The morning had come in slowly, the way mornings do on old water, light arriving before warmth, mist sitting low over the surface of the lake like something that had nowhere else to be. Viktor Sorokov had driven out before dawn, before the town stirred, before the bakery on the corner of Lenina Street put its first loaves in, before the dogs started their rounds. He had done this for thirty-seven years, and the rhythm of it was so deep in him now that he woke without an alarm at quarter past four and was dressed and out the door before the kettle finished boiling, a thermos of tea tucked under his arm and the folding chair and the rod case already in the back of the old Niva that his son had offered to replace twice and that Viktor had declined to replace because the Niva started in cold weather without complaint and asked for nothing except oil and occasional conversation, which Viktor provided.
The pier was his by habit rather than right, which amounted to the same thing. He had been coming here since before the birches along the eastern bank had grown taller than a man. The planks had been replaced twice, the posts once, and still the pier had a particular creak on the fourth board from the shore that Viktor knew well enough to step over without thinking.
He set up his chair with his back to the treeline and his face toward the open water and baited his hook with the patient attention of someone performing a small ceremony, which was exactly what it was, and settled in. The float was a red and white thing, a little weathered, that his wife Masha had given him on his fiftieth birthday as a joke because she said he spent more time watching floats than watching her. He had laughed and told her she was never as still as a float, which she had considered for a moment before agreeing.
That had been fourteen years ago. He watched the float now with the same quality of attention he had once given to much larger and more dangerous things, and found that the practice transferred well. Attention was attention.
The object of it mattered less than the quality of the act. He had already brought two fish to the bucket, a reasonable start for this hour, when he heard them. The sound arrived before they did.
Young men carried their voices differently than older ones, with a forward projection that announced itself around corners and across water, a sound that said we are here and we expect the world to rearrange itself accordingly. Viktor heard the footsteps on the pier boards, heard the creak of the fourth plank that he always stepped over, heard it twice more in quick succession, and noted all of this without moving his eyes from the float. He also heard the particular quality of their silence at the end, the silence of young men looking at an old one and deciding something.
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