An animal or another late walker stirred leaves on the path behind him.

Vasilievich did not turn. He imagined or tried to imagine for a breath of a moment that it was his wife, Magda, a few steps behind him, that she would join him to look where his eyes now turned, at the Krestovy Cliff, the bloody cliff where, Vasilievich knew, the White Guards had shot the revolutionary sailors and workers of both Sebastapol and Yalta. At the base of the cliff stood the church that had been built on the ruins of a palace destroyed by fire more than one hundred years ago. He needed no old woman to tell him that. The church stood only a few hundred yards from the sanitarium, whose roof now caught the last rays of the sun.

Magda had died five, no, nine years earlier, he thought. It couldn't be. But it was. He smiled. Sentiment. He was not a sentimental man. He had displayed no great affection for Magda while she lived. In fact, they had fought often, and he could recall no instance of their having embraced over the final twenty years, and yet he missed her. When she died, he had secretly rejoiced, his somber eyes downcast, the suggestion of tears threatening. He rejoiced in his freedom. He could work whatever hours he wished, smoke his pipe in his underwear, watch the television. But that sense of freedom survived less than a year. He was not sure how much less. The feeling of loss had come gradually.

This time the sound on the path behind him made Vasilievich turn. He should be wearing his glasses. He knew that, but Georgi was a proud man. He had once been a large man, but the years, his illness, and something in the soul that he could not quite understand and in which he did not believe had begun to shrink him.

There was nothing, no one, there. But still, it did not hurt to be cautious. He bent down at the edge of the rotunda and pretended to tie his shoe while he glanced toward the trees without turning his head.