Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

Author:A.D. Miller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385533454
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-22T06:00:00+00:00

THAT EVENING I found Oleg Nikolaevich waiting on his landing in distress. I could tell that he was waiting for me because he was coatless and hatless, not going out or coming in from anywhere. He was standing in front of his door, looking like a relative expecting bad news from a doctor. He tried to smile, and asked me how I was. I told him I was fine but very tired. He didn’t budge.

“Nikolai Ivanovich,” he said, “I must ask you once again for your help.”

I knew it was about the old man.

“Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said, “forgive me, but what more can I do?”

“Please, Nikolai Ivanovich. Go to my friend’s building. Just to look. I think there is someone in his apartment. I was on the stairs and I heard them coming down. Please.”

I looked into Oleg Nikolaevich’s eyes, and he looked away. I could see he was embarrassed to ask me. In retrospect, I think that for him the whole thing was less about his friend, in a way, than about resisting change, fighting time. I think he just wanted to keep his life as recognisable as he could for as long as he could—his friend, his cat, his books, his manners. I think that was why he stayed on in his downtown flat, instead of renting it out and living on the proceeds like most of the old Russians who had a pad like his (all their less tangible assets having vanished in the economic carnage of the nineties). Oleg Nikolaevich wanted to stop the clock.

“Okay,” I said in the end. “Tell me where he lives.” He told me, and I can still remember: apartment thirty-two, number nine, Kalininskaya (a little turning between my building and the Bulvar that ran down the side of the church).

“So I turn right out of here, then take the first road on the left, and it’s there, along from the church?”

“In Russia,” said Oleg Nikolaevich, “there are no roads, only directions.”

• • •

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