The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

old woman, interrupting
the girl's prattling. She probably had no illusions either. 'In the
large room.'
    The girl went dashing obediently to the kitchen, but not before
she had smiled once more and deliberately brushed her pert breasts
against me as she said in my ear:
    'She's got really bad . . . My name's Tamara.'
    Somehow I didn't feel like introducing myself. I followed the
old woman through into the 'large room'. Well, it was huge. With
furniture from Stalin's time and clear traces of the work of an
expensive designer. The walls were covered with black-and-white
photographs – at first I even took them for elements of the design.
But then I realised that the blindingly beautiful young woman
with white teeth, wearing a flying helmet, was my elderly lady.
    'I bombed the Fritzes,' the lady said modestly as she sat down
at a round table covered with a maroon velvet tablecloth with
tassels. 'Look, Kalinin himself presented me with that medal . . .'
    Dumbfounded, I took a seat facing the former pilot.
    Even in the best of cases people like that live out their final
days in old state dachas or in monolithic, dilapidated Stalinist buildings.
But not in an elite residential complex. She had dropped
bombs on the fascists, not ferried the Reichstag's gold reserves
back home to Russia.
    'My grandson bought the apartment for me,' the old woman
said, as if she had read my thoughts. 'A big apartment. I don't
remember anything here . . . it all seems familiar, like it's mine,
but I don't remember . . .'
    I nodded. She had a good grandson, what could I say? Of course,
transferring an expensive apartment to your war-heroine grandmother's
name and then inheriting it later was a very clever way
to do things. But in any case it was a good deed. Only the servant
should have been chosen with more care. Not a twenty-year-old
girl obsessed with the profitable capital investment of her pretty
young face and good figure, but an older, reliable nurse . . .
    The old woman looked pensively out of the window. She said:
    'I'd be better off in those houses, the little ones . . . I'm more
used to that . . .'
    But I wasn't listening any more. I was looking at the table,
heaped high with letters bearing the eye-catching stamp 'No
longer at this address'. It was hardly surprising. The addressees
included such figures as the old Soviet Union figurehead Kalinin,
Generalissimus Joseph Stalin, Comrade Khrushchev and 'Dear
Leonid Ilich Brezhnev'.
    Our more recent national leaders had clearly not been retained
in the old woman's memory.
    I didn't need any Other abilities to guess what kind of letter
the old woman had posted three days earlier.
    'I can't bear having nothing to do,' she complained, catching my
glance. 'I keep asking to be assigned to the schools, the flying colleges
. . . so I can tell the young people what our life was like . . .'
    I took a look at her through the Twilight anyway. And I almost
exclaimed out loud.
    The old pilot was a potential Other – maybe not a very powerful
one, but it was crystal clear.
    Only, to initiate her at that age . . . I couldn't imagine it. At
sixty, at seventy . . . but at eighty?
    The stress of it would kill her. She'd just fade away into the
Twilight, an insane, insubstantial shadow.
    You can't check everyone. Not even in Moscow, where there
are so many watchmen.
    And sometimes we recognise our brothers and sisters too late.
    Tamara appeared carrying a tray set with dishes of biscuits and
sweets, a teapot and beautiful old cups. She set the dishes down
on the table without making a sound.
    But the old woman was already dozing, still perched on her
chair as firm and upright as ever.
    I got up carefully and nodded to Tamara:
    'I'll be going. You should keep a closer watch on her, you know
she forgets where she lives.'
    'But I never take my eyes off her,' Tamara replied, fluttering her
eyelids. 'I'd never . . .'
    I checked her too. No Other abilities at all.
    An ordinary young woman. Even quite kind in her own