The Twenty-Second

March 7, 2020

Accountants, they say, see figures even in their sleep, and the cashiers at the market hear coins jingling when they close their eyes; at our bus depot there was a dispatcher who counted buses for forty years and, having retired, spent the first six months recounting the cars in the yard from his window out of habit — morning and evening — and was very upset if one of them didn't come home for the night. Anyone who counts something for a long time sooner or later begins to see in the figures not figures but an order, and then any extra unit sticks out of that order like a nail out of a plank. For Kesha that unit became the twenty-second of March.

There were twenty-six photographs for March.

Kesha sat over them from the evening of the sixth till the morning of the seventh, and when Grisha came clattering down the iron stairs at half past seven, Kesha was still sitting there, and the lamp was still burning, and the tea in his mug had a thin skin on it, like a puddle with a film of ice.

He looked at every one. In order, from the first of March. He opened a picture and looked, as he always looked — the month rose before him like a road — and he walked along that road unhurriedly, day by day, to the twenty-second. And at the twenty-second he stopped.

The woman in the puffer jacket whom the bank would take, but not in that department — the twenty-second clean. A quiet Sunday; she'd be baking a pie.

The old man with the stick, "Purse," "the twelfth it is" — a blot.

Kesha looked at it for a long time. Back then, on the first, he had not seen it. He was sure of that — he could not have missed it; he had read that month carefully then, right to the end, he always read to the end. There had been no blot then. And now there was. Black, round, with spreading edges.

So it had appeared afterwards. So a photograph taken a week ago had changed.

No, Kesha corrected himself. The photograph had not changed. A photograph is just a picture, pixels, numbers in the laptop's memory. The month had changed. The month he saw through the picture. This old man's future had changed in a week — and the picture, like a window, now showed something else.

It happened. The future is not carved in stone; the future is like a river, and if you throw a stone into it, the current may shift a little. Kesha knew that. Sometimes a person, having read a parchment, would do something — and the month would turn a little. A little. Not so that a black stain suddenly appeared in the middle of a clean day.

He went on.

Lyonya the courier, in the yellow jacket, "Heart" — Kesha opened his picture and knew at once that something was wrong here, even before he reached the twenty-second. Lyonya's month was not the one he had read on the first of March. Then Kesha had seen: the girl won't come back, but on the tenth Lyonya will meet another one, in a café where he'll be picking up an order. A simple good month, a bright one. Kesha had written exactly that.

And now Lyonya's month broke off on the ninth.

Not broke off — was flooded with black. The blot was not on the twenty-second but on the ninth, and it was bigger than Tamara Petrovna's or Kubyshkin's — it spread over two days, three — and after it everything was not merely faded but grey and empty, like an old washed-out photograph in which nothing can be made out any more.

Kesha looked at this for a long time. Then he went on.

Two more — a blot. The man who wanted to sell his car. And the girl, the student, who had exams to pass. Both on the twenty-second.

The rest — clean.

Five out of twenty-six. All after the first of March. All on the twenty-second, except Lyonya.

---

Then Kesha did one more thing, which only occurred to him towards morning. He opened the February folder.

The February pictures showed February. But if a client had come, say, on the twentieth of February, Kesha saw their month thirty days ahead — to the twentieth of March, the twenty-first. Not to the twenty-second — a day or two short. But still.

Kesha opened a picture taken on the twenty-eighth of February — one of the last clients of the month, a young woman, "Work." And walked through her month to its very end, to the twenty-eighth of March.

Her twenty-second was clean.

He opened the next one, the twenty-seventh. Clean. The twenty-fifth. Clean. The twenty-second of February — here the month ended on the twenty-second of March, at the very edge, and Kesha could barely make out that last day — clean.

Not one blot. Not in a single February picture.

Kesha leaned back in his chair.

The blot had not always been in the future. It had appeared. It had appeared at a certain moment — and from that moment it had begun to show through on all the pictures, old and new, in some people and not in others. And Kesha knew — did not guess, but knew, with that same heavy knowledge from under his ribs — when that moment had been.

The evening of the first of March. When a man in a long coat came into the shop without his footsteps ringing on the iron stairs.

---

"Good morning, master," said Grisha from behind the curtain.

"Morning," said Kesha. His voice was hoarse, like that of a man who has been silent all night.

"Haven't you slept?"

"No."

Grisha was silent for a moment. Then he seemed about to say something but changed his mind and went for the bucket.

Kesha closed the laptop. His eyes ached as though sand had been poured into them. He sat for a while looking at the green curtain, listening to Grisha clattering the bucket and the cloth slapping on the slabs — from the far wall to the door, not missing one — and suddenly understood what he had to do.

He did not know what the blot was. He could see it, but he could not see what was in it. It was like a smudge on a window — you look through the window, you see the street, but in one place there's a smudge, and you can't see anything through it. And to make out what's behind the smudge, you have to come closer. You have to look not at the whole month but only at that day. You have to read "Caution."

"Caution" was a special kind of reading. Kesha did not like it. In "Heart" or "Work" he looked at the month broadly, as from a hilltop, saw everything at once, and picked out what was needed. But in "Caution" you had to go down, into the month itself, and walk through it slowly, looking round every corner — and everything that was hiding round the corners looked back at you. After "Caution" Kesha always had a headache. That was why it cost five silvers — more than anything except "The Main Day."

He could have read "Caution" from an old picture. But in the old pictures the blot was as if seen through glass — showing through, ghostly. He needed a fresh picture. Today's. He needed a living person who had a blot — and he needed them to come today.

Kesha did not know whether such a person would come. But he decided: if one did, he would read them "Caution." Free.

---

The seventh of March is a special day in our town — an eve. On that day men walk the streets with anxious faces, as before an exam, and buy up everything in the flower kiosk by the market, from tulips to the mimosa that Auntie Galya the flower-seller brings up from the south in tomato crates; by lunchtime the mimosa is gone, by evening the tulips are gone, and the latecomers buy pots of geranium and tell their wives it's "something to remember me by." On that day women pretend they are expecting nothing, and for that very reason go to fortune-tellers especially often — to find out what they'll be given and whether they'll be given anything at all. Madame Zoya across the road saw up to twenty people on the seventh of the month; for Kesha, who never had more than five, the queue formed from eight.

First that day were two sisters as alike as two drops of water — both small, sharp-nosed, in identical knitted hats with pompoms — and both took "Heart," and both about the same man, and Grisha, writing them in the book, was so afraid of mixing up the pictures that he labelled them just in case: "Sister 1," "Sister 2." Kesha read them both. Both their twenty-seconds were clean. The man, by the way, would go to neither of them — he was married, only they didn't know it yet.

Third was a man who wanted "Purse" — a stocky man in a leather cap, carrying a bag from the hardware shop with a roll of wallpaper sticking out of it — and while Grisha photographed his palm he explained that the wallpaper was for his wife for the holiday, because flowers wilt but wallpaper stays, and this, in his opinion, was an argument so irresistible that Grisha could find nothing to say against it. His twenty-second was clean: on that very day he would be putting up that very wallpaper and would quarrel with his wife over the pattern.

Fourth came a woman of about thirty-five, in a long jacket, with a baby in a pram. Her name was Oksana. She wanted "Work": she had been promised a promotion, but it kept being put off, and she wanted to know whether they were deceiving her.

Grisha photographed her palm. The baby in the pram looked at him with round eyes and sucked its mitten.

Kesha opened the picture.

She'd be promoted — yes, she would, only not in March but in April. Her boss wasn't deceiving her; he was waiting for a decision from above himself. Kesha had already begun to write — and, as he always did now, ran through the month to the twenty-second.

A blot.

Kesha's hand jerked, and a drop fell from the pen onto the parchment — small and round. He looked at it. Then at the picture. Then, slowly, he put the pen down.

"Grisha," he called.

Grisha looked round the curtain.

"Tell her: the master wants to look at 'Caution' as well. Free."

Grisha goggled. That never happened. The master never did anything for free — not because he was greedy but because Grandpa used to say, "What's free isn't valued. What's free doesn't come true. A person has to pay in order to believe." Grisha did not know this, but he knew that free didn't happen.

"Free?" he repeated.

"Free. Tell her it's a present. For the holiday. Tomorrow's the Eighth of March."

Grisha went out. Kesha heard him talking to Oksana — clumsily, stumbling — heard Oksana not understanding at first, then being surprised, then laughing: "Well, if it's a present…" The baby in the pram cooed.

Kesha picked up the picture again.

---

To read "Caution" you had to close your eyes.

Not completely — just a little, so that the picture blurred, so that the lines on the palm turned into vague shadows. And then the month did not rise before you as a road, as it usually did, but surrounded you on all sides. You were inside. You walked through the days as through rooms. And in each room there was something: here furniture, there a window, somewhere a corner beyond which it was dark.

Kesha walked through Oksana's March.

The seventh — today — a bright room; she laughs, the baby coos. The eighth — flowers; her husband brings tulips, yellow ones. The ninth, the tenth — work, ordinary, grey, no corners. The twelfth — the baby runs a temperature, but nothing serious; it'll come down by evening. The fifteenth — she'll slip by the entrance to her building but keep her feet. Here there was a corner, a sharp one — and Kesha noted it so as to write: "On the fifteenth watch your step by your building." The sixteenth, the seventeenth…

The nearer the twenty-second, the darker the rooms became. Not from misfortune — from something else. As though up ahead someone were standing at the window and blocking the light.

The twentieth. The twenty-first.

The twenty-second.

The room of the twenty-second was flooded with black. Not darkness — darkness comes in different kinds, there's soft night darkness, there's thick cellar darkness — but ink. Kesha stood on the threshold of this room, and the ink began right at his feet and went on ahead, and there were no walls, no ceiling, no floor to be seen — only a black smooth surface, like a pond at night.

He looked into it. Looked until his eyes hurt — and even when they hurt, he did not stop.

And gradually, the way an image comes up on a photograph in the developer, something began to show in the blackness.

First just a shadow, a little darker than the rest. Then an outline. Elongated, dark, standing. Tall. Widening towards the bottom, right down to the floor — like a man in a long coat that reached his heels.

The figure stood in the very middle of the blot. Motionless. The way people stand at a bus stop waiting for a bus — patiently, not looking at their watches, knowing the bus will come.

Kesha looked at it and could not take his eyes away.

And then the figure — slowly, very slowly, as if it had nowhere to hurry and a whole eternity ahead of it — turned its head.

Towards him.