along a side street, where he was almost immediately flagged down by a pushy young woman. They agreed a price and set off to the south-west district.
The tutor halted opposite the Rolan movie theatre and lit a ciga rette. He looked at Andrei, the trainee he felt the greatest liking for, and asked:
'Have you read Denis's Stories?
'Uh-huh,' the boy murmured. He was a well-read, bookish boy from a good family.
'What can we say when we recall the story 'The Grand Master's Hat'?'
'That little Denis Korablyov lived in a very prestigious neigh bourhood,' the boy replied.
The young female trainee laughed. She hadn't read Denis's Stories, she had only seen the TV film a long time ago and then forgotten it, but she understood the irony.
'And what else?' the tutor asked, with a smile. He never smoked as he walked along, because he had read in a fashionable magazine that it wasn't a respectable thing to do. And now every time he inhaled he brought his death closer ?but it wasn't the nicotine that was to blame.
The boy thought about the question. He liked the young woman magician, and he also liked the semi-conscious awareness that he was cleverer than she was.
'We can also say that chess grand masters are very careless people. His hat was carried away by the wind and he didn't notice.'
'I suppose so,' the tutor agreed. 'But for us Others, the main moral of this story is not to get involved in petty human problems. You are likely to be misunderstood or even become an object of aggression.'
'But Denis made up with the grand master. When he offered to play him at chess.'
'And another wise thought!' the tutor continued. 'You don't need any magic to order to establish relations with a human being. You don't even need to try to help him or her. The important thing is to share the other individual's interests.'
They listened to the tutor attentively. He liked to take some fairy tale or children's book as an example and draw lots of inter esting comparisons. The trainees always found that amusing.
Half a kilometre away from them the former taxi passenger was walking along Myasnitskaya Street. He stopped at a kiosk, found some change in his pocket and bought the Komsomolskaya news paper.
The tutor looked around for the nearest rubbish bin. It was a long way away. He was about to throw his cigarette butt in the pond, to delight the swans, but he caught Andrei's eye and changed his mind. This was terrible ?three whole years as a Light Other and his nasty little human habits were still as strong as ever... The tutor walked briskly over to the bin, dropped his butt into it and came back to the trainees.
'Lets move on now. And watch, watch, watch!' By now his death was almost inevitable.
A middle-aged man holding a newspaper approached the Chistoprudnoe metro station. He hesitated before walking down the steps. On the one hand, he was in a hurry. On the other, the day was much too fine. A clear sky, a warm breeze... the borderline between summer and autumn, that season of romantics and poets.
The man strolled as far as the pond, sat on a bench and opened his newspaper. He took a small flask out of the pocket of his jacket and sipped from it. A hobo carrying a plastic bag full of empty bottles stared at the man and licked his lips at the sight of that gulp. Not expecting anything, but unable to overcome his habit of begging, he asked in a hoarse voice:
'Will you give me a drop, brother?'
'You wouldn't like it,' the man replied calmly, without the slightest sign of malice or irritation. It was simply a statement.
The homeless man hobbled on. Three more empty bottles, and he would be able to buy a full one. Number Nine. Strong, sweet, tasty 'Number Nine'... damn all these bourgeois types with their newspapers, there were people here suffering from hangovers...
That was the very day when the hobo's cirrhosis of the liver would develop into cancer. He had less than three months left to live. But that had nothing to do with what was happening on the boulevard.
'A man with a plastic bag, an ordinary human being,' said the woman trainee. 'Andriusha, you have the keenest eyes here, can you see anyone?'
'I see a hobo ... A Light Other by the metro!' the boy cried, with a start. 'Vadim Dmitrievich! A Light Other by the metro! A magician!'