Arkady’s neighbors leaned back in their seats as if from the radiant heat of a fireplace. It was the fringe of beard under the chin that gave the hypnotist a serious, academic caste. That and the thick glasses that enlarged his eyes, as intense and unblinking as an icon’s. “Open yourself up and relax. Cleanse your mind of old dogmas and anxieties because they only exist in your mind. Remember, the universe wants to work through you.”

“I bought a crystal on the street,” Veronica said. “His people are selling them everywhere. You place a crystal on the television set and it focuses his emanations directly on you, like a beacon. It amplifies him.”

In fact, Arkady saw a row of crystals on her set. “Do you think it’s a bad sign when it’s easier to buy stones than food?” he asked.

“You will only find bad signs if you’re looking for them.”

“That’s the problem. In my work I look for them all the time.”

From his refrigerator Arkady took a cucumber, yogurt and stale bread that he ate standing at an open window, looking south over the church toward the river. The neighborhood had ancient lanes on real hills and an actual wood burner’s alley hidden behind the church. Behind the houses were back lots that used to hold dairy cows and goats, which sounded good now. It was the newer parts of the city that looked abandoned. The neon signs above the factories were half-dark, half-lit, delivering illegible messages. The river itself was as black and still as asphalt.

Arkady’s living room had an enamel-topped table with a coffee can of daisies, armchair, good brass lamp and so many bookshelves that the room seemed to have been built against a dam of books, a paperback bulwark from the poet Akhmatova to the humorist Zoshchenko, and including a Makarov, a 9-mm pistol he kept behind the Pasternak translation of Macbeth.

The hall had a shower and WC and led to a bedroom with more books. His bed was made, he gave himself credit for that. On the floor were a cassette player, headphones and ashtray. Under the bed he found cigarettes. He knew he should lie down and close his eyes, yet he discovered himself wandering back through the hall. He still wasn’t sleepy or hungry. Merely as an occupation he looked into the refrigerator again. The last items were a carton of something called “Berry of the Forest” and a bottle of vodka. The carton demanded a mauling to permit a stream of brown, gritty juice to plop into a glass. By taste, it was either apple, prune or pear. Vodka barely cut it.

“To Rudy.” He drank and filled the glass again.