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I’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in Milan; our bus has stopped at the border, and waits to go through customs what country are we entering? one of them asks me; Poland, I say so that’s what, the EU? he asks no, I say Poland’s not in the EU yet what other countries are we going through? Germany, I say, Austria he nods Portugal, I lie; he nods again; I could have said Greece, Syria, Ireland—he’d have nodded oh, mighty athlete, our bus will travel through Iceland, we’ll see sheep, deer, muskoxen; we’ll see camels; we’ll see the early ice— hills of not quite solid, not yet formed (they call it ‘uncrystallised’) but very real, early ice; we’ll see the Alps—they’ll be to both sides of us— there’ll be some nice places to cool off; we’ll see the ruins of Thebes, and the remains of mad Alexandria— but we won’t look at any of this; instead we’ll watch movies on our disc players; we’ve been watching movies the whole way from Moscow, one was an American film in which it gradually became clear that using the shampoo Head and Shoulders was the only way to save yourself from the alien invaders (at the end, it turns out the film has actually been an epic shampoo commercial)[1], and just now we watched an old Soviet film about World War II, the action takes place around here somewhere— I am ground, over, over, come in, this is ground, over, the communications officer says, she is a pretty young officer, but no one answers, they’re dead (they’re gone), they’ve been killed, though not before communicating the movement of the Nazi troops, and their impending attack from the northwest, I cried over this ‘I am ground, over, over, come in, this is ground,’ I’d had a lot to drink on the road from Moscow to Minsk, but I would have cried even if I hadn’t had a single drop between Moscow and Minsk; I remembered the poet Lvovsky, who said he cried when he watched Amélie, why did people love this Amélie so much? is it that they’re so hungry for some ordinary magic? it’s silly to explain that people liked it just because they were hungry for magic but there’s no time, and no chance, to explain why they really liked it; there’s a very popular, very stupid new word—positivity (it’s an idiotic