Summary
A nameless drifter—gaunt as churchyard marble—tramps across the permafrost of 1917 Arkhangelsk, chasing rumor of a vanished theater troupe whose last performance reportedly drove an entire audience to simultaneous catatonia. Frostbite blooms on his cheekbones like white chrysanthemums while he pores over fire-scorched playbills, each page exhaling ghost-laden dust. The city itself feels evacuated by history: tram wires sag with rime, Orthodox bells crack mid-peal, and the Dvina River swells with coffin-ice that sings in contralto at night. In a candle-lit warehouse he discovers the company’s single surviving actress, Vera, her irises ringed with the bilious yellow of iodine poisoning; she insists the play they mounted was not Chekhov or Gorky but an apocryphal piece exhumed from the court of Tsar Alexis, a liturgy of snow meant to summon an imperial ghost who never arrived. Together they re-stage fragments on the city’s frozen canals, using frostbitten refugees as impromptu chorus, hoping to coax the missing spectators back from their trance. Each rehearsal erodes the boundary between drama and delirium: icons weep molten gilt, a child’s tin soldier bleeds sawdust, and the drifter’s reflection exits a mirror without him. When the final curtain falls on the river’s cracking skin, the audience re-appears as translucid silhouettes whose applause sounds like distant artillery; Vera bows, dissolving into snowfall, while the drifter remains alone, clutching a proscenium arch made of icicles that melts into the collar of his coat, forever staging the play in the theater of his skull.
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