'It was just the complete pizdets.'

He uttered the Russian obscene word, which was commonly used in two senses - 'total fuck-up' and 'unsurpassable excellence, in some way related to a total fuck-up'. Yet it had one more rare meaning that I suddenly recalled. I sat upright.

'That's it, I've remembered!'

'What have you remembered?'

'I've remembered who you are.'

'And who am I?'

'I read somewhere about a dog like you with five legs. The Dog Pizdets. He sleeps up among the eternal snows, and when enemies descend on Russia in their hordes, he wakes up and . . .'

'Treads on them with his leg?' he asked.

'No. He . . . He kind of happens to them. Like shit happens, you know. That's it. And I think in the northern myths he's called "Garm". Have you come across him? The Nordic project's your area, after all.'

'No,' he said, 'I haven't. It's interesting. Tell me more.'

'He's a truly fearsome dog. The wolf Fenrir's double. He'll come into his own after Ragnarek. But in the meantime he guards the house of the dead.'

'What other information do you have?'

'Something else a bit vague . . . Like he's supposed to spy on men to see how they make fire and pass the secret on to women . . .'

'Skip this,' he growled. 'What else?'

'That's all I remember.'

'And what are the practical consequences here?'

'Concerning Garm, I don't know. You need to go to Iceland for a consultation. But concerning Pizdets . . . Try to happen to something.'

I said that to him as a joke, but he took my words absolutely seriously.

'To what?'

I was suddenly infected with his seriousness. I ran my eyes over the surrounding space. The laptop? No. The electric kettle? The light bulb?

'Try happening to the light bulb,' I said.

A second went by. Then suddenly the light bulb flared up in a bright bluish glare and went out. Everything went dark. But for a few more seconds the spiral of wire, photographed by my retina, continued to illuminate my inner world with an echo of its extinguished light. When that imprint faded, the darkness became total. I got up, fumbled on the wooden crate that served us as a table to find the torch, and turned it on.

There was no one else in the room.

He didn't come back for two days and nights. I was sick with worry and exhausted by the uncertainty. But when he came in I didn't reproach him, not a single word. Chekhov was right: a woman's soul is essentially an empty vessel that is filled by the sorrows and joys of her beloved.

'Well, how was it? Tell me!'

'What point is there in telling you?' he said. 'This I have to show you.'

'Have you learned to do it?'

He nodded.

'And what can you happen to?'

'Why, to anything,' he said.

'Anything at all?'

He nodded again.

'Even me?'

'Well, not unless you ask me to.'

'Can you happen to yourself?'

He gave strange sort of chortle.

'That's what I did first of all. Straight after the light bulb. Otherwise, what kind of Pizdets am I?'

I was intrigued and even a little frightened - after all, this was a serious metaphysical action we were talking about here.

'And what kind of Pizdets are you?' I asked in a voice hushed with respect.

'Total,' he replied. 'Absolute, final, complete and irreversible.'

At that moment he exuded such romantic power and mystery that I couldn't restrain myself and reached out to kiss him. He turned pale and stepped back, but then apparently realized that wasn't the way real machos behaved, and allowed me to finish what I'd begun. Every muscle in his body tensed up, but nothing terrible happened.

'I'm so happy for you, darling!' I said.

Not many were-creatures know what it is to feel happy for someone else. And tailless monkeys know even less about it, all they know how to do is smile broadly in order to boost their social adaptability and increase the volume of sales. While imitating the feeling of happiness for someone else, the tailless monkey actually experiences envy or, in the best case, remains indifferent. But I really did experience that feeling, as pure and transparent as the water in a mountain stream.

'You can't imagine how happy I am for you,' I repeated and kissed him again.

This time he didn't move away.

'Really?' he asked. 'But why?'

'Because after all this time you're in a good mood. You're feeling better. And I love you.'

His face darkened a little.

'I love you too. But I keep thinking that you're going to leave me. You'd probably be better off if you did. But I won't feel any happiness for you.'

'In the first place, I'm not planning on going anywhere,' I said. 'And in the second place, the feeling you speak of isn't love, it's a symptom of egoism. To the male chauvinist in you, I'm merely a toy, a piece of property and a trophy status symbol. And you're afraid of losing me in the same way a property owner is afraid of being parted from some expensive item. You can never feel happy for someone else that way.'

'So how do you feel happy for someone else?'

'For that you have to want nothing for yourself.'

'You're telling me you don't want anything for yourself?' he asked suspiciously.

I shook my head.

'But why?'

'I told you that once already. When you look inside yourself for a long time, you realize that there's nothing there. How can you want something for that nothing?'

'But if there's nothing inside you, there's nothing inside anyone else either.'

'If you think about it properly, there's nothing real anywhere,' I said. 'There's only the choice with which you fill emptiness. And when you feel happy for someone else, you fill emptiness with love.'

'Whose love? If there isn't anybody anywhere, then whose love is it?'

'That doesn't matter to emptiness. And don't you get hot and bothered about it either. But if you want a meaning for life, you'll never find a better one.'

'But love - isn't that emptiness too?'

'Sure.'

'Then what's the difference?'

'The difference is emptiness too.'

He thought for a moment.

'But can you fill the emptiness . . . with justice?'

'If you start filling the emptiness with justice, you soon end up as a war criminal.'

'You're getting something confused there, Ginger. Why a war criminal?'

'Well, who's going to decide what's just and what isn't?'

'People.'

'And who's going to decide what the people should decide?'

'We'll think of something,' he said and glanced at a fly soaring past. The bluebottle dropped to the floor.

'What are you doing, you brute? Do you want to be like them?'

I nodded in the direction of the city.

'I am like them,' he said.

'Like who?'

'The nation.'

'The nation?' I echoed incredulously.

I think even he was embarrassed by the pomposity of the phrase, and he decided to change his tone.

'I was just thinking, maybe I ought to go to work. To find out how things are going.'

I was staggered.

'Are you serious? Aren't three bullets enough for you? You want more?'

'You get these misunderstandings in our profession.'

'What misunderstandings?' I groaned. 'It's the system! You thought the system needed bright individuals, did you? It needs everyone grunting along together!'

'If necessary, I'll grunt with the rest. You just think, what are we going to do when the money runs out?'

'Oh, that's not a problem. Don't worry about that. When I go to the shop I can do some streetwalking.'

He knitted his eyebrows in a frown.

'Don't you dare talk like that!'

'And don't you dare say "don't you dare" to me, all right?'

'My girl's going to sell herself . . . I can't get my head round that.'

'"My girl, my girl . . ." Exactly when did you privatize me?'

'Are you going to earn money from prostitution? And feed us with it? Like something out of Dostoevsky.'

'Oh fuck your Dostoevsky,' I exploded. 'And I have.'

He looked at me with interest.

'Well, how was it?'

'Nothing special.'

We both laughed. I don't know what he was laughing at, but I had a good reason. I won't include it in these pages, out of respect for Russian literature, but let me just say that the red spider in The Possessed once crawled across the hem of my sarafan ... Ah, all the titans of the spirit to whom I have given my amusing little gift! My only regret is that I never raised to Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's lips the goblet that he described so magnificently. But in Soviet times leaving the country was a problem. Let this be yet another villainous outrage on the conscience of the baleful communist regime.

Fortunately the nascent quarrel had ended in laughter. I had almost made a mistake - you should never directly contradict a man, especially if he is tormented by doubts about his own worth. I ought to have found out what was on his mind first.

'Do you want to go back to pumping oil?' I asked.

'No, not there. Mikhalich does the howling there now.'

I guessed that during his absence he had been in contact with the outside world - he might have seen someone or spoken with them on the phone. But I didn't show the slightest curiosity about that.

'Mikhalich? But when he howled, the skull didn't cry.'

'They've come up with a new technology. Take five ccs of ketamine, add two ccs of pervitine, inject and then apply an electric current.'

'To the skull?'

'To Mikhalich.'

'The perverts.'

'Too true,' he said. 'It'll be curtains in a year like that.'

'For Mikhalich?'

'Nah, it makes no difference to Mikhalich. Curtains for the skull. It's already covered in cracks from all those tears . . . Caliphs for an hour . . . As long as the oil's flowing, the money's rolling in, they're doing fine. But nobody wants to think about what's going to happen tomorrow.'

'Listen, what kind of skull is that?' I said, finally asking a question that had been tormenting me for ages.

'That's something I can't tell you,' he said, suddenly turning sombre. 'It's a state secret. And in general, don't talk about my job.'

I wasn't surprised that he still thought of the old firm as his work. There are some jobs you can't resign from of your own free will. But I hadn't expected him to want to go back to the people who had put three silver bullets in him. Although I did-n't know what had really happened then - he never shared it with me.

'Where will you go, if not to the oilfield?' I asked.

'They'll find something for a super-werewolf to do.'

'What?' I said with a frown. 'What super-werewolf?'

'Me,' he replied, surprised.

'Since when did you become a super-werewolf?'

'Since when? As if you haven't seen.'

'You think you're a super-werewolf?'

'What do you mean - think? I know.'

'From what?'

'From this,' he said. 'Watch.'

Another fly zooming along just below the ceiling dropped to the floor. It was strange to watch - the flies didn't drop vertically, they followed parabolic curve, continuing their forward motion, and they looked like microscopic kamikaze planes, nose-diving at the enemy from on high.

'Stop showing off,' I said. 'What does one thing have to do with the other?'

'Meaning?'

'Well, let's accept you can kill these flies. Let's accept that you're Pizdets and Garm. But why have you suddenly decided that on top of all that you're the super-werewolf as well?'

'Then who is the super-werewolf, if not me?'

'I told you already,' I said. 'The super-werewolf is a metaphor. To call some individual creature the super-werewolf means to descend to a very primitive level.'

'Okay, then I'll be him on that primitive level,' he said in a conciliatory tone. 'You got a problem with that, Ginger?'

'No, we can't leave things like that. Let's analyse this question properly.'

He sighed.

'Go on, then.'

'Imagine I buy myself a uniform on Arbat Street and start walking round town in it, making out that I'm a general in the FSB. You tell me I'm not a general, and I say, ah, go on, let me be a general for a bit, what's your problem?'

'That's an entirely different matter. The rank of general is awarded by a specific structure.'

'Right. That's what I'm talking about. Now think how you found out about the super-werewolf. You didn't hear it from Mikhalich, did you?'

'No.'

'Then there's probably some system of values that the word came from. Super-werewolf is the same kind of rank as general. Only it's awarded by tradition. And you have about as much to do with that tradition as I do with your firm. Do you understand that, grey one?'

'And I suppose you, Ginger, do have something to do with this tradition, right?'

'Not only do I have something to do with it,' I said. 'I'm the carrier of the tradition. The line holder, to use the correct term.'

'What line's that?'

'The line of transmission.'

'You mean you're the absolute authority here as well?' he asked. 'Straining yourself a bit, aren't you? Think you'll be able to hold up the roof?'

He seemed to be genuinely irritated - he even used an expression from the criminal jargon used by bandits and the FSB.

'Don't confuse a mystical tradition with the Shangri-La casino,' I said. 'The line holders are called that because they hold on to the line, not because they hold it up.'

My answer seemed to puzzle him.

'But what is that - a line of transmission?' he asked. 'What's transmitted along it?'

'Nothing.'

'What?'

'Like I said. Nothing. I've explained that to you so often, this kettle will understand it soon.'