Free The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin­

doctor watched. He suddenly realized he had absolutely no desire to talk to her.
    “You’re a bachelor?” she asked, and returned the cigarette to him.
    “You can tell?”
    “Yes.”
    He scratched his chest:
    “My wife and I split up three years ago.”
    “You left her?”
    “She left me.”
    “So that’s what happened,” she said respectfully.
    They sat quietly.
    “Any children?”
    “No.”
    “How come?”
    “She couldn’t conceive.”
    “Ah, so that’s it. I gave birth, but it died.”
    They sat silently again.
    The silence stretched on and on.
    The miller’s wife sighed and sat up on the bed. She put her hand on the doctor’s shoulder: “I’ll go now.”
    The doctor said nothing.
    She turned over on the bed and the doctor squeezed to one side. She lowered her plump feet to the floor, stood up, and straightened her nightgown, while the doctor sat with the extinguished cigarette in his mouth.
    The miller’s wife stepped toward the door. He took her hand:
    “Wait.”
    She sat back down.
    “Stay a bit longer.”
    She pulled a lock of hair back from her face. The moon moved behind clouds and the room was plunged into darkness. The doctor caressed her; she touched his cheek:
    “Is it hard without a wife?”
    “I’m used to it.”
    “May God help you meet a good woman.”
    He nodded. She stroked his face. The doctor took her hand in his and kissed the sweaty palm.
    “Come see us on the way back,” she whispered.
    “It won’t work out.”
    “You’ll go a different way?”
    He nodded. She moved closer, lightly touching him with her breast, and kissed his cheek:
    “I’ll go now. My husband will be mad.”
    “He’s asleep.”
    “He gets cold without me. Too cold, and he’ll wake up and start whining.”
    She stood up.
    The doctor didn’t try to keep her any longer. Her nightgown rustled in the dark, the door squeaked and closed, and the steps of the staircase creaked under her bare feet. The doctor took out another papirosa , lit it, rose to his feet, and walked to the window.
    “ Guten Abend, schöne Müllerin…, ” he said, gazing at the dark sky hanging over the snowy field.
    He smoked his cigarette, stubbed it out on the windowsill, got in bed, and fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.
    Crouper also slept soundly. He fell asleep as soon as he got up on the warm oven bed, put a log under his head, and covered himself with the patchwork quilt. Falling asleep to the sound of the doctor’s strong, nasal voice chatting with the miller’s wife, he thought of the toy elephant that his late father had brought six-year-old Kozma from the fair. The elephant could walk, move its trunk, flap its ears, and sing an English song:
    Love me tender, love me sweet,
    Never let me go.
    You have made my life complete,
    And I love you so.
    After the elephant he thought of the horse the drunken miller kept harping on. Vavila, the late merchant Riumin’s groom, had entrusted Crouper with the horse. This was at the fair in Pokrovskoye, before Kozma got married, but when he was already known as “Crouper.” Vavila had a year-old colt for sale, and he had been walking around the fair with him all morning, trying to sell him. He got greedy, and thought some Chinese people and Gypsies were trying to cheat him. He asked Kozma to hold on to the colt, said he was going to “stuff his face and take a dump.” He gave Kozma five kopecks. Kozma found a spot by the willow, near where the saddler’s stalls began. He stood there with the colt and cracked sunflower seeds. Right about then some movie people from Khliupin put up two receivers and stretched “tableau vivant” screens between them. They displayed dolphins. It turned out that the picture wasn’t just lifelike, but touchable ; the dolphins swam from one screen to the other and you could touch them. First kids and then men and women came up to touch the dolphins. Crouper tied the colt to the willow and waded through the crowd. He reached out and touched a