Vanya swirls vodka in his unkempt mouth, tasting bitter failure.
One tooth to the back of his mouth which he can feel with his tongue he knows to be black and hollowed out with a creeping decay like the apartment blocks which suddenly collapse inwards from time to time in the outer reaches of the city. He dreams of Volgograd, walking the battlefields, sniffing around Pavlov's house and Mamaev Kurgan. Instead he journeys to Samara, drunkenly saluting the space shuttle moored close to his hotel and queues for the return flight to Moscow amid a crowd of doctors pressed together beside a coffee stand at five in the morning.
Kiosks are his passion, innocuously they dispense the real medicine of newspapers, coloured magazines, cheap lighters and innumerable bottles of inebriating poison which he so badly needs. Ice cream in winter has become his diet.
Inspiration is needed. The toilet smell drifts down the aisle all the way back into the west, the plane a floating sunspot over Nizhny Novgorod and the Volga a ribbon of gunmetal infinity snaking like an umbilical cord over the untrammeled plains of central Russia.
His eyes heavy, dimly take in a chocolate factory he always heard tell of. The long ateries disconcertingly unchoked by traffic at this early zenith of an autumn dawn, a taste of hunger in the mouth and curled up memories of park pavilions and painted gates unraveling somewhat on the ride from Sheremetovo.
Daylight weak yet pure and a sense of emptiness as Saturday awakens into a long gleaming vessel gliding in slow motion. Scratching an eyebrow and checking for messages. Nothing from Natasha, and it has been three days. An accordion reverberates joyfully in the underpass on Kievskaya. He's back to Moscow. The hospitals are full of amputees, brilliant children with blood diseases and hearts as big as trees.