A car in the next parking lot was enveloped with flame, and a sense of duty coupled with ordinary curiosity compelled the policeman to dress and go outside.
He walked to the car and saw the owner, a very young female student, standing not far from the vehicle. Her dog was barking and jumping around. Bill Thompson’s golden retriever was yapping as well from the porch of the house. Neighbor’s dogs echoed them. Jeff decided that it had been these sounds, and gleams of the flame, that had been the basis of his nightmare.
Shimmering lights flashed, a siren sounded as a fire truck arrived, and the fire fighters started extinguishing the fire, covering the car with foam.
The owner looked at Jeff and sniffed.
«I left a bottle of kerosene in the car,» she confessed confusedly, and she cried. «Mom’s gonna kill me.»
«There, there,» Jeff hugged the girl. «It’s not the worst that can happen in life. Take it like a celebration of a New Year.»
This phrase cheered up the student, and she laughed.
They looked around. The expiring flame and the neighbors’ Christmas decorations, bright and shiny, accented with the lights of the fire truck and the oncoming police cars, bizarrely colored the snowy night street.
It was impossible to be angry or upset tonight, this, the second night of the new year. Optimism and hope involuntarily reigned in everyone’s souls. But, recalling his dreams, Jeff sadly thought about the unattainability of being with the woman he dearly loved.
It was getting dark and the freezing rain had turned into a snowstorm.
Ruslan Grafinsky, struggling through the beating wind, was thinking that he would never get home. He walked along scarcely able to see the road. The sidewalk seemed like a skating rink and Ruslan could barely keep his feet.
He was wearing a warm coat, but his pants and gloves, wet after the rain, felt like they were made of ice, and he was chilled to the bone. Dozens of nails pricked his limbs, his frozen hands became numb, and a dagger thrust into his knees with every step.
Ruslan was Russian; he was born and raised in Moscow and had been accustomed to cold. But it was the first time in his life he had faced such weather – when moist gale and frost united their efforts as though planning to terminate all living beings.
«I will be okay,» he thought, walking as if in a bad dream. «But how do the poor animals stand it? Birds, deer, others, who have no hole or shelter.» He recalled the many homeless animals on Moscow’s streets, and he almost did not feel his own pain, suffering with a sense of compassion more than with the cold.