The Sixth Watch

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FIFTEEN YEARS IS a long stretch.

In fifteen years a man can be born, learn to walk, talk and use a computer; learn to read, count and use the toilet as well; and then, a lot later, learn to fight and fall in love. And sometimes, to round things off, he brings new people into the world or dispatches old ones into the darkness.

Over the course of fifteen years spent in prisons for especially dangerous criminals, murderers pass through all the circles of hell, and then go free. Sometimes without an iota of darkness in their souls. Sometimes without an iota of light.

In fifteen years even the most ordinary man can radically change his life several times. He leaves his family and starts a new one. He changes his job maybe three or four times. He makes a fortune and is reduced to poverty. He visits the Congo, where he smuggles diamonds, or settles down in a deserted little village in the Pskov Region and starts breeding goats. He takes to drink, acquires a second degree, becomes a Buddhist, starts taking drugs, learns to fly a plane, and goes to the Maidan in Kiev, where he gets a smack across the forehead with a truncheon, after which he enters a monastery.

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