern hick town, where in the neglected streets he had seen the army armored vehicles and tanks crawling back and forth and tearing the asphalt with their tracks, as well as the moustached-bearded swarthy men strolling around with machine guns, as local paramilitary groups, some in civilian clothes, some in field camouflage uniforms, and the long queues of jaded nervy women in black crowding at the bread shops.

Now, in all likelihood, Nadine was at home, and she had probably read the explanatory note pinned over the writing table in place of the discarded quotes, while in the note he apologized for the haste of his disappearance ("I don't know how long my absence will last and how it will end for me. You better really move to live at Victoria while you can"), alluding to the "purely spiritual" motives for his flight, unrelated to his attitude towards her ("I go away not from you, but from myself, and not to anyone to anywhere, but perhaps to himself to nowhere"), and recommended that, if he did not appear soon, she should dispose of the copies of his "Theses of the Myth" as she pleased ("You can hand the copy to Bez, and if it will be useful for anything, he may publish it. You can also bring it to my faculty on occasion, to let the colleagues read all that. Or you can simply destroy all, not to bother with it. Believe me, I shan't be offended"); so that his muddled missive hardly explained anything to her and could in no way calm her dumbfounded by encountering the undeniable manifestation of the sheer religious insanity of her weirdo; but now he no longer depended on her opinion of him or on his love for her, who had remained there, below, in his accomplished life that had been composed anew in the immeasurable present day; and clenching in his stiff fingers the buffed slippery haft of Yul's knife, which helped out him in climbing the glacier, he, awakened from numbness, thawing out and feeling the warmth spreading from somewhere inside and filling his body, repeated in a sing-song voice to himself the airily susurrating sloka of Vedanta: "The world... is like a dream... like a dream..."

His life was lived; his role was played out; his say he had to say was fully said to the final ellipsis; and, to all appearances, the time had come for him to step out of his life role and quit the scenic plausibility of this world of memory which was being imagined by him in a still lasting instant of the flash of his separateness and selfhood. His fourth hypostasis was the immortality of his light, and, filling with the life-giving weightless warmth of an enlarging newborn stellar clot rising in his empty soul, he got up incorporeally from the icy stone executioner's block and straightened up in the cosmic silence of his continuing dream into the space of the immovably swarming sparks flying together with him within the expanding infinity towards the fiery limit of eternal renewal--he stood up as a defenseless tiny speck of flesh in the cyclopean colossality of the night mountain peaks stretching around, whose whitish glacial hoods of granite tectonic wave crests surrounded his heavenly height, and, having thrown away the already needless knife into the darkness, onto the blue arctic snowy slope behind, as if lifted up by the breath of flight that carefully caught him up, lightly ran up a rocky hill sticking out of the glacier, to the highest point of the conquered peak.

The strong gusty wind, which had been blowing him off the rocks during the ascent, suddenly subsided and instantly outlined a circle of faint breeze round him, enclosing his peak with a transparent column of complete calm, and he froze on the flat top of the truncated cone, at the bottom of the telescopic tunnel piercing the night and leading still higher, into the unreachability of the beyond, into the joining of his light in the light of earthly creation, of which he was a grain of sense; and the clot of his spiritual ovary becoming the light and filling the soul was growing in the meantime from a granule of fiery grain into an all-resurrecting, all-preserving luminary and kept on growing further, as if a star born in him could even grow through the bodily boundaries outside, beyond his real carnal self. And when he felt himself this clot wholly--when the unbearable incandescence of his ever-growing sun had reached the last limits of the visible--he, like some indigenous shaman or a spellcaster-sorcerer, lifted up his hands to the sky in the eternal filial gesture of invocation and fervent prayer.

"I am Your thought, Lord," he thought imploringly in the stillness of the night. "I am also You..."

And the sky over him cracked and opened up at the end of the tunnel into the dazzling sunniness of a shining eye; and, hidden by the invisible walls of the erected tower from the world, from there, from the center of the circle, a blinding shaft of vertical lightning struck him; and the sword of the Lord's glance cleft him in twain: here, at the top, suddenly connected with the heavens by a fiery thread of frozen lightning, he saw, more and more from outside, how his dissolving body, burning out without trace, was melting in the forever merged radiance, while there, far away from himself disappearing in heavenly fire, he stood, pressing the bell button, at the door of his home--he stood deprived of his former divine power for good, but again earthly, again loving and suffering, again ready to live his human life and go through this only life humanly wisely and manfully, not shirking responsibility and not betraying himself; and at the same moment, somehow from above, his third self watched the teary-eyed red-haired woman jumping up from her chair from the desk, at which she was sitting lost and depressed a second ago over his chaotic explanatory note and over the opened folder with his philosophical work that she took out to read, on his parting advice, but was unable to begin because of tears. Split up for an instant by the miracle of the last descent, he was returning both to his life and to God, and both of his returns were him--were the path to himself--were the two poles of the striving for completeness placed in his soul by the Creator to never fade away, like his spirit, and never know its true purpose.

And his flesh, nailed by the point of the lightning sent down to him to the stone nipple of the earthly maternal planet, as if transported there, down, into his human bodily incarnation, dissolved in radiance with a slow glaring flash; and the clot of his soul, turned into radiance and no longer closed in its melting shells, burst liberatedly as the germinal core of an universal explosion; and, having blazed up all-seeingly with the fiery chaos of this stellar clarity splashing out time and space and flying off into infinity, with some strange absorbing interest, he fixed his attention on the existence of one of the innumerable living fragments of his cosmos, on one of the most intimate fantasies of his all-encompassing imagination unfolding in the freedom of its spontaneity in one of the worlds of his awareness, in the contradictoriness of the diversity of which he found the inexhaustibility of being he was creating in himself.

But imperturbably contemplating the planetary living fragment of the light field of the explosion creating all existence visible now in its entirety at the inexhaustible point of the destiny being fulfilled always and everywhere, and already detachedly observing the farces and tragedies of the universal mystery of self-knowledge which was being played by him-mankind, he-God, nevertheless, even in the immortality of his Spirit, albeit a little bit, still was that personage, doomed to life and death, waiting at the door there for his future--he was that insatiably many-voiced and many-faced unrepeatable "I" of his own God-given soul--that amazing creature created by the omnipresent Fate, but ever creating himself, whose name was, as he remembered, "human being"....


December 2020 - November 2023