In the morning, Ilya woke on the bench by the ticket booth to Varya Gordeeva tapping him on the shoulder with the handle of a screwdriver.
"Alive?"
"Looks like it."
"Then get up. We have two possibilities. Either we were poisoned by mould last night, or what your grandfather kept in the park wasn't a ride."
"Which do you prefer?"
"I prefer the third one, where I quit and move to Sochi. But I have a loan and a mother with high blood pressure."
The dry remark saved the morning from panic. Ilya almost smiled. Then he saw the ledger and stopped.
Tolik Zharov's entry had not closed.
A new word had appeared beside it: "witness".
Beneath the word lay an old envelope. Grey, thin, with the factory stamp and an empty rectangle where the amount should have been. Ilya had not seen the envelope appear in the booth. Neither had Varya. It had not been there the previous evening.
On the back, in a child's hand, were the words: "For Dad, when he comes back".
Ilya stared at the words for a long time. Then he asked:
"Do you know where to look for his daughter?"
Varya picked up the envelope between two fingers, like something that might burn her.
"No one disappears completely in Zarechensk. It's a small town. People just pretend they don't remember."
They began at the old factory hostel. Then they went to the archive hut by the works gate. Then to the woman who sold sunflower seeds at the bus stop and knew every divorce, funeral and move better than any register. She did not remember Tolik Zharov's daughter's name at first. But she did remember that as a child, the girl had fought anyone who called her father a drunk.
"Then she stopped," the woman said. "Got tired, I expect. Everyone does."
Tolik Zharov's daughter lived in a concrete tower block behind the market. It was her grown-up son who opened the door. He listened to Ilya, looked at the envelope and said:
"Mum doesn't talk about that."
"This isn't about money," Ilya said.
"That's what everyone says when they come about money."
The door was almost closed when a woman's voice came from inside the flat:
"Show me."
She came out in a dressing gown, small and grey-haired, with dry hands. She took the envelope without surprise. She looked at the child's handwriting for a long time, but did not cry.
"Where did you find it?"
Ilya did not try to dress up the lie. He only said:
"In your father's ticket booth. At the park."
The woman looked up at him.
"My father didn't have a ticket booth. He had a shop floor."
The correction mattered more than any explanation. Ilya nodded.
"On the shop floor."
Then she let them in.
The flat smelt of medicine, fried onions and old furniture. A photograph of a young man in a padded work jacket hung on the wall. Tolik Zharov was smiling differently in it than he had in the night. In the photograph, he did not yet know that the town could subtract a man from a shift.
His daughter told them little. She knew nothing about the documents. She knew only that her father had gone to his shift, then they had failed to find him, then people came and told her mother: he isn't in the shift book. If he isn't in the shift book, there are no wages. If there are no wages, there is nothing to make a fuss about. Her mother fell ill after that. The girl took the empty envelope to school because it bore her father's handwriting, and she had nothing else left of him.
"And your grandfather…" she said, looking at Ilya. "Semyon Ilyich. He came once a year. In May. Brought food. Never said who it was from."
Ilya felt something old shift unpleasantly inside him.
"Grandad?"
"He never defended anyone with words. Words came hard to him. But he brought potatoes. And sugar."
Varya Gordeeva looked out of the window and said nothing. It was not an empty silence. She seemed to be putting two pictures together in her mind: the old man who removed the seal from the Room of Fear every night, and the same old man standing at a stranger's door with a sack of potatoes.
They left without making any promises. Tolik Zharov's daughter did not ask whether her father would return. She did not ask whether the vision had been real. She merely took the envelope and said:
"If you see him again, tell him I never believed them completely. I got tired, but I didn't believe them."
That night they returned to the shop floor.
This time, Ilya did not wait for the room to ring the bell itself. He placed the envelope on the clock-card rack and spoke the full name:
"Anatoly Pavlovich Zharov. The shift is recognised."
The Room did not answer at once.
First the distant machine began to hum. Then the hooks on the clock-card rack clicked one after another. The cards rose as though invisible hands were placing them in their proper positions. The blank card was the last to go up. Now it bore a name.
Tolik Zharov stepped out of the darkness.
He looked just the same. Padded work jacket, wet hair, clock card. Only the water no longer vanished at his chin. It fell to the floor and left ordinary dark drops.
"Did it reach her?" he asked.
"It reached her," Ilya said. "She said she never believed them completely."
Tolik Zharov closed his eyes.
The shop floor breathed out.
It was not the wind. It was the sound of people who had stood at their machines too long after the end of the shift and had finally heard that they could go.
The ink on the right-hand page of the ledger trembled.
Tolik Zharov. Last shift. Paid.
But below it, where Ilya had hoped to see blank paper, a new line came through.
Not all of them.
Varya was the first to see it in the morning.
She looked at the ledger for a long time, then said:
"I really don't like the fact that I'm beginning to understand your grandfather's handwriting."
"What do you understand?"
"It isn't a list of the dead. It's a list of the ones somebody left out of the count."
Ilya was about to reply when a child screamed outside.
They ran out to the Room of Fear.
Three teenagers with phones stood by the entrance. Adults were already gathering behind them. Someone was laughing, someone was swearing, someone was filming the sign. A new door had appeared in the Room of Fear's black façade. It had not been there yesterday. Even the paint around it was fresh, though it smelt not of paint but of machine oil and wet work overalls.
A sign hung above the door.
"THE SHOP FLOOR WITH NO SHIFT"
The first teenager, trembling with excitement, said to the camera:
"Guys, this is seriously mental. They've got a new room here. It really is like it's alive."
Ilya stepped forward to close the entrance.
But the till rang.
The daytime till. Ordinary. Loud. Money.
A woman with a child was already standing at the window, asking how much a ticket cost.
And so the first debt they closed became the park's first day back in business.
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