Saturday, February seventh 2037, the Academy, minus seventeen outside. Kira and Lia in Moscow: Lia in the morning — her schedule had shifted to Friday — had a meeting scheduled with Nikolai Stepanovich Arsenyev at the forest school on Shabolovka (he sometimes comes to her separately, with a notebook, and they speak for an hour about Russian literature of the early twentieth century; today — on Tsvetaeva, with the assignment for February: “find a line in Tsvetaeva that personally does something to you”). Kira accompanies them, because Lia at ten and a half already goes alone, but Arsenyev likes Kira to come for the first fifteen minutes and then drink tea separately with him in the next room. Arsenyev and Kira have their own format of relations in which I do not participate; since 2028 they have been discussing the question of how to praise a child correctly in the presence of a third person, and they have between themselves an established form of agreement that does not need my tasks.