A twenty-seven-year-old woman sleeps, dreaming, and the dream offers a vision that feels almost holy. In the dream, a place named Heaven Office appears—though she does not understand it consciously, there is a sense that it is sacred: vast edifices or towering shelves, borders and edges blurred by mist, sections marked in red like enormous cells that loom high above. There are no doors, and every room and corridor seems glassy and open, with no ceilings to speak of. Everything simply pours upward, outward, dissolving into the sky and into the surrounding air. There is no scent of asphodel or violet; the world is an overwhelming white noise of space and light.
She later notes that the rooms are organized not by familiar logic, but by a strange, almost alien system. “In that place, things are grouped in a way I can’t quite explain,” another voice explains. “Not by the usual categories we use—technology, music, books, ponds—but something else, something elusive.” A single thread runs through the dream: a certain red hue appears in texts, in life, in love, and everything seems to gravitate toward it, as if all matter is drawn to red’s magnetic pull.
She searches for the right department, the correct path, yet cannot determine the logic that would point the way. It could be among the departments she needs, but which one exactly? The puzzle is intensified by signs whose lettering is incomprehensible—a jumble of Chinese, Latin, and nonsensical characters that feel like the language of programmers rather than any human tongue.
In one scene, she wanders in as if among the cells of a honeycomb, asking the same question again and again. They tell her they have something for her—a letter her mother wrote long ago when she was a baby—and now it might be time to read it. They also place a small box before her, square and low, about three centimeters tall. It is blue, with a pale white circle or perhaps a flowing white design on its surface. Something inside the box hums with metal; the box is not hers, although she somehow recognizes it as belonging to someone else.
She brings the box into her room, a room with one large window, as if every soul in heaven or elsewhere has its own window to watch the world. If a friend is lucky, their window might be within reach, and a hand could be pressed through to feel the other side. She sets the box on the table, clearly visible from the opposite window, while she remains in the room opposite the building.
He speaks with a tremor of guilt and says, “I have to give you something that is yours, not mine, something from your childhood.” From the opposite window he answers, with a weary voice, “Sweet. I am still waiting for the moment when that happens because this thing is exactly me.” He wonders what might be inside that box and why he once resisted it so fiercely. The keys, too, are strange and varied, puzzling in their own right.
Why did Repin’s son Yuri resort to such baffling behavior? His father had already crossed into the land of asphodelia and misty violets. When the artist lay in state, the family gathered, and the priest began the funeral service. Yuri was not at home—the sister asked the priest to wait, explaining that he had gone hunting at dawn and could return any moment. He did return, carrying two rabbit carcasses tied by their ears and hind legs to resemble a wreath. With the wreath in hand, he moved to his father’s coffin and attempted to lay it inside, a display that enraged the priest who ordered it removed as a shameful act.
The artist’s son declared that the wreath would be placed in the grave itself. The priest insisted that carrion not be laid on a sacred tomb. The siblings, Repin’s daughter and son, were deeply upset by the rejection. They later said that the priest’s darkness blinded him to the meaning of the son’s final gift to his father. A black, troubled soul, not a mere madman, cherished the soul of a brother as fields of asphodelia and fearless meadows stretched into the distance, with wild violets blooming beneath a wide sky.
Yuri Repin would take his own life in Finland after the war, a stark end to turbulent times. Yet through it all, a refrain persists: friends keep trying to lay a wreath of bunny ears and daisies into the coffin of a shared history, a weight that feels impossible to lift. And still, time passes, even as the ache remains. The narrator admits there is no time for a bath or for perfect understanding—there is only the sense that everything will pass, while memory remains.
In a furious critique, Blumikha entered the scene without any shame about the craft. Anna Akhmatova’s biographer notes that a day earlier Zheleznova called him names, and this morning he was labeled garbage, this afternoon a bastard, and yet tomorrow he might be urged to care for a sick child. The sentiment is carried forward: the literature, the life, the art—they endure and are recollected in equal measure. And so it will be with them. Time will move on: shootings, deaths, fires—but the memory will not fade. The world will keep reminding them of the price of being named, of the sting of slurs spoken in the heat of the moment.
The narrator refuses to leave. There is a stubborn memory that rattles like a key in a box, reminding them what was done to them and what others said. What old friends wrote today leaves an imprint that cannot be erased. The author Valery Bryusov once spoke of mercy and pity in a stark, almost clinical way, recounting a scene of tenderness turned into cruelty through rational cruelty. He recalled his own struggle to stay humane in the face of suffering, the urge to cause pain as a misguided attempt to heal. The memory of such acts, and the people who helped shape them, remains with the living. They are not dead brothers, but they are not forgettable either.
And so the narrative closes, not with a definitive resolution, but with a vow. The past will not vanish, the pain will not fade, and the friendships that were tested will endure as a stubborn, uneasy memory. The author’s voice lingers in the space between memory and present, between the ache of loss and the stubborn light of what remains.