‘I personally—’ the young woman began, but stopped when she saw the man wasn’t listening.
He took out a phone. Dialled a number. Spoke in a quiet voice: ‘I need a level-one clearance. One or two. No, I’m not joking. Try to find one …’
He broke off the call, looked at the young woman and nodded. ‘I’m sorry, an urgent call … What were you saying?’
‘I personally am child-free,’ the young woman declared defiantly.
‘Free of children? Are you infertile, then?’
The young woman shook her head. ‘A common misapprehension. We child-free women are opposed to children because they enslave us. We have to choose – between being a proud, free individual or a social appendage to the population’s reproductive mechanism!’
‘Ah,’ the man said, with a nod. ‘And I thought … you had health problems. I was going to recommend a good doctor … But you do accept sex, though?’
The young woman smiled. ‘Naturally! We’re not asexual, are we? Sex and marriage – that’s all very good and normal. It’s just … tying yourself to those creatures that are always yelling and running around and—’
‘And pooping,’ the man suggested. ‘They’re always pooping as well, aren’t they? And they can’t even wipe their own backsides at first.’
‘Pooping!’ the young woman agreed. ‘That’s it precisely! Spending the best years of your life serving the needs of undeveloped human juveniles … I hope you’re not going to lecture me on morals and try to persuade me to change my mind and have a huge brood of kiddies.’
‘No, I’m not. I believe you. I’m quite certain you’ll remain childless to the end of your life.’
The boy and his mother walked past: the child was slightly calmer now or, more likely, he had simply resigned himself to the fact that the flight was going to happen. The mother was speaking to her son in a low voice – they heard something about a warm sea, a good hotel and bullfights.
‘Oh God!’ the young woman exclaimed. ‘They’re flying to Spain … It looks like we’re on the same flight. Can you imagine it, listening to that little tub of lard’s hysterical squealing for three hours?’
‘Not three, I think,’ said the man. ‘One hour and ten or fifteen minutes …’
A slightly scornful expression appeared on the young woman’s face. The man appeared perfectly capable and competent. But then how could he not know the most ordinary things … ‘The flight to Barcelona lasts three hours.’
‘Three hours and twenty minutes. But suppose—’
‘So where are you flying to?’ asked the young woman, rapidly losing interest in him.
‘Nowhere. I was seeing off a friend. Then I sat down to drink a mug of beer.’
The girl hesitated. ‘Tamara. My name’s Tamara.’
‘I’m Anton.’
‘You probably don’t have children, do you, Anton?’ asked Tamara, still unwilling to abandon her favourite subject.
‘Why do you think that? I have a daughter. Nadenka. The same age as that … tub of lard.’
‘So you didn’t want to let your wife remain a free, healthy woman?’ Tamara laughed. ‘What does she do?’
‘My wife?’
‘Well, not your daughter …’
‘By training, she’s a doctor. But in herself … she’s an enchantress.’
‘That’s just what I dislike so much about you men,’ Tamara declared, getting up, ‘that vulgar affectation. “An enchantress”! And no doubt you’re quite happy for her to slave away at the cooker, wash the nappies, get no sleep for nights on end …’
‘I am, although no one washes nappies any more – disposables have been in fashion for a long time.’
At that the young woman’s face contorted as if she had been offered a handful of cockroaches to eat. She grabbed her handbag and walked over to the check-in desk without even saying goodbye.
The man shrugged. He picked up his phone and raised it to his ear – and it rang immediately.
‘Gorodetsky … Completely? No, third-level won’t do at all. A full charter flight to Barcelona. You can accept it as second-level … Can’t you?’
He paused for a while, then said: ‘Then one seventh-level for me. No, that’s wrong. The boy has a First- or Second-Level gift of clairvoyance. The Dark Ones will dig their heels in … A single fifth-level intervention – a change in the fate of one human and one Other … All right, put it down to me.’
He stood up, leaving his unfinished mug of beer on the table, and set off towards the check-in desk, where the fat boy was standing in the queue beside his mother with a stony look on his face, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.
The man walked straight past the checkpoint (for some reason no one even tried to stop him) and approached the woman. He cleared his throat politely. Caught her eye. Nodded.
‘Olga Yurievna … You forgot to turn off the iron when you were ironing Kesha’s shorts this morning …’
A look of panic appeared on the woman’s face.
‘You can fly on the evening charter,’ the man continued. ‘But right now you’d better go home.’
The woman tugged at her son’s hand and then went dashing towards the exit. But the boy, whom she suddenly seemed to have forgotten completely, gazed at the man wide-eyed.
‘You want to ask who I am and why your mum believed me?’ the man asked.
The boy’s eyes misted over as if he were looking inside himself, or at something far, far away on the outside – something in a place where well-brought-up children weren’t supposed to look (and where badly-brought-up adults shouldn’t look either, unless they really had to).
‘You are Anton Gorodetsky, Higher White Magician,’ said the boy. ‘You are Nadka’s father. Because of you … all of us …’
‘Well?’ the man asked keenly ‘Well, well?’
‘Kesha!’ the woman howled, suddenly remembering her son. The boy shuddered and the mist in his eyes dispersed. He said: ‘Only I don’t know what all that means … Thank you!’
‘Because of me … all of you …’ the man murmured pensively, watching as the woman and her child rushed along the glass wall of the terminal building towards the taxi rank. ‘Because of me … all of you will live lives of luxury … All of you are doomed. All of you have been bankrupted … All of you are, will, have been – what?’
He swung round and walked unhurriedly towards the exit. By the entrance to the ‘green corridor’ he stopped and looked back at the queue that had formed at the check-in desk for Barcelona. It was a large, noisy queue. People going away for a holiday at the seaside. There were lots of women and children in it, lots of men and even one child-free young woman.
‘God help you,’ said the man. ‘I can’t.’
Dima Pastukhov had just taken out his lighter to give his partner Bisat Iskenderov a light, even though Bisat had his own lighter – it was simply a routine they’d got into. If Dima took out a cigarette, Bisat reached for his lighter. When the Azerbaijani decided to smoke, Dima offered him a light. If Pastukhov had been inclined to intellectual reflection, he might have said this was their way of demonstrating their mutual respect for each other, despite their differences of opinion on many things – from problems of nationality to which car was classier: the Mercedes ML or the BMW X3.
But Dima wasn’t inclined to reflections of this kind – he and Bisat both drove Fords, preferred German beer to Russian vodka or Azerbaijani cognac and had quite friendly feelings for each other. So Dima clicked on the button, summoning up the little tongue of flame, glanced briefly at the exit from the airport terminal building – and dropped the lighter just as his friend’s cigarette was reaching for it.