looking fellow frozen in an attitude of fright in the darkest corner of a dark building for a lifeless fresco on the wall, especially for a man with imperfect eyesight and three, or perhaps even four, glasses of wine coursing through his blood. No, it was not at all surprising, and yet—and yet, there was something strange, something unsettling about the fake saint’s appearance, about this whole encounter, in fact…. Straightening, he peered with renewed wonder into the tormented, bearded face of the stranger, feeling suddenly, unaccountably certain that if he remained with this mysterious man, in this deserted church, for just a while longer, he might in time be able to understand the precise nature of things, to decipher their eternal riddle, to finally read sense into this day, this week, this life—to see clearly, as never before—
And then he went numb with incoherent terror, and felt frantic to leave this dreadful ruin of a place, with this dreadful ruin of a person, far, far behind him.
Carefully averting his eyes, he edged toward the exit.
“Very sorry to have disturbed you,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but I really must be—”
The man regarded him sadly, without moving.
“And here I hoped you would keep me company,” he said. “The nights have grown so long, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I live here, you see. Do stay for a bit, eh? We can talk, I know so many different things, I can even tell you the story of my life—you won’t be bored…. Just don’t go away, not yet, please…”
It occurred to Sukhanov that the man might be dangerous—after all, there was no predicting madness. He continued to back away, muttering about a train he had to catch, until he reached the molder ing door. There, with the breeze brushing his neck, he felt braver, and a desperate thought stirred weak hope in his heart.
“Listen, since you live here,” he said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice, “can you tell me how to find Bogoliubovka? I was going to the station there, but I was a bit turned around on the way, and now it’s late and I’m completely lost.”
The stranger’s fleeting smile was disconcertingly familiar.
“I wish we were all as lost as you are,” he said. “You are in Bogoliubovka. The station is just down the hill, less than two minutes away. Only there’s no sense in going there tonight, there won’t be any trains until tomorrow. Plenty of space here, though… How about it, eh?”
But Sukhanov was already heading down the path.
“Tolya, my name is Tolya!” a disembodied voice chased after him from the echoing shadows. “Perhaps you could stop by again some day? I’m always—”
The rest was carried off by the night. Not pausing, Anatoly Pavlovich murmured under his breath, “So, my personal patron saint, no less. Just in time too—if ever I needed divine intervention!”
And he even attempted to smile at his little joke; but as he ran toward the faint village lights scattered plainly across the darkness, he strove not to wonder how he had missed noticing them before, or why he had not recognized the Bogoliubovka church, which he had seen scores of times from the window of his chauffeured car on the way to the dacha. Above all, he avoided thinking about the small pieces of plaster, suspiciously like fresco fragments, that he had glimpsed strewn here and there in the beard of his mad namesake living all alone in the abandoned house of God.
EIGHTEEN
The hands of Sukhanov’s watch had stopped at thirteen minutes past ten, but he could sense that the night had already moved into that chilly, faintly unreal stretch of transitory weightlessness that lies like mist between the deepest, most silent hour of darkness and the first timid encroachment of light. The hour, however, mattered little; the important thing was that the train had come in the end.
Shivering with exhaustion, crammed on a hard-backed bench between an ancient man asleep with his mouth open and a corpulent woman noisily extracting something vile-smelling from the folds of a newspaper, Sukhanov found himself drifting in and out of fitful dozing, his head nodding to the rhythm of the wheels. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the miserable train station, which hours and hours of waiting had carved indelibly into his memory—the tracks glinting under a blinking lamp; the littered length of the platform, empty save for a few shapeless figures sprawled in the shadows among bales and baskets; the drifting stench of urine; the boarded ticket window with a scribbled note glued underneath, at which he had squinted for long, dim minutes but managed to decipher nothing but “except on Tuesdays” and “without stopping at…”
For the first half-hour, he had paced restlessly up and down the platform. Then he stopped and intently watched the tracks, replaying in his mind the image of the train emerging from the darkness, as if trying to summon it into being. After another half-hour, growing tired, he squatted squeamishly on top of his bag and gradually allowed himself to fall asleep.
He had a strikingly vivid dream. In the dream, realizing that the train would never arrive, he abandoned his futile vigil and stumbled through the night back to the ruined church. It was empty now, and the air inside brighter; the pale frescoes floated gently above the walls. Feeling curiously lighthearted, almost happy, he swept a corner free of rubble, pulled a coat out of his bag, and wrapping himself in it, lay down and sank into merciful, tranquil sleep, until someone tapped him on the shoulder amid a rising rustle of movement. He looked up reluctantly—and saw before him the dirty platform, the lamp flickering over the empty tracks, the vague, shifting figures. His mouth was dry, his hands stiff with cold; he must have been asleep for a while, perhaps for hours. A man in a fedora, his glasses flashing bleakly, his sand-colored beard fluttering, his features indistinct in the meager light, was bending over him, talking in an urgent voice.
“Only five minutes now,” the man was saying, “but they won’t let you board without a ticket!”
Sukhanov sat up and blinked in confusion. The man kept pointing to a small building across the tracks, repeating excitedly that there would not be another train, that Sukhanov needed to buy his ticket while there was still time, that he would gladly watch his bag…. Suddenly understanding, Sukhanov scrambled to his feet and, mumbling thanks to the kind stranger, hurriedly limped off, his legs still heavy with sleep. The next few minutes moved so fast and were so perplexing that he nearly mistook them for an extension of his dream. The tracks caught at his shoes with shards of bottles and tangled wires; the village disintegrated at his gasping approach into an ugly jumble of outhouses, laundry lines, and falling fences; he tripped against an enormous sack lying in the middle of the street and almost screamed when the sack muttered a drunken oath. When he finally pushed open the door of the building indicated by the man in the fedora, he expected to see a lit room, a counter, a woman in a window saying sullenly, “One way to Moscow, four rubles, three kopecks,” but was plunged instead into a darkness full of stale warmth and odors of manure and sounds of sleepy stirring. Something fluffy fled clucking from under his foot, and numerous wings broke out into frantic flapping above his head—and then, before he could gather his disoriented senses, the sharp whistle of a quickly approaching train tore through the night behind his back.
Cursing, he turned and dashed back to the station, pursued by the indignant cackling of chickens. He was still scampering over the tracks when a pair of dazzling lights blinded him in an outburst of oncoming noise. For one mad moment he stood still and stared, almost convinced that this night, this day—this whole past week, in fact—were but a disjointed nightmare, and that the shining thunder flying at him with such inevitability would bring with it a blissful promise of awakening. Then the moment passed, and he bounded in one last effort over the tracks and up the steps and, his heart flailing ominously, arrived at the platform, just in time for a powerful rush of air, a screech of brakes, a reluctant squealing of sliding doors, a dense press of people who from a few immaterial shadows had somehow grown into a shoving, pushing, striving mob…. He was trying to fight through the crowd in search of the man who had promised to watch his bag when a surging wave of bodies, baskets, bales, buckets lifted him forcibly and carried him off. In the next instant another whistle sounded, and as the floor skidded beneath his feet, he was hurtled forward into a thronging, reeking space.
The train had left the station.
In spite of the unreal hour, the car he found himself in was full to the point of bursting. As soon as he recovered his balance, he elbowed his way through, standing on tiptoe now and then in hopes of glimpsing the old-fashioned hat and the yellow beard. But the stranger was nowhere to be seen, and in a short while, Sukhanov started having nagging little doubts about a station office supposedly open so late at night, his stumbling through a chicken coop, the fact that no one seemed to demand a ticket from him after all…. And when the truth finally dawned on him, it was simple, as most truths are. He had been duped out of his bag.
