Thanks to his father-in-law, he now knows that history, and looking at the revolver makes him consider the irony. He owns a gun that killed hundreds of his compatriots who had the misfortune of living during Russia’s earlier, carnivorous times. Now, as his father-in-law often says, a rueful smile on his face, we live in vegetarian times, and the gun has been rendered useless. Or maybe it is simply on hiatus. With their motherland, where wars and revolutions happen with eerie regularity, one never knows. He glides his hand across the barrel, cold and a little rough; clicks the trigger; opens the case with bullets. They are pointed, made of brass. He pulls the hammer back and slides one in.

His wife will genuinely grieve, just as her mother and perhaps Vadim, who will be angered at seeing his daughter so devastated. And Sasha? She is gone from his life for good, vanished to the other side of the curtain. She is no longer here, within the confines of this reality. He has made sure of that.

A line from a poem floats to the surface of his mind: “Let’s part tonight and end this madness.” Mayakovsky, his favorite poet who has always been his lighthouse, his salvation. He scrunches his face and shakes his head. Mayakovsky, who ended up blowing his brains out. Some lighthouse. What a fucking joke.

He lifts the gun out of the drawer, weighs it on his palm. It feels too light to inflict such irreversible damage, too insignificantly small. He rubs the textured handle, presses the barrel against his temple, his forehead, his heart, as if trying to find a place most efficient for the bullet to inflict its ultimate damage, the place of certainty, the place of finality. He doesn’t want to wake up in a hospital, with relatives and friends around his bed casting him pitying glances. How did Mayakovsky do it? he wonders. He read about it somewhere, but not, of course, in the Soviet papers where everyone is too optimistic, too busy building a bright future. Then he slides the gun in his mouth and pushes the end of the barrel against his upper palate. Is this only a rehearsal? He will know soon enough. He holds the gun there for a few moments, his tongue finding its way to wrap around it: a warm, wet life embracing its cold opposite. It tastes of metal, dust, and time. The savage time, the squandered time. The time about to end.

48

48

She is twelve thousand meters in the air, trying to clear her mind and focus on her imminent future. Or is she trying to understand her past? Every time she glances at the overhead television screen that shows the position of her Aeroflot flight, Kolya and America get closer. The miniature airplane on the screen is like a needle over the Atlantic, stitching the two hemispheres together with the thread of their route.