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drinking milk-it's children who need it. . .
But people usually don't pay much attention to nature's opinion.
And Others pay even less.
I reached for the jug and poured myself another glass. Cold, with a smooth layer of cream . . . why does boiling
make the cream so smooth, the tastiest part of milk? I took a large swallow. No more-I had to leave some for
Svetka and Nadiushka. The whole village-it was quite a big one, with fifty houses-had only one cow. It was a good
thing there was at least one ... and I had a strong suspicion that the humble Raika had Svetlana to thank for her
magnificent yields. Her owner, Granny Sasha, already an old woman at forty, had no real reason to feel proud. As
well as Raika, she owned the pig Borka, the goat Mishka, and a gaggle of miscellaneous poultry without any
names.
It was just that Svetlana wanted her daughter to drink genuine milk. That was why the cow never caught any
illnesses. Granny Sasha could have fed her on sawdust and it wouldn't have changed a thing.
But genuine milk really is good. Never mind the characters in the ads-they can arrive in a village with their cartons
of milk and that jolly gleam in their eyes and say "the real thing!" as often as they like. They're paid money to do
that. And it makes things easier for the peasants, who were long ago broken of the habit of keeping any kind of
livestock. They can just carry on abusing the politicians and the "city folk" and not worry about pasturing any
cows.
I put down my empty glass and sprawled back in a hammock hung between two trees. The locals must have
thought I was a real bourgeois. I arrived in a fancy car and brought my wife lots of funny foreign groceries, spent
the whole day lounging in a hammock with a book... In a place where everybody else spent the whole day
roaming about, searching for a drop of something to fix their hangovers . . .
"Hello, Anton Sergeevich," someone said over the top of the fence-it was Kolya, a local alcoholic. He might have
been reading my thoughts-and how come he'd remembered my name?
"How was the drive?"
"Hello, Kolya," I greeted him in lordly fashion, not making the slightest attempt to get up out of the hammock. He
wouldn't appreciate it in any case. That wasn't what he'd come for. "It was fine, thanks."
"Need any help with anything, around the house and the garden, or you know ..." Kolya asked hopelessly. "I
thought, you know, I'd just come and ask . . ."
I closed my eyes-the sun, already sinking toward the horizon, glowed blood-red through my eyelids.
There was nothing I could do. Not the slightest little thing. A sixth or seventh-level intervention would have been
enough to free the poor devil Kolya from his hankering for alcohol, cure his cirrhosis and inspire him with a desire
to work, instead of drinking vodka and thrashing his wife.
And what if I had defied all the stipulations of the Treaty and made that intervention in secret? A brief gesture of
the hand . . . And then what? There wasn't any work in the village. And nobody in the city wanted Kolya, a former
collective farm mechanic. Kolya didn't have any money to start 'his own business'. He couldn't even buy a piglet.
So he'd go off again to look for moonshine, getting by on money from odd jobs, and working off his anger on his
wife, who drank as much as he did and was just as weary of everything. It wasn't the man I needed to heal-it was
the entire planet Earth.
Or at least this particular sixth part of the planet Earth. The part with the proud name of Russia.
"Anton Sergeevich, I'm desperate ..." Kolya said pathetically.
Who needs a former alcoholic in a dying village where the collective farm has fallen apart and the only private
farmer was burned out three times before he took the hint?
"Kolya," I said. "Didn't you have some kind of special trade in the army? A tank driver?"
Did we have any paid professional soldiers at all? It would be better if he went off to the Caucasus, instead of just
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dropping dead in a year's time from all that fake vodka . . .
"I wasn't in the army," Kolya said in a miserable voice. "They wouldn't take me. They were short of mechanics
here back then. They kept giving me deferments, and then I got too old ... Anton Sergeevich, if you want
somebody's face smashed in, I can still do that all right. Don't you worry, I'll tear them to pieces!"
"Kolya," I asked him, "would you take a look at the engine in my car? I thought it was knocking a bit yesterday
..."
"Sure, I'll take a look!" said Kolya, brightening up. "You know, I. . ."
"Take the keys." I tossed him the bunch. "And I owe you a bottle."
Kolya broke into a happy smile. "Would you like me to wash your car too? It must have cost a lot . . . and these
roads of ours..."
"Thanks," I said. "I'd be very grateful."
"Only I don't want any vodka," Kolya suddenly said, and I started in surprise. What was this, had the world turned
upside down? "It's got no taste to it . . . now a little bottle of homebrew ..."
"Done," I said. Delighted, Kolya opened the gate and set off toward the small barn I'd driven the car into the
evening before.
And then Svetlana came out of the house-I didn't see her, but I sensed her. That meant Nadiushka had settled
down and was enjoying a sweet after-lunch nap ... Sveta came over, stood at the head of the hammock and
paused for a moment, then she put her cool hand on my forehead.
"Bored?"
"Uh huh," I mumbled. "Svetka, there's nothing I can do. Not a single thing. How can you stand it here?"
"I've been coming to this village since I was a child," Svetlana said. "I remember Uncle Kolya when he was still all
right. Young and happy. He used to give me rides on his tractor when I was still a little snot-nose. He was sober.
He used to sing songs. Can you imagine that?"
"Were things better before?" I asked.
"People drank less," Svetlana replied laconically. "Anton, why didn't you remoralize him? You were going to-I felt
a tremor run through the Twilight. There aren't Watch members here ... apart from you."
"Give a dog a bone and how long does it last?" I answered churlishly. "I'm sorry . . . Uncle Kolya's not where we
need to start."
"No, he's not," Svetlana agreed. "But any intervention in the activities of the authorities is prohibited by the Treaty.
'Humans deal with their own affairs, Others deal with theirs. . .'"
I didn't say anything. Yes, it was prohibited. Because it was the simplest and surest way of directing the mass of
humanity toward Good or Evil. Which was a violation of the equilibrium. There had been kings and presidents in
history who were Others. And it had always ended in appalling wars ...
"You'll just be miserable here, Anton ..." said Svetlana. "Let's go back to town."
"But Nadiushka loves it here," I objected. "And you wanted to stay here another week, didn't you?"
"But you're fretting . . . Why don't you go on your own? You'll feel happier in town."
"Anybody would think you wanted to get rid of me," I growled. "That you had a lover here."
Svetlana snorted. "Can you suggest a single candidate?"
"No," I said, after a moment's reflection. "Except maybe one of the vacationers..."
"This is a kingdom of women," Svetlana retorted. "Either single mothers, or their husbands are slaving away and
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