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up as a pillow. There is nothing more dramatic in the photo than a young boy overcome by tiredness and hiding from his employer’s eyes in an attempt to replenish some of the strength he’s used up hawking papers in those neighborhoods of cracked sidewalks, at bus stops, and out in front of office blocks. The photo reveals no injuries or any trace of tears or torture. None of that was necessary for me to know for certain, at that moment, as I contemplated that snapshot, that if, by some twist of fate, that boy had been one of my own children, I would be unable to spend a single moment of my remaining days doing anything other than hurling rocks through windows, setting off bombs left, right, and center, assassinating chancellors, burning down palaces, until I was gunned down by a well-aimed shot from a crack sniper crouching behind the open door of a patrol car. The upshot of this bewildering mess of memories and ideas that act as if they had a life of their own and come to land on my brain like crows is that the things for which I’d lay down my life are things I no longer have. I’ve either lost them or I’ve lost myself, but either way, I reach out and touch nothing but thin air.
    The radio says that the blizzard now battering my windowpanes swept through Moscow some twenty hours ago. It arrived at my door after turning the domes of the Kremlin white and sweeping through nighttime Europe, steam rising from millions of boilers working at full blast while men and women sleep. It’s mighty cold in this part of the planet. Save under this heap of blankets, where I lie motionless in a fetal position, all is night and frost, icicles hanging from eaves, water turning to ice in the pipes, whole litters frozen solid in their dens. Out there, everything hisses, everything roars.
    It is all but impossible to keep the anguish at bay when it comes with a convoy of memories en masse, jumbled together, like a slew of arrows unleashed at once without taking proper aim, to see which one might pierce some flesh off in the distance, which one might tear through a nerve, which one might burst open an eye. In my dreams I am hunted by hounds and torches, my first name, my last name, called out endlessly, while I crouch shivering in the bushes, trying to keep my breathing in check, to keep stock still, to keep from coughing. I often wake up in the middle of the night, not always able to recall what I was dreaming when I sit bolt upright. I then have to get out of bed, switch on a lamp or two, rinse my face. My heart still racing. It only knows how to work toward one goal, the poor thing, and in its determination to pull in the direction of my survival, regardless of whether that’s reasonable or otherwise, it allies itself with the storms. It pumps blood nonstop, unable to do anything else, sending it to the farthest vessels, to the tips of my fingers and toes, to my trembling brain, and this is tantamount to fueling the endless flow of images through my mind, words and ghosts, memories roaming in packs, the faces of those I miss the most, some of whom have already left this world for good and others I wish had done so a long time ago, eyes that once looked on me with love. There are momentary truces every now and then, but there is nothing so fragile and slippery as that deceptive calm. Occasional buffers against the disquiet sometimes occur to me, hideouts that, no sooner have I tried them out, prove utterly ineffectual. In search of refuge, my natural proclivities lead me back to the books that in times gone by, in previous slumps, in now half-forgotten debacles, succeeded in restoring me to the land of the living. But my concentration span is now all but nonexistent. I have no use, therefore, for full-length stories in which to immerse myself, since they all spit me out whether I like it or not, but rather, if anything, an atmosphere, a mood, some piece of prose that’s halfway fit to live in, any context-free passage that might