THERE’S A SIMPLE WAY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT A BLIND MAN feels in this life: close your eyes and try to do something. Something ordinary, not difficult. Something you normally do anyway “without looking”—take a spoon out of a drawer in a table, light a cigarette, put a CD in a music center. It only takes five minutes at the most to understand everything and know that you’ll never forget it.

Or you can try a more humane experiment. Tie a load of about ten kilograms, wrapped in a big, soft pillow, to your stomach. Only the load has to be something fragile, and so precious that you would be absolutely distraught if you lost it. Then walk around like that for twenty-four hours. And sleep with this load . . .

Even like that you can’t get the full comparison, but somehow men who have been through that kind of training start jumping to their feet as if they’ve been scalded when they catch sight of a pregnant woman standing in public transport.

Magic, of course, is not given to us from birth (if we don’t count my daughter, that is) and it’s not as priceless as a child. Magic is merely an additional convenience in life. Just like that damned flashing light on an expensive car . . . or a Duma deputy’s ID that makes him “uncheckable,” brings traffic cops out in red blotches and makes them salute the offender with black hate in their hearts. So surely I would be able to manage without magic for just twenty-four hours?

Although, of course, it would have been good to leave myself the Sphere of Inattention. As the magical version of the flashing light . . . no, to hell with it!

Mind you, I was very well aware of just why my thoughts kept coming back to that crappy piece of transparent blue plastic that squawked and flashed on the roofs of Mercs and BMWs. I was driving home in the daytime, but I had been rash enough to try it at rush hour (incidentally, after the new mayor of Moscow dedicated a massively broad lane on every major thoroughfare to public transport, rush hour in Moscow had stretched out to fill the whole day and a large part of the night) and the bureaucrats’ cars overtaking me in the oncoming lane had begun to provoke despairing envy and burning hatred simultaneously. I tried to recall if I’d ever seen vehicles with special signals like these in any other country at all—apart, that is, from police cars and ambulances. I could only remember a few odd cases—one in London, one in either Spain or Italy.