Epilogue

Seven years later.

June 2048. Father’s dacha in Yerino. The same Melba apples, the same Yellow White. The swings — the same, the second set, with the oak board and the parachute cord. Over seven years Karl has retightened the cord three times (he does this every summer, before Lia’s arrival in July); the board — polished smooth by feet; the brass rings in the Melba branch — darker, oxidized naturally.

Lia is almost twenty-two: she turns it in July. She is today at the Academy, leading her first natural Triad: three teenagers, fourteen to sixteen. The eldest is Sasha from Voronezh, Karl’s younger brother (eighteen years apart: Karl’s parents, having let him go to the Academy, didn’t stop at one child). The other two are Irina from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Mark from Odessa, both came through Elsa. The Triad started up in May. The first stable group effect — last Thursday, by Lia’s report through Olga.

Today I, Kira, and Schrödinger Junior are on the porch of father’s dacha. Father is eighty-four. He’s in the shed. What he does in the shed in the last year — we don’t know. In the morning he came in, said: “go to the porch, I need to be alone.” We went.

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I am fifty. In May I turned fifty; Kira in January marked forty-five. I left the institute in ’46, that is, two years ago. Not dramatically — wrote a resignation, Lena signed it, Seryozha and I drank a cup of coffee in the corridor, and I handed over the lab to two junior researchers. Lena for my fiftieth came to father’s dacha with a huge box of Kirov pastila and a photograph of an old Zenit-E 1972 on which she’d shot me in ’41 in the clearing during the assembly. The photograph stands in my study on Shabolovka.

I am now — a teacher of a single Triad. Single Triad — is when the curator works with three students directly, without intermediaries, in a regime of slow individual transmission. I have right now three students: Anechka, thirteen, from Cheboksary; Stepan, fifteen, from Novosibirsk; and one young woman named Tatyana, thirty-one, an engineer, who awoke in ’37, then lost herself, spent half a year being treated in the Sokol psychiatric clinic, in ’44 found the Academy through one entry in Meduza by Lena Markova, came to Olga; Olga brought her to me in ’45. She works finer than the schoolchildren; with her I have the fourth year of continuous practice.

Kira — at the Academy works with the body, with the fourth year of school. Her youngest student right now is a boy Gosha, seven years old, natural, brought by his mother from Yaroslavl last August. Lia spotted Gosha back in December and said to Kira one phrase: “Mom, in three years he’ll be your first serious student.” Kira nodded. They both know Gosha’s future a little more than is proper for his mother to know.