I wonder if that’s a plus or a minus for us, I thought as I sluiced myself down under the shower head. Take this shower, for instance. The head’s not cheap, probably quite expensive, in fact, with its tiny little holes for the water and valve for sucking in air. Self-indulgence? Not exactly. A shower like this uses about half as much water as mine in Moscow does. But we’ve only just realized that water costs money—and a lot of it! No one really appreciates what they have in abundance, so we Russians have never really valued or cared for our forests, rivers, and natural environment—or even ourselves, basically. The attitude in that old one-liner “Shall we wash these children or have new ones?” is still around, only nowadays we Russians take care of the children . . . but not of ourselves. What has to happen to us before we understand that we have to take good care of everything we have, of every tree in our boundless forests, every little stream that isn’t even marked on the maps, every village with only five households, every soldier drafted into the army, every man in the street toiling under his dreary daily burden? What will it take to change us? Communism didn’t change us—it valued people in words, but even then not all of them, and only as cogwheels in a single, integrated mechanism. Democracy didn’t change us: on the contrary, it gave us all the freedom to hate each other. What is it that we want? Maybe, like the Jews thousands of years ago, only pain and death, to lose our state and be scattered throughout the world, despised and oppressed by other nations—maybe only that will allow the Russian nation to come to its senses and recover its unity. To unite, but not as it has united in the past—without counting the losses or acknowledging the cost of victory—but on some other level? All great peoples have to suffer catastrophes sooner or later, to pass through their own national holocausts: this is a lesson known by China, which was once dying of opium addiction and has been torn apart, and by Germany, which suffered defeat in two wars and the disgrace of Nazism. And it should also be remembered by Russia, which has suffered fratricidal revolutions and bloody wars . . .

But for some reason it isn’t.

I turned off the water and looked at the murmuring television.

One inclination we Russians are always ready to indulge at the slightest nonsensical excuse—such as a cheap TV or a shower head—is to meditate on the fate and fortunes of our Homeland and the Universe. We’re always good at that.

I toweled myself down, put on a bathrobe, and walked out of the bathroom. And that was when the doorbell rang quietly.

Somehow I was certain it wasn’t Arina.