"Punisher." Phoebe Bridgers. October 28th, 2018. She could feel each bump of the uneven dirt track as the van rumbled northwards, ever northwards. There was no train here. If there was a train here she would be on it right now, but instead she rode the unsteady currents of the Skurov Road. This is what it was called, according to the old man driving the van, but it wasn’t much of a road. Impressive, however, was the manner in which tonnes of snow had been forced aside into massive drifts for hundreds of kilometres to keep the track clear. It was a feat of human persistence that even Michelle couldn't flippantly disregard. It had snowed for almost the entire journey from Chaklov to here, which was a two-hundred kilometre north-easterly trundle - slow and painstaking and hardfought - through Siberia's less hospitable regions. The trip was only possible thanks to Mikhail and his van. Michelle liked Mikahil because he was quiet. He’d begun the journey by telling her about the monthly trip that he took through the winter along this man-made chasm in the snow to take essential supplies to the village. She nodded but didn’t reply. He followed suit and said nothing else for twelve hours. "Almost there," he said, finally. He was working from memory, she assumed, given that the white walls either side of them showed no signs of receding. "Almost there," she repeated. Almost where ? She knew what lay behind her, both literally speaking and less so. This was an easier question than what lay ahead. When she closed her eyes, she involuntarily conjured the image of a boat, her own frail figure on the deck, a continent receding behind her with her old friends standing on the shore. It was inarguable that she was running away: from America, from Snowmantashi and from Bell, and now from Europe, too. She’d already been to Vladivostok, the end of the Earth, and found that it wasn’t far enough away. Jean-Luc waited in Moscow. Was she running away from him, also? Their trajectories had run in parallel since they’d left their separate lives under distinct big tents. But he hadn’t come to the Arctic. There was nothing for him here. Whether that was also true for Dreamer remained to be seen. It didn’t help that she didn’t know exactly where she was going. All she knew was that they were almost there . But something about the approach - as the dirt track narrowed beneath their tires and the snow drifts on either side of them continued to grow - filled her with hope. She knew hope was a dangerous thing, but this road was a frontier and a horizon. This road also, incidentally, led to the village of Tretyakova. We’ve already established Michelle’s ignorance with regards to her destination, outside of the obvious fact of its remoteness, but I think you’ve earned a little advanced knowledge. You deserve it . Wading through all one hundred and thirteen previous volumes is a task comparable to Michelle and Mikhail’s silent sojourn into the distant, lonely north. So sit back and enjoy your reward. The end is in sight. Tretyakova was a small village with a permanent population of eighty three, not including the conscripts stationed at the two adjacent military bases. Indeed, the settlement itself now mostly existed to support and sustain the men and women (but mostly men) who came and went from the Lazarev Naval Base and the Borodin Army Barracks. These soldiers were tasked with maintaining and strengthening Mother Russia’s claim in the Arctic Circle, which is an important pursuit of several nations in the neighbourhood. Important to governments, that is. I'm sure most regular folk care even less about Arctic territory than they do everything else. The village itself, separated from the military institutions by a wide estuary of the East Siberian Sea, was comprised of four districts of differing size but roughly equal importance to its precarious survival. These four districts were nestled around the Plain, or Prostoi in the local tongue: a gentle slope that flitted periodically between summer green and winter white, through which flowed the Yakupova river from Lake Khodyrev. Flowed when it wasn’t frozen into a sheet of ice, of course. To the west, upon the banks of the eponymous lake, was the Khodyrev District, where the old squat huts had character and their own kind of grace, and the fisheries mostly amounted to warehouses for family-run trawlers. South was the Zoloev District, the newest of Tretyakova’s regions and its industrial powerhouse (as much as it had one). There, the large, brutalistic housing was an assault on the eyes, the incessant rumbling of the lumberyards concurrently working over the ears. North of the Prostoi were the large abodes of the Ryabtsova District, elaborate new-builds that remained empty and wasteful for most of the year, and beyond that the whalers’ huts. Now, in 2018, less than a half-dozen Melville-channelers remained in the village of Tretyakova, but there was a time - during the great and terrible whale culls of Stalin’s years - when there were more of them here than soldiers and sailors across the estuary. The few whalers that remained were reclusive and wary. Seeing one had become a rare and special treat. On the north-east tip of the peninsula, high upon a cliff perpetually battered by the cruel and unpredictable Arctic storms, the Tretyakova Lighthouse sat at the end of a thin finger of land that jutted through the frozen water. Easy to visualise? Maybe not. Good job I drew you a map, dear reader. For a point of reference, if you need one, Dreamer’s arrival in Tretyakova meant that she was two hundred kilometres north-east of Chaklov, which itself was fourteen hundred kilometres north-east of Yakutsk. These numbers and names will mean nothing to you, unless you happen to be a mathematician with a reasonably strong understanding of Russian geography. This is rather specific and seems unlikely. It is enough, dear reader, to know that Michelle is a long way from home , which in itself is something of a complicated concept for her in the first place. "You know where you’re staying?" Mikhail asked, as he took her rucksack from the back of his van and handed it to her. He’d come to a halt in the first fork in the road since leaving Chaklov. There had been no other vehicles, people, or animals on the single straight road, either. Only them and the snow. "I know where I’m staying," Michelle replied. She pushed her arms through her rucksack’s straps and went on her way. The instructions to find her accommodation - a whaler’s hut on the north coast of the peninsula that was empty during this and every other winter - were straight-forward enough. Follow the dirt path northwards, keeping to the wider road, until you couldn’t follow it anymore. The arrangements had been made by Anastasia, a performance artist Michelle met in a Belorusskaya dive bar back in Moscow. Anastasia had spent more than a year living here (sometimes alone, sometimes with her cousin, the whaler) whilst on the verge of a mental breakdown. She’d told Michelle about it in a different Belorusskaya dive bar, and sworn the remote location and fresh air had helped to drive the demons away. Michelle had her doubts, but pretty soon realised that Anastasia was describing the exact thing she’d spent years searching for. Memories of Vladivostok, of disappointment and regret. She hadn’t come this far to go no further. It was only as she crossed the arched bridge over the Yakupova River that she was high enough to see the village. The snow had slowed to a gentle pace and she welcomed the respite by lighting a cigarette. She counted a few dozen buildings in various clusters, distinctive only because of the long, wooden stilts on which they stood. She assumed this was one of the defenses the villagers employed against the ever-encroaching snow. Another was evident only each morning, when teams of soldiers would arrive across the frozen estuary and begin loading the excess fresh powder from around the village into trucks, which were driven back across the ice and disposed of further west. It seemed like an arduous, endless cycle for very little gain, but she at least admired the symbiosis between the villagers and the soldiers. Neither would survive without the other, regardless of the futility of their overall task. Dreamer rounded the Prostoi and passed a surprisingly busy inn with Лебедь written (in cyrillic) on a sign that flapped in the frequent, cold winds. She could read the letters but not translate them, though in this case their meaning was illuminated by the weathered painting of a white swan on a frozen river. The hill grew steeper between there and the Whaler’s District, which amounted to eight short, squat, identical huts and the harbour buildings. This part of town - the oldest, smallest, and furthest north - occupied the shadow of the huge, octagonal lighthouse on the peninsula’s tip. Hers was the one labelled #8 , on the oceanside of the road and (somewhat inconveniently) directly next to the only other dwelling with obvious signs of inhabitation. On the porch of #7, wearing an unfastened bathrobe, baggy black boxer shorts, and hiking boots, sat a tall, barrel-chested, bearded man with a tumbler of brandy in one hand and a cigarette in another. "Здравствуйте, девушка !" he announced as she shuffled by, the stilts beneath his house giving him a high, almost throne-like vantage point. "Здравствуйте," she repeated. It was one of only two phrases she’d mastered, and she feared she’d be employing the second soon. "Где Сергей вас всех находит?" he asked. She could tell it was a question from his tone only. "Я не говорю по-русски," she said, whilst climbing the stairs to her own porch. A rocking chair was positioned there but she approached the door instead, checking under a pot housing a dead plant for the key. The barrel-chested man let out a chuckle. "English, then," he continued. He threw the end of his cigarette down into a nearby snowdrift. "Ivan Dyadyović Volgin. Welcome to Tretyakova." "I didn’t expect anyone here to speak English," she replied. The key clicked and the door opened, but she paused to regard Ivan Dyadyović’s keen eyes. They were as cold as the snow. "You spend time on the sea, you learn lots of things," Ivan answered. "You’re a whaler?" she asked. "No. But I know whalers. You’re in the right place for them." "Where are they now?" "Not sure. Probably out whaling." "I guess that’s what they do." A pause. Michelle exploited it and began her exit. "Make sure you keep your doors locked, девушка ," Ivan said. "Windows, too." "Because of the cold?" she asked. His attire suggested there was little to worry about. "Because of the bear," he said. He was still smiling. She went inside. She had a week until Mikhail would climb into his van and trundle back to Chaklov. A train waited there to return her to Yakutsk and some semblance of civilization, and so she spent the next few days acclimatising as much as one can to such harsh and inhospitable environs. The cold didn’t bother her too much. She could dress for the cold and it was warm inside. The inn on the northern tip of the Prostoi , with the weathered image of a white swan on its sign, seemed an ideal place to start. She didn’t have to wait long to meet her neighbour again, either, for it seemed that - prior to descending on unsuspecting foreigners from his raised porch in his bathrobe - the Лебедь was a favoured haunt of Ivan Dyadyović, just as it was for much of the rest of the village. As she nursed her fifth beer (which was preceded by her fifth vodka, designed to warm her and accompanied by a toast to Mikhail, the village’s delivery man and thus its saviour), the barrel-chested man emerged into the tavern, fully clothed and not yet fatigued by an afternoon’s consumption. He spent a moment heating his hands over a fireplace, smiling at Dreamer when he noticed his neighbour sitting alone in the corner, and then ordered a brandy. "You’ve settled in already, I see," he said, nodding at the array of empties on her table, positioned around an unopened copy of Anna Karenina . She’d been carrying it around with her since Moscow and Berlin before that, and in a less literal sense for a lot longer. Ivan, with what she was learning was trademark familiarity, sat down on one of the empty stools at her table. "Good book?" "I don’t know," she answered, both truthfully and evasively. She thought that perhaps this trip would be the one on which she would finally conquer that particular personal mountain, but her seclusion didn’t shake her from apathy. Maybe the Лебедь inn was too close an approximation of what she’d left behind. "Haven’t started it." "Heard it’s a classic, девушка ," he said, between sips of his brandy. "Not much of a reader myself. But my daughter tells me this village is perfect for it. Not a lot else to do, unless you prefer to drink. She’s young, and will learn eventually." "Your daughter lives here?" Michelle asked. Ivan nodded his head. "When she’s not at school," he replied. "Where’s her mother?" she enquired, without tact. "Not here," he answered, absently. "Not anywhere." In the ensuing silence, Ivan removed a pack of Russian cigarettes from his pocket and tapped one against the end of the table thoughtfully. Michelle regarded the quizzical look on his face, which brimmed with expression despite being mostly hidden by thick fur. Eventually, with a sigh, he lit his cigarette and turned back towards Dreamer. "You want me to leave you with your book?" he suddenly asked, breaking a silence that had started upon their table but spread across much of the bar. She’d come to learn that such interludes were common in Tretyakova. "I think today I prefer to drink," she said. She retrieved the book and placed it in her bag, next to a small, silver case filled with a half-dozen joints she’d prepared for the day. Only on her porch as the moon watched over the end of it could she finally enjoy one, and she did so whilst reflecting on the surprisingly thoughtful man who’d spoken to her for much of the afternoon in forceful half-truths. Her early understanding of him was fragmented and incomplete, but she found him a tantalising concept nonetheless. Her train of thought was interrupted only by the sight of the octagonal lighthouse, overlooking the frozen bay and producing a beam of bold, pink light that cut through the winter mist. This image - uninterrupted by even the currents of the sea, which were held in stasis (or at least obscured) by a thick sheet of ice - was disturbed only twice. Once by the slow, clubfooted figure of Mikhail the van driver limping up the footpath between the Ryabtsova District and the Lighthouse, his body obscured by thick, old-fashioned robes but his frame unmistakeable. And maybe half an hour later by a slender, lithe girl - eighteenish, probably - with pale skin, black hair, and a pair of ice skates tied up by their laces around her neck. The blades shimmered in the pale moonlight. She paused when she smelled Michelle’s smoke, sniffed, smiled, and then entered #7. Ivan’s daughter, Dreamer assumed. She finished her joint and watched the lighthouse's pink beam scanning the frozen surface of the water. Her assumption was confirmed the next day, when she met the pair whilst walking amidst the eaves of the Tambiev Forest to the village’s south. Maria seemed like a sensible girl. She said little and remained aloof to the conversation between Dreamer and her father, instead preferring to inspect the trunks of trees deadened by winter, or to listen closely to distant birdsong. Michelle only knew she understood English by subtle reactions to her father’s heavily-accented speech and the muttered greetings she offered upon introduction. Ivan warned Dreamer about bears again before he left, his daughter illustrating his caution with an exhibition of her own teeth and claws. Michelle saw both Ivan and Maria, sometimes together and sometimes alone, frequently throughout the days that followed. On the fourth night following her arrival in Mikhail’s van, Dreamer paused on the bridge over the Yakupova River to light a cigarette and watch a young woman skating on the frozen surface of the Khodyrev Lake. It took several minutes for her to realise that it was Maria, who'd been formally introduced by her birth name by Ivan and then henceforth referred to as Masha. She was nearly a grown woman but her father still used this childish shortening. Perhaps always would. All fathers coddled their daughters. It was one of the reasons Dreamer was glad hers died when she was so young. She watched Masha complete a series of figure eights, first expanding in size before contracting again until she was barely moving from the central point. She progressed through a sequence of toe loops, axels, Euler jumps, and eventually a quite remarkable flip that elicited a gasp from her one-woman audience. Dreamer continued to smoke, a small mound of discarded ends accruing around her Vans, as the girl gracefully glided in concentric circles, her elegant, almost hypnotic path eventually taking her into the centre of the lake. Where the frozen layer was thinnest. Her blades cut through the frost, plumes of disturbed snow and ice cascading either side of her as she traced her powerful arcs. Michelle matched her with an expulsion of smoke. Dreamer realised the girl knew she was being watched. Enjoyed it, maybe. Certainly wished to put on a show: one that flaunted her poise, her grace, and her cavalier daring. Michelle was impressed despite the narcissism. Perhaps because of it. Eventually, the girl turned in a one eighty on her heel and then skated in a straight line towards the bridge. Michelle thought she might disappear beneath it, but she angled her blades and came to a sudden halt amidst a dancing column of disturbed snowflakes. She stood, smiling and satisfied, in the structure's shadow. "Very impressive," Michelle said. She stopped short of a round of applause. "How long have you been watching?" Masha asked. Michelle glanced down at the pile of cigarettes next to her feet. Counted them. Eight. Shit, eight?! "A while," she answered, evasively. "Can you skate?" Masha continued in her enquiries. "Of course I can skate," Michelle replied, perhaps a little defensively. "I'm from the Netherlands. Not like that, though. We skate for speed." But on thin ice, too , she thought about adding. She didn't and lit a ninth cigarette instead. "I've got some spare blades at home," the girl went on. Michelle was beginning to enjoy her smile less. There was a suggestion about it that she didn't like. "What size are you?" "Where's your father?" Michelle asked, mostly to change the subject. "He doesn't skate?" "Not this late," the girl replied. "He says it's too dark." "Maybe it is." "He's at the lighthouse if you need him," Masha went on, whilst beginning to glide again on one skate. "But I don't think you're allowed. I'm not." "I saw Mikhail going to the lighthouse two nights ago," Michelle said, absently. It wasn't clear if it was to the girl, but Masha heard it and responded either way. " All the men go to the lighthouse." "There was a pink light." "Always is." A pause. The night felt a little colder. "What happens there?" The girl only shrugged, and smiled, and then skated away. Michelle saw her briefly again the next morning, when she met Ivan for a walk they'd planned to take into the Tambiev Forest, but around her father Masha would say nothing beyond cursory, inconsequential salutations. "Tretyakova is not a normal holiday destination for a young woman," Ivan said, as they traversed the mossy land beneath the eaves of the Tambiev. They continued in an easterly direction to where the dead trees were less dense. "Tretyakova is not a normal holiday destination for anyone." Michelle thought about this pair of statements for a long while. There was no question but, given Ivan's searching glances and his reciprocation of the ensuing silence, she sensed a reply was expected of her. "Maybe I'm not normal," she said, finally. It was a non-answer. Ivan shook his head and rolled his eyes. "Why are you here ?" he asked. "With me ?" "You're showing me the forest," she replied. He scoffed at the response. "That's not what I'm asking," he said. She knew that and he knew she did. "You want to know what I think? I think you're looking for something new. Something other . Poor wording, I know, but it's the best way I can describe it in English. You don't know if it's a place or a person or a thing, and you don't know where to look for it. But you know it's not where they are. The rest of them . They're just as sad as you are. And that's why you're here, with me: you think I can show you something that nobody else can. I have at least this going for me." Dreamer considered the analysis, which was freely given in a kindly, even tone. Too kindly, even. It differed from her own framing of this journey, one that suggested cowardice and abandon in the more pejorative sense. It was pleasant to picture herself as an adventurer - intrepid and empty - searching for truth or beauty or any thing, rather than a scared young woman running away from her problems. "Am I close?" he asked, eventually. She didn't know how long she'd been entranced in silent thought. "I hope so," she said, truthfully. She didn't want to be a coward. It was then that they saw the bear. Huge and silent and powerful, he reared up onto his hind legs, maybe thirty metres away from them upon the frozen estuary. Ivan placed his hand in front of her to stop her from moving any closer, which she had very little intention of doing. Their breathing was quiet, eventually synchronising in rhythm amidst the tension and the freezing cold. The bear stared at them with sad and lonely eyes. Then, he stretched out and walked into the forest. Ivan would go no further. They turned aside from their morning plans and returned to the village. The barrel-chested man said very little on the walk to his hut, into which he promptly disappeared as the bear had the trees. They met again the next evening at the Boathouse Inn in the Zoloev District. Ivan's terror and the requirement for subsequent isolation following their encounter with the local wildlife seemed to have retreated. Michelle decided not to bring it up. She found him smoking on the deck, staring out at a boat that was sundered within the frozen ice atop the estuary. It was a startling image, and one that she carefully considered herself before disturbing Ivan's own thoughts. She knew that, logically, the boat must have been freed from its natural shackles each summer, when it could be moved even if it couldn't move itself. Why, then, did it appear as though the ship - disused and dishevelled, but far from a wreck - had been stuck here forever ? Perhaps it was an affectation, or a symbol, or a reminder. She didn't think to ask. "You want to eat?" he queried, when his cigarette had burned to the filter and he'd grown tired of the boat in the ice. "I'm not hungry." "I think I’d prefer to drink again," Michelle said. "Just set that down here," Ivan instructed the barman a short time later as he emerged from the backroom with a fresh bottle of vodka. The first was only two-thirds full, in their defense. The barman shrugged and obeyed the orders before returning to his own drink. Michelle, meanwhile, continued to stare at her companion, aghast and perplexed at the latest in a long series of proclamations of worldliness. " You ’ve been to Rotterdam?" she asked, with a healthy helping of condescension. For once this was unintentional. "Of course!" he answered, whilst pouring them each another measure of the clear and sharp alcohol. "I'm a man of the sea! Spent a season in Rotterdam, though I wasn't so lucky as you have been with beautiful Tretyakova. No knowledgeable locals to show me around." "Why did you come back?" she asked. And then, perhaps unnecessarily, she repeated and elaborated. "Why did you come back here ?" Ivan smiled. She realised he was missing two of his teeth. "I'm never any where for long," he said. "You remind me of someone," she replied. "Who do I remind you of?" he asked, whilst raising his vodka to his lips. "I don't know," she said. "I don't think I've met them yet." "That doesn't make much sense," he mused, as he placed his empty glass back on the bar. "But you told me that you aren’t normal." "I said maybe I’m not," she answered. She feared that ultimately she was. A few hours later, after the bar had stopped serving and they'd been asked twice to take the rest of their third bottle with them and go home, they stood upon the decking again to look at the pale silver moon above the sundered boat. When she kissed him he tasted exactly how she expected him to. Vodka and tobacco on a surface level, which in itself was fine, but there was an earthiness beneath this that hooked her. He tasted real. They walked home in silence. Out on the frozen surface of Khodyrev Lake, Masha drew lazy figure eights upon the ice with her shimmering blades. A torch fastened to a headband illuminated her immediate path, but beyond this the darkness ruled. She placed her hands behind her back, interlocked her fingers, and bowed her head. She tried to skate for speed and grinned as the wind rushed through her hair. His eyes were still keen but less cold when she was this close. His hands were heavy but firm and steady when he pushed against her hips. She was pressed between his barrel-like chest and the wall behind as if clutched in a vice. The wall had more give. He was huge but somehow delicate and graceful, even as he enveloped her. She burrowed into him. Masha skated in the shadow of the forest, the tallest trees of the Tambiev towering above her and - from the right angle - blocking out the moon. Shrouded in the darkness, she extended her left leg behind her in a grotesque arabesque, her momentum slowing and then rapidly increasing again as she completed a camel spin. She grasped at her skate with outstretched hands at the end of the turn, attempting to level out into the elusive Biellman, a spin she was still yet to master. Her fingertips brushed against the cold blade. Not tonight. Next time. Out of the dense undergrowth of the Tambiev, heavy paws padding on the thick frozen surface of the lake, the bear emerged. His white fur glistened in the moonlight. His soft breath misted in front of him as he watched the girl. Her jeans pulled down around her thighs and her knees up beneath her chin, Dreamer sat atop the kitchen table and braced herself for his entry. It was clumsy, hasty, impatient. Regrettable and surprising, given the firm and deliberate nature of his movements to this point. Grace and poise were dead. Lust had clouded his mind and robbed him of his delicacy. An untamed hand gripped her thigh, but her bare skin was cold and sharp to the touch. He grasped her belt instead and used it to pull himself deeper into her. She bit down on her lip and closed her eyes. The last act of Masha’s young life was an uninspiring bracket turn that took her closer to the eaves of the forest. If she’d have known, she might’ve attempted the Biellman one last time. Her dance with the bear was short and violent. She preferred to dance alone. Several parts of Masha lay strewn upon the ice, the frost stained red with her blood. One shoe had come loose in the struggle. He finished with another low, guttural grunt, having managed to elicit a solitary murmur - a deathly quiet opening gambit that was never built or dwelt upon - from her suddenly dry lips in return. After a few heavy breaths, drawn through his tight and rattling chest, he pulled away and meandered half-hard towards a window. He opened it and lit a cigarette, a rasping cough momentarily overcoming him. He didn’t look at her. They never did afterwards. She pulled her trousers up and collected the one shoe that had come loose in the struggle. There was half a bottle of vodka in the freezer. She was parched. Masha’s body was found by Anton Nikolaevich Zakharov, a worker at the Zoloev Lumberyard, and Alexandra, his Siberian husky, whilst the pair were out for a pre-dawn walk. The short bout of frenetic panic, paranoia, and decisive calls to action that ensued in the village resulted in the majority of Tretyakova’s able-bodied men gathering weapons (or approximations thereof) and trudging across the snow with hazy, half-hearted notions of revenge. Ivan didn’t go. He sat on his porch in his bathrobe, boxer shorts, and hiking boots, smoking cigarettes and drinking brandy. Michelle collected her bag from #8 and paused as she passed beneath Ivan’s raised porch. The sun was rising in the distance, its harsh, bright light shimmering across the polar desert, vast and white. She realised that it wasn’t snowing. "You’re leaving," he said. It wasn’t a question. "Mikhail’s waiting for me," she replied. She hoped that was true. She didn’t want to wait a month for his return and it was a long way to walk. "You’ll come back," he mused, after a lengthy pause. "You don’t know me," she answered. Her tone was soft. "At all." "Maybe," he shrugged. "Maybe not. But I know you’ll be back. Perhaps not here specifically, but somewhere like it, and with someone like me. You think you’re the first European girl I’ve seen hiding? Vladivostok is full of them. Have you been?" "I just left," she said. He let out a chuckle. "Wasn’t far enough away?" he asked. She didn’t answer, but the truth of it stung. "I don’t need to know very much about you at all to see this. The world you left behind? The one you run from? It’s not your world." Michelle left Tretyakova. She didn’t return for many years. October 22nd, 2032. The track was new and the ride was smooth. The train cut through a man-made channel in the trees before emerging onto a white field, the station - one of only a handful of buildings that she didn’t recognise from her last visit - rearing up before the procession of carriages and opening its arms in embrace. The train slowed down and then came to a halt on the platform whilst a vaguely-robotic woman welcomed them over the speakers, in Russian only, to the village of Tretyakova. Dreamer remained in her seat for a few minutes after the train had stopped. This was often down to the patchwork of old wounds and nagging aches: her shoulder, her hip, her left knee and her right ankle. Or, sometimes, a resistance to confront whatever situation she was being delivered to. Both of these things were true now, but neither was responsible for her current inertia. The last few words of her book, the dog-eared corners and crinkled spine of which were indicative of long neglect, held her temporarily in stasis. ‘"I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."’ She was as conflicted by this last paragraph as she was most of the novel. She felt something resembling empathy for Kostya, and identified with his penchant for angry discussions and tactlessly expressed opinions. She had no such feeling for his wife, who she found sort of pathetic, a weak and fragile thing complicit by her meekness. And she couldn’t suffer Kostya’s leap to prayer, and to attribute such frail and facile meaning to his existence. She wished the book had ended on the platform, with Anna caught between the screeching wheels and the tracks, the thoughts of the onlookers left unwritten. When she walked out of the station and beheld the panoramic of the village, the lake, and the forest, she remembered the woman that she was the last time she came here. She viewed it from a different angle and at a different time, but the most significant differences between then and now were found in her. She was more Kostya than Anna at that stage: meek and tactless, full of fear and regret, and dominated by vile obsessions. She was still wrestling, too. Taking a break, but very much in the game. This last thought made her smile, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth more pronounced under this subtle exertion. Upon these rare occasions when her mind raced to her time within the squared circle, memories long receded and half-hidden under less extravagant ones, one image more than any other dominated her thought. But she hadn’t travelled this far ( again ) to relive Mexico City. There were other bones to dig through. She arrived in the Whaler’s District at sunset, half-expecting to find him on his porch in his bathrobe and boxer shorts. He was there, but wearing a heavy trench coat and a black fur ushanka. He was fourteen years older, she mused, and all men lose their daring with age. A cigarette hung limply from his lips and his hand clenched a glass of brandy. So many constants, so little variation. She stood in the shadow of his porch. He looked up but barely registered her presence. Sucked the end of his cigarette. Sipped his brandy. Neglected to speak, at least not first. "Do you remember me?" she asked. "Of course, девушка," he said. She didn’t answer right away. Didn’t move much either, except to shuffle awkwardly and anxiously beneath the weight of his averted gaze. "I said you’d come back," he added, finally. She sighed. Shook her head. "Why are you here, Michelle? Fourteen years is a long time." "A long time to think," she said. "A long time to move on." Moving on. Easier said than done. It’s not a skill she’d mastered. Perhaps she hadn’t tried hard enough. "One week isn’t very long, in the grand scheme of things," Michelle began, whilst lighting a cigarette of her own. "But this place left its mark on me. I have questions, I guess." "Fire away, девушка," he said, with a toothless grin. "Maybe you’d like to go inside?" His hut was exactly as she remembered it. Unremarkable, both outside and in, but for one feature that Michelle couldn’t help but steal glances at after being seated at the kitchen table. When she’d last passed over the threshold, Ivan had checked the shoe rack next to the door and noted Masha’s missing skates. Now, Dreamer’s eyes frequently regarded the blades, well-polished and sharpened as if she might return at any moment and slip them on. "Well?" he asked, after sitting down with a black tea, a slice of lemon floating on its surface, which he placed down next to his brandy. Her eyes were dragged away from the blades and met his cold, keen stare. She found herself swimming in them, and almost forgot he’d lost his teeth and his hair. He seemed young and powerful again, even if she never would. "Why didn’t you go after the bear with the others?" she asked. He sipped once from each of his drinks. "Right to it, девушка?" he mumbled. His voice had lost some of its command, breaking the spell of his eyes. "To what end? To catch the bear? To kill it?" "I guess the others thought of it as justice," she said, careful not to frame the argument as her own. "Revenge." "Revenge against what?" Ivan responded, with a scoff that quickly descended into a rasping cough. She remembered this, too. "The bear? Nature? Equally ridiculous, for different reasons." Dreamer thought about his conclusion and found that she agreed. She shifted focus. "What happened to Masha’s mother?" she asked. "Same thing that happened to Masha," he replied. He finished his brandy in one so as to steel himself. "She was killed by a bear, too?" "No. The same thing more widely speaking. I brought her here shortly after we were married. She hated it. Spent most of our life together here dreaming of getting away. I should’ve let her. Helped her. Gone with her, even. She finally drifted far enough away to leave me. Never made it out of Tretyakova, though. Died in a blizzard the day before her boat left for St. Petersburg. Have you been? It’s quite lovely." "I’ve been," Michelle said. Ivan refilled his brandy. "It’s quite lovely." "You think I should’ve searched for revenge on the blizzard, too?" he asked. "Not if she was going to leave you," Michelle mused. "Why didn’t you go? Either with her or since?" "I’ve come and gone over the years," he answered. "But my roots go deep. Always found myself drifting back here. There’s nothing in Tretyakova, granted, but there’s not much else out there either. I guess you know that. You came back, afterall." "I came back, afterall," she repeated. The concept of home reared its ugly head once again. She felt placeless and timeless and ultimately ashamed. "You all out of questions?" Ivan enquired. He was asking almost as many as her. "What happens at the lighthouse?" she asked. Ivan smiled. He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the arm of his chair. Flicked it into a nearby snowdrift. Stared at the rising moon. "You want to see for yourself?" he said. "It’s almost time." "Time for what?" she asked. He was still smiling. He didn’t say anything else until they got to the lighthouse. The маяк was a tall, tapered octagonal prism with a domed roof and - still now, as had been the case in 2018 - a pink light scanned the frozen surface of the East SIberian Sea. The beam seemed more solid now, as if its strangely curious operator had kept up with the technological advancements of the time. Contrary to the houses and dockyards in the village, which were wrought of hardwood from the Tambiev Forest, the lighthouse was entirely composed of white stone and stained glass. Ivan led the way along a path atop a thin, high spit of land that jutted out into the ice. A man wearing a long, purple robe, tied around the waist by a length of thick, gold thread, greeted them at the lighthouse’s entrance. Well, he greeted Ivan specifically. He didn’t acknowledge Dreamer’s presence at all. They spoke in Russian and as if she wasn’t there, except for a brief interlude in which Ivan nodded at her and the other - who amounted to a guardsman, she assumed, but guarding what she couldn’t yet say - searched her with a long, daunting glance. She shivered, the wind and the guard’s eyes conspiring against her. Then, he stood aside, and climbed the spiral staircase towards the lantern room. It was wide and with low ceilings, its central focal point the convoluted mechanism that perennially searched the frost with its pink beam. They weren’t alone. Sat cross-legged in a wide circle around the pink lantern were seven other men, each identically dressed in purple robes, Ivan removing his trenchcoat and ushanka and taking position around the lantern. Michelle knelt down next to him, an eerie sensation that she’d been here - or somewhere like here - on more than one occasion in the past taking hold. She recognised Mikhail but he didn’t recognise her. The ninth man appeared from the watch room below. He was different from the rest. He was dressed for the sea, and carried with him a barrel that he set down next to the pink light. "Who is he?" Michelle asked. Her voice was soft but carried and echoed around the wide room. She was certain that the rest of them, particularly the narrow, wiry man in the middle of the circle, had heard her, but none were interrupted from their ceremony. "He’s the Whaler," Ivan said. "There’s only one?" "There’s only one here." "What’s in the barrel?" "The blood of his catch." She didn’t have any more questions. The whaler began to chant. Slowly and quietly and in a language that she neither spoke nor recognised. The other men, Ivan included, lifted their hoods to cover their heads. They stared at t