Clouds drifted in his way as the road dipped south by the swimming pool where the Church of the Saviour used to stand, and he found himself forced to drive onto the sidewalk and stop. It was stupid. Stalin had torn down the church. How many Muscovites actually remembered the Church of the Saviour? Yet that was how they identified the pool. Once Arkady got out to put the wipers on, he lost interest in the task. The car looked like a jar draped with wet leaves on the outside and airless as a grave within. He needed a walk.

Was he in an emotional state? He supposed so. Wasn’t everybody, all the time? Had anybody ever, awake or asleep, experienced a totally nonemotional state? To his right, a swale of trees sank into steam flowing from the pool. He climbed down and then up through them using branches as handrails until he came to a real handrail of metal, cold and sweaty to the touch, and pulled himself onto an apron of concrete.

He walked around a locked and shuttered changing house until he came to the edge of the water. Vapor rose not in wisps but as white and dense as smoke off the surface of the water. This was the largest swimming pool in Moscow, a perfect factory for the fog that wrapped around him and made his eyes smart from chlorine. He knelt. The water was heated, warmer than he had expected. Although he had assumed the pool was closed, the lamps were on, sodium halos hanging in the mist. He heard the slap of water against the sides, and then not words but perhaps someone humming. He wasn’t sure of the direction, but he thought he heard feet strolling around the pool’s perimeter. Whoever it was hummed not so much tunelessly as idly and in snatches, in the manner of someone who believes himself or herself totally alone. Arkady guessed from the lightness of the step and voice that it was a woman, probably an attendant or a lifeguard who felt herself at home.

Fog was a great confuser. On a trawler, Arkady remembered a veteran seaman who had listened to a distant foghorn for an hour before discovering that the sound came from an open bottle ten meters away. “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—that’s what she was humming. A classic. Unless no one was there, because suddenly she was silent. Waiting for her to start again, he tried to light a cigarette, but the match was dowsed instantly and the cigarette crumpled into wet paper and tobacco. How hard was it raining? He heard her from a new direction, straight ahead and higher, nearly level with the lamps. Her voice faded, paused, and he heard the flexing of a diving board. There was a flash of white dropping through the steam and the swallowed splash of a clean entry.