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The Observer Effect. November 7
In the morning, Natalya Sergeevna said that she and her husband were going to the gompa.
She couldn’t explain the reason for this decision, just as one cannot explain why a specific dream visits them. They simply felt they had to go. Perhaps it was the call of ritual, perhaps an attempt to find meaning in a vanishing world, or perhaps just the habit of following an itinerary when all itineraries had lost their meaning.
They wanted Padma to go with them. The girl stood by the window, her face as impenetrable as a mask. She flatly refused. She didn’t cry, didn’t argue; she simply stepped back and pressed herself against Alexey. The movement was unconscious, almost instinctive, like an animal choosing a shelter before a storm.
Polina observed this with surprise. Why him, and not me? she thought. The girl hadn’t chosen her, a woman whose nature was defined by caregiving. She had chosen Alexey. A man who was himself turning into an abstraction, into a set of formulas and theories. Perhaps that was precisely the logic. The child sought protection not in warmth, which was fading, but in cold, lucid structure, in the last island of order, even if that order was the order of madness. Or, more likely, she instinctively felt what Polina did not yet grasp: Alexey, speaking of the obsolescence of humanity, was closer to the truth than those who were still trying to pray.
Dmitry Stanislavovich and Natalya Sergeevna left together. Their figures, receding along the trail toward the monastery, looked like two commas in a sentence that would never have a period.