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Petersburg I had been hoping against hope to leave behind
     invaded my brain cells: Faceless men were spilling out of doors and windows; thick-soled, steel-toed shoes were kicking at
     figures on the ground; a little boy I did not recognize was cringing in a corner. Oy!
    Proust, Marcel, somewhere said the only paradise is paradise lost. Or words to that effect. Petersburg, lost, still did not
     seem like a paradise to me. Nor, for that matter, did Backwater, found. Which left me, like the Rebbe plying between two shores
     in his
traghetto
, en route …
    Now that I think of it, it is probably true what my mistress said me about my being more interested in the going than the
     getting there. Arrivals give me migraines. If only someone would invent a journey without an end.
    Feeling out of place, out of time, out of sync, I prowled the apartment over the Rebbe’s head, stepping off the distance from
     wall to wall, from window to door, from bookcase to fireplace, from one end of the corridor to the other,from toilet to tub, calculating square meters, almost swooning when I came up with 120, which was twice the size of the apartment
     I had shared with two other couples in Petersburg. I explored closets and nooks and the crawl space under the staircase leading
     to the attic, all the while flicking switches—I turned on the toaster, the microwave oven, the dishwashing machine, the electric
     knife sharpener, the electric can opener, the Toshiba T3200SX computer. On a bookshelf I came across a Sony hi-fi that would
     have cost me a year’s salary on the Petersburg black market. I pushed buttons, I twirled knobs. A radio came on. What turned
     out to be a local early-morning call-in show was under way, with a host who talked so rapidly I had to shut my eyes to follow
     what he was saying.
    If I understood the situation correctly, the host was in the process of interrupting the program for the hourly news bulletin.
     I remember some of what he said. A clerk transcribing the number of the winner of the South Dakota lottery had made a typing
     error, a seventy-seven-year-old man was informed he had won twelve million dollars. The next day, when the error was discovered,
     he died of a heart attack. On the local front, residents protesting against the construction of a radioactive-waste dump in
     the county were assured by a state commission that the dump site posed no health hazard. Federal law required every state
     to have a place to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, hospitals and industry by 1993. Residents opposing the
     dump site claim that radioactive waste would seep into underground rivers, eventually polluting the county’s water supply.
     And this item just in from the tri-county newsroom: State police today discovered the body of the latest victim of the serial
     killer who has been stalking the tri-county highways and byways. The most recent victim, a thirty-seven-year-old septic-tank
     cleaner, brings to twelve the number of people mysteriously murdered in the last sixteen weeks. A police spokesperson stressed
     there was no pattern to the crimes; the age and occupation of the victims, the sites of the murders, the intervals between
     the crimes were never the same. The only thing connecting this grisly series of killings, aside from the .38 caliber dumdum
     bullet rubbed with garlic and fired at point-blank range through the victim’s ear into his or her brain, was the signature
     of the killer—whichis to say, the lack of a signature, the utter randomness of the murders. “And now,” the host rasped into the microphone, “we’ll
     take some more calls.” He repeated a telephone number several times.
    Without thinking I snatched the cordless telephone off the hook and punched in the number. I could hear a phone on the other
     end buzz. A recorded announcement informed me I was seventh on a waiting list. You must understand that for someone who has
     spent half his life queuing in Russia, being