Chapter 11

Welcome to my world, Mari. I’m glad you came back. This tale of ours will be to your taste I think, my love. It will seem senseless to begin with, but by degrees, word by word, it will all become clear. You will perceive a certain order and purpose, maybe even beauty, in this horror.

Do you know who I am? Have you solved the puzzle?

We’ll start with something simple. Look at me. I am a new man. Once, I was made of flesh, now I am a sticky web of pain and dreams. I have a strange condition. I will fall into a deep sleep all of a sudden several times daily and find myself in a dreamscape of painfully beautiful images full of cruelty. I live the life of a lab rat: mazes, tests, interrogations, and torture with needles. The professor straps me into his machine and tells me to describe my dreams.

“What’s wrong with me?” I ask the professor.

I dreamed of the murder again. On the outskirts of the grey city I dreamed.

No, let me start over.

I dreamed of a saint in white, walking among the criminals on the outskirts of the grey city, in the nave of a huge church like a hospital. Murderers, monsters, soldiers, deaf and impassive, on their knees. Coming up beside me, he takes a small, sharp file out of his pocket and pulls down my lower lip with his thumb. He files a cross into my teeth.

Pigeons circle above us.

“A great many birds, one for each sin,” he says. They soar up and crash into the dome. Their tiny bodies fall. As I pick one up, I see it has a child’s face; it whimpers. I thrust the knife into the saint’s ribs, right up to the hilt. He dies quietly. I lay next to him, my face turned to the glow of the dome. The birds keep falling. But none of it is real. The dawn’s rays over the grey city shoot right through me. I am wounded. I fall for you once more. I fall for you, as one falls into an enchanted slumber.

Maria read the new letter before entering her flat. The six black holes at the base of the rusted blue letterbox looked back at her. It usually brimmed with charity begging letters, junk mail, brochures and, less often, bills. And now these letters.

She had always thought the post a meaningless service, until now. Leaning against the peeling wall in the damp, cramped staircase on the fifth floor of her Stalin-era block, she fumbled for ages with the box’s little lock, which was there primarily to quash the curiosity of teenagers from the school across the street who would come in to kiss and smoke.

When she got halfway through the letter, she glanced down to the bottom. That same signature. That same sparse “Romodanov Neurosurgery Institute, Kyiv” written on the back instead of a full return address.