As the merry music continued in the house, he knew he had to leave soon for his next assignment. In a fittingly horrible, epanaleptic assignment of duties, he was now projectionist again. He traveled from outpost to outpost with reels of film. He had also tried, timidly, to speak to the local populace about Bolshevism, and somehow he had never been successful. Tonight he hadn’t even bothered. He had sat on the floor (all the chairs were taken), and within a few minutes, a goat and two pigs had found him and were lying against him for warmth.

The animals’ adoration was intriguing to the villagers. Ptor, whose house it was, thought this might mean Hugo was blessed by the domovoi. But after excusing himself to use the privy, Hugo did not touch the cross, which was offensive to Elijah, and which was punishable by having the saint stab him with a knitting needle.

Ptor worried about Hugo, who seemed unaware of what might happen to him, so he sent his cousin and neighbor Ivan to watch out for him. The privy had been designed for the needs of only a few people; the influx of American soldiers had overburdened it. Waste froze the moment it left the body, and so peeking above the hole in the wooden planks was a cinder cone of solid fecal matter that had to be chipped away every morning. Ivan watched Hugo enter the privy and apparently not use it. Instead, Ivan could see him staring out the privy window and wiping at his eyes, and a few moments later, he left and closed the door without saying thank you to the domovoi of the privy, who would undoubtedly punish him by tickling him to death.

Back inside, Hugo also knocked over the linens and then restacked them himself rather than allowing the oldest woman in the village to do it (a terrible, terrible punishment of being tickled to death awaited that transgression). Most men on the verge of being tickled to death would be weeping, begging forgiveness, making sacrifices of grouse or house rabbit, rubbing icons on the doorstop, bringing unplucked chickens to bury below the stoop in front of the bathhouse, but not Hugo. He seemed innocent and helpless, and that this man would so soon be tickled to death made the peasants at the dance feel sorry for him.

He had learned some Russian—the words for “worker,” “grain,” “collective,” “struggle,” “landowner,” and a sentence or two that conveyed that the person to whom he was speaking was the means of production. Tonight he had the ear of both Ivan and Ptor, who leaned forward, nodding their heads sympathetically.

He had to shout to be heard over the music, and he wasn’t sure he was using the right words, but they did nod, and Ptor did sadly offer him a cigarette. It seemed to be made not of tobacco but of dried grasses and perhaps some rye berries.