The hunchbacked road of lustrous cobblestones descended steeply to the river. A pudgy, short-legged adolescent boy with unhealthy circles under his eyes rode a bicycle along the very edge of the pavement, hugging the sidewalk. His heart pounded in his ears like a hammer, and he touched the brakes with his foot; rumbling wagons passed him, but he felt that he was racing along at incredible speed, passing everything and everyone, and that’s the way it would seem to him his whole life, because his pride would never allow him to acknowledge his weakness. Descending safely, he rode on to the wooden bridge with a victorious expression. Below him flowed the Neroch, a narrow little river unmarked on any map, even the large-scale ones; the boy found this a bit insulting, because, even though by summer’s end, rusty tin cans and broken bottles covered with algae jutted out of a trickle of water, in the spring, the river flooded, inundating the municipal park and even the little houses behind it; the current became powerful, and the dark water almost reached the bridge; large chunks of ice crashed against its piles, causing the bridge to shudder. Trees torn out by the roots floated down the Neroch, as did beams and boards. At that time of year only the Volga—which the boy had never seen—could compete with the Neroch. Having crossed the bridge, he turned left and, pushing the pedals, drove up the street to the incongruous building, resembling an ancient castle, that housed the Opera Theater—just a few days ago on the square, in front of the theater, where the local fops rode bicycles, sometimes “no hands,” with only a barely noticeable movement of the torso—just a few days ago, his mother’s first cousin, Tusik, had taught him to ride the bicycle. Tusik ran, holding the bike with one hand on the seat and the other on the handlebars, pouring sweat, because it wasn’t so easy to keep a bicycle with a pudgy boy in a state of balance—he had to take on his weight and push him straight, so that the boy and the bicycle didn’t crash into him; and he kept on repeating the same thing: “Pedal, Gavrila,” though the boy wasn’t called Gavrila at all; but the boy heard something rakish in this cry, something that put him on equal footing with Tusik—like men understanding each other—and he pedaled industriously. The bicycle began to acquire more independence so his teacher was no longer supporting the vehicle, but simply holding it by the seat, and occasionally the boy even felt like this was a hindrance, so he turned the pedals even harder, and for a short moment he completely escaped all oversight—the teacher was just running alongside, and the boy couldn’t believe that he was riding by himself, without anyone’s help, as though he’d suddenly flapped his wings, risen up, and taken off—and he felt a combination of terror and sweetness at this scalding, sudden independence, which threatened to end in a crash. He looked back—Tusik wasn’t running or even walking, he just stood there, his figure grew smaller and smaller every second, and with his arm he made a movement that meant “turn faster!” Losing his balance, the boy flew onto the asphalt, scraping his knees, which bled, and Tusik ran over, helped him get up, and it started all over again. Tusik was tall—at least he was the tallest in the family—with straight dark hair that easily strayed over his forehead, and calm, deep-set gray eyes in which something reckless occasionally appeared: his grandfather had been a Don Cossack, whose photograph was preserved in a gold locket that Tusik had inherited from his mother; the boy loved to open it and look at the photograph: the Don Cossack had a long, bony face, and mustaches like Taras Bulba, and his light eyes were even deeper set than Tusik’s. The boy was very proud of this kinship, although no one in the boy’s family had ever seen the grandfather—his daughter, Tusik’s mother, had been obliged to convert to Judaism in order to marry, and the Don Cossack, not very happy about this fact, never visited. Tusik’s parents had died when he was two or three years old, and since then he’d lived with the family of his aunt, the boy’s grandmother: she loved Tusik more than her own daughters, at least she said so, maybe because of his calm, agreeable disposition, or maybe because, since he was an orphan, he gave her the opportunity to feel that she was a benefactress … Riding on to the little square in front of the Opera Theater, the boy merged into the stream of other riders—less than a year later, the German headquarters would be located in the building of the Opera Theater, and the boy’s family, already evacuated, and seized by a premonition of the winter of ‘41, received a postcard from Tusik on just such a clear, late-summer day—the only postcard they ever got, written in his careful handwriting, which leaned left. Tusik begged them not to worry, everything was fine, but how are they, how is Mama?—that’s what he called the boy’s grandmother—and on the other side of the postcard, written in his own hand as well, was the return address: “247 A. S. B.” After asking around among friends, the boy realized that A.S.B. was the “Aerodrome Service Battalion,” and he kept trying to imagine Tusik’s duties—for some reason he thought that Tusik carried crates of ammunition or cleared the airfield, but by then Tusik was a commanding officer, although a junior one; during the Polish events he was in the army and was awarded one square for his service. The boy remembered quite well the photo of Tusik in his field cap pushed back at a jaunty angle, and the square pinned to his lapel; they managed to get that photo later from some distant relatives, then enlarged it, almost made it into a kind of portrait—and now it’s on my mother’s desk, under glass, next to other photographs and a group family portrait, where the boy is still a little boy: thin, wearing a sailor’s uniform, his ears sticking out. And when the knee-high autumn mud on the outskirts of the Ural town began to freeze and hoarfrost began to appear on the walls of the room where the boy’s family lived after evacuating, and the presentiment of an early winter actually turned into an unprecedentedly early winter—but maybe that’s the way it always was in the Urals—and all the streets, and roofs of the one-story wooden houses with carved window frames were covered with snow and the brushwood bought at the market could easily be brought home on a child’s sled, and milk was sold in the form of semi-transparent ice chunks—a whole bundle of letters and postcards arrived with the stamp: “Addressee left,” but the thought of Tusik’s death didn’t gain a foothold in the family immediately, and even after the war was over, they kept on hoping and asking, and then they found out that one night German tanks had suddenly burst into the place where Tusik’s unit was staying. Tusik and the other soldiers were quartered in barns on the outskirts of a village, and the boy tried to imagine the expression on Tusik’s face in the last minutes of his life, when the tank drove over the shed and, turning right and left, it began to crush everyone there with its caterpillar treads; then they probably took him away to be shot because he was a commander, a communist, and a Jew, and they couldn’t take him prisoner; but the boy could never imagine the expression on Tusik’s face just before dying, because Tusik could pin him flat on his back with one finger—he was the tallest person not only in the boy’s family, but in the whole building. When the boy’s classmates came over, he left the door to his room open on purpose so they could see Tusik when he walked down the hall. Tusik couldn’t die by someone else’s hand—he was stronger than everyone! The boy smiled sadly at these thoughts, because by that time, when the circumstances of Tusik’s death had become known, the boy was no longer a boy. I dream of him often even now, and my dream is almost always the same: I know that Tusik has died and at the same time he’s with us—he lives in our pre-war apartment, but he isn’t quite living, he sort of inhabits the place; he appears only at night, alien and elusive. I can never manage to talk to him or even see him—but he sleeps in his usual place, on the squashed sofa with protruding springs, in a huge room—bigger  than  whole  two-bedroom  apartments  are  these days—partitioned by screens, behind which grandmother and grandfather live. On this very couch Tusik used to demonstrate various fighting tricks to the boy, pinning him down with one hand and then squeezing and pummeling him, giving off hideous sounds at the same time. In the dream, I walk into this room, but the couch is empty—there are only wrinkled sheets and protruding springs, and I have a feeling, no, I know for sure, that Tusik is at his girlfriend’s, that’s where he really lives, that’s where he talks and acts like himself. Grandmother was very proud that as a sign of obedience, Tusik didn’t marry the girlfriend after all; he went out with her for several years, but grandmother didn’t care for her: she thought that the girl didn’t love Tusik and had her own, selfish designs on him. She had short hair and glasses, but even wearing glasses, she squinted a little. Sometimes Tusik...