Squinting and examining him, Artiom noticed a grey tuft on the red head of Afanasiev. That tuft looked ugly, like a bit of molting fur on a sick, mangy dog.
“What did you find?” asked Afanasiev. “A louse?”
“No, everything’s fine,” answered Artiom.
People looked in the mirror rarely on Solovki. Afanasiev hadn’t seen himself yet.
Sometimes he made the automatic gesture of reaching for his forelock, as though he were catching a fly near his face. But the invisible fly kept flying away, and he slowly lowered his hand, reaching with his finger in the air, as though adding flourishes to his never-ending speech.
At every new rise of intonation, the hand flew up, looking for the forelock… and again floated there, having forgotten, along the way, what it had been looking for.
“… as you know,
