In his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost universe — not the Soviet universe, because that didn’t contain any wandering Tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in parallel with the Soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe, which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity, and just as imperceptibly.
