'Bored?'
'Uhuh,' I mumbled. 'Sveta, there's nothing I can do. Not a single thing. How can you stand it here?'
'I've been coming to this village since I was a child,' Svetlana said. 'I remember Uncle Kolya when he was still all right. Young and happy. He used to give me rides on his tractor when I was still a little snot-nose. He was sober. He used to sing songs. Can you imagine that?'
'Were things better before?' I asked
'People drank less,' Svetlana replied laconically. 'Anton, why didn't you remoralise him? You were going to – I felt a tremor run through the Twilight. There aren't any Watch members here . . . except you.'
'Give a dog a bone and how long does it last?' I answered churlishly. 'I'm sorry . . . Uncle Kolya's not where we need to start.'
'No, he's not,' Svetlana agreed. 'But then any intervention in the activities of the authorities is prohibited by the Treaty. "Humans deal with their own affairs, Others deal with theirs . . .".'
I didn't say anything. Yes, it was prohibited. Because it was the simplest and surest way of directing the mass of humanity towards Good or Evil. Which was a violation of the equilibrium. There had been kings and presidents in history who were Others. And it had always ended in appalling wars . . .
'You'll just be miserable here, Anton . . .' said Svetlana. 'Let's go back to town.'
'But Nadiushka loves it here,' I objected. 'And you wanted to stay here another week, didn't you?'
'But you're fretting . . .Why don't you go on your own? You'll feel happier in town.'
'Anybody would think you wanted to get rid of me,' I growled. 'That you had a lover here.'
Svetlana snorted.
'Can you suggest a single candidate?'
'No,' I said, after a moment's reflection. 'Except maybe one of the holidaymakers . . .'
'This is a kingdom of women,' Svetlana retorted. 'They're either single mothers, or they're here to give the children some fresh air and exercise while their husbands are slaving away. That reminds me, Anton. There was one strange thing that happened here . . .'
'Yes?' I asked, intrigued. If Svetlana called something 'strange' . . .
'You remember Anna Viktorovna called to see me yesterday?'
'The teacher?' I laughed. Anna Viktorovna was such a typical schoolmistress, she should have been in the old Soviet film The Muddle. 'I thought she came over to see your mother.'
'Both of us. She has two kids – a little boy, Romka, he's five, and Ksyusha, who's ten.'
'Good,' I said, giving Anna Viktorovna my seal of approval.
'Don't try to be funny. Two days ago the children got lost in the forest.'
My drowsiness suddenly evaporated and I sat up in the hammock, grasping a tree with one hand. I looked at Svetlana:
'Why didn't you tell me straight away? The Treaty's all very well, but . . .'
'Don't worry, they got lost, but then they turned up again. They came home on their own in the evening.'
'Well, that's strange,' I couldn't resist saying. 'Children who stayed in the forest for an extra couple of hours! Don't tell me – they actually like wild strawberries?'
'When their mother started giving them what for, they told her they got lost,' Svetlana went on, ignoring me. 'And they met a wolf. The wolf drove them through the forest – and straight to some wolf cubs . . .'
'I see . . .' I murmured. I felt a vague flutter of alarm in my chest.
'Anyway, the children were in a real panic. But then a woman appeared and recited some lines of verse to the wolf, and it ran away. The woman took them to her house, gave them some tea and showed them to the edge of the forest. She said she was a botanist and she knew special herbs that wolves are afraid of . . .'
'Childish fantasies,' I snapped. 'Are the kids all right?'
'Absolutely.'
'And there I was, expecting foul play,' I said, and lay back down. 'Did you check them for magic?'
'They're completely clean,' said Svetlana. 'Not the slightest trace.'
'Fantasies. Maybe they did get a fright from someone . . . perhaps even a wolf. And some woman did lead them out of the forest. The kids were lucky, but take a belt to them . . .'
'The young one, Romka, used to stammer. Quite badly. Now he speaks without the slightest problem. He rattles on, recites poetry . . .'
I thought for a moment. Then I asked:
'Can stammering be cured? By suggestion, you know, hypnosis? . . . Or some other way?'
'There is no cure for it. Like the common cold. And any doctor who promises to stop you stammering with hypnosis is a quack. Of course, if it was some kind of reactive neurosis, then . . .'
'Spare me the terminology,' I asked here. 'So there is no cure. What about folk medicine?'
'Nothing, except maybe some wild Others . . . Can you cure stammering?'
'Even bedwetting,' I muttered. 'And incontinence. But Sveta, you didn't sense any magic, did you?'
'But the stammer's gone.'
'That can only mean one thing,' I said reluctantly. I sighed and got up out of the hammock. 'Sveta, this is not good. A witch. With power even greater than yours. And you're first-grade!'
Svetlana nodded. I didn't often mention the fact that her power exceeded my own. It was the main thing that came between us . . . that could really come between us some day.
And in any case, Svetlana had deliberately withdrawn from the Night Watch. Otherwise, she would already have been an enchantress beyond classification.
'But nothing happened to the children,' I went on. 'No odious wizard pawed the little girl, no evil witch made soup out of the little boy . . . No, if this is a witch, why such kindness?'
'Witches don't have any compulsion to indulge in cannibalism or sexual aggression,' Svetlana said pompously, as if she was giving a lecture. 'All their actions are determined by plain egotism. If a witch was really hungry, she might eat a human being. For the simple reason that she doesn't think of herself as human. But otherwise, why not help the children? It didn't cost her anything. She led them out of the forest and cured the little boy's stammer as well. After all, she probably has children of her own. You'd feed a homeless puppy, wouldn't you?'
'I don't like it,' I confessed. 'A witch as powerful as that? They don't often reach first-grade, do they?'
'Very rarely.' Svetlana gave me a quizzical look. 'Anton, do you have a clear idea of the difference between a witch and an enchantress?'
'I've worked with them,' I said curtly. 'I know.'
But Svetlana wasn't satisfied with that.
'An enchantress works with the Twilight directly and draws power from it. A witch uses accessories, material objects charged with a greater or lesser degree of Power. All the magical artefacts that exist in the world were created by witches or warlocks – you could call them their artificial limbs. Artefacts can be things or elements of the body that are dead – hair, long fingernails . . . That's why a witch is harmless if you undress her and shave off all her hair, but you have to gag an enchantress and tie her hands.'
'For sure nobody's ever going to gag you,' I laughed. 'Sveta, why are you lecturing me like this? I'm no Great Magician, but I know the elementary facts, I don't need reminding.'
'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you,' Svetlana apologised quickly.
I looked at her and saw the pain in her eyes.
What a brute I was! How long could I go on taking out my insecurities on the woman I loved? I was worse than any Dark One . . .
'Sveta, forgive me . . .' I whispered and touched her hand. 'Forgive a stupid fool.'
'I'm no better myself,' Svetlana admitted. 'Really, why am I lecturing you on the basics? You deal with witches every day in the Watch . . .'
Peace had been restored, and I was quick to reply:
'With ones as powerful as this? Come on, in the whole of Moscow there's only one first-grade witch, and she retired ages ago . . . What are we going to do, Sveta?'
'There is no actual reason to interfere,' she replied
thoughtfully. 'The children are all right, the boy's even better off than he was before. But there are still two questions that need to be answered. First, where did the strange wolf that drove the children towards the cubs come from?'
'That's if it was a wolf,' I remarked.
'If it was,' Svetlana agreed. 'But the children's story hangs together well . . . The second question is whether the witch is registered in this locality or not, and what her record is like . . .'
'We'll soon find out,' I said, taking out my mobile phone.
Five minutes later I had the answer. There was nothing in the Night Watch records about any witches in the area.
Ten minutes later I walked out of the garden, armed with instructions and advice from my wife – in her capacity as a potential Great Enchantress. On my way past the barn, I glanced in through the open doors – Kolya was hovering over the open bonnet of the car, and there were some parts lying on a newspaper spread out on the ground. Holy Moses . . . all I'd done was mention a knocking sound in the engine!
And Uncle Kolya was singing, crooning quietly to himself:
We're not stokers and not carpenters either,
But we're not bitter, we have no regrets!
Those were clearly the only lines he could remember. He kept repeating them as he rummaged around enthusiastically in the engine:
We're not stokers and not carpenters either,
But we're not bitter, we have no regrets!
When he spotted me, he called out happily:
'This is going to cost you more than half a litre, Antosha! Those Japs have completely lost it, the things they've done to the diesel engine, I can hardly bear to look!'
'They're not Japanese, they're Germans,' I corrected him.
'Germans?' Kolya said. 'Ah, right, it's a BMW, and I've only fixed Subarus before . . . I was wondering why everything was done different . . . Never mind, I'll put it right! Only my head's humming, the son of a bitch . . .'
'Look in on Sveta, she'll pour you a drop,' I said, accepting the inevitable.
'No.' Kolya shook his head. 'Not while I'm working, no way . . . Our first farm chairman taught me that – while you're messing with the metal, not a single drop! You go, go on. I've got enough here to keep me busy till evening.'
Mentally bidding farewell to the car, I walked out into the dusty, hot street.
Little Romka was absolutely delighted at my visit. I walked in just as Anna Viktorovna was about to suffer ignominious defeat in the battle of the afternoon nap. Romka, a skinny, suntanned little kid, was bouncing up and down on the springy bed and yelling ecstatically:
'I don't want to sleep by the wall! My knees get all bent!'
'What am I supposed to do with him?' asked Anna Viktorovna, glad to see me. 'Hello, Anton. Tell me, does your Nadienka behave like this?'
'No,' I lied.
Romka stopped jumping up and down and pricked up his ears.
'Why don't you take him and keep him?' Anna Viktorovna suggested craftily. 'What do I want with a silly dunce like him? You seem like a strict man, you'll teach him how to behave. He can look after Nadienka, wash her nappies, wash the floors for you, put the rubbish out . . .'
As she said all this Anna Viktorovna kept winking at me emphatically, as if I really might take her suggestion seriously and carry off little Romka as an underage slave.
'I'll think about it,' I said, to support her educational efforts. 'If he just won't do anything he's told, we'll take him for reeducation. We've had worse cases, and they turned out as meek as lambs!'
'No, you won't take me!' Romka said boldly, but he stopped bouncing, sat down on the bed and pulled the blanket up over his legs. 'What would he want with a silly dunce like me?'
'Then I'll put you in a boarding school,' Anna Viktorovna threatened.
'Only heartless people put children in boarding schools,' said Romka, clearly repeating a phrase he'd heard somewhere. 'But you're not heartless.'
'What am I supposed to do with him?' Anna Viktorovna repeated rhetorically. 'Can I offer you some cold kvass?'
'Me too, me too!' Romka squealed, but a stern glance from his mother shut him up.
'Thank you,' I said with a nod. 'Actually it was this silly dunce that I came to see you about . . .'
'What has he been up to?' asked Anna Viktorovna, taking a businesslike approach.
'It's just that Sveta told me about their adventures . . . about the wolf. I'm a hunter, and the thing is . . .'
A minute later I was sitting at the table with a glass of cold kvass, the centre of attention.
'Yes, I know what they say, but I'm a teacher,' Anna Viktorovna was saying. 'They say wolves help clean up the forest . . . only that's not true, of course, a wolf doesn't just kill sick animals, it kills any animals it can get . . . But it's still a living creature. A wolf 's not to blame for being a wolf. But here – right next to the village! Chasing children! It drove them towards the cubs, do you realise what that means?'
I nodded.
'It was teaching the cubs to hunt.' Anna Viktorovna's eyes lit up, either with fear or that mother's fury that sends wolves and bears running for the bushes. 'What was it – a man-eater?'
'It couldn't have been,' I said. 'There haven't been any cases of wolves attacking people round here. There haven't even been any reports of wolves living in these parts for a long time . . . most likely it was a feral dog. But I want to check.'
'Yes, check,' Anna Viktorovna said firmly. 'And if . . . even if it's a dog. If the children didn't imagine the whole thing . . .'
I nodded again.
'Shoot it,' Anna Viktorovna requested. Then she added in a whisper: 'I can't sleep at night . . . for imagining . . . what could have happened.'
'It was a doggy!' Romka piped up from the bed.
'Hush!' Anna Viktorovna shouted at him. 'All right then, come here. Tell the nice man what happened.'
Romka didn't need to be asked twice. He got down off the bed, came over to us, clambered up onto my knees with a very serious air and looked into my eyes searchingly.
I ruffled up his coarse, sun-bleached hair.
'So this is what happened . . .' Romka began contentedly.
Anna Viktorovna looked at him in a very sad sort of way. I could understand her. It was these little children's father that I couldn't understand. All sorts of things can happen. So they were separated. But how could anyone just cancel his children out of his life and be happy just to pay maintenance?
'We walked and walked, you know, we were out for a walk,' Romka told us with agonising slowness. 'And after we walked for a while we reached the forest. And then Ksyusha started telling me scary stories . . .'
I listened to his story very carefully. Well, the 'scary stories' might be one more reason to believe the whole business was imagined. But the child was speaking perfectly clearly, except for repeating a few words, which was usual for a child his age; there was nothing to find fault with.