Reach the magical city some day.

Where everyone breathes inspiration like air

And all of the architects there are dreams,

And it’s not banknotes, but sunlight that warms,

And if you’re in love, they won’t think you a fool.”

And the young boy sitting there on the stairs

Believed in the moon’s fateful songs of deceit.

And when he believed, the stairs started growing

And carried on, reaching right up to the sky.

The boy set off up to climb the ribbed steps,

But his friends and family all came running:

“You have no business up there in the sky!

Stop! Don’t go—this fate is for fools!”

And, listening to them, the boy came back down

With a lingering, longing glance at the moon.

But later he hid and hated them all

And wept for what he had seen in the sky.

That made me wince. The wrong choice. The boy-Prophet was nothing like a romantic young hero, but the song was reproaching me for something.

He wept, feeling emptiness filling his breast.

His way had been lit, as he scrambled on high,

By the light of his tremulous, fluttering heart,

But running back, he dropped his lamp in the sky.

And there it hung now, a small star up in space,

Like a bright, shiny little Christmas-tree toy,

Among all the other little toy hearts

Left there by all the obedient boys . . .

What the hell was this? Why couldn’t these Kazakhs imitate Russian kitsch pop and sing songs about beautiful girls, expensive resorts, and glittering cars, instead of propagating this decadent romanticism! I turned off the computer and walked out of the office.

My feet took me to the basement floors of their own accord. The door of one of the rooms was open and I glanced inside. The two “old-timers,” Jermenson and Glyba, were sitting there, sipping calmly on glasses of cognac. Mark Emmanuilovich was snacking on nonkosher smoked eel, while Glyba, a member of the old Soviet school, was using “nikolashka”—a sliced lemon, sprinkled with coffee and sugar. There was a sign of the new times, however—the coffee wasn’t instant, but natural, and Glyba was crumbling the beans over the lemon with his strong fingers.

They were sitting with their backs to me, but that was no hindrance to them.

“Come on in, Anton!” Jermenson called amiably.

“You’ll have a glass of cognac,” Glyba told me no less sociably. Told me, not asked.

Without speaking, I joined them at the table and took a glass. To my surprise, the cognac wasn’t French, but Moldavian—a pot-bellied bottle with a label that said Surprise.

“To the victory of the forces of good,” said Jermenson, taking a sip from his glass.

“Over the forces of reason,” Glyba continued.

I downed my glass in one and immediately regretted it. The cognac turned out to be surprisingly good. In fact, you could say it was excellent.