I was no longer Dmitri Samuelovich Rabinovich, I was no longer Nikolai Petrovich Durkov, I was now Petr Petrovich Nikolaev. Each time I changed my name, it grew more anonymous.

The advice of myself and any other reasonable person in or near my situation (has anyone seen one? Where? I’d like a word with him....) would have been to split town after changing my name for the second time. But that proved unnecessary.

Niko and I soon learned that even one more serious forgery in my name wouldn’t have made much of a difference: the city’s census system had suddenly changed to accommodate my identity politcs. New municipal legislation had been created especially for my name, and all the world seemed to look the other way and let me do what I would. If I could have forced myself to look the other way when all this supernatural nonesense began developing around Mathilde Caruso, freshly dead, now I had read too much into the story to leave behind this legacy that no one would pursue. I was part of it now myself. The fable had intertwined unnoticeably with my own life.

After learning that I no longer worked at the Moscow Police Information and Archive Center, (Ivanov had never told me I was fired, he quietly explained that until I got things straightened out with my name it was impossible to put me back on the payroll, considering that Rabinovich was still a suspect of an assault on restricted government property), I telephoned the DESS Housing Directory in the central municipal district, and asked if the resident of 2 Brusov Street, apartment 21, Rabinovich, Dmitri Samuelovich, still lived at that address, since he could not be found at work. The young woman asked me to repeat the last name, and after a pause replied, not too clearly, that she could not give out any information unless the inquirer showed up with a birth certificate proving relation, or something that proved him to be the employer of the person in question. I knew this was nonsense, because I had used the same directory to track virtually anonymous persons. Just in case, though, I asked Niko to bring in the proper identification from work, rearranging it a little to put him in place of Ivanov, and arrived at the DESS office with him. An older woman, obviously not the one that spoke to me, looked at the papers that Niko produced from a plastic bag, then automatically opened the cabinet to look for files. Then abruptly she closed it, knit her brows, and asked: “Rabinovich? Dmitri Samuelovich?” I nodded.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to get a paper from the police, stating that a police search is about to be initiated.”

Niko leaned on the counter in front, almost stretched out his arms, and eyed her closely. She seemed uncertain. “I am the police!” He proudly displayed his MVDA identification card. “We’re beginning a search!”

She looked up at him questioningly for a moment, then her at once stern, wrinkled eyes blinked and appeared almost pleading; stood up. “Just a moment. Valya!” she called. “Val’, come here a second.” A younger woman in uniform stepped out of the adjoining offices, glanced at me and Niko and whispered something to the secretary. Momentarily the latter nodded, glanced thoughtfully at the ceiling, and said to Niko, “If you have already begun a search, then you need a search warrant. Directory services don’t take orders from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

“But you just said-” I objected, interrupting myself from frustration....

“Akh, suki!” Niko exclaimed to himself, and whether the woman heard that or not, taking it in whatever way she could since we left immediately, seemed to be no one’s concern. Niko the magician, the hacker of all bureaucracies, later went to Ivanov to ask for my former entry in the payrolls and some further documents, to maybe even organize some sort of search warrant, but Ivanov telephoned back the next day to say that the files in question had been misplaced. Niko looked at me, deadpan. “There’s your long desired anonymity.”

And yet, for some reason, despite this hassle about locating one single Dmitri Rabinovich in time and space, all the customary bureaucratic barriers that barred young men of questionable reputation from changing their names too quickly had been removed. I filed for a new passport for the second time and in a week it was already available...

In the first place, I didn’t understand why changing my name yet again was even necessary. All criminal and legitimate authorities seemed to have locked the identity of Dmitri Rabinovich behind and iron vault. What did I have to do with it as long as I was Nikolai Durkov? But Niko insisted that any idiot could trace Durkov back to Rabinovich. He said I must do everything to escape the possibility of pursuit.

But I wasn’t being pursued. Moreoever, there turned out to be no trial for Dmitri Rabinovich, the alleged purpetrayer of the underground assault. He was investigated “administratively” and given a short prison term.

Then, after Nikiforov called to inform me that I was no longer a suspect I went to the city directory, looking for the name Dmitri Rabinovich. I happened to know that there were at least three in Moscow besides myself. And now, not a single one’s records were available.

I went to my apartment on Brusov Street, and found, not to my surprise, that it was sealed off for reconstruction. They didn’t even have the nerve to admit that it wasn’t reconstruction, it was investigation. How long had I been gone – perhaps two weeks – not nearly enough time to reconsign my property, the permission for which, of course, had not been given, even if what I had was in shambles. Asking Lena and Igor what had happened here, they replied, amid pleas and exclamations of where I’d been and why I hadn’t come to see them, that the apartment was being remodeled by the Austrian couple whom I had sold the place to. And wasn’t I supposed to know about that.... yes, I did, I did, of course... you see, I’d lost my job, and my mother was ill and all, and I tried to sound natural as I made it all up right there on the stairwell.

So some Austrian couple that came from the same place as the late Estonian businessman. But who was I to stand in the oldfashioned stairwell and wonder, who was I, Nikolai Durkov, temporary inmate of the Serbsky psychiatric ward, who was I compared to Dmitri Rabinovich who nobly confessed to assault… I was just a stupid bystander.

So that was how it happened – I was left with no job, no apartment, an a name that I couldn’t remember most of the time. Concerning the matter of propiska, that vicious responsibility of establishing a formal place of residence if you were to stay in the capital of Russia (that little written document – propisat’ meaning to write in – being a commodity more priceless than imported heroin to the “businessmen” coming in from the south, or whatever tomato sellers, drunkards or prostitutes that happened to wander in on bloody ankles and hang out on dirty suitcases in the sour-smelling markets that surrounded the major train stations), I was actually living with Niko, who had “written me in” in his apartment for now.

Each incident, detail, failure of glance or permission that made up the hues of my new reality occurred to me in the last car of the train, hurrying along the red, Sokolnisheskaya, subway line, the first one ever built. I knew it well because it took me to Niko’s house. On the way I passed Chistye Prudy, Clear Pools – the station from which, in the days when it was still known as Kirovskaya, the Kremlin Metro line that Mathilde Caruso had never built supposedly branched. I gazed a moment at the reflection of the reflection of the reflection of the glass, black as it were, like Juliette’s one-time glance and hair, but how the hell was she tied into all this.... If I could have for just a moment connected those events leading up to my arrest, and clearly look back at each nuance of the past several weeks, then maybe I would have understood how everything came to be, how magic wasn’t involved, else this was science fiction, and I was the Kafka-Hero, complete with blood and gray, unshaven anonymity, or the short old Rabinovich, who lived on the fifth story of every Soviet apartment with his mother, lived the fable of stuffed fish and---

It was all because of Juliette Caruso. Someone was working very hard to keep a lid on that name, and that was why everyone scrambled to make Mathilde Caruso’s case as unnoticeable as possible, to sell off her property recursively, to forget she even existed, because otherwise she would lead right to her own granddaughter. Foreign quasi-photographer with a man’s leather jacket, surrounded by bald cigar-smoking clowns, herself black-haired, pale and elfish, who gathered enough strength to push me into a frozen river. I was taken from prison so that I wouldn’t talk, whether to Nikiforov (if he wasn’t the one to set up the impostor) or anyone else – the conviction of a man by the name of Dmitri Rabinovich was a pure and mocking act on the part of those who wanted to keep the name Caruso in the dark. They were the ones who kidnapped me, learned what I knew, and probably having almost total access to the city’s police did all the rest – that which seemed at first to be so magical. The phonecall that I received from myself that one night was just the beginning. Whoever these people were, they seemed to be able to turn the whole city inside out.

Then who planted the manuscript under my pillow, and why?

“They’re all working for Caruso’s group!” I exclaimed in Niko’s kitchen, almost slamming my fist on the table. “This was what she was trying to save me from!”

“Zachem tak krichat’? Niko asked, leaning his head back with disappointment. “Besides, I wouldn’t jump to such violent conclusions so fast. You hardly know anything. According to your logic, these people you’re talking about wouldn’t have any reason to keep you around – they would have wasted your ass long ago. But they didn’t! And someone planted a manuscript under your pillow in the psychiatric ward.”

“That’s what breaks everything up – doesn’t fit anywhere,” I explained quietly, trying futily to point something out on the table among the glasses. “It’s as though someone else wants to use me to find out about Boolean Frost.” I whispered the last word, and glanced down the hall, because of the scratch of the key in the door; Sofiko had come home from work, sang something on the way to the kitchen, set a bag of food on the table and kissed Niko on the top of the head. The teakettle suddenly came to another boil.

“Can you get me into government archives?” I whispered when she stepped out. Niko eyed me expressionlessly, his fist supporting his cheek and distorting his face.

“Boolean Frost....” he sighed. “Perhaps. But I wouldn’t go as far as government archives just yet.” Then he raised his finger and squinted, a cross between Hercule Poirot and Joseph Stalin: “There are too many thing you skip over in your condition, my friend. The situation might be much simpler than it seems, or vice-versa! I’ll see what I can do. In a couple of days, I should bring home some documents, and you’ll see if they’re any help to you.”

I was through risking my life searching out the criminal elements that I supposed ran this fiasco. It was not a drug ring, it was not a government conspiracy. It was not that someone wanted me dead; it was just that someone found me useful for my own curiosity. Whatever this was, I was certainly not the only person who wanted to learn more, defying the governemnt that wanted to keep Boolean Frost a mystery. I would follow the paper trail from now on.

And the first place I would start was with the the words that ended the manuscript about Mathilde Caruso, the mysterious name of Boolean Frost that I had been puzzled by long ago and forgotten, back then a year ago when the word was nothing more than an agency where Juliette Caruso worked. What was Boolean Frost? A cover-up? A business? A person? A religion?

The math department at MGU, Moscow State University, had fallen into neglect over the years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, government education all but went to hell, and that meant that the more talented specialists, the physicists and mathematicians who no longer saw their paychecks and had dropped from the ranks of the Revered Members of Soviet Society to the mashed-carrot and buckwheat eaters of the thread-bare trousers and half-geeky children, had no choice but to leave the country (those who could), hoping to find jobs in their field somewhere in the States, but all ending up working as computer programmers in New York and California, regardless of specialization. Meanwhile, the department continued generating good specialists through inertia, and those milled around amid the marble stone and buzzing fountains and symmetrical trees in front of the Stalin-built Neoclassical sky-scraper that was the Moscow State University in southern Moscow, one of the seven or nine towers erected in 1949 that could be seen from practically any point in the capital.

At the entrance to the applied sciences library archive section, I showed my little identification card that Niko had forged for me, temporarily turning me into a historian from some obscure university in eastern Russia; the secretary wrinkled her nose, and let me in.

I had searched for the Caruso Project in the municipal archives library with records of Moscow’s subway and found nothing. My search for the name Mathilde Caruso in the historical library didn’t bring any results either. As to the strange two words – boolean frost – neither their translation into Russian, moroz buliev, nor the blade-like, narrowing combination of watery syllables in English, could be found in any library. This archive was the last place left to search.

As I sat at the table with the card catalogue, I came across endless dissertations and articles written on boolean algebra, applied boolean algebra, the educational and pedagogical advantages of boolean algebra as integrated into beginning math courses, the evolution of boolean algebra and its use and progression from Pascal to C++, boolean variables used in compilation, articles on loan from Great Britain about George Boole, dissertations on George Boole, an article or so written by George Boole himself (what a bastard – to translate into Russian and become splash)… But there was nothing, of course, about what I needed.

I flipped the cards with my fingers, mumbling the name or subject with detachment. I had grown bored and contemplated the green glass of the lamp next to me. The reading hall was empty except for one rather large student who had fallen asleep on the table in the far end where I sat, and made a clear puddle of drool next to his old, Soviet paper notebook. Outside, it had once again begun to snow. Just as absently I glanced back at the cards I was listing through, and murmured the title of an article from 1976, called “The Principles of Boolean Algebra as They Apply to a Binary Mammalian Brain.” Mechanically, I whispered his name, too common to remember, and flipped over to the next card and looked away. I had not been thinking.

Then suddenly my eyes remembered the print before them a second ago. I grew tense and flipped back to that article: the author, whose name I deemed too common to remember, was Durkov, Nikolai Petrovich.

I lost my mind and pulled my hair. I tore out the card, ran to the pickup desk, and demanded to know if professor Durkov still worked here. The woman expressed her disapproval of my removing the card from the catalogue without mincing words, then sent me to the university directory on the first floor, in the main room, near the registration desk- room 197.

I ran in there heedlessly, tumbling, gasping, without knocking or quite even knowing what it was that had astonished me. A plump, red-haired secretary was sitting on the office couch, drinking tea and explaining something very important about nail fungus to an older woman. “Where can I find professor Durkov?” I shouted.

The woman turned her head; not with surprise at my tone – rather from custom, she yelled back: “How the HELL should I know?” Momentarily she had lifted up her hands and then almost daintily slapped them against the surface of the table. “Maria Ivanovna, look at this type! Maybe you want the founder of the university, too?”

I tried to straighten up, I tried to collect my thoughts, but they had exploded in all directions. “Can you at least find out if he still works here?”

With that barely audible, exasperated click of the tongue, she unintentionally rattled the glass of tea against its iron holder as she pushed it aside, and pulled out a directory folder of some sort, listing through it and deliberately taking her time. “Durkov, Nikolai Petrovich,” I said, repeating my own name – the one I had gotten used to right before it had been changed.

“Durkov, Nikolai Petrovich,” she repeated, pointing it out as though it were obvious. “Worked here since 1970. Suffered from a nervous breakdown and retired in 1988. Living on an invalid’s pension in Moscow. ”

“Address? Phone number?”

She closed the booklet and looked up at me with big, innocent-looking eyes. “Confidential.”

What I found out through Niko’s meticulous administrative maneuvers didn’t make me feel any better. When I told him what had happened at the university he locked me in the apartment and went out to look up the fate of Professor Durkov himself. For several hours I walked around the spacious kitchen, and then towards evening Niko came home, exhausted apparently, and produced from his coat a thin folder which he tossed on the table. “Don’t ask me anything,” he barked. Then he relieved himself of his coat, scarf and hat and like a statue sat down across from me.

“Why not?” I asked, after a long pause. “What’s wrong?”

He smiled a little and opened the folder, lighting a cigarette acrobatically. “There really was a Nikolai Petrovich Durkov all along. He didn’t just materialize after you changed your name to Nikolaev. So he’s not a fake. But when you find out what the chap’s been up to these past couple of days you’ll wish he was a fake.”

“What?”
“Let’s say that about nine years ago Durkov retired from MGU because of some health problems, right? And then right after that, would you imagine, he’s diagnosed with schizophrenia! Now why is that strange? ‘Cause no one noticed it before. Sure, I’d guess he’s had some rare fits and all, like some old eccentric mathematician that he was. Then after the diagnosis he starts demanding funds for research of all this ridiculous nonsense: suicide, flies, snow, altogether. Anyway, for nine years, on and off, he’s treated at various research centers and hospitals. Otherwise he’d stay with his daughter. Even managed to publish some articles, but no one paid any attention because he blabbered about stuff that no one could understand.”

“So why is that so interesting?” I interrupted.

Niko leaned back and was earnestly silent for once. “Because a month and a half ago, my friend, your absent-minded professor, who was in treatment at the time, gets a visit from some unknown fool that he claims to recognize. They talk for a while, and then afterwards the professor violently demands a trip to the library – not just any library, but the Lenin Library. He insisted until his daughter had them arrange a little field trip.” He paused. “Comes back from the library entirely catatonic. No one has a clue what he was reading up on in there, but it must have been really depressing. After a week of that silent moping on his part a nurse comes into to find him hanging from the ceiling. Not dead just yet. Well, after rehabilitating the old bastard they decide it’s one of those times to ‘find out what’s going on’ in your Russky sense of the word, and guess where they transfer him.”

“Serbsky Institute?”

“And that’s not the crazy part.” He closed the folder and learned back drowsily. “Professor Durkov was admitted on the same day as one Dmitri Rabinovich confessed to the assault of an underground security guard, and the same day when you, a.k.a. Nikolai Durkov, were released. Stayed around for a few days until they determined that he wasn’t criminally dangerous or something like that, and then he was transferred back to the psychiatric hospital at Sokolniki. But the weirdest part is that he was transferred to Sokolniki on the day when they closed the investigation on you while you were Durkov.”

I uncovered my face and looked up at him dumbly. The whole view of him and the rest of the kitchen was swelling and vibrating a little, and I felt that pressure inside my head that you get when you drink really clear water. Or when you are afraid of death for the first time. “Is that supposed to mean that he was maneuvered around to set me up?”

“To set you up? You’re going a little too far with that. Not even the sun revolves around you.” He sniffed. “I’d say they were doing exactly the opposite. Maneuvering your two identities around to erase the paper trail leading back to your real name and identity. You’re becoming anonamous, Petrovich.”

“How did you find out about all that?” I suddenly whispered, “how did you get the file?”

“It’s just a medical history. And it wasn’t that hard to find him when you start calling up all the hospitals with the right credentials.” He sighed noisily and took a long drag on his cigarette. “But that’s none of your business. Get used to imagining yourself the pawn, Mitya. You’re that little bit of hair that gets into people’s teeth, either that or a convenient chair, but small – barely visible and gray; you get tangled under people’s feet, everyone’s tired of you, you’re tired of yourself....”

I didn’t uncover my eyes and forehead then, and felt entirely lost. “I want to see this man,” I murmured slowly, “make sure that he’s not just a bureaucratical personage that you and your friends make up.”

“I don’t make up paper people, Mitya,” he said heartily and somehow reassuringly, “I eat them.”

There is a difference to one’s existence and identity when it is tinged with shame, even for any one ordinary person. To fall back for me into this meaningless abstraction meant walking beneath the sun with the sensation that since I believed myself to be both guilty and meaningless, any car had a right to hit me, the earth to swallow me up, for walls to suddenly surround and destroy me. Though I don’t know where that shame came from, by instinct I was already trying to make myself small, infinitely smaller than that one chiasmatic point which silently stretched on in all four dimensions. But I was getting carried away.

Conversations had grown more difficult to endure; not because in speech I found replicated all the loophole nuances of my thought patterns, and the little breaths I would take between lines of the manuscript, gulps of water like the barely existant chain of logistics that bound Mathilde Caruso to some sphere of perception that neither Niko nor I knew anything about, but because the unexpected and rather violent frosts which took hold of the city last week and now for the past five days were replenished by a continuous falling of thoughtful snow had impelled me unnoticeably into a delirium which had no other symptoms save for sleepiness and a desire to weep. I would find myself pausing rather too often in front of store windows where frost made unbelievably solid fractals on the saturated glass, and dry snow like flakes of glass themselves that spread out all through the air in spite of a very bright, though distant sun.

What was happening to me?

By following the nurse into the visitor’s room in the psychiatric hospital on Matrosskaya Tishina in Sokolniki, an old northeastern suburb of Moscow with neat houses of red brick, I’d only confirmed to myself that professor Nikolai Durkov was sick with the flu. Knowing that, I had for some reason referred back to my earlier overly cautious methods of survival; made sure to strengthen my immune system by getting exactly eight hours of sleep, and pouring two packets of ascorbic acid powder down my throat.

There I was only half joking, but the thought of the flu did occur to me. Also somewhere I had read that before the cruelest interrogations Lavrenti Beria would hand prisoners an orange or two, and not knowing what exactly to expect from Durkov, if anything at all, I brought an orange and a lemon dangling from my wrist in a plastic bag on the way to Preobrazhenka Station in Sokolniki.

Some moments of confidence would find me certain that Durkov would tell me a great deal, though not necessarily about what I wanted to know. The consecutive instants would burn with shame as I realized, what could I have been thinking? That this old fool would calmly take both my hands into his, and say, gratitude, Dmitri Rabinovich, I changed my name recently, just like you, and I was the one that called your house once, and I planted the manuscript under your pillow.... ha-ha! I wrote the damned thing!

You wrote it, I would ask with indignation and relief, you? And then so much of this strange mystery would resolve itself and disintegrate, the looking around behind corners, the suspicion, and perhaps even the conviction that at some point in the past several weeks I had been stolen, and not even noticed it. Then a bubble of confusion would float out from his lips, the lunatic, to the effect of, I’m sorry, Dmitri Rabinovich, that I stole you, and did not give you back....

That had been what I’d dreamed by way of the so-called Freudian wishful dream; implying the Dostoevski masochism that determines in the subconscious mind of every Russian man that he does not belong to himself. I dreamed this on the bus I had ridden, packed in like a sheet in a suitcase, with so many people with wary, tired faces like myself, that instead of holding on to something, I was pressed in with my arms folded at my breast like a corpse, lying vertically as it were, because I couldn’t move.

Nikolai Durkov was a wrinkled, long-limbed old man with false teeth and a very desperate squint in his eyes, who lay in bed covered with bunches of paper that he had scribbled things on. There was a stack of them on his nightstand, along with some sleeping pills and a plastic three-channel Soviet radio set.

Awkwardly introducing myself to Nikolai Durkov and raving about how interested I was in his work and how we both spent time at Serbsky Institute together, I promted him to ramble. I had not expected him to be quite lucid, especially because he was recovering from a bout of the flu, but his uninterruptable monologue was so filled with information yet so illogical and insequential that I immediately lost track and surrendered to the beckoning of the silent and monotonous snow on the other side of the windows. I paid attention only to Durkov’s dimming gaze as he blabbered about something as distant to me as the effects of whatever on a binary mammalian whatever… Then, just like looking through the card catalogue, I had missed something very curious in his story. I abruptly turned my head to get his attention, and he was suddenly silent. “What did you say?” I asked, though I didn’t know why, because it hadn’t seemed interesting.

“That an old friend of mine, who committed suicide the night I asked to be taken to the library, left me several letters with attempts to put into prose some fragments of the history of the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company.”

“Letters?” I repeated, puzzled by the recurring suicides.

“I threw them all out, of course....” said Durkov, absently looking at the floor to the side of his chair with distaste. “They were boring, and he hadn’t proven anything new with his research.”

“What is the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, then?”

“You know, once when I was teaching a third course group,” he carried on, digging in his ear and not really hearing what I had asked, “I had a student who was tormented by very realistic death dreams and it got to the point to where he couldn’t concentrate in class. Once I started talking to him, it turned out that he wasn’t suicidal at all, just a little overwhelmed. And then I started meeting all these people with similar problems, and did a lengthy study.” Then he suddenly laughed. “Well, something came out of that – I got an article published in Novyi Mir, on the subject….”

“Nikolai Petrovich,” I interrupted trying to hide my frustration, “does this have anything to do with your diagnosis, or what you read in the library the day you were transferred to Serbsky Institute? And you never did tell me about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company... was that what you had read about?”

But Durkov made a very sour face and shook his head. “Why are you so interested in the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company? It’s not really that interesting. Besides, so many people have written about it, and no one can ever reach a conclusion.... as an educated man, I personally don’t like pursuing things when a conclusion can’t be reached, and I suggest that you don’t waste your time on such matters – a young citizen like yourself.... could be useful... in other things....” That was a peculiar hesitancy: I leaned closer the moment I noticed it and tried to remember everything else he had said that afternoon, because suddenly his hesitancy at some points made all the details significant.

“But Buenos Aires, well, haven’t you read about it? Anyway, before the first World War there was a little fraudulent company in Serbia, that secretly smuggled dissidents to America... and that’s, basically, what the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company was.”

I was about to ask him to explain, but the nurse came in and motioned at the clock. I knew he wouldn’t tell me anything else next time, if I came back, that chance was lost, but everything he said, about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, about his article on death dreams, about the suicide case of his friend – that all somehow seemed relevant, though I didn’t quite know why. But I had to pursue those trails that he mentioned.

When I left the hospital it had already grown dark outside, and snowflakes had taken on the strange shape of little needles on my coat, I felt that all those things he had mentioned followed a pattern I was already familiar with. Mathilde Caruso traveled to Buenos Aires with Serpico, and later in Moscow had dealt with characters suffering from some strange insanity. And she had also committed suicide. Durkov, who was a mathematician, strangely researched those psychological disorders, and it seemed that somehow, vaguely, he had come across Boolean Frost – and that had driven him to insanity.

From his words, and from what Niko told me of his diagnosis, it seemed that the suicides around Durkov, and Durkov’s suicide attempt, had been results of learning too much about something that bothered them deeply. Boolean Frost. He had come across it doubtless, I had no way of proving it, but being able to empathize with him, I felt sure he had learned more about Boolean Frost than he wished to reveal. My only hope was to follow his own research, since he seemed to be the only person whose suicide had been unsuccessful.

I went back to the library. And I found many things about Nikolai Petrovich Durkov.

That was what I had read first, because it made the least sense and was the most ambiguous. It intrigued me too, because while I had not experienced the said death dream, I felt strangely able to relate. But that article suddenly became irrelevant, and just the familiarity of the idea on its own startled me as I walked down the steps of Lenin Library and tried to avoid the ice in the dark, and the sudden wind that cleared the square of most of the people and kiosks. It was what I had read after that passage that made the biggest impression on me.

Two days before in desperation I had asked the nurse at Matrosskaya Tishina if she knew anything of what Durkov had read the day he tried to commit suicide himself; she looked at me as though I were crazy. I had asked if she had noticed anything strange that day and she began to object rudely, but I showed her a ten dollar bill, and silently she led me into one of the offices, opened a file, and took out a folded sheet, and threw it over to me. “That’s a letter they found on his bed. He wrote it about nine years ago.” Then she turned a little pale. “You can have it if you say it never existed.” I had taken that letter with me to the library and read it after the Novy Mir article. It disquieted me, and made the windows outside hum with a particular thoughtfulness, because Durkov had been a different man once, and something troubled him.

Outside the library, I reread that letter many times, because it put into words some of the trances I had been finding myself in ever since I got out of the tunnels and the psychiatric ward. Those moments of utter shame I had been looking inside points so small that they flickered momentarily only in the mathematical sense, and I hadn’t the words to reveal them. Durkov had.

But there was something else that worried me much more, and that was Durkov’s repeated references to Buenos Aires. When I got home, I reread the passages about Mathilde’s trip to Argentina, and the six passport blanks that a tiger revealed to her, for which she lost Serpico and nearly her life.

That evening, I was not surprised when Niko showed up dark of face and whispered that there was nothing at all concerning the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company in any archive he could access. But he did find records of a file on Mathilde Caruso that had been transferred to the FSB, formerly the KGB, formerly the NKVD.

Though Niko could not access it he had a friend who would. The next day, the friend, whose father was a former officer, risked a few harsh words and that evening the case of Mathilde Caruso was lying on the kitchen table. Niko had gone to work and I was alone with Durkov’s letter, article and health records. A folder labeled Case No. 244, Concerning Mathilde Caruso, dated 1926, was also in front of me. I thought I had everything I needed to piece the events of the last year together. But among the papers inside the folder, nowhere was Mathilde’s name mentioned. There were only two documents, and they were annotated by Theodor Kochernikov, who had interrogated Stanislav Mokhov and, once he had finally found her, Mathilde Caruso. I imagined that the third document in this folder must have been the first part of the manuscript detailing Caruso’s life, in particular her dealings with Serpico, but it had obviously been missing from this folder for a long time. Somehow or other, it had made it into the room of police officer Boris Krasnodarov, along with many items from Mathilde’s apartment.

The second document proved even more revealling.

Excerpt from page 56 of The History of Fraud in Argentina, pub. 1922:

Cocaine and tobacco? Its shipment to Marseilles? And that was how Mathilde Caruso got to Buenos Aires in the first place, through Salvatore Serpico.... but that was in 1917 – the page said the company function until 1916, when something must have happened to change the nature of its business, that is if what Mathilde encountered had anything to do with the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company at all.

“Who the hell is Ruben Vishapian?” I shouted the minute I heard Niko at the door. He burst angrily into the kitchen and stared at the two pieces of paper I had produced from the folder. Muttering something in Georgian he picked up the phone, and since the conversation took place in that melodiously throaty, ringing language I could only gather that he was elaborating violently on the same question I asked him. And then abruptly he threw the receiver down.

“Listen to this. This folder was apparently supposed to contain the first part of the manuscript that we found in the home of Boris Krasnodarov. These documents were supposed to be what prompted Kochernikov, who was heading the investigation of a certain Ruben Vishapian in the 1920’s, to seek out Mathilde Caruso through Stanislav Mokhov.”

“But what does this Vishapian have anything to do with Caruso?”

He glared at me.

“How should I know?” he said. “Do you really think that if Stalin hired Caruso to not build the Kremlin Metro he would have allowed for it to be documented?”

“There was the protocol of the interrogation of Stanislav Mokhov from 1927,” I protested, “there were other articles down there...”

“Mitya, don’t be such an idiot... that’s the reason they were down there, in the tunnels. And I seriously doubt that you or anyone else will ever see them again, especially since Mathilde fell out of the window on your sorry head.” He noisily set the kettle on the stove. “Anyway, I don’t have anymore time. Ivanov’s sick, I have to get back to the office.”

I looked at the window beyond Niko’s green lamp and found that it was already dark. But not seven o’clock yet. And without putting the papers away, I ran out of the building, along the embankment of the Moscow River, all the way north to Lenin Library Station, rode north to Sokolniki and marched in to the mental hospital at Matrosskaya Tishina, right into Durkov’s room on the third floor. He was nearly asleep, and there was no one else – no one had even noticed me.

“Nikolai Petrovich!” I cried. He started and squinted at me.

“Visiting hours are over,” he murmured weakly. “And who are you?”

“You don’t remember me? I came by a couple of days ago. We had been at the Institute of Serbsky at the same time, and I was asking you about that.”

He stared silently for a moment. “What do you want?”

“Remember you said something about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company? You said that it was a-”

“Don’t talk to me about that,” he suddenly yelled, his face contorted with such annoyance that I shuddered, “I never said anything, no one ever said anything....”

“I read a page about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company.” I sat down next to his bed. “But what I really came here to ask you was why you did a study on psychological pathology while you were a math professor. Your expertise is in boolean algebra.”

He quieted down and looked at me blinking. “Come closer. What is your name?”

“Nikolaev. Petya.”

“Listen, Petya,” he began quietly and apologetically, his tone and manner now thoughtful and humane, as though his absent-mindedness was only a trick, and his caprices a game for show to the hospital. “Like you, I came across Boolean Frost. And after that, I came across some most peculiar characters, who behaved so strangely that I shifted my professional focus on them.”

This was the first, and probably the last time that I would ever see Durkov talking lucidly. I tried to keep that lucidity from slipping away. “But what about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company? How did you ever come across that?” But it was already too late. I spoke too rashly.

“I never wrote anything about the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company. But I had friends who researched its history. That segment you read was probably Zemlyanski. He had some extensive material later on. But he killed himself before he went any further. And remember I told you about my friend Artur Mikhailovich? He was about to have an article published, but he recalled it from the press at the last minute, and on the next day turned on the stove in his kitchen and went to sleep forever.” Then his eyes were beginning to fill with tears as he looked blankly at the wall. “There was another man I knew, a psychologist, and we did research together. It was he that helped me gather material for the study of the death dream, because he’d noticed it a long time ago in a patient who one fine day disappeared without a trace. After we did that study he grew interested in the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, but before he could get anything accomplished, he grew extraordinarily depressed and secluded, and hanged himself with two belts from the battery in the bathroom.”

“But why? What do death dreams have to do with the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company?”

“Why do you need to know?” and his tone changed again. “That’s why I don’t like looking into things that don’t have a conclusion. I ended up here instead, because... because.... Get out of here, Petr Petrovich. Visiting hours are over.” And he turned thoughtlessly to the wall and closed his eyes. I thanked him and went home silently, without buttoning my coat in the snow. But as I stepped out of the courtyard onto the curving lane, I noticed a small blue car start up, which I had seen do the same outside of Lenin Library, when I had visited it. Whether it followed me or not I didn’t know, because I vanished in the underground of the subway the first chance I got. It would be such a long way home.

Chiasmus No. 1

Proval No. 1

“Look at the sign that says the hall stops at one, Dmitri Rabinovich,” says Niko, deep in thought, as we stand at the transfer from Teatral’naya Station. “It doesn’t close, it stops, because the hall, sloping down with its fifty three flowered arches and thirty-four double lamps, seventeen on each side, will be broken up and filled with dirt or water. And the vestibule of the station Okhotnyi Ryad will be deconstructed, and the marble in the train platform taken out and the escalators disassembled. Then all stations are taken down like that, and every single tunnel between them, in its entirety, is made to collapse, and then those vast holes in the ground are filled with rock, sand, and nonsense as though there was never anything there. For each segment and detail of the Moscow Metropolitan System is taken down and destroyed at closing time, then rebuilt in all its glory by morning. And each tunnel is excavated again, that marble is carved anew, artificially aged by placing individual specks of dust into the folds of all the carved flowers, hammers, sickles, Lenins, mosaics, and lamps to make it seem that those stations are still sixty years old.” Niko turns somewhat sad, slowly; his eyes widen as he takes a moment to glance up and stretch out his arm, hand in a fist, then open his palm, and sigh heartily. “Each night they deconstruct the Moscow subway, only to rebuild it again by morning. And they have been doing that each night for sixty years, with such impeccable precision that no one noticed.”

“But Niko,” I object drowsily, “there are other really old tunnels down there, that I was in myself. They can’t rebuild those every night, can they?”

Niko squints as he takes a long drag from his cigarette and blows the smoke out all around him. “There is not only one Moscow Metropolitan System, just as there’s not only one galaxy. Take this train. It will reach the last stop, but it won’t turn around to go in the other direction. It goes on and on, around the world, till it comes back from the opposite end of the subway line it serves. See the number on that train?” and he paused to point at it. “You won’t see the same number for another ten years.” Then he thinks quietly and seriously for several minutes. “Let’s say a line, any line, continues in a circumference around the world. But you, my friend, already know of some underground stations. Trains of the Moscow Metropolitan System don’t only travel around the world, they travel inside and all through it- so that for two rubles you can get on at, say, Smolenskaya and get off at 34th Street Station, then change to the F-train and go directly to Brooklyn. You think the New York Metropolitan System is a piece of work?” and he laughs a little bitterly. “Those are just ditches. They’ve dug up the entire world to expand the Moscow subway. Its tunnels run horizontally, vertically, diagonally- hell, it doesn’t even matter how they run, if they go over the insides of a sphere. The earth could collapse into itself any moment, it’s so full of holes. And there’s millions of stations down there, but they’re all empty. Imagine, a train leaves the last station with no passengers, and the driver still announces the stops down underground as it makes its way deeper. Some of those trains go straight to hell. Because directly under any Moscow Metropolitan System that you could encounter, which in itself branches out forever in all directions, there’s another Moscow Metropolitan System, and another one under that. And so on.” He sighs sadly again. “And imagine, Mitya, each night for sixty years they’ve been filling up the whole world with dirt and then rebuilding an infinite number of Moscow Metropolitan Systems by morning.”

I thought about it for a long time after that. “Yeah, Niko...” I say, “the Moscow subway’s no joke.”

* * * * *

That night, after I made it back home, I looked at all the documents together. I had Durkov’s entire study before me: reading it made his rambles come together logically. He referred to six cases of unexplained insanity accompanied by death dreams during the early days of the revolution, and I immediately remembered the six passport blanks that Mathilde had seen in Buenos Aires. He said the six cases were said to have disappeared without a trance, underground or something, and I immediately remembered the demented clowns with strange literary names that Mathilde encountered while building her network of tunnels in the 30’s. Durkov wrote that three of his four patients used in the study committed suicide and the fourth disappeared without a trace; his colleagues, the only men who ever researched the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, also either committed suicide or were never seen again.

I didn’t count, being an anonymous blob of greyity in the sticky, now at times slippery city of snow-mush. I looked at all those articles, I looked at the criminal record of Ruben Vishapian, and I didn’t know who he was and why I was looking at the criminal record of a man long dead and probably insignificant. All evidence pointed to some sort of cult worship that this Vishapian was doubtlessly involved in. But it didn’t point to any connection between Caruso, Vishapian, the death dreams and the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company.

I looked at the door, expecting Niko, but no one came; I thought about Juliette Caruso and felt a little sick, but arranging the papers on the kitchen table this was and that it only reminded me of the way the files were arranged in the tunnels, where the passports of those executed in the purges were issued after their deaths, and what became of them now, but it tormented me, that swelling silence of solitude that filled the world with the ticking of your thoughts and the sound of your body which had also swelled to fill the entire universe. I am so huge, I thought worriedly, and even my teeth began to chatter a little. There was not enough room on the table for all the papers spread out, but some overlapped, and it was interesting to watch the chain of relations between each paper or file, one leading to another, which led to a third, and to the initial one. Was it more important that the lower left corner of the Xerox of the criminal showings from Austria of the last years of the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company touched at one point the upper right-hand corner of the criminal record copy of Ruben Vishapian, and that covering, half way the description of the death dream by N. P. Durkov, touching precisely the mention of six ancient madmen? Or was it the other way around?

I was startled suddenly by the thought that I was doing exactly the same thing that the lunatics in the tunnels did with the tesselated bricks, and the thought frightened me….

Suddenly the phone rang, and I started, because it had disrupted my completely irrelevant train of thought; “Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello,” I repeated, “who am I speaking to?”

“Petr Petrovich Nikolaev? This is Petr Petrovich Nikolaev.”

I began to shake, from the sickening depths of my dying stomach... “who?”

“I’d like a word with you,” the voice said threateningly, addressing me informally, “I’d like a word with you as soon as possible....” And just like last time, already a long time ago, I threw down the receiver and shot up. When I had gathered all the papers into the folder, I stuffed that into a plastic bag which found itself at the bottom of the water tank of the toilet, after I’d noisily slammed down the lid.

I ran out of the apartment and forgot to wonder whether or not I’d forgotten to lock the door. I ran down Komsomolski Prospekt, and the cars honked at me, and several times I slipped on the frozen mush which made the cobblestones impossible to walk on. I wanted to run anywhere, but I didn’t know where. I missed the B-route trolleybus and began waiting for the 10, hiding in the glass shelter and peeking out to make sure that I hadn’t followed myself to the bus stop.

It grew late, and gradually the conglomerations of huddled groups around the stop dissintegrated; cars zoomed by more freely, wheezing with their lightening sounds. And I did see a trolleybus in the distance, but I couldn’t tell what number glowed on its head, and whether it was a double or a single car I couldn’t see, for the meandering of its possible posterior segments back and forth on its rubber attachments was invisible behind the regularity of its procession and the curtain of thick moist snow. It approached and began slowing down, but it was empty, and I couldn’t see the face of the driver either, because he was wearing a cap. But I could now see the number of the route: it was zero.

Was there a zero-route trolleybus in Moscow? I knew that the metro-card for a hundred and eighty rubles covered all routes except the busses and trollies numbered 300-500. I knew that there were 600’s and 700’s and 900’s; I knew that there was a number one line, a two, a three, a four, a five – which went past my house all the way to the southern sports stadium by MGU, but nowhere had I heard of a zero-route trolleybus. It came to a full stop, and its doors clambered open. No one stepped out, so I looked around, and seeing no one at all I got on, and the doors closed, and the machine animal groaned on forth, on the Garden Ring that was quickly losing its vehicles. I didn’t know where it would take me- probably to the depot- and I really didn’t care, more so because though I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming or not, or if I was only so deep in thought that the rest of my surroundings grimly fell away, I gazed out of the window quite seriously; remained composed, though breathed faster with the acceleration of the trolleybus and consequently with my thought pattern, and wondered why all those documents, now in the toilet, were so interwoven with one another that each had become an indelible part of my body, to the point where I felt the cold water and the salty smell of the toilet tank- that a part of me was in the toilet tank.

I wondered what had happened to those six insane men after the Revolution, as I wondered where the prisoners whose passports were issued after their executions had gone to, and I wondered also how Ruben Vishapian disappeared, and what had become of all those people, of whom there wasn’t a trace in this world any longer. It was so warm in that seat next to the window, and the leafy frost patterns glittered so drowsily that I relaxed and almost fell asleep. I wondered musingly if maybe there wasn’t a trace of me in this world any longer, but too soon, too soon, and nothing would come of it at all. I wondered where was Juliette Caruso, and if she had perhaps left a trace in this world, but the thought of leaving a trace, and the thought of not leaving a trace, they sort of interwound around each other, and I saw their double helix somewhere within the crystal wall of the frosted window, glittering through the twilight outside.... But most of all I wondered how this was so connected with the fate of Mathilde Caruso, and what had happened to her at the end of the manuscript, too odd to be elaborated beyond the word dissolved. Maybe I’d pull through by that chain, and the mirrors, and the tunnels; but then I thought back for a while, regressed back into the fragments of some seven or nine days, their trickling, and what I had seen between their bookends- either the dissolving of traces, or on the contrary the synthesis of strange crystals that were forming among all this logistical garbage, and a chapter or two, and-

but why hadn’t it entered into my mind before?

The Man that Makes People Disappear- why had I taken that as a figment of style, as such it was meant, literary gimmick to conceal the obvious and inexplicable? That when Winnie the Pooh was dragged screaming into the lower levels of Mathilde Caruso’s tunnels, she was not killed, but made to disappear... that Mathilde Caruso herself had never been executed at all, nor merely saved from a second death in prison, but saved from all archives and records, to live out the remainder of her life without a trace...! That she had been offered to disappear, that countless people went off with that fate, disappearing, hidden from all of life and the world, but.... how? How in the world was a person to disappear- whether it was that famous bureaucratical death, the man consumed by a million papers, so far underground in terms of a paper identity that perhaps not even his mother could find him... was it so old that even Ruben Vishapian disappeared by the same method and became as mysterious as the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company.... And still, what was it that made a ninety-seven year old woman commit suicide?

Then scratching on the frost on the glass I only confirmed exactly the same envelopment of twilight which hadn’t seemed to deepen with time, and in the course of all my wonderment. I felt suddenly on the brink of insanity, I couldn’t understand how I’d never thought of such a horrendous detail; so strange, so phenomenally nominal and unlikely. “Driver! Stop! I have to get out!” But he probably wouldn’t even hear me- he, the trolleybus, as it was wont to combine identities of the driver and the machine and then linguistically treat the result as a living object, had rolled on, katilsya proch, making stops and announcing them without anyone ever getting on. He slowly came to a stop, the minute that what I had said reached his dim, clouded ears and consciousness, frozen into the ice on the windows he stopped and opened the doors, and I stumbled out. How strange, that it wasn’t at all dark yet, though I was already... I was already looking at the very outer highway that circled all of Moscow! “Where the hell am I?” I shouted, but the trolleybus already took off, slow as a turtle. And I couldn’t understand how in the world he had made it from the Garden Ring to the circling highway in less than... less than.... When I got on it was about to be dark, and so even now the sky had barely changed, as though perhaps fifteen minutes had passed, for in my heavy thoughts like snow I couldn’t quite keep track of the current of time, and what had seemed like several hours was in actuality several minutes, and that in an hour there were sixty minutes, and in a minute there were sixty seconds, and in a second there was an egg, and in the egg was a needle, and in the needle was a drug that could annihilate time... (a paraphrase from Jorge Luis Borges). So the sky had allied itself with the passage of one flow of time, but the highway and the forest followed the branch of time that had derailed, and space and time had merged and betrayed me.

I couldn’t stop thinking about an instant of clarity that had flickered eleven times on the bus, or how I’d overlooked it before. It was very bright among the trees, where I ran, halfway to my knees in snow, and I couldn’t understand why such a simple possibility also flickered in Durkov’s vague memories, in his death dream, and then that very familiar point elaborated in a letter to his daughter. Disappearing? The cessation of one’s function in society forever, but not death- all worldly ignorance, but the chance to be aware of it, to go underground in some way, but Salvatore Serpico’s way must have been so perfect and effective that people were afraid to speak of it, afraid even to acknowledge such a mysterious desire, as though it were more shameful than the desire for death. And perhaps they all looked into the vanishing of Ruben Vishapian, and that was the terrible part that to my mind was inconceivable.

The road was no longer visible, and trees didn’t cast shadows on the snow when I collapsed beside a cold log, like a log myself, and realized that I was choked with sobs and exhausted. Oh, God... it wouldn’t do anyone any good to find me like this, when I didn’t quite know what world I was in, what life, but slowly something more powerful than sleep was forcing me to relax, to peacefully watch all those terrors having grown real, and to dig my face into the snow and listen to it freeze.... and the countless hurts, obidy bezposchadnyie, torments by people I didn’t know and never wanted to know, myself manipulated by something huge and menacing, thrown from one end of one unknown terror to countless others, dragged through a dirty lie, made to eat it unknowingly, and all the while I couldn’t guess what the hell was going on, until now....

Some time passed, and when I felt finally numb and frozen I clambered out of the woods and caught a car, silently extending a ten-ruble bill to him, and then said “metro”, because I couldn’t remember anything else. In Niko’s red brick apartment building the inhabitants either slept, or had left that sponge house with windows on all sides deserted like some poor Swiss cheese. I had forgotten my keys and banged on the door and the bell. No one answered, and there was no sound. Then it fell away, the silence, opened, and Niko murmured something in his yellowing perpetual undershirt. He was drunk, he wasn’t in any mood at all; shuffled behind muttering about someone I couldn’t understand, as I wandered into the main room and discovered the reason why.

In the velvet armchair in front of the window sat a pale, wan man who had rather arrogantly not bothered to take off his overcoat. At first glance the upper part of his face, his high forehead and round, watery eyes, but he had the most serious, dead-pan expression, if it could be called an expression, and as he had dropped down into the chair upon being invited in, it was as though he had remained entirely motionless, not like a statue, but like a man in pain, or worse.

“This chuvak dropped in to see you,” Niko mumbled at the floor, and wandered into the kitchen.

The chuvak, who didn’t seem to take any offense at that name, stood up and reached out his slender hand without a shadow of a smile. “Hello, Dmitri Rabinovich,” he said quietly, addressing me just as informally as already twice on the telephone. I recognized that wavering voice as I hesitantly took his hand. “My name is Yuri Nosik. That’s an easy name for you to remember. Please, take a seat. I’m sorry to have startled you this evening.” He looked in Niko’s direction, who didn’t give a damn anymore, and raised his thin eyebrows. “But we really do need to talk.”

But of course by that time I wasn’t quite myself, and instead of answering, I stomped into the toilet and lifted up the lid of the toilet tank to make sure that the papers were still there. They were. Then I rushed back. “Who the hell are you?”

“I told you,” he said, just as placidly, pretentiously not changing his expression, like a government joke, “Yuri Nosik. And I can’t tell you any more about myself right now. But if you think back a little while, you might remember that I exist, or at least once existed.” Then he smiled, but just as briefly, only to expose his unusually large teeth and get back to business. “You are in a big mess, Dmitri Rabinovich,” he continued.

“Ne figa,” I muttered sarcastically.

“But I think you’re already figuring that out.”

“Mister,” I implored quietly, “I can’t quite figure out whether it’s day or night- just a minute ago it was still light outside, but it was already so late in the evening, and then time passed and was so distorted, like through amorphous glass....”

“Don’t be so frank with strangers,” he suddenly interrupted me, and I was surprised. “It’s only seven o’clock, and if you haven’t noticed it yet, it’s already February 21st, so I’m not surprised it got dark so late.”

“February 21st....”

“It must be hard for you, all this, and getting phonecalls from yourself on top of it all. I bet you feel like some one dimensional Kafka character... but that’s not important.” He sighed, visibly recomposing himself as I sat down. “You know my name from a couple of weeks ago. If you recall, you were arrested for trespassing, but I’m not going to bore you with the elaborations. Before you were arrested, you happened to pass through two tunnels that connected the former Neglinka canals to the tunnel that led to a secret Kremlin bomb shelter from the subway station Chistye Prudy. Now the reason that you were there, and what you saw afterwards, is what I-”

“I was kidnapped by the police,” I stammered hurriedly, “and they lead me out into that tunnel, and that’s why I got lost in the Kremlin Metro....”

“Dmitri, don’t lie to me. I know perfectly well when you had been kidnapped, and even if you pulled that stunt off with the prosecutor, it’s all useless now. Besides, it wasn’t by the police, it was by thugs hired by an investigator in the eighth police precinct. But I don’t know those people, and fortunately I never had anything to do with them.” He leaned closer to me in his chair. “But when you were detained by several men within that one connecting tunnel I was supposed to talk to you before they let you go, only, as you can see, the opportunity was lost.”

“Yuri Nosik,” I whispered sadly, a name I should have certainly remembered, if I hadn’t been chased out of my head by those ludicrous passport records in another attic. “Yuri- then that was the tunnel that was built by Mathilde Caruso?”

His face for a faint flicker assumed that of a close neighbor, almost understanding me to the point of reflection, but that instant passed, and he was thoughtfully gazing at me, the expressionless mask having melted away into an introverted face. He stood and reached in his coat for a cigarette, which placed in his mouth without lighting up. “If you don’t mind,” he said, so quietly that I barely heard him, as though he were offended, “I suggest we go for a little walk. It’s a nice, clear night.”

“Clear night, Mister Nosik?” Niko piped up drearily, unexpectedly back from the kitchen. “It was also a clear night when you showed up looking for my friend, and we had a nice lack of a conversation....” Bleary-eyed, he had found an old Caucasian knife in the cupboard and was dancing with it slightly around the room. When Nosik and I were already standing by the door on the way out, Niko stopped and looked at me fierily for a second as though he were aware of something behind my left shoulder, and said, pointing with the knife: “Mitya, dear Mitya, if this were a novel, I would have been the narrator.”

Nosik silently lead me through the courtyard and past the kiosks in the direction of the subway. I was no longer surprised by anything he did or anything that happened, but his movements puzzled me, because with spastic gestures he checked the snow and tested the pavement for ice, but did it so quickly that one might have thought he had training. “I’m sorry,” I muttered when the subway was in view, “if I said something I shouldn’t have about the tunnels.”

“Wait,” he said, “not here.” And he spoke again only when we were in the middle of the hum of the platform of Park Kulturi with its statues of athletes in the pillars. “So you read the manuscript? And I wonder, why did you do that?”

“Mathilde Caruso jumped out of a window right when I was walking under it. Since then I learned that I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I found out the reason why.”

“And why is that?”

“Because her grand-daugher pushed me into the Neva last winter so that I would forget about the murder of my friend.”

He was silent for a moment. “It’s funny. When two men dragged you into a basement at gunpoint you were not so eager to tell them all this, though they were more interested and insistent than I am.”

“It’s not that funny. If all that had happened now instead of then, I would have probably betrayed my mother.” Then I looked at him closely. “How do you know all that? You were the one that called me a long time ago... and you were the one that followed me in the car....”

When we got on the train he answered me. “You don’t know me, but I knew you even before you showed up in the tunnels. I hope you understand that everything that has happened to you this winter is a result of your position as someone working in someone’s interests, against another. A woman falls on you, you take advantage of some opportunity to start digging in something completely unfathomable, but you can’t escape being drawn into whatever it is you are digging into. No one, never in time nor all the world, has looked at a thing objectively, exerted a force upon it without it exerting an equal force on him.... Sorry to get carried away. You are a pawn. You will remain a pawn unless- but that can wait, and there is no escape from it anyway.”

I didn’t pay attention where he lead me after that, because I was too tired to wonder if he would maybe kill me, which seemed likely and logical, but thinking straight didn’t seem to be worth it any more, so I just followed him into the old, slanted three story building with dark windows and crumbling stone. Inside he knew his way in the dark, but I stumbled until he took out and lit a flashlight. We descended into a basement and I wasn’t even surprised, not as he opened a familiar door, and as he opened another, and I saw the vision of the inside of a dark brick tube winding away to the right. Once, when I was a different man, I ran down that same tunnel pursued by gun shots, and I didn’t know where I was, or why.

“This is very old- it’s not what you think,” said Nosik, stooping and walking onward carefully. “It was built in 1925 by some former engineers and mathematicians that worked for Salvatore Serpico. It’s not long- it stoops down here, and has only two bunkers. But that’s all that was used by them until 1936, besides the existing sewer tunnels, that is. No one knew about this tunnel, not even Mathilde, but it was connected to the Kremlin Metro through her tunnels after 1938.”

“I don’t understand,” I said quietly.

“What is it?” He stopped and looked at me, shining the flashlight at the ceiling so that we were illuminated by the reddish-brown glow of the tessellated brick patterns.

“If they were engineers, why did they work for him?”

“You remember the six mental cases in the 1920’s- the so-called death syndrome? It was a progressing neurosis that left patients so obsessive that they couldn’t comprehend anything. You know. Those engineers- they couldn’t find work anywhere else, obviously. And being so obsessive, capable of the same level of intensity in concentration as many schizophrenics, they were well suited for their job in the tunnels.”

“And how could the Caruso network have connected to the Kremlin Metro if she had never actually built the Kremlin Metro?”

“Because it was never directly connected- it was very closely laid, and could easily be joined through some old canals that ran in that very area.”

“Did Stalin ever know about it? That it was later connected to the Kremlin Metro?”

He turned now and shone the flashlight in my face and smiled. “That’s not a very good question. It’s too difficult to say what Stalin or anyone else knew and didn’t know about Mathilde Caruso after 1938.”

“What happened in 1938?” I asked, but I already guessed the answer, and Yuri the Nose lead me up to a round door he paused before opening it.

“If you don’t already know, you’ll find out soon.” When he opened the door I expected to see a cellar, but instead I stared into an office, with some crude paneling laid up against the bricks, and long tables against all four of the walls, and about seven or eight fully functioning computers- all Pentiums, all very high speed, all turned on. There were cushioned black chairs for every one, but only about three people were in the room, talking among themselves in hushed voices. Two were young men that had an aloof appearance of European students debating a quiet matter of principle; the other was a stylish woman with short-cropped black hair, no more than thirty, busily typing something on the computer, and apparently on the way out- she was dressed that way, at least. At any rate, no one in the room seemed to belong there- rushed in to make a dollar, or so, or maybe have a cup of coffee in that atmosphere and surf the net. And yet when we first walked in they were silent, and stared at me without any sort of acknowledgment. I looked at the first one that stood up and tried to identify his face as someone I’d seen long ago in these tunnels, but it was too blank, too empty, bare of any national features, except an unusual darkness around the eyes. When he greeted Yuri he spoke with an accent so slight that I couldn’t place it. When they began speaking among themselves it was in an quiet though guttural language with consonants so long that it made it musical. I looked for a place to sit, and someone moved a chair in my direction without regarding me much at all, and when I looked at Yuri questioningly, he said my name: “Dmitri Rabinovich.” And was silent.

“Where am I?” I demanded, looking at everyone in the room.

“You are a client in a firm,” Yuri replied. “Suren, would you explain?”

There was silence. I wanted to laugh. “Boolean Frost Enterprises? That’s where you brought me? Why couldn’t you have taken me sooner?”

There was no reaction in Suren’s face. He didn’t seem to care, as though he didn’t understand, but I knew he did because he spoke clearly. “No, we provide a service to customers. It’s a very big service, so a lot of money is involved, and a lot is at stake, and-”

“So who are you, finally?” I shouted, feeling like Faustus, quoting him, not knowing if I should take it for a joke.

Suren paused, said something to someone else, then turned back to me quietly. “I’m no one in particular. I work for a company that makes people disappear.”

“Then I was right!” I sat down and burst out laughing- I was right all along! And I kept on laughing, or maybe I had wanted to cry instead... “But how?”

“Sometimes death is the only way to hide some people,” he continued, unmoved, routinely, as though he were describing the rules of a game in kindergarten, with his large eyes and innocent, soft accent, “because these people are running from someone or something. For hundreds of years thieves or criminals would go underground in a sense, live under a false name, in exile. In America there is the Witness Protection Program, but that’s not always effective. Changing your name and face and place of residence isn’t enough, because you can still be found. So what we do is eliminate every last trace of yourself. We give you a death that’s not exactly death, because you live after your own death, and no one knows you. We make you disappear so ultimately that not even you would be able to find yourself.”

Those last words were said so lightly, so commercially that they seemed almost appealing to me, to such an extent that I felt like I was swaying in my seat from wishful curiosity, because I didn’t quite understand them. “And- and people come to you for this?” I asked hoarsely.

“Those that know about it can have themselves made to disappear for about five or ten grand each. The price varies according to how notorious you are- usually it’s a little over the price of a professional assassination. So if a contract on your life cost a hundred grand, the price for your disappearance would cost you a hundred and fifty.”

“I see,” I murmured, then paused for a while... “are you.... um, legal?”

For the first time Suren smiled, and looked at a companion, who also smiled. “Fortunately, that hasn’t been made clear in the recent past. I heard that you know about what happened here in the Thirties.” He paused thoughtfully. “Then again, Salvatore Serpico was never legal.”

“So all this started with Salvatore Serpico,” I whispered, “that was what Stalin used Mathilde for...”

“All right,” I heard to the side of me... “I’m out of here.” The woman dressed in black grabbed a purse, kissed Suren’s cheek and brushed past us. “Tell Tony I’ll be in tomorrow at eleven at Neglinka. I’ll finish sending the new FSB liquor tax quotas- their server was down since six today.”

“Wait, where are you going?” Suren objected, ignoring me for the moment as though we really were in a normal office.

“This one guy they picked up out of Sheremetyevo, in from Amsterdam, is getting suicidal.”

Suren laughed out loud- completely relaxed in character. “So you sell yourself, then?”

“Don’t scare your customers,” she said, glancing at me with a half-smile, “I have to arrange a meeting between him and someone he did a project for a while back.... And you, Mister, you shouldn’t be nervous- Suren is the only person that bites around here, and he’s already had lunch.” Before she flew out of the door, grabbing her coat, the other man called, “Arminé,” and, touching her shoulder momentarily said some words that I couldn’t understand. She nodded silently and left. I stared, shamelessly, still nervous. “What language are you speaking?”

The man finally looked in my direction as though noticing me for the first time. He took off his glasses and paused for a moment, taking my features into account. “Armenian.”

“Look at your prospects, Dmitri Rabinovich,” Yuri said quietly, as though he were saying my name for the last time.

“What prospects?” I whispered.

Yuri stepped closer. “Do you know why you ended up in the psychiatric ward? Or let’s go a while back- why your tormentors let you out into this very tunnel, where you’re sitting right now, why they had brought you to the basement of this very house....”

“They- you, it’s you!” but I had said that so quietly and unsurely that it might have not been said at all.

“Why would someone plant a manuscript under your pillow when you were isolated if before then they had done everything possible to keep it hidden, if the suicide of Mathilde Caruso or her history were never discussed? Why else would Nikiforov be so insistent about what you saw in the tunnels, even though it had nothing to do with your case?”

“That was a government secret-”

“Yes, but no one knew why.”

“I started finding out...”

Yuri was silent and looked at me with satisfaction. I paused and suddenly began to realize that I was answering my own questions, that Niko was right- all along, from the very start I had been a pawn in someone’s hands, that I was being used to lead someone into the depths of this very cartel, just as Stalin used Mathilde to find Serpico. “The passports!” I remembered. “The old criminal cases with the passports!”

“Right here,” Suren suddenly replied from behind, tapping on a file cabinet. “Some of them, though not through your help. Used by Serpico himself, at one time- imagine, all those people were his clients, and escaped death. Until recently the cases were scattered wherever they had been left years ago, and didn’t interest anyone. Then you showed up, and brought someone along your trail.”

“Your whole arrest,” Yuri continued gravely, “the entire investigation, and especially your confinement in the psychiatric ward, for isolation, was set up by a few rather influential people who wanted information. Nikiforov was used to get you to talk about what they wanted, and I don’t even think he knew what was going on. All that was a farce, as you might have noticed, to make you curious without suspecting anything, to make you curious enough to where you would want to find us almost against your will. But first you had to be convinced that you weren’t doing anything against your will- then you would search madly, thoroughly, until you find exactly what you were looking for, and when you did, so would they.”

“But who are they? Politicians? High ranking criminals? What are you talking about? And why would they need you?”

Yuri was silent for a moment, and finally took off his coat as he sat down and sighed. “Sometimes it could be the state, as in Stalin’s case, sometimes it’s companies who are being defrauded by this kind of scheme… Do you know what happened in St. Petersburg about a year ago? Don’t be too quick with your answer, think about it first.”

I opened my mouth, but didn’t say anything. “No,” I answered at length.

“Maybe that’s for the better.”

“Now I know,” I muttered bitterly, “that you don’t have any other alternative but to kill me.”

“Alternative?” Suren said with bright smile. “If that were the case there would have been a bullet in your head weeks ago, before you did all this damage. No, no, we’re the ones that are offering you the alternative.”

I looked up at him intently and understood. I looked into his bright, calm eyes, and the clarity of his pupils in a multi-layered and many faceted brown abyss, and the emptiness there, and it scared me, only a moment of associating the still slightly abstracted totality of endless time and endless space that I had dreamed since childhood to the escape that was offered me here in the dark, and it was so vast that it scared me. I forgot even to think of Mathilde Caruso, with whom I felt I’d made some sort of connection long ago, that in an abstracted sense we were so very similar, and indeed everything that had happened to her happened to me also. Without quite understanding in what sense it meant to “disappear”, or even how exactly they managed to do it, the brief thought of it terrified me, perhaps because I couldn’t understand it, because I also felt certain that it implied something besides a typical misplacement of records, or leaving the city, or a new face and identity- the truth was, it didn’t seem that any of those components applied to it at all, but that this was something entirely different, but familiar from birth, only that sense of wonder and familiarity glinted in awareness for a brief second, before it dissolved and filled me with fear. My eyes then turned to the computers. “How does it happen?” I asked quietly.

“I can explain only a tiny part of the process,” Nosik said. “With the possibility to link every census and identification database in the country to our database of clients, we begin shuffling our client database, and the parameters of each client start getting mixed up. What happens is this: let’s say the name of a client is switched with another’s. Then it is switched again, so that the client’s name keeps changing, faster and faster, as do all the other identity parameters. This shuffling speeds up and permeates into all other databases that contain information on any given client. When the original parameters of the client can no longer be traced, the mess that his file has now become is deleted.” He looked at me intently, and squinted. “Of course, there’s much, much more, but you wouldn’t be able to understand it, and I don’t think you’d want to.”

“Still… I don’t have the money for that kind of service,” I muttered feebly, and tried not to look at anyone.

“No one asked you about the price,” Suren protested. “Do you really think that we brought in a man like you, without a job, a place to live, uncertain if he’ll be alive the next day at all, expecting him to come up with five or ten thousand? It interests us more than it does you that you disappear, although most likely for you the other alternative is death.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I mumbled, trying to wave everything away, the uncertainty and my reluctance towards that proposition. I didn’t want to know anything else, I regretted deeply that I knew this much already- if I could have erased everything I had discovered that day, and maybe the days before I would have gladly done it, even if it would never return the life I was accustomed to before all this started happening to me, even if I would remain equally dependent on Niko, like a bum, for an indefinite amount of time. At least existing would be so much easier, without the gnawing suspicion that something so unfathomable was possible, that you could plunge yourself into that, if you wanted to. That was more overwhelming than standing on the ledge of a balcony staring down, because every human deep inside wants to jump, he can’t help wanting it- because it isn’t the hopeful and ambiguous promise of death that beckons him, but the endlessness of space in that seeming abyss. And that was what had been called Mathilde’s geometrical anguish- the essence of this and the impossibility of understanding it wasn’t contained in philosophy, but in its physicality.

The walls were growing a little suffocating, and it seemed that the air had grown thin, instead of thick. I had to breath deeply in order to be satisfied, I felt like my insides were slowly and calmly liquefying, and exhausted beyond all measure. I couldn’t see a few meters ahead of myself because my eyes couldn’t seem to find any necessity to focus, and the indifference of everyone’s faces made me feel horribly naked. Maybe it would have been better to live with a constant fear of dying, maybe that was even-

“That’s what you think at first,” said Suren a little cheerfully, as though in response to my thoughts.

“How do you know?”

“Experience with many clients who are never certain of what they want.”

“I have to leave...” I suddenly jumped up, out of breath. “No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t ever go into this willingly.”

“I don’t think you have any other choice,” Yuri said coldly.

“I don’t care,” I called back, not looking over my shoulder as I ran down the hall, looking for the way out. “I don’t care! I don’t care!” because no one, not they, not Mathilde Caruso, could begin to understand the depths of my horror at those instants which jumbled together like drops of water and wouldn’t let time fall away chronologically as it usually would. I didn’t know then that time wouldn’t ever again regain its chronological property for me- at least that parameter had been annihilated, evaporating with hardly anyone noticing.

Eleven years ago in Sukhumi Nikoloz Baratashvili was the son of a prominent restaurant owner, who never helped his father and spent his days putting together discarded mechanical gadgets and selling them all over his street. He knew who was willing to pay what, who minded and who didn’t mind that kind of commerce in the area, who needed a share, and how big, and who was supposed to know about it, and who wasn’t. He was a specialist at that since childhood, and he didn’t sell just gadgets, many of which didn’t even work, but things useless that could be made to seem valuable, the sale of secrets, of minor loyalties, of knowledge. The mystery of his name forced him to compose poems which he would carve on the bark of trees in front of some women’s houses, who changed weekly, but those poems had the fleeting and intoxicating life-span of most of his loves. Before his respect of spicy food, young wine and beer had adorned him with a massive frame and a good-natured belly, he was so attractive that many girls were afraid to look in his direction lest the fire of his eyes leave a wound in them that would never stop bleeding. Other than that he was harmless, and in his free time was seen often on the terrace of a sea-side cafe, drinking wine and playing backgammon with Sergo Gogoladze who told him all the dirty jokes in Georgia.

The sea breeze would mix in with the sun and the smell of sand and spices, roll a little over the old cobblestones of the narrow streets with the two-story houses, their balconies and open courtyards, barefoot men strolling the streets and tangling the wind further, curling like the letters on the store-signs and in the books of that mysterious language, and hit Niko’s nostrils so that he would beat his chest with his fist and announce to the entire street that as soon as he got rich, he would take everyone to Odessa on a boat for the biggest binge of their lives. He had wanted to be a mariner as long as he could remember; he wanted to be greater than Rustaveli in his travels and conquer all the queens of the world. Many people believed him, most of all old Sergo Gogoladze, who would always get the first drink.

Once Niko was drinking wine alone on the terrace, deep in thought and looking out at the moody water. It was a Tuesday afternoon and there weren’t any boats visible, and the day was gray and muggy, and he couldn’t see the green mountains in the distance. Then all of the sudden a small white car silently pulled up to the pier, and the door opened, and a girl no more than eighteen stepped out and sleepily looked around at the street, at the water, and at a boat appearing finally in the distance. She scraped at the sand with her sandal, tied all the way past her ankle, where the hem of a purple silk dress meandered along with the sea. A thick braid of raven black hair reached her waist and curved a little, just like the outlines of her face, her lips, and the deep, dark lines of her eye-lids. She was olive-skinned and circular, spherical, “slender as a cypress” and thoughtful as the earliest hours of morning. She walked slowly towards the cafe, swaying carelessly as though in the breeze, her huge, almond eyes focused within themselves, her curving mouth a little open, with a strand of black hair brushing against her lips. When she looked up and saw Niko Baratashvili sitting at the table and staring at her she stopped, and her eyes no longer gazed inside herself.

As a woman she looked into his face and stopped thinking. She stopped breathing, too, and standing, and being motionless. She knew that she hadn’t fallen in love in that instant, but that didn’t matter. She was neither burned by his stare, nor pierced by it, and yet beckoned was not the right word either, but none of that mattered, because nothing could be availed, because everything else had disappeared, and because there was no longer a necessity to move or wonder. Neither did she know what face she was looking into, because neither the face nor the body of that man occupied a particular space, but existed in four dimensions simultaneously, and the likeness of herself in the black curve of his burning eyes, repeated less gently, evoking within her a strong desire to weep.

Niko looked and saw that her eyes had stopped moving, and looking at his they had died, as had his, for once he had a notion of falling in love and never speaking another word again. He knew he hadn’t fallen in love, but he knew he would never speak another word again, not when as a man he looked upon her swaying form and realized that he would never see another thing, not after the curving, parted lips the color of a pomegranate, but paler, and trembling slightly, because each thing he felt, or lack of it, filled up with her presence, was reflected in her eyes. So some men see a woman like that, and neither will speak another word for as long as they live, because without living the instant, they have been dissolved from the inside by the glance of one another, and being infinitely instantaneous that dissolving is way out of the bounds of time and space, and as it doesn’t pertain to their fabric neither is it noticed by man or woman.

“Suliko...” Niko murmured feebly, dying, as he would in another instant, covered with blood, which he was for the moment aware of.

But the woman slowly blinked her eyes, which had glazed over by a mist that had attacked him too, and murmured just as weakly, “Arminé.”

Niko meanwhile was hurrying to remember his own name so he could utter it, but at that moment the boat from the distance pulled in, and the girl was called, and slowly began walking backwards, not taking his eyes off him, and when finally on the boat she leaned over the edge and strained her long neck to gaze at him, as he himself had got up from the table and ran to the dock to stand at the edge for an hour, until the boat and the woman who wouldn’t take her eyes off him faded away in the mist and went off somewhere to Odessa.

The next day a bomb was planted in the restaurant of Levan Baratashvili, perhaps by members of the same groups of Abhazians who within seven years would turn that little town into a shadow of itself, but at any rate neither the owner of that restaurant, nor his wife, were ever found again by their son, who searched and searched, and then in despair hid upon a boat, not knowing who pursued him, and after spending three days and nights in a train station in Odessa which was no longer the same for him, he saved enough for a train ticket to Moscow.

According to the posthumous recollections of my thought process in the tunnel, what happened afterwards provalilos’ into a lapse of the same time and space, contemplating which had already begun to sicken me. I found myself under the sun, smoking a cigarette furtively over a dusty garbage urn next to the entrance into Teatral’naya station, barely standing when crowds brushed past me, though where I had gotten the cigarette, when, and the act of lighting it, was a blank. I looked up and saw my reflection in the unwashed wood-framed glass and jumped backwards- I could hardly recognize myself- my face was swollen as though I hadn’t been sober in three days, my eyes filled with tears, slanted and cast themselves down with such sadness and despair that I wondered if maybe it wasn’t me at all, but the perpetual drunk with stained pants at the kiosk.

There were no bruises, my limbs didn’t ache, neither did my head; no one had touched me. My clothes were dirty, but my wallet was in tact. I didn’t notice any after-taste of stale beer or vodka. I was about to look at a newspaper to check what day it was, but realized that it had been weeks since I’d paid attention, and it wouldn’t tell me anything about how long my lapse had been. In my pocket there was one clear green metro token and nothing else- I crossed Teatral’naya Square, in front of Bolshoi Theater, over to Manezhnaya at the entrance to the Red Square which I avoided, then also avoiding the underground mall which always perplexed me went down into Okhotnyi Ryad, rode to Park Kulturi.

I had been gone two days. In other words I had gone off with Yuri the Nose the day before yesterday. Expecting to find Niko worried or on the phone about me I came in to see him dozing on his chair, and asked why he wasn’t at work. When he noticed me he mumbled something and turned away with distaste. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered why no one seemed to care or notice; it struck me as something completely unfair if I was to be left friendless, because that had something to do with what I had just spent so much energy forcing myself to run away from. But in those next few days that changed: I could no longer allow myself to look for the mystery of Juliette Caruso, or the reason for the suicide of her grandmother, abhorring it because I had learned it would surely kill me, and someone wanted for me to do exactly that, but I could neither leave nor do anything- to go to my mother all the way in Orekhovo would certainly put her in danger, because I had no doubt that someone kept track of every step I took; to look for work- where? What could I do, if my name was no longer listed as a Moscow resident? Then at those moments at night, only when you are tired and not forcing yourself to sleep but finally willfully walking into that abyss I was beckoned by another kind of nothingness, or imagining one, and that seemed so desirable that I would be startled awake to ask myself what it could be, but never draw the line.

I had a dream suddenly where Niko convinced me that the best way out was for me to kill myself, and I, the fool, had agreed, him counseling me, preparing me for some unidentified instant in the future when I would end my life and be dead after that. And though my weak reluctance in that dream was drowned out by an indifferent sorrow I nonetheless hungered more than anything to not be, simply because that was what must be done, that was how everything was to turn out. In the few waking seconds before I opened my eyes I consciously felt the bitter aftertaste of that overwhelming desire for death undefined, or rather defined as the lack of anything else- and I still wanted it for the first few seconds as I blinked, looked around, and found myself intact on the couch in Niko’s plush living room.

That day I tried not to think about anything, but it didn’t work- I pulled out Durkov’s paper on death dreams and realized that I had experienced them all my life, that in reality there had been nothing special about them at all, until now, when the strange desire for something I couldn’t understand permeated my taste for food as it lingered around after fitful sleep like that, that in the confusion of lethargy a man can convince himself of anything if he wants, of death, or the desire for it.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to fall into eternal oblivion, for my body to rot away and for everything that had happened to me in twenty-eight years with such strenuous experience and perception to suddenly become insignificant. Let me close that theme right now, I would think, that obscene “existentialism” of the so-called emptiness of living, because I could have shat on all that essence or meaning of it, but its texture I wouldn’t give up, nor would any man- not certainly the six lunatics who ended up selling their souls to Salvatore Serpico, their lethargically-induced desire for death turned only into the desire for the alternative. The opportunity to sit and stare out of the window, to eat and drink and feel the closeness of a woman was the most valuable luxury I could afford, and I wouldn’t have given it up for anything, no matter how I suffered in solitude and anonymity, the total anonymity of not only being excluded from society and its function but threatened to never approach it. I had felt that, but I had also felt the other moments, of soft drink, the texture of the sound of mingling voices, smells that drew physiological reactions and the interplay of living colors meandering in motion and interacting with you, because a movie was not the same. And I would have given my life for all that.

Then what was the peculiar tugging at my chest in the foggy moments of the night, the wonder at the impossibility of a man to come up with a way to make people disappear? It had been done many times before- revolutionary organizations played with the identities of their agents so well that some could never be found on the face of the earth again, and that for hundreds of years turning more difficult as communication began to change the definition of existence as something that was noticed and spoken. And I also wanted to disappear, beside that of not understanding how it was done in this world and in this plane of time, the gnawing remembrance of being.

In sleep, sometimes, in half dreaming or in lack of it, I often saw Armine sitting on the windowsill, in perfect symmetry, kept straight by the palms of her thin white hands, fingers pointing in opposite directions, and her head turned ninety degrees to the side. The next moment that I remembered in that series of non-chronological points was when I was already looking for her, or not her but images in the background- not Sheremetyevo, but the basement office that suddenly no longer existed or else could not be found; not her, but the sausage man, and awaking like that, sometimes someone doesn’t know how long he has been asleep, or awake, like the voice of a friend who has been drinking tea too long.

A Kadrovoye Agentstvo- agencies which sprouted all over Moscow, promising personnel for expanding companies and jobs for the job seekers. Sometimes they worked merely in organizing and posting vacancies as a paid service to companies seeking employees, sometimes it was the other way around, and for forty rubles or so you could have your resume sent around like a manuscript to various enterprises, until your “agent” found you a suitable job. These agencies weren’t frequently used by most sensible people, and were trusted by still less. I’m happy to say that it couldn’t have been Niko responsible for making me acquainted with one, wandering into my presence condescendingly with his nose seriously in the depths of a newspaper: that wasn’t so. In fact, he didn’t have anything to do with finding this agency- for God knows when, whenever I’d walked into that old two story building between uneven tall houses on a hill, and forgotten about it after I found its basements empty, the words boolean frost were nowhere to be seen in or out of context, its sense unclear, and then suddenly the words appeared everywhere- in newspapers, next to job offers, on the grimy walls of old buildings, in wooden tunnels surrounding reconstructions with flaps of paper bearing a hand-written telephone number: Kadrovoye Agentstvo Boolean Frost, Personnel Outlook- Services are free.

And once again I found myself by the door into Nikolai Durkov’s room, and I didn’t say hello before I asked him, what is Boolean Frost?

“You never heard of Boolean Frost?”

I stood aghast, I was sure at that moment that for the past months everyone was playing a joke on me, and this was part of the punch line. “If I had, I wouldn’t be asking.”

But Durkov seemed more surprised than me: he immediately sat up in bed, which I had never seen him do, uncovered himself, and stared at me as though I were joking. “You mean, you never heard it in commercials, on store signs, in publishing houses? Listen, Vid, right, or Dovgan’? But you’ve never heard Boolean Frost?”

“Would you tell me what it is? I haven’t, I’m sorry, I don’t have a television, and I haven’t been out lately.”

But nothing, of course, was that easy with Durkov. He looked down at his feet and began snickering, then laughing, mumbling the two words occasionally. “That’s as though some kid asks me who Father Frost is.”

“So is it the same thing?” I barked. But Durkov only laughed louder.

“Go to your library,” he muttered, “go read about things that never happened. Mathilde Caruso... Mathilde.... Do you know that I met her once? She had been a teacher of physics since 1954, and never changed her profession since then, only schools, like gloves or bodies of souls. All that time she never set foot into a university, except once, five years ago when she came to talk about introductory quantum theory to the first level students at MGU. She was ninety-two or ninety-three, she walked into the room, with one eye sadder than the other, and each of her steps was the length of her foot, and she barely raised her heels off the ground. She spoke so quietly that they had to bring a microphone, and even then it was difficult to hear, because she had used up her loud voice long ago, before you or I were even born, and it still crackled, and she was as shy as a little girl. And after over fifty years she still spoke with an accent that softened all the vowels and consonants. But you know what the strangest thing was? Maybe two or three times someone asked a question concerning a very complex or ambiguous point which she had failed to clarify, and then each time she grew troubled, looked at me with knit brows, and would say with a lost smile: ‘Ne ponimayu.’”

“She probably didn’t know,” I objected, “she studied everything superficially, and you said yourself she never set foot into a university.”

“That’s what I thought too. But the questions that were asked weren’t difficult to answer- I could have done it as a mathematician. And Mathilde Caruso, since she returned to Moscow in 1954, had spent each day teaching and studying physics, and understood Russian as though she had grown up speaking it. Those were questions, my friend, that she didn’t want to answer.”

“So why didn’t you talk to her?” I implored him quietly, “why didn’t you ask, why didn’t you try to find her? There were so many things she could have told you, you, me, anyone- she knew things no one else knew.... at least concerning the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company.”

He eyed me from the side suspiciously- his right eye had a way of doing things separately from his left eye, and from the rest of his face. Then from under the pillow he drew out a piece of paper that had a familiar signature on it. “You see this? Of course you do: you read it.” Then he chuckled. “You read a lot of things. And this? They never mailed my letter for me. A letter I wrote for my daughter! You could say my only relative! Bastards. They call this democracy.” I could tell he would get carried away again and was looking for a window through which I could make a pretext to leave, but all those were snowier than that which hung by his bed. But he looked up again. “This,” he whispered, and there was a marked change in his intonation, as he spoke into his almost soiled shirt, “this is what I was studying... why would I ask Mathilde Caruso? What would she know? For that you’d have to look into the work of Ruben Vishapian.”

“Ruben Vishapian?” I repeated, “you know about Ruben Vishapian? Who is he? What work?”

But Durkov was already shaking his head, and both his eyes worked in tact and crinkled as he turned away, and I heard then some drawn out, dreary vowels, already he was weeping.

“Did it ever occur to you,” I murmured, more to myself than to him, “that the disappearance of Ruben Vishapian in 1916 coincided with the death of Alfred Steelsborough and the end of the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company?” Carefully I picked up the letter from his hand, and he didn’t even seem to notice, as I looked over the lines: On the other side of a mirror there is a parallel sort of existence.... A lunatic had been studying a form of parallel existence, or maybe then he hadn’t been a lunatic at all. And in what way did he mean “existence”? ....a “fictitious life”, igrushechnaya zhizn’. If you look at the process of perception as a set of components, the only way to describe this plane is by saying that perception is numbed in such a way that certain components are entirely absent.... not anything like wishful thinking, or whatever world of fantasy a man may create... this is something that is no doubt created, but it is so similar to what you are living, an exacted abstraction, a game of your existence made so pure that if you by chance cross into it you easily dismiss the border. But what did this have to do with the disappearance of Ruben Vishapian? And what did Ruben Vishapian have to do with Mathilde Caruso?

According to my liberal interpretation of Durkov’s article on death dreams the reminder of things previously dear would often send a patient into a bout of uncontrollable tears and a subsequent catatonic state. Did Durkov suffer from death dreams? Did he experience them so frequently that sometimes they visited him in waking hours, so as to lie on his back and moan word phrases that no nurse or doctor could understand, completely suffocated by that horrendous desire that had driven him insane? Or maybe that hadn’t driven him insane at all.... Not all of the researchers who eventually committed suicide necessarily suffered from symptoms of depression or manic-depression, and some nights even I would have one of those mysterious death dreams. They all had something else in common- they all studied the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, and maybe Mathilde Caruso, who dropped out of a window at the age of ninety seven, had also been associated with it when she went to South America eighty years ago.

“Two Serbian patients sat in Ruben Vishapian’s Constantinople office. They did not look at each other, moreover neither seemed to notice that he wasn’t alone. When Vishapian had spoken to the examining psychologist, he learned that both were under acute intoxication, it just wasn’t clear from what. The psychologist also noted that, although both had been interviewed together in the same room at the same time, during the session neither would acknowledge the other’s presence.

“The first question that Vishapian asked the psychologist was whether the two had suffered from any symptoms of neurosis, and was answered that while one experienced strange reoccurring nightmares and complained that he was terribly afraid of people thinking him incompetent at work, the other was severely depressed and very often his manias of being alone brought him into such states of anxiety that he would become helpless and almost entirely incompetent. Neither of these disorders, however, could explain the present half-catatonic state, taking into account that both patients were capable of communicating as far as their state of seemingly limited perception and thought would permit.

“Ruben Vishapian spent two hours with the patients, one hour devoted to each. Then he had them taken back to their hotels that he had arranged upon their arrival in Constantinople. After sitting alone in his office for an indeterminable amount of time and thinking, he said to himself:

“‘The minds of those two don’t notice each other. Each remembers his own name, but can’t link that name to his own person. The minds of those two don’t notice themselves.’

Vishapian looked over the reports that the stenographer had taken down, unnoticed behind a wall, and rereading that when asked about the time, date and year, neither responded, Vishapian thought some more. Then he said to himself, but more to himself:

“‘The minds of those two don’t notice a lot of things. I wonder if some components of their centers of perception have been blocked. I wonder why some centers would be blocked, though, like time and identity perception, while their kinetic dimensions have been hyperbolated, so that each movement is magnified by hundreds of kilometers, and the office space they were in seems to them like the whole world.’

“He stood and went to the window, and stretching out his five fingers he smiled, and said to himself, only this time not aloud:

“‘It is as though some parameters of their personas have been selected and others dropped off, so that they live and sense themselves to be in a sort of modular space. I wonder what it is that they saw or ate which made them feel that way. At any rate, if I find it, those two will be in my pocket by Wednesday.’”*

Things like that baffled me remorselessly, because I couldn’t understand where they came from. Sometimes I would stare at the wallpaper for hours trying to draw the ends together, and then stop myself at the thought of why it was significant. The work of Ruben Vishapian was the subject of the letter of an insane math professor, if I had understood that correctly, or was able to notice that parable at all.

But where did things touch the Boolean Frost Employment Agency, which I was certain was a cover company for other shady operations which perhaps... did not exist? That beige two story house near Krasniye Vorota, just three stops from Niko’s house, but so seemingly close to where Mathilde Caruso supposedly worked in the 1930’s, was empty, as it had been when I was kidnapped, and no trace of the presence of people or of a tunnel leading downwards could be detected, though I went there every day, and each time hopefully looked for a bluish car following me. I would tell them everything, I would agree at first to disappearing, just to see what they did- I would rather die than continue living like this, staring up at the sky sometimes and pausing still in a moment when for some reason everything else seemed to fall away and no longer matter, though the only close explanations to that horrendous emptiness inside I found in the descriptions of Durkov and the supposed research of Vishapian. Vishapian? I had a strong suspicion that both he and Mathilde Caruso were involved in the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company, which was also a cover company for some operations. Perhaps a double cover- tobacco trade covered cocaine shipping after it was illegal, which covered something else, but what?

I stopped again in front of a familiar door that lead nowhere in that falling house, and had thoughts which raced with unimaginable speeds and like lines suddenly began to merge, but then at once faded. On the back of an advertisement for Boolean Frost which I’d picked up, newly posted, on the wall of an adjoining bank I scribbled: I’m willing. Rabinovich, a.k.a. Petrovich, etc..... But in a moment of panic I couldn’t remember my present name, and added: You know the rest. Who do I address it to? Did I know their names? Yuri, Armine, and that was all. I rolled up the bit of paper, and before sticking it into the crack in the door I wrote those names along the tube I’d made of it. Then I ran out, and realized that it should soon be spring, but looking around didn’t believe that thought, and somehow knew for certain that this winter would last forever.

I had dialed all the numbers posted in the Boolean Frost ad, where answering machines requested that I send a detailed resume by fax and someone would get in touch with me soon. No one got in touch with me; I contacted stores, firms and agencies who might have had possible dealings with Boolean Frost, and learned the postal address. I sent a form there, Niko even organized a note on an upcoming Tax Police checkup, but no reply came. Was it all really so shady that not a single service of the cover company even existed? No, some businesses claimed that they had personnel chosen by the Boolean Frost Personnel Agency, employees who claimed that about a week after sending the resume they were summoned for an interview regardless of their being applicable to any pending vacancy. I wrote ten resumes with different names, backgrounds, professions, and addresses (addresses which I could check)- no response ever came. I finally went to the tax police with the crumpled ad to make sure the agency existed, the officer there claimed it did, and that its reputation was impeccable.

Where were their headquarters? Their contact phones? A list, perhaps, of the people who worked there? That kind of information was confidential, it couldn’t be obtained anywhere, it didn’t exist. Boolean Frost- a person or a network- could it be possible that such names would start appearing in directories? It could: Boolean Frost Design, Photography and Polygraphy. Another firm, this one with a single phone and fax, somewhere in Petrovsko-Razumovskoye, closer to Sokol towards the west: 154-0272. Was this a business that had left traces of itself around the city... Niko asked around, then brought me reports from a major financial corporation from Ingushetia called BIN, which claimed that Boolean Frost had worked with them on an advertising booklet in Russian, English and Turkish, and that the final projects of their cooperation were very much approved. Another client was Iris Cleaning, which had ordered advertisement flyers and was also very satisfied with the outcome. I had seen both products, both had the signature of Boolean Frost as though it really was signed by the hand of a person signing a name. Boolean Frost- this and a personnel agency, perhaps other things, and already it was reminding me so much of the outer infrastructure of the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company- at least two services, and also linked to so many unfathomable things.

“It is a funny name,” said Nikolai Durkov, looking at a chapter of the Caruso manuscript. “Boolean Frost has its linguistic origins.” Good thing I caught him in his academic mood, I thought. “The people that surrounded Salvatore Serpico in his work had a kind of religious attitude towards him- gradually, all other factors in their lives started becoming less and less significant, and they deemed him Father Frost, the giver of gifts.”

“Why Boolean? What did they have to do with mathematics?”

“Don’t look so deep into it. Smart people, those. Let’s see, George Boole... well, the principle of Boolean Algebra is a binary system, on the most primitive levels, and it is said that Boolean Frost could endow people with a binary gift.”

“What the hell is a binary gift supposed to be?”

Durkov paused for a moment to laugh at me. “I’ve observed very intelligent people become entirely infantile when under attacks of severe neurosis. Those mental cases sixty years ago knew more of Boolean Algebra than you or even I, but they had this sublimation thing going on, where the laws of binary logic were applied to their own existence. And their icon, their Joseph Stalin, their Father Frost suddenly became Boolean.”

“I think I understand,” I said drowsily, looking deep into my head, and I didn’t really want to talk anymore.

“Well, good!” he chided sarcastically, “you could have figured it out yourself.”

“I didn’t know you had read the manuscript.”

“I haven’t- I knew the person, and I knew what she was associated with. But that’s not my concern any longer. She’s dead.” And he refused to communicate further.

Once I dialed that number, 154-0272, in the afternoon, and no one answered. I wasn’t at all surprised, but when I dialed again in the evening, a woman’s voice picked up and said hello without introducing herself or the business she was in.

“Boolean Frost?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Now, now, what did I say, ask, request? I hadn’t a clue... but it all spilled out anyway. “I found you though Iris Cleaning. I’m from the advertising department of Karpov Publishing, we work with small construction magazines, and need some promotions, but can’t turn to an advertising agency, so...”

“Send a representative to this address on Monday with statements about what you have in mind. We’ll discuss prices.” And then she hung up- she didn’t tell me the address, she didn’t care, no names, no details, didn’t even check up on all that crap I’d said about advertising, it wasn’t even real....

If at a certain point I had lost track of the time that passed since whatever had happened to me happened, now I had forgotten to ask with what purpose I acted, why I was so insistent on getting inside the organization by whatever means possible. Niko could no longer be involved in this: once, I was sure, as he now often did: walk into my room, puffing thoughtfully on a cigarette, and slowly summarize either my situational incompetence or the ambiguous events of the previous day, whatever they were, that caused the change in the color of my face from gray and strained, with bulging eyes, to puffy and pasty white. In fact it embarrassed me if he knew by what method I had obtained whatever small invoice from Iris or Bin, taking an order from the Boolean Frost Photography House, because I couldn’t arrive as a representative about to make a deal, or how many times I had gone in search of their offices, and for what pointless reasons. So then I tried to talk to him as little as possible about all that- he immediately understood, perhaps grumbled a little when I didn’t answer his questions, but then contented himself occasionally with viciously penetrating generalutions.

At a certain point I know I did make it into those offices, but recently I was beginning to lose the ability to view quantative eventualities as instances or events. It was a condition like when you are really drunk or with a high fever: on the one hand time is distorted, on the other instances mix with one another and the concept of chronology is inconceivable. At any rate, whatever point at which I reached the offices was inevitably linked with hours and days of trying to get in touch with the secretary, by way of the doorman, by way of that same crumbling invoice. (Invoices were very strange among businesses here: it surprised me that they were used in this company- most places like these hardly paid any taxes at all, and so it was completely unnecessary for them to keep formal records of their transactions and deals.)

Why people there floated past, unrecognized, ambiguously taking down my name, it wasn’t that at all which I remembered, because there was very little that I could remember now, and it seemed that the amount of information I could keep in my head at one time was limited, so that I paid attention only to things which presented immediate consequences. I returned to the office once, in this hydro-technical institute or something like that, on the fifth story of a drab gray tower beside a field, I knocked on the door beneath a newly printed Boolean Frost sign displaying a coin with a curiously grinning joker, his torso turning into another upside-down bust like on a card, but no one answered. I pushed the door open gently and saw a pair of eyes glance at me.

Chiasmus No. 2

A small tragedy occurred with me that September in St. Petersburg. I can’t say September, nor clarify whether it was the September before my gradual and a little painful disintegration that winter, or the September after, when our economy crashed on August 17th and Sofiko waited for hours in line for sugar, salt and butter. I also can’t say by what name I wandered around the city; though certainly the night before Juliette had still teasingly called me Mit’ka, and reassured me that she was looking at the same Dmitri Rabinovich that she cast into the river- I can’t say I trust her that well. She doesn’t refer to concrete things all of the time, and you can’t really tell whether the absurd stories she tells, full of those intense glances and accented intonations, are from her life or you own.

That one night I stood perplexed by that one story that apparently occurred to one of us: don’t rely on me for accuracy, for perhaps she explained it like a fish-integration that runs in the blood of all Carusos, or maybe Dmitri Rabinovich really did stand there all winter, or maybe it wasn’t me at all but someone else. Anyway, so it seems, that I- being something like Dmitri Rabinovich at the time, was returning to my hotel by way of the central Nevsky Prospekt, turning off onto the canal of Griboyedov Street, and saw that they were laying new cement mixed with tar on Nevsky.

Well, I was surprised and a little disappointed, needing to get to the other side and turn left on to Griboyedov, to an old house by a travel-agency, the rotting window of which (being the tiny brown room I was renting in that deceased hotel) over-looked that sad brass cone of St. Isaac Cathedral. But I strolled on a little further, coughing from the overpowering smell of the tar that stood in the smoke that came off the street, in the process of being laid. In the next square (not being from St. Petersburg, I can’t remember the name) people were crossing to the other side, over the newly-laid steaming cement. It was dark; the steam-rollers were freely rolling by without any signs or caution or fences; I also stepped off the sidewalk and began crossing Nevsky Prospekt like all the others. Now since this was not exactly cement, but gravel mixed with tar, it was sticky and stuck to my shoes. In places it was still soft, and my heels made little imprints. I walked faster- the street was much wider than I thought, or else it was just taking me a very long time to cross it. Actually, the tar was getting stickier the closer I got to the railing over the canal on the other side of the square, intending as I did never to leave its side and continue on along the black fence on the sidewalk in the middle of that little street. There it was- closer, closer, but my feet wouldn’t move any more. I wasn’t sinking, but somehow my ankles were covered and glistening with tar, and it had filled my shoes, and my shoes stuck in the cement. I was still standing in the middle of Nevsky Prospekt.

No one knows exactly how long Dmitri Rabinovich stood there- some say he did it on purpose to empathize with Mathilde Caruso before she disappeared, when during her interrogation she was forced to stand on her feet for five days. Others say it wasn’t Dmitri Rabinovich at all. But for several days, before he was removed, a person did stand in the middle of Nevsky Prospekt. There are those that still claim that it was a statue begun successfully, but since the mayor didn’t have enough funds to finish it, with the economic crisis and all, it was taken down.

But I can’t really remember the details. If it really was me that stood there like an idiot for five days, then I’m only sorry that no one thought to take a picture. I’m so tired of forgetting what my name was when a certain event took place in my life, I wish someone at least took this down as something that happened to me, because not even Juliette Caruso will identify for sure when, how, and who stood for five days on Nevsky Prospekt. And maybe it wasn’t Juliette that told me the story, but I that told her. That night, when I never made it home.

* * * * *

Those eyes didn’t recognize me, because they had already recognized me long ago, not waited for me, but expected, gazed silently, darkly, all empty but knowingly piercing nonetheless. Uniform distance from the black brows, themselves almond-shaped but wide as tear-drops, with a prominent inflection in the lower eyelid, simple, sad, and terribly black. At first I didn’t recognize them, because I only saw them and the black hair, not the lower part of the face which was blocked by the top of the monitor of a computer. But I knew innately that they had been eyes I had been waiting to see also, in all their fierceness, and burning intelligence. And I stood like that maybe for a year or two, while all other things fell back into place, while they looked at me as emptily as I looked at them. They didn’t move when they saw me, neither did the head; I rushed into the room to see the rest of her, lounging back in the chair with her arms around a guitar, in a long, black sweater and her boots on the counter, two tiny braids covering her ears, though her hair was still as uniformly short as it had been then. She glanced downward silently and her lower lip protruded as though she was bored, while she strummed something and sang a few words in a language I couldn’t understand.

“Juliette?” I murmured, leaning in her direction, but frozen, not believing my eyes.

“There you are, Dmitri Rabinovich,” she said, but her voice was not hers, it was the voice of someone I had already heard recently, because her accent was practically gone. And she didn’t really seem to care either way, not looking at me, but at the screen, where a deck of solitaire was displayed. “Everyone else is gone for tonight. Strange that you show up like that. I thought I threw you into the river.”

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, I even smiled a little. “What are you doing here?” But even that was so casual, so superficial, as though she were an old colleague I hadn’t seen in a while.

“I’m working,” she replied, but a strange thing happened then: noticing that casual irony, she repeated it, but so subtly that had there been another person in that room who knew every single detail of our situation, he wouldn’t have noticed that it was irony.

“What? What are you working at?”

She smiled and tilted her head. “Well, I’m not working now, I’m at work. I work as a photographer.”

“For Boolean Frost?”

“You’re smart.”

“I didn’t know Boolean Frost was an advertising agency,” I said, speaking as though nothing else was going through my mind, because at that moment I was only afraid of what she would say next, because I was afraid of her, because of my relationship towards her.

“You probably knew us as a Kadrovoye Agentstvo. That network is a little more extensive.”

“Listen,” I sighed, gathering up all the courage I had and leaning in mock confidence on the edge of the table, “a couple of days ago I spoke with a certain Yuri Nosik, and he brought me I guess to a filial of yours at Krasniye Vorota, and... and asked....”

She looked up at me knowingly, but just as mockingly. All the same she spoke in full earnest, and that was what terrified me. “You’re right, that’s the personnel agency.”

“They offered to make me disappear,” I blurted out.

“Disappear?” she smiled mysteriously, “they do that sometimes. They change your profession if you’re in trouble. It’s not exactly official because it’s almost fraudulent the way they practically give you a new specialization overnight, but...”

“No,” I interrupted frantically, not understanding what she was saying, “they said they make people disappear, they charge five grand, like a hit....”

“Five grand?” she asked skeptically. “They mean five thousand rubles.” Then she sang something else to herself, stared at me silently for a while, deep in thought and not smiling. “Besides, I saw you there.”

I stopped and stared at her again, while her face was expressionless, and for a moment saw her in all the variants of all the features I had looked at in all my life, changing tones and faces like a pearl. Like Salvatore Serpico, she had at least eleven faces, maybe more, and I wondered where she hid them. “How?” I uttered hoarsely. “Through what glass or window could you have seen me? I was in a tunnel.”

“I can’t believe you don’t remember me,” she replied drowsily, turning away. “I mean, you might have forgotten everything that happened, but you’d also forget my face, in the Neva....” I listened intently to the texture of those words, and the voice became unbearably familiar.

“There was a girl there,” I wondered quietly, “who ran off to some client. But I couldn’t see you in her face, you’re like your grandfather....”

In a flash of a second her eyes became wide and fierce again as she looked at me. “How do you know? I can look like whomever I want, in your eyes, at least. I am Armine, Juliette.... and you’re foolish enough to believe that.”

“I read a manuscript that they found in your grandmother’s apartment.”

“You read a story,” she sang musingly, strumming again, obviously trying to get rid of me, or innocently waiting for me to leave.

“A story?” I objected, “you mean that none of that was real? No case number 357, no tunnel network built by Caruso, that I walked in myself? And what about this,” I cried, staring at my palm, where the scar from a knife had extended my life-line, “who did this? And maybe my own case, which never reached the prosecutor’s office, will never be found again, and Investigator Nikiforov will refuse to say he even knows my name.... of course, what name does he know.... But Juliette, Juliette, listen- you were in that tunnel there, you were Armine, you heard what they told me, why a man named Dmitri Rabinovich, who was not me, was convicted of a crime that I committed?”

She stared, aghast, or perhaps not aghast at all, but seeming that way. Froze in her chair, clutching the guitar.

“Don’t look surprised,” I told her.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she suddenly asked, as though playing a lunatic who had forgotten what had been said by herself a second ago.

“Salvatore Serpico,” I said, and stepped back.

I had never gotten used to, in St. Petersburg, the way her face could change expressions so quickly, and not just expressions, but the whole context of her being, as though she really had several faces and several lives along with those. Now she grew as sad as though our whole encounter had been a burden on her, but said something entirely contradictory, with a frankness that penetrated all lies I had ever heard, for this wasn’t one: “That was a character my grandmother made up with her friends in Paris. He’s not real. He’s fictitious.” Leaned back again calmly, and even lit a cigarette, now taking the time to explain the whole farce to me. “It’s all a fable. You see, I wrote the manuscript.”

“Then... then how, why did your grandmother, Mathilde Caruso, commit suicide?” I came towards her, I even pleadingly picked up her hand. “Juliette,” I whispered, “it wasn’t enough for you to throw me into the river- I was walking by the Yauza a couple of months ago, perhaps only a month, and a terribly old woman falls right in front of me... Look, look-” I pulled up a familiar edge of my coat, “you see that dark spot? That was her blood...”

“Then stop tormenting yourself, Akakii Akakievich,” said Juliette and stood up from the chair, lazily. “Go away from here, forget everything you saw, forget me, and then maybe you’ll wake up a different person again.”

“I don’t believe you,” I explained, “you can’t hide anything from me anymore.” But when I responded with a glance I couldn’t stare into her face, it was too bright and painful, and I turned away. “I want to disappear,” I whispered, “I understand what you wanted to keep me away from then, but I still don’t understand the death of my friend, and even if I did, things happened to me that won’t let me live like what I’ve been living. I forget things that escape my attention forever, never to remember them again. I might forget that I saw you, and all this. But I won’t forget that there was a very good reason why your grandmother jumped out of a window. Tell Yuri- tell whomever you see first- that they can do what they want with me. Because I know you won’t. You don’t want anything at all.”

There were games that people played knowingly on both sides, a kind of prisoner’s dilemma, because already long ago I knew that Juliette would shamelessly deny everything that was happening around us, or around me. And while she was denying it, convincing me that everything was a legend and a rumor, a banal conspiracy theory, I was already prepared to defend it as real, because now that I was an indelible part of this situation, by convincing me that Boolean Frost didn’t exist in the terms I believed it she would convince me that I didn’t exist either. We both had known we would meet, we both knew what we would say to each other, it was just a matter of rearranging the words to fit time, if time was applicable, which I doubted.

She raised her brows momentarily with that kind of detached acceptance and looked to the side. “Then leave. But don’t think that I would be so simple that I’d try to convince you of something like that after all that you saw. I’d like for you to show me Moscow.” Then she paused and gazed out of the window, where there was a sunset that cast strange shadows on the white apartment towers in a row, and they in turn created havoc by lighting some of their windows, so that as Juliette saw day on one side and night on the other she was so immersed that her eyes grew glassy, her lips parted, and she murmured, unable to move: “I haven’t been here in a while, and now that I see it again I find it a very strange city. Perhaps the coordinates of time and space are a little distorted here, but I wonder why.”

“What are you standing around in your old coat like a phantom for, Akakii Akakievich?” asked Niko, holding a spoon in his hand as he met me in the hall and made a grimace.

“Don’t call me that,” I barked, and I didn’t feel like taking it off, or even staying. I didn’t even know what I was doing in his apartment; it was clean, richly decorated with rugs, crystal vases, and I stared ahead with puffy eyes and couldn’t move. “Today I saw....”

“What?”

“I saw.... I saw how.... Juliette.”

Niko stood at eye level with me and stared into my eyes. I didn’t know until now that he was capable of mirroring them, as they filled with water, not tears, the lids lowering in a sort of trance that I saw Juliette fall into when she stared out of the window. He seemed to remember something immemorial, but looked at me with horror though I thought he’d be surprised and say something witty. No progress- that wasn’t progress- this meant for Niko something that it didn’t mean for me, something that had nothing to do with what was happening around me, something that I couldn’t understand. It was his own phantom.

He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. But before I could wonder why he reacted the way he did a very loud knock on the door startled each of us in different ways. He gazed in the direction of the door with drowsy apprehension, but I ran to open it. In the stairwell I was surprised to see two drab policemen, and a face which I might have recognized once in the eigth precinct, but suddenly that didn’t matter anymore. “Petr Nikolaev? You’re under arrest for the murder of Mikhail Yermolaev.”

I took a step backwards, but instead of the abyss I anticipated was a continuation of space. All I thought about was that it was a good thing I hadn’t taken my coat off. From far away I also suddenly realized with relief that this was the last time that I would be arrested. That was why I felt somewhat like a hypocrite when I muttered, “What?”

“But you can’t do that!” Niko shouted uselessly while they handcuffed me, “the case was closed a year ago...”

“Niko Baratashvili?” an officer said, “I believe you participated in that investigation. It would be best if you came along.”

“I will not!” he protested, “and you will be hearing from my lawyer immediately! What the hell is the criminal code doing in this country? Would you at least have some shame and pretend that it exists?”

“Niko...” I called faintly, “Niko, 154-0272.... Petrovsko-Razumovskoye, don’t lose her, she could vanish at any moment... she wanted me to show her Moscow.”

“I know,” he called back sadly, craning his neck through the door with a tragic expression in his eyes, “I’ll try to get you out, but you know that some things happen beyond my powers....”

No one spoke to me at all in the car. I wasn’t surprised that we were heading north, along the Garden Ring, towards Petrovka, instead of a local detainment center.

I was under arrest for the murder of my friend, whom I saw once on the couch in St. Petersburg, with his hand hanging to the floor, and the strangest thing was that I was no longer convinced that I hadn’t done it myself. So many things had happened since then that I already forgot the initial alibi that Niko prepared long, long ago. Was it a suicide after all? Did it really matter?

I stared at the dirty green wall of a cell until I was nauseated, and was resolved not to utter a single word. They had taken out my file which I had thought was forgotten by Nikiforov, and it wasn’t, and then two officers walked in, took me out, and led me to another investigator’s office just like they once led Mathilde. This was not the Lubyanka, this was Petrovka 38, but that didn’t matter. The investigator looked up at me with an alligator smile and asked me where I was on the morning of January 1st, 1997. But I wasn’t there, I was somewhere else, and I wasn’t I at all.

I called Juliette and woke her up at six in the evening. She was sleepy, mistook me for someone called Aram and spoke in a language that mostly consisted of m’s. Then she came to, and complained that no one could properly show her Moscow because they tried too hard. “Show it to me,” she said with an accent, as though it were a phrase she had learned out of a phrasebook, and I did, I did, I was showing her Moscow like she had once showed me St. Petersburg, though she repaid me with not a word about that which sickened me most.

“Conscious existence is an even slit, according to Nabokov,” said Juliette when she stopped and stared up, squinting, into the snow in the courtyard of two old six story houses with protruding windows, “but your awareness and acknowledgment of it happens at limited instances throughout your life when, for the sake of memory, you mark a single instant or tiny period of time with the thoughts, ‘I exist,’ but more importantly, ‘now is now’, and those moments remain your only proof that you have stretched your existence through time. My such moments of momentary awareness are few and scattered, so that ever since I was a little girl I have collected them and strung them up to make a necklace.”

Then both she and I fell deep in thought.

Text from the unpublished work Recursive Modulation, by Ruben Vishapian:

“I have often wandered inside a very detailed canvas,” Juliette pondered out loud, after everyone in the club “Bednye Liudi”, off of Tretyakovskaya, went home and she sat with her legs crossed at a round table with half a drink, staring into the low, domed brick ceiling of the cellar-stage, “and learned that details blabber stories far longer than simplicity. There are people so obsessed with the consistency of their memory that they painstakingly note down all details for the sake of making the picture more complicated and lifelike. In all actuality complexity is the result of structuralized modulation, and can only be achieved in games that people play. But this is a paradox. My brother is taking a long time at the bar, he grew rusty at ordering drinks already in Bucharest, and has cultivated a habit of picking up women at all the wrong times and places. Did you ask for a martini or a gin and tonic? I vomit at my eleventh screwdriver, sorry. I am not Russian, I have no Russian blood, and that’s a pity, because foreigners are always tempted to think that the Russian soul is very complex, which is of course a romantic myth constructed by the intelligentsia of the last century. Though I’m not faultless- I believe that the Russian man has a bottomless identity, like a well that sneezed.” And at that she smiled a sinister smile, as though it posed some sort of challenge.

Things buried deep beneath a stack of nights were beginning to unravel themselves upon a table in the interrogation room. I was awoken into another particular reality with the backside of a bony fist which smashed into my right cheekbone, I guess after I replied that I refused to answer for Yermolaev’s death, since the case was closed a year ago. “Vladimir Sabotinsky,” I kept repeating, “look in the St. Petersburg UVD archives, assholes, you’ll find him in prison.” Catch: in this world, I’ll say as a footnote, suspects didn’t talk back to policemen while under investigation, it was not a wise thing to do, and so you saw them interviewed on television with benign bruises, mumbling into their coats shyly, and shyly admitting their faults. I had looked up dizzily into a yellow face of an officer in green and blue uniform, and I thought that it was 1938.

“Two months ago,” said he, but he was not Joseph Stalin, who walked now on the other side of my weak dreams, “we reopened that case after information leaked that Sabotinsky had been framed. Last week the allegations were confirmed by the St. Petersburg prosecution department. Were you very close with your friend Mikhail Yermolaev?”

I nodded curiously.

“Then you might have been aware that he was a drug dealer.”

“He wasn’t!” I suddenly protested, but why was I wasting my energy- this, after all, wasn’t real, but as watery and relative as the Boolean Frost Photography House, whatever fraudulence they were responsible for, and if it was convenient for someone, at this minute while I wore my name sideways, to have Yermolaev be a drug dealer, then there goes a flag in your hands, phosphorous inveiglers, for whom words, air and people dissolved into blue snow which melted and evaporated, so that they would have their way with space and time and Yermolaev would suddenly become a drug dealer.

“You might have known about the bag of heroin found under his bed the night of the murder,” Mathilde Caruso’s investigator from the Lubyanka continued, lifting a strange piece of paper from the folder, “but you still deny it. Then let me tell you a little story. Ever heard about a real-estate fraud ring called Partners? Big thing on the news about it- they sniffed out lonely pensioners, alcoholics with no relatives, made them give up their apartment, had them disappear, and sold the property. These people took the passports of the ‘clients’, had their own photos pasted into blanks, stamped and all. Everything was very clean. And then someone discovered an anonymous graveyard. You sure you haven’t heard about it? It was on the news a couple of months ago.”

I winced silently, squirmed, but it was no use. “What does this have to do with Yermolaev?” I asked hoarsely.

The investigator broke out into a shy smile. “Do you remember if Yermolaev was employed?”

“He worked as a programming consultant for a small firm.”

“And how long did he work there?”

“Two years, since his wife left him.”

“According to tax police reports, Yermolaev had a surprisingly humble income- about three hundred dollars a month, and yet somehow managed to afford a luxurious apartment in the middle of Moscow.”

“That’s impossible!” I blurted out, “he never returned since he left Moscow, and his mother lived in Vykhino!”

“Maybe, but the apartment formally belonged to him, furthermore, he had bought it from the Partners agency. Petr Petrovich, there is strange pattern in Yermolaev’s finances.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Petr Petrovich, during the past two months you have changed your name two times. Your previous passport, which had you registered as Nikolai Petrovich Durkov, is false. We linked it to several that had been produced and then obtained by the former Partners agency.”

“My passport,” I began shakily, my hands searching futilely for something on the table because I didn’t know what hole I had fallen into, “could not have been false, because I never meant for it to be false. I went to my a Zh. A. K. office, gave them my old passport, where I was registered as Dmitri Rabinovich, and asked for my name to be changed.”

“And why did you do that?” smiled the investigator.

“For safety reasons. I was being followed.”

“For safety reasons. That makes perfect sense. Here’s what we have on you so far.... A sac of heroin had been found under Yermolaev’s bed the day after his murder, which was the first day of the last year- your friend faced drug addiction and was seriously in debt, that much we’ve confirmed. He had no choice but to turn to his former Partners associates for financial help- that means you, and perhaps someone else....”

I saw two houses as I looked out of the barred window, while I didn’t listen, for some reason, to what the investigator was telling me, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was suddenly incapable of receiving any information....

The roof is sliding, Vova in Kuntsevo saw the wind pull out several trees, sweep them away along with grass and debris, an old cow or so, just like in the movie Twister, but no one saw it here, except maybe at the Kodak CineWorld off of Tverskaya, but that too groaned with the weight of the wind, pushing up its foundations and surrendering to an impenetrable mist and smoke that I kept seeing, on and off, not being able to place that hypnotic, deafening noise of emptiness and the swirling surrounding, so that I stood and held my head with my hands.

“....How long did it take him to pay back his loan? Months? A year? How much time went by after you heard that he bought another apartment in St. Petersburg? It leads up to the fact that they sent you to get the money back from him, under threat of death, because he was your friend in the first place. That was why you were so nervous when he said he had no money, when he said he spent it all on dope- that was why you pulled the trigger....”

Was Yermolaev really in debt? That was hardly a vague thought, but I was in much more trouble. “It’s so ridiculous,” I said softly, “that if this were a novel the author would be laughed at for such a false alibi. No one would send me to him because he was my friend, and you have no proof.”

“We have proof,” the investigator challenged with one of those ridiculously eager grins, and from under the desk produced a dirty paper sac with a gun in it. “The weapon. The bullet in Yermolaev’s head came from this gun, which has your fingerprints on it. Incidentally, this was the same gun found on you when you were arrested in a tunnel under Chistyie Prudy for assaulting a security guard.”

I was screaming inside, I turned my head looking for abstract escapes, but there was air and windows. “Nikiforov.... that case was closed when a man called Dmitri Rabinovich confessed to the assault and the guard recognized him. Nikiforov- I don’t remember his first name- he investigated me....”

“Dmitri Samuelovich, that man called Rabinovich never existed. As far as we’re concerned, the whole scheme was the same identity fraud that you’ve been involved in for years....”

Three more days in a holding cell and I wouldn’t confess, I couldn’t confess, because this wasn’t 1938 and I was luckier- I needed to hold out for only three days, and if they didn’t charge me, by law they had to release me, or provide me with an attorney if charged. But how could I hope for that if they’d already all become absurd balloons? Niko wouldn’t come for me again, because I felt agonizingly certain that I had been deserted not only by logic but by real people as well, so that perhaps the only ones that would whirl or brush past me would be the likes of Juliette Caruso, who was as strange and fair as a dragonfly, Nosik her henchman, and her mysterious brother who didn’t exist.

Speaking of which, I had a peculiar Armenian cellmate who was over a hundred, but didn’t remember his age, though he quite vividly recalled New Year 1900. He occurred to me at the end of that tedious day when they changed me into a dirty gray jumpsuit to make me think that I would be there forever, though I was the only one dressed like that, and passing other holding rooms I could feel dirty, hungry eyes following me with bemusement, staring out of heads that weren’t shaved, because this was NOT a Russian novel. In my room, which contained six people and one bed with a striped mattress marred by an ambiguous brown hole, my top bunk was occupied by a wrinkled, large-eyed geezer who stared at me like a little child and laughed with an Al Pacino grin.

“Why the hell are you dressed like that?” he asked, looking down.

“Why the hell do you care?” I was looking for problems, not from him, but maybe from someone else from the cell, but two or three were asleep, and the others seemed to be too preoccupied with being charged to pay attention.

“I don’t like no psychopaths in my cell. I have three more days and I don’t wanna sleep in a room with a pervert.”

“You got any teeth left?” I asked squinting.

“You wanna come up here and find out?” The two others stirred and looked up from their pillows. The old man’s voice had turned hoarse and shrill at the same time. I looked closer and saw that he had a full head of hair, much of which was still black. He did have teeth, but those were obviously false. The way he looked at me made me uneasy, as though he knew me personally, and his drooping round eyes, sunken in gray shadow beneath bushy brows, didn’t look straight through me, but didn’t seem to care one way or another.

“I don’t deal with paralytics,” I finally replied. He didn’t say anything after that, and as I sat on the cot staring at my feet I asked, “What are you here for?”

Curiously, and with much old age care, he crawled out of the blanket and climbed to the floor. Then he opened his shirt and I saw a huge, thick white scar running diagonally across his stomach and interrupting a pasture of black and gray hair. When he saw me recoil he made a brief, recognizing smile. “A German cut my belly open to the navel with his machete when I was on the Italian front in 1918. In 1941 the same man, who was English this time, continued the slash all the way across with a Turkish knife that once killed my father. He was already English, but I was still Italian.”

“Is that why you’re here, because you’re Italian?”

“I am Armenian. I’m here for turning someone’s van into a casino. Made about five grand in three days.”

“How old are you?” And why was no one else listening, had they heard this already? This was a story, but who cared whether it was lies or not....

“I don’t remember. I couple of years ago I remember celebrating my hundredth birthday. But when this century started I remember drinking champagne with my uncle in Rome.”

“You seem to remember quite a lot,” I mused, glad to be distracted.

“You don’t seem to remember or know too much,” he retorted, but then quickly reached back into his shirt. “Here, you wanna read my dissertation?” He handed me a bunch of old papers that weren’t even bound together. “It was going to win the Nobel Prize in 1920, but someone set me up. Look, there’s my lawyer. They let me have a lawyer. Good luck to you.” Then he nimbly went off to the door that had opened and revealed two men who were supposedly his saviors. They weren’t mine. I looked at the papers. The writing was in a language that I not only couldn’t understand, but couldn’t even recognize the alphabet of. Perhaps Armenian. I stuffed it into my jumpsuit smelling like chlorine and forgot about it, turning over and waiting for my trial or confession while I tried to get some sleep by the peeling wall.

Did I sleep? Did I remember sleeping, or did sleep happen anymore, did I read while dead the strange letters hinting that perhaps that was the very same Vishapian, a thought which crossed my mind but immediately took off without closing the door because it was useless and exhausting? It wasn’t, and even it if Vishapian was alive, then he was not real. I was awake after all, though dawn hadn’t really started yet, and the first thing I saw was that instead of three pages of foreign text hidden by my chest I found one page with one paragraph. Where the rest had disappeared to no one could tell, because I saw a face above me, the face of the wrinkled Armenian except that he was not wrinkled at all, but young and familiar, his likeness perhaps eighty years ago, the con artist of Constantinople. Blindly with one hand I tore open his shirt to see at what age he had obtained his famous scar, if he had lied to me, if he was not perhaps the Hamburger from the Caruso fish story, but instead in front of my nose there suddenly appeared the black barrel of a gun, and I realized that I had never reached to open his shirt at all.

“C’est bon,” he smiled, “tu ne me reconnaîtes pas?” With that last biting syllable, he silently pulled me up by the front of my jumpsuit, and holding the gun in front of me pushed me ahead of him, towards the door, where two policemen in greasy gray shirts were standing. I don’t even know if I was struggling, because I was holding on to the paper and trying to remember if I recognized this man or not, and if I did, then from where. But I do remember a strange thing- the armed guard, half asleep at the end of the crumbling cellar-like hall, stopped us with one hand, and then the man behind me, clutching my hair at the back, thrust my face in front of the guard so that he could examine me, and the guard stared emptily into my eyes, glanced at the gun under my jaw, then calmly at my eyes again, and then sat down and resumed watching the morning news on the television set. Was that odd? Or did it make an impression because of the unbearable coldness I felt spread all over me when looked at? But things like that did not happen in this world, and in bad novels, but were dreamed in unmodelated dreams. “Traitor,” whispered the familiar man in my ear mysteriously as we walked, “scoundrel.” Somehow we were suddenly in a very narrow stairwell winding down, with enough room for only one person to pass at a time, the walls seeming thick and crooked, like a seventeenth century cellar. I kept asking myself and wondering why I was a traitor. “Look around, remember all this,” he continued almost cheerfully, “because this is where you will die, because you won’t leave this place ever, it is your coffin and new home.”

How many times had I been threatened with death, or at least felt certain of it, so that instead of feeling afraid I was dreamily curious, woefully wistful, and wanted something that I could not place. If he had taken the gun away, I would have continued walking down; if he had turned the other way I would have begged him to lead me further. I didn’t know who he was, but I thought at some moments, wondering who had brought electricity to those caverns, that I could guess.

Yuri Nosik was standing in a round room lit by one lightbulb in a hole in the wall, in profile, one hand on his hip, smoking a cigarette. I realized that he was standing exactly like that when I saw him among a few people in the tunnels, in these same tunnels, when I wandered here aimlessly out of my own accord. Then again now I was seeing everything through a sort of brown film, even though I wasn’t blindfolded I felt that I was, and visual perspective was distorted so that when someone leaned me up against the curving brick wall, like a log, and that dark man looked closely into my face, he seemed much larger than life, and his eyes mirrored mine. That had been said and thought before, equally dark as her own, and lined, mirror images, and the mirroring face.... It took me a while, a lot of seconds, to remember where that had been found, in what context and referring to what, thinking that in all actuality those words, in their paper context, could only have referred to the man standing in front of me, a man I knew I had seen before without question, perhaps even knew where, but since that had been in someone else’s fragment of a life, not even my own, I didn’t really care to ask myself where. It was taking me a long while to come to, I felt simplified, fitted into an abstraction of myself where I was allowed to feel and perceive only in a limited number of directions. That was why I thought for a moment that I was blindfolded.

“Um, excuse me,” I asked that familiar man, “did you drug me?”

“Um, no,” he replied in my own voice, his eyes taking my own shape, his face my face, and then fading gently into curving space. The next time I saw him he was wearing a red scarf around his neck, and I realized finally sort of what was going on. The thing was that he looked remarkably like his grandfather.

Who was his grandfather?

“A very notorious man. Worked once in Buenos Aires. Sold cocaine. Made People Disappear.” Juliette Caruso, his sister, emerging out of corner like a blind fairy, hands wringing, piping up, “He didn’t, he didn’t!” She also looked very much like her grandfather, but at the same time managed to resemble her grandmother to the same extent. She didn’t appear yet, she appeared later, or maybe before then, but there was something I knew I had to talk to that man about, something I was shy and embarrassed to bring up in front of everyone else- arrogant Nosik for one, and the two greasy police men who were changing out of their uniforms, their faces suddenly strange and emaciated as though all of this time they had been puffing out their cheeks for show, doing it well. Did they work for him? Were they his clients, unable to afford his services and so running errands and hiding people in the tunnels, almost dead and devoid of sunlight? I was understanding a lot of things, and there were a lot of things that escaped my attention at the same time because of thick fog. All that time I hadn’t been afraid at all, but suddenly, glancing at that police man, I saw momentarily that his now huge teeth were chattering, but his eyes were not full of terror, but of fascination and grave desire, and I turned away and hid my eyes with the sleeve of my dirty jumpsuit. In a gesture that I could never have imagined in all of my life I suddenly took my strange, familiar captor of the slanted black eyes, by the sleeve, lead him aside though he was taller than me and a god, and whispered what was between me and him only: “Who are you?”

Nosik put out his cigarette on the wall, and casting a knowing glance in our direction stepped a few meters away and whistled; the two others plodded mournfully down another round corridor with a few steps, half naked, dragging their uniforms behind them. “Who Are You” looked at me and smiled as he examined the precise quality of my features, trembling eyelids, wide wonderment, himself fascinated but only for a moment, the next glimmer sullen and grave as one of the author’s acquaintances who was once a prototype (the author is Armenian, isn’t she?), but those were thoughts which I couldn’t even hope of understanding, and so they didn’t really appeal to me.

“I am afraid you are talking too much to all the wrong people, Dmitri Rabinovich,” he said to me scoldingly. He was wearing a red scarf. “You don’t want to end up like your friend in St. Petersburg, even though he never went too far and was killed because he was an idiot.”

“You killed my friend?” I asked casually.

“No, I didn’t. You know quite well who killed your friend, and they killed him for the same reasons that now they tried to frame you.”

“Why don’t they kill me?”

“Because you’ve been telling them a lot of very interesting stories that they are not talented enough to make up by themselves, and leading them to places that are even more interesting.” It seemed like I was looking into my own features, he mirrored my face again, put a friendly arm around my shoulder. “But you don’t have to be afraid of them, they wouldn’t ever kill you, they’ll just bother you, blackmail you with their Russky mafioso circuses, people at street corners who are stupid and only know that they’re supposed to stand there and look like God, half remembering whom they’re supposed to be following, but never knowing why. It’s what you know that’ll kill you, or what you will find out, because you won’t settle down until you find out, will you?”

Who are you? Would he answer banally, quoting Goethe? He would.

“Ya- chast’ toi sily, chto vechno khochet zla i vechno sovershaet blago. I think my grandmother met Bulgakov once.”

This question can’t be put in English and can’t be put in Russian, because the direct translation from Russian means something different, exactly what I wanted it to mean. I knew his name or names already.

“What do they call you?”

“They call me,” he drawled out sarcastically, “they call me Boolean Frost.”

I was given three minutes and half a year to three months to memorize the contours of my new hole. From the first day I knew I wouldn’t ever leave alive, and didn’t really want to. My speech became strange and monotonous, my eyes lazy, my hands trembled even though I was perfectly calm, but like Kay in the palace of the Snow Queen I was preoccupied with only one thing- the winding wormholes that led into one office and out of another. One room the bunker of an old general, another leading out into a passage made from a monastery to the other side of the river, under it, in the seventeenth century. Didn’t people find these? Where did Boolean Frost live? Was he a member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Things were very simple.

Once I had woken up in a clean bed made over a couch in a strange office. There were three computers in it, but not a soul in sight. That was an unusual thing, because the last night I remembered waking up, it was in a sleeping bag on the floor of a tiny brick passage, barely wide enough for me to stand in, with two clowns examining and discussing me noisily while I listened to a walkman. That had been all right, even though I was mostly surrounded by lunatics, I could still find someone to talk to and wasn’t in danger of getting lost. Someone had promised to explain what I was doing there, but that never seemed to happen, and I didn’t seem to care any longer. That day I know for certain that I no longer remembered my name or age, not because my past was a blank and I couldn’t remember who I was, but because I really had jumbled all the information in my head and was left with many names, but couldn’t decide which one applied to me. One name would sprout up like a vague recollection when my hand ran over a brick, and I would wonder if it was a name I had once worn or the name of someone else I had spoken to and known.

And once I was walking through the tunnel that definitely was built by Mathilde Caruso, the last one, and hearing a soft weeping in the distance I began to believe that this was really December. Had Juliette already wept in these tunnels, long ago, had I known too long that this would be exactly how I would find her again, after a year’s absence, sitting on the ground teary-eyed holding on to a string with a loop at the end? Not so at all, but I still remembered seeing her like that, though we had already met in an office when she tried to lie to me over coffee and a guitar (hold- there was the unbelievable strumming of a guitar that I kept hearing in those tunnels, and though I might be mistaken I do remember hearing it all my life in the subway, mixing in with the smell of rubber and dust), though I had already showed her all of Moscow, or was about to at any rate. Did linear time really matter? she said to me with annoyance. Must we always structure events along a chronological line as though we are writing a novel?

“You read into useless things that really don’t concern anyone,” she told me, running a stick in a long puddle that collected in the recession of a tunnel she had finally offered to show me herself. “I wish the lives of all grandmothers were all that interesting, meaningful and intertwined like a legend with mine and my brother’s. I don’t have his ambitions or his heartlessness because I miss everything that I destroy.” Then she turned to me with a melancholy diamond in her eye. “The problem with us is that I am the one that has many faces, but he, as strange as it may seem, doesn’t have any.”

Like I stubborn child that had a hard time paying attention I pulled out the page in Armenian and showed it to her silently because I didn’t believe her words then and was certain I saw the face of Armine instead of hers. But she looked at it, cocked her head, and laughed. “What is this?” But I didn’t have the substance to answer her.

And it all really was quite simple, if I followed the string that she did tell me, not bothering to untangle it from the fallacies unknowingly spun into it. “My brother is not my interpreter because I speak all the languages of the world and am a foreigner in no city but Moscow, where my accent juts out like a large nose. He does not live in these tunnels to give orders to a vast network of secret agents as you and your god wish he did. Actually, he lives in San Francisco most of the time, the city of the great hypotenuse, on Sacramento Street on the last story of a tall building, at dusk looking down from that hill on the lights of down-town and the ocean and the Bridge and sunset on the other side. He has offices here underground because that’s more convenient, and that’s where most of his clients are used to looking for him anyway. It was up to me to start advertising last year,” she added sadly after a pause, “but unfortunately no one noticed.”

Juliette’s mother? Was her mother alive? Josephine Caruso spent the first half of her life with her official father Simon, who managed to take her to France the moment he learned that her mother was executed. Fifteen years later a strange middle-aged woman, who was almost catatonic, showed up on the doorstep of that small house in Paris. One of her eyes was sadder than the other, but it took her a while to remember all the languages that she spoke and to begin to understand the strange, gloomy persona of her daughter. That old woman had been Mathilde Caruso, but she couldn’t remain in that city because to her it was like being forced to learn the letters of the same alphabet for the rest of her life. That was why she went back to Moscow to be silent and work as a teacher of physics, living in that same apartment of Simon Serebryansky, who remained in Paris with Josie. As it so happens in legends and banal stories, Josie soon noticed that she was being followed by a strange dark man who claimed to be an old friend of her mother. After telling him to go to hell three times, the forth time she asked if he knew her name, and he said he did- that a long time ago in Paris he was renting a room in the apartment of a very colorful and beautiful woman, whose name was Mathilde Caruso. Josie believed him and later met his son, Carlo, whose mother, by legend the only person Mathilde ever trusted, died in Nazi Germany. These two, Carlo the son of old Giuseppe Viglione and Josie, who within a matter of a year fell in love, traveled to America in 1965, where Carlo dragged lazy Josephine from one commune to the next because he was obsessed with reliving the realities of their grandmothers. Antonio Viglione was born in California, but Juliette was born in Italy and the two siblings switched places like that between their rich parents until they met their maternal grandparents. Tonio was sitting on a beach in Palermo when a very old man swam up on a boat and asked him if he was his grandson. He was fifteen and didn’t know what to answer, so told him to go to hell. The old man winked and said he’d been there already, then told him his name and asked if his grandmother’s name was Mathilde Caruso. Tonio didn’t know and ran inside the house to ask his mother. Josephine had grown tired of Mathilde’s name sprouting up anonymously and in one of her mild fits of temper refused to answer. But his sister, who was thirteen, had just returned from a three week “educational” vacation in Moscow, where staying with Serebryansky’s relatives, she had noticed an old lady who lived next door coming home with a sac of dried apples. It was in an old beige building whose windows overlooked the Yauza River, and Juliette was perplexed by a resemblance. Naively she had approached the old lady and asked if she was not a relative, immediately learning everything in a sentence or two which Mathilde dropped to her quietly like dust from her mouth. So now, when Tonio mentioned the familiar name, Juliette confirmed that their maternal grandmother really was Mathilde Caruso, and that the strange sailor must have been their grandfather. The thing was, trivial and clichéd beyond recognition, that each child looked exactly like a grandparent, and as they grew, their likenesses switched, so that if at fifteen Tonio was a copy of Serpico in his youth and Juliette, at thirteen, was a copy of Mathilde, then at twenty Tonio was a copy of Mathilde, and Juliette, then seventeen, was a copy of Serpico.

“Does that make sense?” Juliette asked me, herself puzzled.

“It does. But I don’t know what either Mathilde or Serpico looked like.”

“They looked like each other,” she muttered bitterly, and I didn’t know why. “That’s the problem- Mathilde and Salvatore resembled each other, almost as though they were siblings. A ty n’je biltse tslovek, ty znajch da ozdech tog, kto bmogjet mertvetsatj blezh chlo.”

I didn’t ask her about the strange language, what soon became known to me as the Serpico dialect that I heard in bits and pieces, interchanging with Russian. But I heard and thought other things as well, thoughts that I hadn’t thought yet but would probably think later, floated by rearranged to accompany dialogue that came too soon and made me so weak and so ill that I remembered Viglione’s words. Time passed differently than in another life, with several things taking place at once while others paused out, skipping back and forth to an uneven rhythm, and something was happening to me, but I didn’t know what. If I found out what it was before it happened, if I found out how I was to disappear before I disappeared, I really felt I would die because hints like that terrified me even now, when they were not even hints. Boolean Frost wouldn’t tell me a thing, he walked under the sun, flew back to California to take care of a magazine that Juliette wrote for as a correspondent, things she did in her sleep. When inclined it was she who threw me pieces of myself which were getting lost, especially when she coaxed me finally to give her brother my last passport. (Seeing Boolean Frost open the door into the office with an umbrella I had screamed desperately because for some reason I already knew what he wanted, having caught glances of some of my names in the files that came up occasionally on computer screens in strange data-bases, and immediately took hold of the only passport I had left. I didn’t know what name was written in it and didn’t really care, I just didn’t want it to be taken away. And Juliette walked up to me and started telling me something very strange so that I stared and listened and couldn’t really see anything else, visualizing the things she was talking about as not taking form but being the only world I could live in for that moment. So I felt and didn’t notice how Boolean Frost himself, with his air of snow and frosty, thoughtful gazes, put an arm around my shoulder and gently pried the red booklet I had folded in my grasp.)

Juliette- who wove all this concealment about nothing at all, in fact that same nothingness which she had come from and was a part of was merely the very elaborate infinity within a nutshell. I saw how she loathed and was addicted to movement and change, that her absolute inability to deceive came from the fact that she had nothing to hide, and was as clear and round herself as a mirror, and having seen and lived through such an inconceivable multitude was at once emptied inside and made hollow, something she realized and never ran from, but warned in a sense herself and her surroundings of the concealed abyss of her mind that they were secretly interacting with.

“Good morning, Dmitri Rabinovich,” she would say to me knowingly, then disappear for a day. I had heard from acquaintances that they never saw her alone, and that if by chance such a thing happened she had a tendency of falling asleep. It was really weird, how all one had to do was step outside of the enclave for a cigarette into a vestibule-like space where you could see a pipe or a grid above you signifying air and sunlight, then five minutes later find Juliette dozing peacefully in a bunker-room turned into an office, having shrunk somewhat and merely thoughtfully let her head slant to the side a little, her closed eyes like huge, shadowy almonds slanting expressionlessly and egotistically, and her lips parted.

“Aren’t you able to ever fall back upon your own thoughts,” I asked her, “some desires, things which no one else knows and some unarticulated materials which never see the light of day? Weave out associations and quietly draw thoughts and eventualities to their rightful conclusions?”

“Eventualities don’t have rightful conclusions ever,” she said softly when she woke up. “And none of my thoughts are ever revealed, because I have never had a thought that could be articulated.”

“Then HOW THE HELL do you speak?”

“You don’t need to think in order to speak.”

“But you need to think in order to speak logically.”

“Then I think while I speak, out in the open. I have no hidden thoughts.”

“But your thoughts aren’t ever revealed!”

She smiled. “Then those are not thoughts.”

But she hated talking about herself. She would try to look away and fidget lazily. Then grow forgotten like maybe a piece of furniture, but unable to endure in that position long she would speak again about something entirely fantastic so that it was impossible to imagine how she came up with these things if her character and thought pattern could not be determined by herself or mortal man. “Do you know, Mitya, that the Moscow Subway is buried each night and rebuilt in full by morning? That’s the secret my grandmother kept. And also that it runs thought all the earth, inside of it, so that soon it will implode.”

“Yeah, I think I heard of something like that,” I said shakily, because I didn’t want that elaborated. We were in a rather narrow segment where the water kept on dripping, and I didn’t want to imagine trillions of tunnel segments identical to this one, repeated forever in time and space. But that was not her own thought. And the frequency of her shallowness was merely confined to her inability to come up with anything original, merely replicated a conglomeration of such an unimaginable array of information at any instant that the resulting concept couldn’t even be perceived as anything at all, like the color white. That was how she rarely remembered the names of her friends, the initial identities of her clients, her past words especially fell away into chasms that only I recalled, and so I recalled bits of things that had never existed.

“So you don’t change when you change languages?”

“No. I am language.”

“What was the first language you learned?”

“I don’t remember. Armenian, I think.”

“Strange, and not your grandfather’s language.”

She laughed. “My grandfather didn’t have a language. Your grandfather had a language.”

I paused nervously, drawing circles in the filthy mud and shivering. “I mean Salvatore Serpico, the Man that Made People Disappear. Well, at least I guess you were an easier case- it was Mathilde that didn’t have any nationalities.”

“She didn’t need any.”

“I will place you-” I said suddenly, not listening to her, “just like myself- I can determine us in time and space, it doesn’t take a lot of thought.... you- Caruso... the pen-name: but you are also Jewish, Italian, whatever else...”

“I am less Armenian than the author of the novel in which we are characters.”

There it was again- my mistakes all coming together, the dream which began a dream but had never been a dream, and seven lines of seven (now was it seven? was I losing count? how many derivatives in the fish story before one got to the primary source?) realities were all coming together and intersecting God only knew where.... I started to cry again, begging for her to take it back, but she coldly embraced me and said something cheerful and meaningless, and I wondered at how those songs she sang were not hers, and what she had seen and how many times she had seen it and done it to make her mind devour itself so mindlessly.

It was not mud, and it was not filthy. I had wandered alone out of the tunnels and got on the train, and although it was a subway train, I tried so hard not to think about Juliette or subway trains that it was no longer a subway train but a suburban train, and then that, taking me further from the city that that I loved and hated and was trying not to think about it wasn’t even a suburban train any longer.

Chiasmus N. 3

Proval N. 3

As Rabinovich I sometimes wondered at the spherical dreariness seen in the distance as some abyss from the airplane; in all actuality it would have puzzled one such as I, why the end of the earth was not known to anyone but myself- why once, flying, I had beheld it as the clear blue reflection of the sky- reflected in air, not earth, because earth couldn’t reflect. Me- and someone else too- if such a thing were possible, I, or whatever that singular pronoun had become, would spend much time trying not to understand the abyss at the end of the earth, but the ignorance of it- why it had been hidden or not spoken of, or perhaps incidentally veiled as an ambiguity in the roundness of the earth. Just rising above that roundness, one saw then, as I did in my one (own) moment, that the line of circumference of this world, with all its proud and gallant millenniums, did break- for it was not infinite, as a circle is, and as had been believed for the most part of Modern Science.

Maybe it really had been unintentionally ignored, named ocean or crevice, neither of which applied to it at all because they signified micro-abysses, those skinny oxymorons being spurred from the equally liquidly limited profundity of the meaning and meaninglessness of language.

Rabinovich, or eye, glanced at that puzzlingly, at any rate; the pure blue abyss. Someone, upon awaking, I thought, really should tell the rest of our population that there was an end to the earth, the likeness of which dropped away as though a crevice, yet not so, because that particular absence of something, repeatedly ignored or missed by the likes of Columbus, Magellan, and others, continued respectfully in all four dimensions; though one can just as easily state that it discontinued in all four dimensions, since the laws of math or logic didn’t quite apply here- we tried, but we couldn’t even bind it by Einstein’s Axioms, much less Euclidean space.

The day I learned that Nikolai Durkov was hanging from the ceiling on a rope was the same one in which I confirmed for certain that his life’s work was associated really with something much older and more ambiguous than I ever thought. I also learned how much closer this man lived and functioned to me than would have appeared: Nosik silently informed me that the room I was staring into, in an old building belonging to a small institute that no one used anymore and whose basement had been connected recently to one of the tunnels, was Durkov’s office. His torn shoes swayed back and forth, barely touching a simple old desk and the nervously scrambled papers lying all over it. Two or three unsuccessful attempts at a suicide note, a couple of dollars, and rewritten excerpts from something by Ruben Vishapian in Durkov’s hand were all I managed to collect before someone else chased me out of there, and quickly took care of the body. That was also the day when I learned from Antonio Viglione himself that Durkov had been a client. In the last year he had invested all his savings in several pyramids, carefully taking out the little growths of income and finally handing everything over to Boolean Frost- why, was he ill? That wasn’t the detail which surprised me, in the collection of aspects I was beginning to pick out about this strange phenomenon, collect and then immediately forget because time had long ago begun to move strangely, and because I had already been convinced that just as several languages exist, just as there are many spatial planes, so there are several time planes, but none of that really matters. I was surprised that, coincidentally or not, my second false name was that of a client of Boolean Frost, even if I had changed it before I myself had become a client. Then again it was impossible to tell when I had become a client, and could be easily believed in the narration I was beginning to live in that I had always been a client without knowing it. And that particular pattern of name changing coincided not only with something I remembered seeing in old archives in other tunnels in other lives, but with an article barely published once and then immediately hidden into other odd archives by people who no longer existed and had probably never existed- the same clients of Boolean Frost who, if they were ill, sometimes did not live to see the fulfillment of the service they had paid for, and took their own lives. Perhaps it was one of the last pieces in my much too talked about puzzle, the one I was constructing myself, the piece that linked Ruben Vishapian to the Buenos Aires Tobacco Company. If only to have a brief opportunity to look into the endless files that breathed within Viglione’s computer network- those files constantly changed places with one another, changed, disappeared entirely, came back again, while new ones were continuously added and taken away. It was an article headed “Buenos Aires”, and was said to be written some time ago in Paris by a man who didn’t understand what he was talking about. That press was half yellow, so was the article, and it was impossible to pick the credible details from the same yellow conspiracy theory fantasy, not to mention the ridiculous historical inaccuracy. Nonetheless, the common thread did hold, that it was Ruben Vishapian who had invented, God only knew how, a way to make people disappear:

How he had invented it was another matter altogether. I was aware of some theory or paper written long ago by Ruben Vishapian, as I was aware that it had been precisely what Durkov and all those other lunatics had researched until it killed them, so I was simultaneously terrified of digging into those things. I tried to ask Juliette, but at the last moment realized that she had vanished days ago, and whether I wondered about it or not it had suddenly become very clear that I would never see her again because she really was part of a slightly different reality. But haunted by Durkov’s concept of structuralized space I asked everyone I could encounter there where I might have spent days or merely hours what material Vishapian had written. That seemed no more useful than that man’s criminal files- they told me he had studied psychology and law in Paris, but spent most of his years afterwards in Constantinople as a private attorney. Was that before or after he had traveled to Buenos Aires? It was both. But Vishapian really had written a dissertation which now lay scattered in many different languages all over the place. In certain Soviet files which I had overlooked in those very cabinets hidden in the places where the Caruso network should have connected to the Kremlin Metro I found only pieces that were placed there much later, and those pieces offered only a blurry picture which had no hypothesis.

Now I finally understood what had happened to my friend Misha Yermolaev: somehow through coincidences possible only in the mysterious spheres of work and its extrapolations in this country, he became associated with Antonio Viglione and his software deals in San Francisco, to where Misha had sent his resume again and again. Working closely with such ambiguous affairs naturally put him in danger of learning things he would never have liked to know. To work for Boolean Frost meant that your colleagues were often suffering from the last stages of insanity that could only be alleviated in two ways, and when Yermolaev accidentally dug a little too deep into those files that he was paid to process without knowing what they were for, he discovered that somehow, in a way he could not understand and probably wouldn’t want to, he was helping to make people disappear from the face of the earth without a trace. Had he been haunted by the question how, had he spied and crawled through sewers as I had? Misha was a much simpler character, in this particular novel, he had very few facets, and so, as soon as he found out, he paid an amount of money which would make him disappear, with time getting a little too drawn into what he was working on and waiting, until he finally learned something that was entirely unbearable, and killed himself, as Durkov had killed himself, as those three researchers who studied Boolean Frost, and as Mathilde Caruso, who had already disappeared once. Viglione’s alibi one year ago had actually been true, so true that no one believed it.

Text from the unpublished work Recursive Modulation, by Ruben Vishapian:

But even this I didn’t find as valuable as those longer pages which Durkov, for some horrible reasons, had rewritten by hand, perhaps because what he copied it from had been lost forever. That went back a little further not only to the six cases of insanity and the three suicides, but reasons which had always lurked in the back of my mind when I thought of Boolean Frost.

He was describing almost the same thing as what Durkov was finding in his patients, except that he was always avoiding something crucial. Vishapian’s theory was too careful to not mention the point, as though everything that it was trying to say could not be heard by mortal ears. If he was explaining, perhaps to himself, how people can be made to disappear then he would never mention that it was exactly what he was trying to describe, and he was probably right.... And still, how could anyone believe that by eliminating parameters you could destroy the object itself? The object would have to be from the start a little false, like a doll. But nothing in the theory applied to practice- I was aware of already what went on within their huge computer network that they had linked to every server in this city and somehow to practically every government network, especially the census system. From my own experience I learned that all the names in the database of clients were gradually exchanged and jumbled along with other credentials and that was how by accident I had carried the name Nikolai Durkov, even though Niko.... had done that unintentionally.

“Nikoloz Baratashvili?” said a familiar voice, of someone standing behind me as I sat in a chair, looking at one of the computers which were hardly ever supervised.

“Can you read my thoughts, Viglione?” I asked drowsily without looking behind me.

“Your thoughts are no longer thoughts to be read, Dmitri Rabinovich,” he replied, sitting backwards in a chair next to me. “Have you ever wondered why your friend was so interested in your case? Why he took it up in the first place one year ago? I think you probably know already. He was once married to Armine Vishapian. Remember Armine? You saw her here once with Nosik. She’s in San Francisco now, this city scares her a little.”

I opened my eyes wide, then blinked immediately. By then that didn’t seem to be so important to me, I felt a little too lazy to wonder if Niko betrayed me, though I knew it wasn’t true, and I had always suspected a sort of connection between them, because when I looked through Niko I saw Juliette.... Juliette? Who had a hoard of genuine last names to choose from? That one of them was Vishapian? That Serpico really had been invented out of the blue long before that name became as famous as Al Pacino? Vishapian, Serpico, Zmeev, was I already aware of the fact that vishap meant “dragon” in Armenian, and zmeia was a snake in Russian? That he had made everything up and it came true?

“I feel sick,” I muttered quietly. “That theory was written in 1914 by Ruben Vishapian who later disappeared by his own method and became Salvatore Serpico- all because he had already read everything that would ever be written?”

“No, Mitya,” Viglione reassured me, “because some people live and find time unbearable. But they still manage to live.”

I shook my head to get those thoughts out; in essence all I could think about was the hypothesis, and just as I was convinced that in prison I had met Ruben Vishapian himself, I was also convinced that he had given me, as a joke, a crucial part of the theory, which was in Armenian. I reached into my already dirty pocket and pulled out the crumpled paper I had scrutinized and futilely showed to Juliette. Her brother now looked at me darkly and read it. “I will translate it for you,” he said, “but I doubt it would be much use. I suggest you look in the appendix that is at the end of the novel of which you are a character.”

To my lack of embarrassment I felt hot tears well up in my already swollen eyes, as they had not done for so long, and I wondered why he was joking so cruelly and why what he said hurt me so much. Why what he read terrified me so much because I would never understand what it all meant, because to understand and live at the same time was impossible.

“The mathematical definition of a model is the representation of an object with a reduced number of parameters, an abstraction, if you will, if we are to define abstraction as any alteration within the total sum of parameters of any object. During the last moves of my game with this particular man, I will call him Marko, I raised the following question: if I continue a series of modulations initiated once from a prototypical subject, in such a way that certain parameters may be hyperbolized, will the total number of parameters approach zero as the degree of modulations in the series increases?” When he was finished he looked up and smiled at me as though expecting something. “Come on, Mitya,” he said as he stood up and stretched, extending a hand to me, “you’ve had a hard day. Don’t cry like a baby. You’ve already read what’s going to happen to you, and there’s hardly anything left of you anyway.” He looked at me sideways in an uncertain pause. “By the way, Misha Yermolaev never committed suicide. As long as were both here and already talking on a sincere level, I’d like to get the records straight.” He rolled over to the computer and logged on to another police database. As I stared at our own archives catalogue, the one I was so used to looking at in another life but hadn’t seen in weeks, I recognized that I had never really seen it before.

“Then who killed him?” I asked quietly.

“A man called Dmitri Rabinovich.” And my own criminal record suddenly appeared on the screen, declaring reassuringly that I had already been convicted of murder after my last arrest, and most importantly, I was dead- having hanged myself in my cell.

“But that’s not true!”

“Several contradicting truths can exist simultaneously,” Viglione interrupted. “Yermolaev really was shot by a man who later took your name, as a matter of practicality. Get this- it was your old security guard himself- the one you stole the keys from. He was actually one of our people. Incidentally, Misha found out too soon after he paid for our services what was actually going to happen to him. Then he couldn’t take it anymore, and asked us to kill him instead.”

“But how could the security guard and the guy who confessed to robbing him in the tunnel have been the same person?”

“Quick change of name and identity. The use of already transparent stunts. Of course, our man has a new identity now, but this is your record. As far as logic is concerned, you killed Yermolaev, and it can’t be proven otherwise...”

I gazed with a little intoxication, now mild, and noticed how strange it was that his eyes took my shape. I saw him looking through me, seeing the back of the chair behind me, the bit of brick wall revealed in the crack behind me. “Why would you do that?” I whispered.

He leaned closer to me. “Because this is the last existing record of you, Mitya, in all the world. Your criminal record. And it will be deleted tomorrow at dawn after all the possible traces to what used to be the security guard are removed. It’ll be deleted, and no one will notice.”

What kind of abstraction is the literary or conversational recursive function? That question bothered me repeatedly in the five days I spent alone in Niko’s apartment, soiling the couch and getting on everyone’s nerves (by the third day I actually lost the habit of flushing the toilet). I knew that in the Georgian language the use of quotes was replaced by the addition of an “o” to the last word of the sentence that was spoken, which was incidentally the vocative case- if I remembered correctly, kheli, khelis, khelad, khelma, khelo... And other georgianisms that I had studied at the last minute with Niko after waking him up at three in the morning: the absence of feminine and masculine, that verbs had, in fact, more valences than any Indo-European language, and more morphemes per word, that they conjugated not only to accommodate tense and subject, but direct and indirect object as well.... That called for many confusions, I instantly protested, because the expression of a Chinese-doll like set of dialogues, in itself defined as a recursive abstraction, could not be expressed so that the reader could distinguish all levels of derivations, and all words would end with an “o”.

But that didn’t explain how or why “skazhi” had turned to “chkadi”, that though the alteration in Slavic languages of d to zh and vise versa exists as an arch-phoneme, the “k” after the “s” should have been swallowed into a simple “sh”, but perhaps that could be attributed to the fact that this strange language or dialect (as was said) evolved in a period of a day or two, and the quick nature of its almost immediately fluent adoption by a new speaker was a specific attribute of persons suffering from death dreams.

I seemed to have collected enough common symptoms to call it a syndrome. Was it a mental disease, or a mere crisis of character? The fact that there existed a wide and gradual spectrum of its intensity perhaps made it another form of neurosis so common and varied that only its extreme cases, which were very rare and showed symptoms of schizophrenia, were ever documented. Maybe even I had a mild from of it; then again, that would mean that the moment anyone learned of the possibility of disappearance by the Vishapian method, he would be clinically insane.... but that couldn’t be, because then everyone could spontaneously go crazy without any internal change, as a matter of context....

By that logic, I should have gone insane and started speaking the Serpico dialect, but I didn’t- I dreamed of death, but it turned out that I had dreams like that all my life, and my hands trembled ever since I saw Juliette Caruso laughing at me last winter.

Text from the untitled manuscript found in the apartment of Mathilde Caruso:

I memorized the fish story. I took out several dictionaries and began translating it into parodies of English and Georgian to see how the levels of dialogue changed. I took out the grammatical notes I had taken down of the Serpico dialect and translated it into that also. In Georgian every word ended with an “o”, and when Sofiko read it, since Niko wasn’t home yet, she looked at me like at an idiot and said it was gibberish. When Niko stared at it he praised it as the highest achievement of Georgian poetry. But the English version used an alteration of two types of quotes, double and single, so that the seven levels of reality were further digitized and given “odd” and “even” properties. Their initial digitalization- I couldn’t quite grasp that, though I knew it had something to do with Vishapian’s modulation theory, and the loss of parameters. I should have dared to add an eighth level, being the Caruso manuscript itself, but that was wrapped in an unrecognizable sort of taboo, the analysis of which made my stomach groan painfully.

I was overtaken by the whole affair suddenly. Those inverted realities whirled around, and I felt dizzy, collapsing on the couch. Half an hour later, not wanting to think about anything anymore I went to the kitchen to get the beer and dried salted fish I’d picked up in the subway because it looked like it had a lot of eggs. And of course it couldn’t help reminding me about all that business with the Mongolian woman- the fish joke, the monster jumping out of its belly. By trying to avoid reminders of that page I was taking my mind off with a pure metaphor, and began poking with a knife at the vobla. And I half-expected it. When, upon tearing up the scales of its white underbelly for the cheapest dry caviar in the world, instead of caviar I pulled out an enlarged bubble that contained a yellowing roll of paper, three centimeters long, I wasn’t surprised. I merely looked around cynically to make sure nothing else had happened that shouldn’t have. My next reaction was to call someone and tell them about the coincidence (although I already knew it wasn’t), but then I became embarrassed suddenly and realized this wasn’t the kind of thing I would like acquaintances to know about- a surreal fairy-tale about a never ending fish, sixty years old, and coming true exactly sixty years after it was told. Instead I unrolled the bit of paper, though it always sprang back into a tube, and didn’t rub my eyes, nor cry out in horror- what I discovered then was a new and fascinating thing, a phenomenon obvious and practically harmless, but so awfully terrible nonetheless, because this was the catch, the last piece in the theory of eliminating the parameters of a person until he disappeared altogether, the only reason it was possible. When my lips opened to murmur, “Oh, God, O bozhe,” in that old Russian vocative, I had a thought of who exactly was the god I called, and that one was desperate and in tears, also calling out oh god to a god calling out god, and this inversion, these maddening and impossible recursive functions went on in both infinities.

Body Count for the Plot of Boolean Frost, by Anna Arutunyan

Who Lives Who Dies (How many times) Who Doesn’t

Niko Baratashvili Mathilde Caruso(2) Ruben Vishapian

Juliette Caruso Salvatore Serpico(3) Antonio Viglione

Sofiko Baratashvili Mikhail Yermolaev(1) Dmitri Rabinovich

Alexei Kirilov(1) Stanislav Mokhov

Boris Krasnodarov(1)

Nikolai Durkov(1)

Julia Rosenburg(1)

Coco the Tiger(1)

Dmitri Rabinovich(1)

In a novel, deaths are the materials out of which a plot is constructed, and therefore are exaggerated so that the death list is longer than the life list, even if the number of survivors is necessarily greater.

It took less time than it ever had taken before to walk over to that forgotten square by the Yauza, or perhaps it wasn’t by the Yauza at all, but the little alley off of Bolshaya Nikitskaya, which was old Gertsen street- Brusov Pereulok branching off, where a massive gray house from the last century stood across from some trees which might have already been green by then had I not been delayed for so long in that particular winter, which was spherical like an independent world and never ended, when it stood by itself.

I couldn’t tell if I was standing at the brink of my own window and looking down at the sidewalk, just as I couldn’t tell whether that sidewalk was covered with snow or if it was the sidewalk I had been walking on one night in December, or the one that lead to my own door. An old Armenian was sitting in an armchair by my desk that no one ever used, if it was my desk at all, smiling, if he was smiling at me and not on someone else who had long ago either died or disappeared. And if she, Mathilde had died, then standing now on the windowsill I understood why- because I wanted to die also, who hadn’t had a chance to disappear yet. She, after all, had already done it once and made two separate existences for herself (as had the author of this novel in an entirely different way) but had never understood what made it possible to vanish entirely as though her entire existence was confined to a single name written on a piece of paper. Was that Ruben Vishapian sitting there and holding a dried fish in his hand?

Matilda was half asleep and suddenly unsure of what language she was thinking in. Her back had been bothering her for a whole week, and today was the first time she had left the apartment, only to walk a few blocks and pick up her pension of three hundred thousand rubles. On the way she had bought a persimmon, though she rarely could afford fruits, and wondered towards the evening when it got dark why the air was flat and wrinkled as though it was a single sheet of plastic film- she had never noticed things like that in this city, nor given thought in over forty years to her once favorite topic- how the subway in this city actually worked, and if it really was endless. That night, as she lay in bed she began thinking about it again almost like a reoccurring nightmare, when suddenly the doorbell rang. It was almost eleven, and no one except for Liudmila Nikitishna from the floor below ever visited her anymore, so she thought of not answering it at all. But the ringing persisted with such obvious insistence that with some trouble, Matilda crawled out of her bed, realizing she wouldn’t make it without her walking stick, and plodded in her torn slippers past the kitchen and two rooms that would soon have Estonian roomers that would pay her a hundred and twenty dollars, to at least see who was on the other side ringing- perhaps they came to rent the rooms already. No, those were supposed to move in on Sunday, and today was either Friday, or was it still Thursday? Remembering that she wouldn’t be able to see anything without her glasses, she went back to the kitchen to look for them, but realized that she had left them on her nightstand, where the stuffiness reminded her once again that tomorrow she would definitely have to wash the curtains. The ringing continued with the same impatience. Finally Matilda leaned up against the door and peeked to see who was on the other side. When she saw that it was a very old man with a young and vicious smile she opened it and couldn’t believe her eyes.

A normal man, when told that he is living within a structuralized plane which is in banal terms a virtual reality and a fictitious life, will either laugh or get tangled in a useless metaphysical discussion, which he will still not take seriously. The author’s close friend recently told her, over breakfast, that there are different levels of yes and no depending on context. A normal man, therefore, even if he believes that he is living in a novel, will never believe in it literally because his mental capacities depend upon a conviction from birth that he exists.

Now two things were supposed to happen to me, because a human being, dependent on reason, cannot continue living when he knows that he does not exist. I had just now learned that something was philosophically wrong with me, so wrong, in fact, that it pained me to keep my eyes open. One escape depended on me alone, the other on the god that sat with a lap top at a desk cluttered with books and pistachios, in front of a window in the center of Moscow, or on Boolean Frost. In a linearly plotted novel, those two things were mutually exclusive; or perhaps, looking back upon the various outcomes in this and previously inverted manuscripts, one escape could be taken immediately after the other, but not vice-versa. And I would or wouldn’t have jumped from the window ledge if I didn’t suddenly realize that since that day that I had woken up in a forest of ice I had no longer existed.

Rabinovich lifted his head and found himself in strange surroundings. He could see the sky, but it seemed to be joined to a hazy solid film which was in places entirely opaque, making it quite dark, whereas in others the light of the sun was merely smeared all over so that the rays lost their contours entirely. It was very cold and the very surface that he was lying on seemed to be made of that same haze, except it was darker. Looking around, he believed himself to be in a sort of cave, but then understood that the lumpy floor he was lying on, the tube-like pillars that were in some places uneven walls and the translucent ceiling- it was all ice. He stood up, trying to find a way out of this cave, but it wasn’t a cave at all- he was standing upon a frozen lake somewhere, or not even a lake, but a water shelter somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow where a trolleybus numbered zero had finally let him off. He crawled out of an opening in the ceiling of ice and found himself standing in a huge white space. That was what had happened, he realized as he made it onto dry land in search of the highway- a week ago in the middle of severe frosts, they had decided to lower the water level here, so that in many places the first layer of ice remained, while a new one beneath it formed almost immediately.

He wanted to take a subway train to the center of the city but found that the trains took much too long, that when he got on it took him three days to get to the other end of the line because they kept making stops in strange dark places among glittering Moscow towers. On the way he had an argument with a strange businessman without a winter coat who was trying to convince him that Lake Baikal was really bottomless in the sense that its waters went down all the way through the earth and joined with the Pacific Ocean. Rabinovich didn’t know whether to believe him until he finally made it out into the city and found that although it was ten in the evening and the middle of winter, the sun was shining. Apparently he had been mistaken in thought- days were longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. And Lake Baikal was endless, and so was the subway, which was taken apart and rebuilt each night.

He wanted to go to his friend Niko’s apartment, but realized at the last minute that he had no such friend because he had dreamed it all, sleeping under the ice, so instead went over to his mother, but she wasn’t home. So he went to his own apartment, where he had almost jumped out of the window, and because of all that decided to forget about everything and go to bed.

He awoke at eight. He threw his legs over the bed, sat in that position with a bowed head for no more than six seconds, and after finding his slippers with his feet, he walked slowly across the room, dragging his heels over the floor, through the hall, to the bathroom.

Rabinovich looked at his face in the mirror which couldn’t hide its reflection of the small round window across (I wonder- were there round windows in that house, 2, Brusov Street, which I checked out a couple of days ago, before starting work?). His face had recently obtained a peculiar grayish color that he noticed straight away, and straight away decided to buy some fruits or wine on his way to the library.

Somehow or other, the walls over the bathtub were no longer painted with the customary dirty beige, but covered instead with newly laid ceramic tiles, which had nonetheless already begun to drip with mold that hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Rabinovich didn’t remember how and when the change had occurred, he wasn’t even sure if anything changed at all, he just knew that once the walls were different. Opening his mouth he forgot to toy with expression; examined his teeth very carefully, took a toothbrush and measured exactly two balls of paste, set down the brush in the same spot as he did each morning, where it waited while he meticulously replaced the cap on the tube. Then he jammed the toothbrush in his mouth, and looked into the mirror. To the right of his gray face, between that and the reflection of the far edge of the bathtub, there was a round window with the crooked cross of a frame holding the double panes together. Beyond the slightly murky glass, the inner courtyard of the building could be seen on most days, though perhaps only a window or two of the opposite wing if one was standing as far away as Rabinovich. Now it was beginning to snow. The snow grew so damp, so slow, and so thick, that not only did the two windows outside become invisible, but even Rabinovich’s bathroom suddenly became completely silent. He watched that slow floating down, uneven, as it were, though still like the passage of credits at the end of a movie, and he stopped brushing.

I remember that, but was there ever a round window in my bathroom, or in Niko’s? Can I make that matter, or that the snow, or the endless winter, the snow which makes everyone unrecognizable? Didn’t Ruben Vishapian use that snow for a very good purpose, and I never even bothered to wonder when, until it was too late, until through that same frosty fog I could no longer see neither the laughing face of Boolean Frost, nor of myself? Even the last instant of February was too easily forgotten, too quickly the winter here turned on axis to fall, then right away to endless winter once again, and so even the Seventeen Instances of Spring, via my television set, would seem to drag on for years and years, momentarily forgotten even while I with my friend would try to recall a good Stirlitz joke. I only knew, perhaps was able to picture in a watery distorted floating of my tired eyes that in the frozen darkness that followed I could see the face of Ruben Vishapian, or not him, but the boolean frost, now having arranged itself for an instant approaching zero seconds as the void which I once saw at the end of the earth from my airplane. That frost was as the snow which mixed in and sort of helped sweep this stony city off the face of the earth when I was hardly looking. That snow was like the snow in the round window.

Rabinovich glanced back at his face after less than a second of looking at the more distracting reflection. Being brezglivicious to flies and other hexapedal nonsense, he didn’t like the mist in the window, and that was why, after he would finish brushing his teeth, he would cut a piece off of an unused white sheet, and neatly nail it to the wall above the round window, to serve as a curtain.

But then when Rabinovich looked back at his own eyes, not seeing anything, he was dully troubled, like the dusty aftertaste of numbness; bent and unbent the fingers of his left hand which hung loosely by his pants. He stopped brushing his teeth and rinsed his mouth. When he went to the library, he didn’t forget to buy a bottle of cheap dry wine, whose after-taste bothered him all night, and he thought to himself: I wish the night would hurry up and turn to morning again, so that I can get up and brush my teeth.

Rabinovich was always haunted by the strangest swirling music anyone could ever imagine- an ocean and a river of air which swelled to fill all the streets and alleyways of Gertsen street and the Arbat. Juliette was right, the Moscow subway was endless, its excavations really did fill the entire globe down to the center, originating in hell where no passenger (except for maybe one or two) ever made it, and as each station was closed each night, then deconstructed entirely only to be meticulously rebuilt exactly the same by morning when the metro opened at five (they accomplish all that in less than four hours- amazing!) so now he saw and understood within the absence of all other people including himself that the network had slowly begun to collapse of its own accord, and that the speed of its demise was accelerating hyperbolically.

After that night of shallow dreaming and bitter taste, when the bleakness of a couple of hours troubled him with the uncertainty that comes at the end of a long but entirely empty day, a strange swelling noise finally penetrated the round window of his bathroom, curled into the long hallway and the two dusty bedrooms that he hardly used, then slowly began to explode into a particular kind of pressure that compelled all objects in mysterious ways. He went to stand at the window by his made bed, and saw that thick thunderclouds had made it dark outside on Brusov street, and the wind had picked up all the dust, trash and newspapers off the sidewalks and was now hurling it gradually but inevitably several meters into the air, where it all combined with various other objects whirled off the roofs. Before the windowpane was pushed entirely out of its frame, Dmitri saw three or four trees and street sings fly before his eyes into a peculiar oblivion. Next came balconies, billboards, a few unsuspecting pensioners still reading their neo-Bolshevik newspapers even though the wind had already turned them this way and that. Then the roofs came, businessmen, gangsters talking on cell phones which they held with the main finger and pinkie sticking out like in Russian anecdotes. He saw small houses- in fact, the whole block across the street had already been blown away along with the Conservatory at the corner on Gertsen, and he could see through most of the other buildings all the way to the Kremlin of which there remained only one tower with the steeple torn off, because everything else was in ruins and being turned into dust by the fierce wind. He didn’t remember if the onion domes of St. Basil Cathedral, the famous ones on all postcards, twirled by him before or after he himself was in the air, pushed into a strange and huge whirlwind where he was not alone, but not himself either, looking down upon what used to be a concentric network of roads like a spider-web, divided by a swirling river that was no longer there. None of that was there anymore, for all that was left was an empty space, not even a steppe- a flat blank that had once been a city called Moscow, but that had surrendered to a childish, swirling music that had blown it away into oblivion.

Rabinovich vaguely wondered, with his last ability to wonder, if the god that sat and put together cunningly the bits of his life and world which had just flown past him, now sat drinking in order to get drunk, and if he, Rabinovich, might not have been the cause of her violent despair. After all, he was not thrown around between cities and structuralized dimensions, he had not known the bafflement of foreign sidewalks and the intrigues of social strings within his own city. After that thought, he, like Moscow, was wiped from the face of the earth.

Nikoloz Baratashvili glanced out of his kitchen window and saw that it had been spring a long time ago. Just this morning he recognized that by the continuous dripping surrounding his and all Moscow buildings, and by the gradually melting snow sliding gratingly down the roofs. He was not the one that who had wondered whether this winter would ever be over, but a figment of his imagination, which had been wiped off the face of the earth, had once asked that question in earnest. Now that it was already the middle of April and a green sort of mist had begun to spread over some of the lilacs and asps outside of his window, Niko could relax within the quiet certainty of his structuralized spatial dimension; that he, unlike some people we know, was in the city of Moscow, capital of Russia, formerly Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, though fewer and fewer remembered that or fortunately cared. He finished his bitter coffee and cigarette, wiping his mustache, and picked up the manuscript that had been a little too carelessly left lying on the table. He carried it under his arm all the way to the editor on Volkhonka, hanging on to a bar in the subway train and wondering how the manuscript that was Boolean Frost was a little too thick, a little long-winded, open-ended, intellectual, and all that other nonsense that only Nabokov could write and put into the mouths of his own characters. Niko wasn’t into all that multi-faceted consciousness nonsense, and if the author of the novel now under his arm, of which he was a character and sometimes narrator, wanted to dig into recursive functions, Borgesian metaphysics and pretentious existentialism, by all means that was her headache and problem, one which must have taken at least two years out of her youth, which instead she could have spent partying like Juliette Caruso, her alter ego, in New York and Moscow.

But Niko smiled ironically into “the darkness of the tunnel” that he saw from the roundish window of the second car of the train. He was being a little shameless and rolling useless barrels into an abyss- no linguistical footnote needed here- if he thought that the novel to which he owed his quasi-virtual existence need not have been written, that was, after all, also his problem. The suicide of countless people in this allegedly structuralized plane due to a suspicion of something he had been half-aware of for over ten years could have been avoided, as well as a number of awkward nuances necessitating the unwieldy but fashionable addition of an appendix which would justify such problems as the plagiarism from a film about a real cop named Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino who might have been able to play Salvatore Serpico/Ruben Vishapian in the movie version had this plagiarism not taken place (even if in New York alone there are at least 300 residents with that last name). That it was in places a “damsky roman” could also be forgiven because of a couple of honestly vicious paragraphs. The main problem Niko foresaw was explaining to the editor what the hell this too too long novel was about. Chinese-doll set of stories with a pretense on those sophisticated post-modernist textual mind games borrowed from Milorad Pavic and God bless him Jorge Borges? A gloomy psychological thriller fed on electronic music now issuing from the broken Sony in Arutunyan’s cluttered room? Or a story of several inverted and recursive loves that gets a little too complicated when the author tries to tie it all together by the ever aloof Man that Makes People Disappear, his mysterious methods and deeply philosophical context? Vishapian’s obscene likeness to Mephistopheles and Jack Kevorkian? Niko wondered if he should mention the numerous flaws of this masterpiece immediately to the editor so that they wouldn’t seem so obviously unintentional, or hold it off till later and pretend he’d written it all- his own life and torment, not to mention the inconvenience of others, for example, poor Kafkaesque Rabinovich.

Niko thought that it was a bother to examine the name on the cover, the Armenian name that was apparently supposed to belong to the author. He had a problem with the whole treatment of the subject because he considered it in bad taste to advertise individual authorship to an extent where the writer’s personal life began to intertwine with that of his own, especially if this novel was so seriously attempting to be stylish. With that thought, noticing the sudden dryness of the text and narration, he opened to door to the main entrance into the Institute of Philosophy which was the same big-windowed old yellow building where the publisher was located, to the right of the contemporary collection wing of the Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka Street, then rose up the wide staircase to the third floor, past the room where Stalin was rumored to have once held a meeting. The editor he spoke to on the phone had scheduled the appointment for three, and now it was twenty till four- still, Niko was asked to sit and wait in the old yellowish office with the cracking wooden floors, because the editor was still at lunch.

Of course this mildly reminded Niko of the treatment of time in the novel which he held in his lap. Foremost, momentarily ignoring the circular logics of all those Vishapianisms, was the author’s and God’s conviction that time and its coordinates were partially determined by space, which explained the psychotic behavior of time and tardiness and the city of Moscow and especially the rest of Russia. What was disappearing, after all, when one compared it with the absolutely uncanny contextual chiasmii encountered by any traveler of space? Every man longs to disappear in some way, if not to disappear then at least to dissolve, by jumping from the different realities among countries, by writing of hyperbolized hopeless love turning into devilishly stylish phantoms flying through imaginary tunnels under Moscow which might not be so imaginary after all, but which were already made up once by Tom Clancy at least; or by torturing Dmitri Rabinovich until he, only the quasi-narrator, manifests that complicated desire taking shape in someone’s or everyone’s breast, through months or perhaps millenniums. Niko listed through some of the last pages with a wry smile- verily, God and Time despised each other, with Lucifer, personified by Vishapian, on God’s side hacking Time to bits, along with the linear plot- and that was no way to write a novel, a novel unwriting, destroying itself in the process, along with the city or cities where it was written (Michael, I recall three or four)....

Niko grimaced with nausea- he couldn’t stand those holes in the text where the naked life of the author showed through. Figuratively it mirrored the long inverted manuscript and the life of the poor old woman who started it all- the one that played with centuries and people like masks, and who suffered no less than the unstructuralized counterpart that created her. But how much, Niko wondered, was Mathilde Caruso really relevant to Boolean Frost, how was the plot of her existence planned? Not well thought out at all, and accidental as reality, not to mention that practically everything that the author ascribed to Mathilde’s life eventually carried over into her own, so that our poor God or god was at some point convinced of a pending diagnosis of schizophrenia, or at least of the same fate as Kafkaesque Rabinovich who was manifested in her hopefully unstructuralized life as equally Kafkaesque Viesel, right after Vishapian’s manifestation into a self-assured and vicious actor called Aram Margarian. That was that, but Mathilde who played with the torments and inconveniences of multi-lingualism, internationalism, multiple deaths, Stalinism, totalitarianism, the burden of too many lovers and acquaintances, and pretentious role playing because of a seeming, searing emptiness inside which all eventually lead to death, disappearance, and much, much more....

Impatiently glancing at his watch, Niko heard the door open, and the promised editor finally stepped into the office with a small folder in his hand, just like Mathilde’s or Dmitri’s investigator. He stood a little awkwardly, looking at Niko with the faint squint of trying to remember something. He had the ambiguous agelessness of a young face who had seen too many things fly over his head. He had shaggy dark hair and hadn’t shaved in days, which gave his colorless features and parted lips and even more aloof appearance. He wasn’t tall and even stooped shyly, somewhat too thin for his light flannel jacket. Approaching the middle of the room, he motioned and asked, “Niko, right?”

“Yes, we spoke on the phone.”

“Dmitri,” said the editor, extending his right hand after he put the folder on the table, “Dmitri Rabinovich.”

Niko knit his brows momentarily and flipped through the pages he had printed from the new laser printer at work. “How interesting- both of us figurate in this novel. It’s called Boolean Frost, by the way, Moroz Buliev.”

“That is interesting,” Dmitri replied, nodding. “And what a strange title. I wonder why it wasn’t written in the synopsis you e-mailed to us.”

“Oh yes,” Niko smiled gleefully, since, after all, he had come here with a pretty concrete purpose, “has the publisher had a chance to look at it yet?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact he has, and was the one that told me to call you. He is interested in reading the entire work.”

“That’s great,” Niko replied thoughtfully. He had already decided that it would be useless to attempt to criticize the work.

“Can I look through it?”

After Niko handed him those 207 pages, all in a stack, he watched as Rabinovich spent several minutes in complete silence, beginning to read from the first page. He could see how his slightly melancholy eyes were narrowing, his forehead growing a little tense and all the features of his face darkening.

“It’s not an easy thing to read, I admit,” Niko added apologetically.

“I can see it’s going to be quite a bit of work to edit,” Dmitri agreed, “but reading this I find it all familiar somehow, as you probably did,” and he looked up with a squinting smile.

“I would agree with you,” groaned Niko reluctantly after a pause, “but I find it banal to discuss such complicated text within such clichéd context. If you’ll excuse me, I also find it banal to chew over a widely overused postmodernist ending to a long novel, so I would like to get back to the publishing specifics. How do you think we should copyright it?”

Rabinovich paused politely in obvious disagreement, as though in the middle of a sentence, and waited. “I’ve just noticed two endings like the type you mentioned, right here at the end,” he continued slowly and quietly as he held some of the last chapters. “The episode of Moscow being blown away is certainly borrowed from One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the review and analysis of the novel within the end of the novel itself was often encountered in Nabokov, especially in Ada.” Then he knit his brows and waved the whole thing away. “No, you’re right. That kind of philosophizing could go on forever. In that case the novel really need not have been written. Have you finished editing it yourself?”

“Almost.”

“Good. In that case, I will go speak to the editor-in-chief concerning its printing possibilities. It doesn’t appear to have a very wide possible audience, does it?”

“Who knows. It includes too many styles to determine that now. What worries me is that it is too long.”

“Yes, I will definitely ask about that,” said Dmitri standing up and smiling sadly, looking at the manuscript like at a box and picking it up off the table, “but you see, I haven’t worked here long enough, and what really interests me is its marketability. Who knows what garbage people will read- and then you hand Americans and Russians some kind of inverted disappearing tricks, women falling out of windows and other nonsense... After all, what if it would make an equal impression on a person in some unknown to him language, like Armenian?”

KONETS