Fatiaitsev lifted a red indignant face to the ceiling. “I’m not clowning around! I’m truly suffering! I’m a clown mime! The eternal Pierrot! And you’re the shameless Harlequin!^[8] No more than that!” he rumbled.

True, Fatiaitsev did not make a noise for long. He stopped playing the fool after only half a minute and invited Irka and Essiorh to dine with him. “Do you know how I live now, where this wine, smoked sausage, grapes, and other elements of aristocratic degradation come from?” he asked, nodding proudly at the table.

“You wander along Arbat in a red wig, with a red round nose on an elastic band, and sell balloons?” Essiorh smiled, knowing the correct answer but having decided to play along.

“Balloons? Nothing of the sort,” Fatiaitsev protested violently. “That phase of my life is over. Now I write speeches.”

“For the government?” Irka asked in surprise.

Fatiaitsev shook his head. “I haven’t fallen so low yet. They have their own clowns there. I compose confessions of love for romantics devoid of eloquence; tragic epitaphs to brothers lost prematurely, when those who blew them up crowded around with tears in their eyes – sincere tears, mind you!; wedding invitations; and other things. There are the unexpected orders. Recently, for example, I wrote a speech for a modest employee who wanted to ask his boss for a raise.”

“So, did he get the raise?”

“Alas, no. The boss turned out to be a tough redneck. But then my charge, in the process of studying the speech – and the speech turned out heartfelt! – started an affair with a colleague. For half a year before that, they sat almost desk to desk but didn’t even look at each other. The affair has gone quite far, and now I write excuses for the wretch, since he’s married. His wife is a rather clever woman, not easy to deceive, and now and then I rack my brain for hours concocting something fresh. Where he was and why he stayed late at work.”

Essiorh shook his head reproachfully. Fatiaitsev was on fire and shot amusing stories one after another. Already at the end of the meal, he mentioned in passing that soon he would be in hospital for surgery.

“What surgery?” Irka asked.

“Well that, no big deal. A matter of several days,” Fatiaitsev replied.

“Serious?”

The clown shook his head. “What is serious, a little thing… I had a granny, smart old woman, but thoroughly sick. I won’t tell you how many times she was under the knife, but she lived carefree the whole time. ‘Eh, Alec!’ she said. ‘Will you really protect yourself? A person dies only once, arms and legs not worn out as they should be, eyes not ruined. Isn’t it a shame? He lies in the coffin, legs are whole, arms aren’t wasted, but where’s the person – gone! Better to leave this world in pieces, but live longer!’ Well, please don’t think badly of me!”

Fatiaitsev inflated his cheeks and smacked them, making a shot louder than a pistol. Then he looked anxiously at the clock and, shouting, “Business! Business! The heart begs for peace!”^[9] dashed away somewhere.

“Well, what do you think of Fatiaitsev? Isn’t he great?” Essiorh asked.

“Your friend is a very sad person,” said Irka.

“Who’s sad, him?” the keeper asked incredulously.

“Yes. Even when he jokes, he has sad eyes.”

“It’s probably because he’s a former clown. All clowns have sad eyes. They make others laugh, but they are not funny to themselves at all,” Essiorh said after thinking.

* * *

The room, which the keeper was proud of, turned out to be tiny. A small semicircular balcony – approximately about two steps – was attached to the window. However, according to Essiorh, it was dangerous to step out onto the balcony – it was in an unsafe state. But then the pigeons loved to visit it. Here they cooed, pecked bread, and left white autographic smudges.

“Well, here we are, home!” Essiorh said with obvious satisfaction.

On each of the four walls, the floor, and the ceiling, Irka saw a shielding rune of Light, remote like the sea, the kind drawn by small children. Irka had never seen a small room guarded with such magical care.

After shutting the door behind himself, Essiorh stuck his ear to it and listened attentively to something for a while. Then he approached the window and looked outside for a long time. He breathed on the glass and with the long nail of his little finger drew a line of strange signs on it. Some of them immediately melted, others were imprinted on the glass, as if burnt on it forever.

Essiorh must have been satisfied with the result. He relaxed and turned to Irka. “And now we can talk business! I’m sure that Gloom would very much want to acquire this…” the keeper said, nodding to a small rectangular object resting against the wall and covered with a blanket. Before pulling off the blanket, Essiorh quickly glanced at all the runes. Then he leaned over, pulled the blanket by the edge, and stepped back.

Irka realized that before her was a portrait. She saw the face of a boy of about eight. His dark hair was naturally curly. Dressed in a white shirt with an unbuttoned collar, he looked calmly from the portrait, leaning on a sabre in its scabbard. For the aforementioned age, the boy’s face was rather too clever and mocking. It was noticeable that he was tired of posing, bored of holding the sabre, and secretly wanted to stick his tongue out at the artist. The portrait must have been painted not on the best canvas and with poor paint. A network of small cracks had already managed to cover its outside.

“Who’s this?” Irka asked.

“Matvei Bagrov, son of the Orlovsky landowner Theodore Bagrov,” Essiorh replied.

“Is this portrait magical?” Irka asked.

The keeper shook his head. “Ordinary. Until the invention of photography, many artists travelled to estates of the gentry, ready to paint everything that was ordered. Portraits of masters, romantic mills, favourite horses, dogs… Then photography ruined everything, and the craft gradually disappeared.”

“Where did you get this portrait?” Irka asked.

Essiorh smiled. “You’ll be surprised. I stole it today from the restoration studio!” he said.

“YOU STOLE IT?”

“Well, why repeat? I told you: I stole it. Everything was done cleanly, with minimal use of magic. I teleported, making use of the absence of the restorers, covered the video camera with a sock, took the portrait together with its frame, and that was it. A matter of two minutes. I spent much more time destroying all the reproductions of this picture and the images stored in the catalogs. Fortunately, there turned out to be not too many of them. The portrait isn’t the most well-known and the majority of the time it was gathering dust in storage.”

“But why did you steal it?”

Essiorh looked at Irka patiently. “Two options. Select one. First: in order to sell it on the flea market and purchase an idiot’s pink dream – a Kawasaki Ninja ZX-R motorcycle. Second: so that Gloom or dark wizards wouldn’t get it.”

“The second,” said Irka.

“I would choose the first. Indeed, awfully attractive. Unfortunately, you’re right, the second,” Essiorh confirmed with disappointment.

“But why is it so important that Gloom doesn’t know what the boy looks like? The portrait is old, and the one in it is long gone,” Irka said, looking with regret at the clever and lively face in the portrait.

The keeper glanced at her with polite surprise. “I wouldn’t rush to conclusions. Do you know for sure that he’s dead? Do you have proof? Is there something that I don’t know?” he asked greedily.

“No, but if one simply estimates the date, then…” Irka began.

“So I thought, you don’t have proof,” Essiorh interrupted her severely. “When a moronoid (let it even be a former one) goes into a standoff, he immediately begins to refer to arithmetic… It’s a well-known practice! Perhaps you’ll even say that three plus three is six?”

“How much?”

“This rule is correct only if you count bricks. But if we, for example, take three kindnesses and three tomatoes and add them up, will this also be six?”

“Excuse me. You’re probably right. I’m a bad valkyrie,” said Irka.

“Well, well…” Essiorh instantly thawed. “I’m not a good keeper, crazy about motorcycles and renting a room in a communal dwelling with payment of euphoric tears! On the whole, the reason I showed you the portrait is that all this is terribly important. But now listen to me. I’ll tell you everything I know about Matvei Bagrov…”

The keeper squatted and slowly passed his open palm several centimetres from the portrait. Then he lightly tapped the boy’s face with his finger. A golden wave ran from his finger along the portrait.

“Do you want to bring the portrait to life?” Irka asked.

Essiorh shook his head. “It’s impossible. The artist was neither a guard nor even a wizard,” he said.

“But you did something nevertheless?”

“Something,” Essiorh replied briefly. “But very little… The portrait won’t be able to come to life, but some minimal changes will happen to it. Possibly – I emphasize! – possibly, in several days the portrait will grow up and we’ll see the face of today’s Bagrov… The way he has become.”

“Even if it’s a skull?” Irka asked.

“Even if it’s a skull. The question is whether we have these several days. I fear not,” Essiorh confirmed stiffly.

After removing his finger from the portrait, he got up. The paint, Irka noticed, had become much brighter. It seemed the artist had just finished it all of a few moments ago.

“What you’ll hear now are only speculations. I rely only on meager information that the Transparent Spheres possess, and my own intuition, which we, keepers, have developed better than the usual guards of Light. Personally, I’ve never seen Matvei Bagrov, not counting this portrait, of course,” Essiorh continued, rather boringly, in his usual verbose manner.

Irka listened attentively.

“However, I’m still almost certain that what I’ll say now will turn out to be close to the truth. One thing I fear is that this would be no closer to the truth than the truth itself, because then it’ll be a lie. Do you understand?”

“Yes. That is, more or less,” Irka corrected herself.

“Matvei Bagrov is about eight in the portrait here. When he disappeared, in the sense of finally disappeared – and he disappeared twice! – he was no more than fourteen. Between eight and fourteen is all of six years – about two thousand days! – but what years and what days! The boy was very energetic. He was raised by his father. Lightning killed his mother when he was around one year old. The father, a retired hussar Colonel, a bully and a petty tyrant, educated the son himself and brought him up very strictly. He got up at five in the morning, and they ran four versts along the forest to the spring. In order to get breakfast, the boy had to fire a pistol and hit a coin hung on a string suspended from a pole. Each day the coin rose a little higher. They hacked with real sabres, only a little blunted. No training weapons. They rode horses without saddles. At the age of seven, the boy was already breaking in the most skittish horses. They say that even steppe stallions became manageable when he looked into their eyes. He hunted not only together with his father, but on a par with his father. An important point, mind you, especially if we recall how old he was then. They say he had bruises all over his shoulder from the recoil of the rifle, but the boy nevertheless continued to shoot and hit… In addition, there were also foreign languages, arithmetic, geography, ancient history, domestic literature, and much more. Such a childhood! At the age of twelve, Matvei Bagrov ran away from home with the gipsies. Someone claimed that he had been stolen, but, knowing his nature, I’m certain that he ran away himself.”

“Didn’t his father try to find him?”

“His father was no longer alive. He perished when the kid was eleven. He rushed out in a fierce frost to drag out a peasant’s old horse that had fallen through ice, caught a cold and died. Matvei’s uncle became his guardian till he came of age, but the young Bagrov could not stand him, although the uncle seemed to be a good-natured man. In any case, he didn’t even raise his voice. Here’s another riddle!” Essiorh said.

Irka, not tearing her gaze from the portrait, felt that the teenager’s face grimaced at the mention of his uncle. “No. Simply a trick of the light! Essiorh said that the portrait can’t come to life…” she thought.

“You said the flight with the gipsies was his first disappearance,” Irka reminded him.

“Yes, the first. Sometime later, the boy found himself on Bald Mountain. More precisely, next to Bald Mountain, since a moronoid can never ascend Bald Mountain. He – this is important! – was twelve and a half. He was wearing peasant clothes. Over his shoulders was a sack. In the sack were a sabre and a pair of pistols, covered with rags so they wouldn’t be seen. By that time, Matvei had already left the gipsies and led a vagrant lifestyle. He slept where he had to, either in a shed or a haystack, and in winter he would ask to spend the night in a warm hut. An outstanding hunter, he easily obtained game and either exchanged it for food or sold it. Now and then herdsmen treated him to potatoes and bread. There were only two things he would never do: steal and beg. Both were beneath him. Indeed he was gentry after all.”

“Didn’t the uncle search for him?” Irka was surprised.

Essiorh smiled. “Perhaps he did, but it was more for formality. Indeed in the case of death or disappearance of the boy, he would acquire the estate. And who could recognize the wellborn son Matvei Bagrov in the peasant boy, and even far from his native place? Well, a boy is a boy. He walked and walked along the road. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Yeah, to my aunt in the city. Father and mother died, and aunt’s in service at a master’s. Perhaps with her I’ll earn a living somehow…’ Besides, Matvei undoubtedly had acting talent. He imitated peasant speech as if he had never read Homer in the original and did not speak three European languages. Now and then, getting carried away, he made up stories, more plausible than truth itself. Truer than the truth, phonier than lies. Only on this basis was it possible to distinguish them.”

“Truer than the truth, phonier than lies….” Irka uttered mentally in order to memorize it. She looked at the portrait again. The facial expression had in no way changed. But the hands on the hilt… Had they really been resting like that?

“You interrupted me! Having accidentally turned up near Bald Mountain, about which he knew absolutely nothing, Bagrov decided to spend the night. The day was already ending. It was summer and he wasn’t afraid of freezing. Before sunset, he came to a stream, across which was a decrepit bridge of a couple of logs thrown together. On the opposite side of the stream was an old cemetery fence, while on this side was a hovel. Not pondering for long, Matvei crawled into the hovel, slipped the sack under his head, and slept as only a person having spent the entire day on the road can. In the middle of the night, he suddenly wanted to drink, and so strongly that he woke up. This desire also saved his life. He saw that a ghoulish green hand had pushed through into the hovel and was reaching for him. Matvei pulled the pistol out of the sack, set the trigger, and fired. He did not miss – and how could he miss! – only the bullet inflicted no harm to the one attempting to grab him. The hand fished for his leg, grabbed it, and dragged it towards itself. Matvei clung to the sack, groped for the hilt of the sabre, snatched it out, got tangled with the webbing of the sack, and with a short downward blow chopped off the hand up to the elbow. In the darkness he heard someone moan, gnash his teeth, and leave.”