So what if they have put up speed cameras all over the place now! Let them send me a fine in the post, I don’t give a damn, I’ll just pay it . . . I moved on at a brisk pace, glancing at the speedometer every now and then to avoid exceeding sixty kilometers an hour. The Lexus loomed up ahead in the distance. Along the side of the road “natives of Central Asia” were picking in relaxed style at the asphalt and the hard autumn ground. For every man with a pick there were three or four standing about aimlessly or observing the slow-flowing river of glittering cars with curiosity. The gastarbeiters were finishing stripping the asphalt off the pavement in order to replace it with paving slabs, after the new fashion. Occasional pedestrians maneuvered between them, skipping from little islands of surviving asphalt to the more even patches of earth. A young mother shoved her baby-buggy forward with dour intensity, as if she didn’t notice the nightmare all around her. I suddenly imagined a young woman just like her, somewhere near here seventy years earlier, pushing a barrow filled with earth from the antitank trenches that were being dug around Moscow with the fascists already at the approaches. But while her grinding labor had been a significant feat of heroism, nowadays this heroic feat had become a meaningless torment.

The line of gastarbeiters came to an end, giving way to dug-up pavement with stacks of somber gray concrete slabs standing along it like columns. I wondered what had prevented them from laying the slabs along this section of pavement first, and then starting to break up the next one.

There was no answer to that question. But at the end of the mutilated pavement, where it was a bit less muddy, there was a traffic-police patrol car parked, and two young guys in mouse-gray greatcoats waved their striped batons at me gleefully.

I squeezed in close to the curb, braked to a halt, and lowered the window.

“Senior Sergeant Roman Tarasov!” the young, ruddy-faced policeman who walked over announced briskly.

“Common driver Gorodetsky!” I replied, for some reason just as briskly and even playfully, holding out the documents for the car and my license.

“We’re infringing the rules!” the sergeant said, grinning.

“Yes, indeed,” I agreed, not attempting to deny it. “I couldn’t bear sitting in that traffic jam any longer.”

“This lane is the lane for public transport!” the policeman explained to me, as if he was talking to a child. “Can’t you see that, then?”

“I can,” I admitted. “But I can also see a Lexus that just drove past you. And I haven’t seen a single bus for the last quarter of an hour.”

The sergeant lost a bit of his joie de vivre, but he carried on smiling.