When Shiva
descends to earth

In an ordinary Siberian city, on an unremarkable street, there lived a man of about forty. His height was unremarkable too, and indeed the one remarkable thing about him was his eyes — some sort of clear grey eyes, very much alive — and his kind face. In short, he was a kind man. He worked at an ordinary job for an ordinary wage, as a design engineer. And it fell out that on a certain August night he had to fly away on a business trip.

Now, that city, Yuzhnomorsk, was notable indeed for standing upon the sea coast, and beside his hotel there was a wonderful forest. The hotel, incidentally, had also been carefully chosen by him: next to it stood some interesting abandoned monastery in a fairly decrepit condition. But the main thing was the sea — and the sea was near. Before he could get to that sea, however, he had to attend a council of design engineers and architects, which was in fact the substance of his trip.

All of this would have been joyful enough, were it not for those accursed sixty thousand which had to be paid to service the mortgage. That money held their whole family in bondage; it was a kind of redemption payment which they were obliged to render to the landowner for the use of his land, while less than half remained to themselves. And so Andrey Vladimirovich Nikiforov set off for this city — as the one chance to rest by the sea. He deeply regretted the impossibility of sending his wife and children there, of whom there were a good many.