Yesterday it had snowed all day, quietly and comfortingly. Throughout the vague daylight hours, big soft flakes drifted down to shroud parked cars and clot the bare branches of the acacia trees. Night had come on imperceptibly; even after the sky darkened, the streets remained bright, as if the white sheets of snow were glowing from beneath.

Towards midnight, Andrei Artemenko went out onto his apartment’s small balcony. The park, eight storeys below, resembled an iced cake, cut into triangular slices by the black footpaths crossing it. The orange streetlamps flanking the main boulevard glowed fuzzily. Occasionally a car ravelled along the cobblestones, but in the muffling snow it could barely be heard. Everything seemed calm, undemanding, freed from time. Andrei stood for a long while, without thinking of anything, without even feeling the cold.

Finally he returned indoors and went to bed, confident the city would sleep well, snug under its thick snowy eiderdown and resting on soft snowy pillows, and feeling that the snow was enfolding him too, tucking him in, protecting him from worry, from responsibilities, from any need to think of tomorrow. He sank into deep sleep.

He dreamed, and in his dream he descended below the surface of the earth, to the kingdom of the fish-people, where underground waters flow through stone caverns. He had come to ask a favour of their king; to allow him to use one of his people as a messenger.

The king agreed, surprisingly readily, but there was nevertheless a misunderstanding. Social status in the fish-people’s kingdom had come to depend on how much or little you resembled a fish. If you had very few piscine characteristics, perhaps just feathery gills and a small spinal fin, you became a civil servant, a lawyer, perhaps even a courtier. But if you had flat, webbed hands and feet and a wide, thick-lipped whiskery mouth, you worked as a cobbler or a cleaner or a washerwoman.

The king, assuming that Andrei wanted the most attractive representative possible, invited him to choose his messenger from a selection of fish-women who were barely discernible as fish at all; a faintly disconcerting width and opacity to the eyes, a slight, delicate webbing between the index finger and thumb.

In fact, Andrei had wanted a visibly half-human emissary, in order to alarm his adversaries, and ensure his threat was taken seriously. But he could not insult the king by asking to see his ugliest subjects, so he reluctantly chose a fish-girl in a red roll-neck sweater, worn high, no doubt to cover her gills. Well, perhaps his message would still be effective, he mused, but he had an uneasy sense of failure about his enterprise.

He was disturbed from his dream by a long, drawn-out moaning, like distant wolves on the steppe. As he surfaced from sleep he recognised it as the wind, howling around the corners of the building. It was already morning; greyish light was leaking in under the curtains. He pulled the blankets up over his head, but he couldn’t return to the fish-people kingdom, or back to sleep at all. Eventually he got up and, pulling on a robe, ventured out onto the balcony. It was snowing again, but very differently to the cheerful Christmas-card snow of yesterday.

The wind, a harsh southerly from out over the Black Sea, had completely slipped its leash. Whistling shrilly, it was dragging at power lines, twisting clouds of powdery snow from rooftops, bending and even snapping off branches. The air was full of whirling specks, rising and dipping like flocks of tiny, aggressive birds. It was impossible to make out the horizon. Even the tramlines along the boulevard below were invisible. In less than a minute the buffeting wind drove him back into the kitchen. He put the kettle on for tea.

Now that Andrei was wide awake, the unpleasant realities of the day ahead crowded in on him. Yesterday, he had reassured himself that these were tomorrow’s worries. This morning, they were inescapably today’s.

Andrei had plenty to worry about. His persistent, underlying concern, like a slowly-worsening toothache, was that in October he would turn fifty. That meant he would not be given any more work at sea by the big firms which controlled the shipping out of Odesa. It didn’t matter that he was double certificated and had a clean record; their age rules were strict. To keep working, he’d have to take lesser-paid jobs with less reliable companies, maybe even on vessels flying Liberian and Panamanian flags. For some years he’d been thinking he should get away from the sea before he was trapped, too old to begin anything else, but each time, he’d pushed the idea back below the surface. The money was good, and he enjoyed the work. Time to worry about that when the problem actually presented itself, he had said to himself. Now it was squarely in front of him.

Even more immediately, this afternoon he had to meet his ex-wife at the attorney’s office. He knew he would have to give her money, or else go to court, and that however vigorously he bargained, it would end up being more than he could afford; fifty thousand, seventy thousand, even more, who knew? It was just vindictiveness, too, because she had a wealthy boyfriend these days, some big-time building contractor from Kyiv.

Of course, that had to happen just now, when well-paid work would soon be closed off to him. And almost worse than all of that, he had to see her, a face he never wanted to see again, a voice he never wanted to hear again. The sight of her sharp, smiling mouth, even before she said a sarcastic word, always felt like a small knife pricking at his neck. No, today was not a day to look forward to. Andrei would have liked a small drink, just a dram, to cheer himself, but he knew he needed a clear head for the day’s business. He could have a proper drink when he got home that night.

It might help shake off this gloominess to go outside, get his blood moving, he decided. If he walked down to the Black Sea shore, there, on the open beach, he might absorb some of the storm’s strength and energy. He gulped down the scalding tea while he dressed, at the last pulling on a woollen beanie and gloves.

He knew the fierce wind would make walking difficult, but outside he found another problem; the deep snow, piled up in unusual places by the storm, made it difficult to tell the road from the footpath. Big rounded hillocks stood where the ground ought to be flat, while other stretches seemed innocently smooth and level, although he knew potholes and low railings lay under there somewhere. And it seemed whichever way he turned, the hard, spitting snow drove directly into his eyes.

Guided by its floodlight pylons, looming like tyrannosaur skeletons in the gloom, Andrei set off toward the football stadium. There was nobody on the street. Even the crows, whose caustic cries marked every winter morning in Odesa, were silent. The traffic lights above the deserted boulevard, changing colour in even sequence, shone out like boiled sweets in the white air. A single line of footprints, pale blue depressions already filling with fresh snow, wandered across his path.

Only when he turned into Kanatnaya Street did he see anyone at all. Three or four men stood around a big acacia tree which had fallen completely across the road, dragging down the power lines with it. Obviously electricians sent out to repair the damage, they were tugging the broken black cables out from under mounds of snow. Like snake-handlers, Andrei thought; he’d seen them perform once, in Calcutta.

Further along, city council workers in faded orange overalls were cutting up fallen branches with rasping two-stroke chainsaws, carving them into short lengths for firewood. An ancient grandmother, bent over nearly double, was sweeping her front steps with a whisk broom, though it was snowing hard enough to cover them again in a minute.

Andrei felt quite alone. The people he’d seen were simply parts of the landscape, like the street signs and telephone poles; they had no connection with him. Under the blank, white sky he felt conspicuous and insignificant all at once.

But as he walked on, he began to feel invigorated by his contest with the wind. He met its buffeting with his chest thrust out, and drew in deep draughts of stinging, chilled air through his nostrils. His face burned with the cold, but at the same time he felt the blood running hotly through his limbs. It was not so bad to be alive, after all, and he’d find a way to deal with his problems somehow.

He turned down the sloping street leading to the beach. As he approached the water, the air became even colder, and he clapped his hands together in their damp woollen gloves.

Reaching the shore, he found the sand covered in snow down to the waterline. A summer changing hut leaned awry under the weight of the banked-up drifts. The tide was all the way out, and gulls sat on the very shallowest water, bobbing on the slack swell. A single swan, just beyond the first line of waves, dipped its head below the surface. Looking for what, fish? Seaweed? Andrei didn’t know. Against the pristine white of the beach, the swan looked yellowish and dingy. The gulls seemed to be watching Andrei apprehensively, as if to say, ‘you’re not going to come so close that we’re forced to take off and fly around in this, are you?’  He didn’t.

The pier stuck out uncomfortably into the grey sea. A rowboat, drawn up on the sand and tethered to a rusty pylon, had filled with snow. Prints of birds’ feet tracked along its gunwale. The wind began to blow even harder, with a cutting, gritty edge, and Andrei hunched his shoulders inside his padded jacket. Now he really was getting cold, and he still had the meeting at the lawyer’s ahead of him. It was time to leave the beach, get home, get warmed up, ready for this next battle.

But as he was turning back he noticed something lying a few metres further along, just above the water’s edge, where the snow gave way to a thin strip of greyish sand. He walked toward it, peering through the murk. A heap of rounded dark shapes, like dirty sponges. Were they jellyfish, perhaps? Washed-up bottles? Andrei was almost standing over them before he realised that they were cormorants. Dead cormorants, seven or eight of them, in an untidy pile. Their wings lay raggedly on the sand, their powerful necks now looking weak and stringy. They were not just dusted with snow, but frozen solid. Ice filled the open, hooked beak of the bird closest to him, and lay like shards of glass amongst the black wing-feathers of the others.

A flock of cormorants, frozen to death together. In a life working at sea, Andrei had seen death in many forms, peaceful and violent, but never exactly this. He pushed at one with his boot; at first it stuck, then flopped over awkwardly, a wing sticking up stiffly. It looked ugly and undignified, and its one visible eye, large, sea-green and perfectly round, stared at him accusingly. Annoyed with himself for interfering with it, Andrei turned his back on the heap of bird-corpses and set off, his feet sinking into the crust of snow, toward the concrete wall dividing the beach from the road.

Somehow, the cormorants reminded him of his dream. Trying to pull it back into focus, he caught fragments: a threat sent to an opposing party, that was part of it. A king was involved, yes, and messengers. Diplomacy, perhaps, an embassy of some kind, but there had been a taste of failure about it.

Had these birds, now piled up together dead, been ambassadors whose mission hadn’t succeeded, or who hadn’t had the strength to return from wherever they’d been sent? Maybe they’d been despatched by the cormorant king as an embassy to the crow king, an age-old enemy. Having failed, they’d been too ashamed to return, and, circling aimlessly up there in the thin atmosphere, had frozen to death and fallen to earth.

Andrei shook his head irritably. Stop this foolishness, he told himself; if you let dreams and reality get mixed up, you’ll really lose your grip on things. It was the ordinary course of nature, nothing more. Yesterday, these cormorants had been flying over the ocean, or standing on a bollard, spreading their wings out to dry, and today they were dead. Well, their time had come around, that was all; their lives were finite from the start, like all life.

But even though he knew this perfectly well, Andrei was disturbed by the heap of frozen seabirds in a way he could neither shake off nor clearly understand. One dead bird he would have given no thought to, but a group of them was somehow different, unnatural. Their collective death, like an ambushed platoon, their clumped-together bodies, their frozen, staring stiffness, suggested futility, waste, failure. And stumbling upon them today, of all days, seemed a bad sign; things would not go well for him this afternoon, and very possibly not in the future either.

Like most people, Andrei had, when his spirits were low, fantasised about changing places with a bird. Absolute freedom, no responsibilities, the beauty of flight, high above the plodding ground. No guilt, no sense of the future. It was not surprising that birds were so often invoked as symbols of happiness. But masterful as a bird appeared in flight, it was in reality a small thing, alone in the world, tossed on wind or water, at the mercy of predators, its life short and easily lost. Then a bundle of rotting rubbish on a beach. And was man any different, really?

Andrei kicked savagely at a plastic bottle lying on the sand. His good mood, and his tentative confidence, had evaporated. All his problems—his forced retirement, his uncertain financial future, the coming argument at the attorney’s—came back over him in a rush, and now he could not see any way ahead. He was chilled, his feet wet, his hands smarting. The sky seemed lower and darker than before. The snow, which had never completely stopped, was falling harder and thicker, crowding him in. Tucking his chin under his scarf, bowing his head into the wind, he began to climb the wide, cracked concrete steps up to the road.

This bleak day, the dead birds, his dream, all seemed jumbled together, and designed to oppress him. I started out in life with infinite possibilities, or so I thought, he said to himself, and I did what I believed was best, I’ve made mistakes, of course, but that’s human. Surely being human doesn’t mean you have to run up against a blank wall? Even if life is like a maze, it can’t be a complete swindle, there must be one correct way through it. Obviously I’ve taken a wrong turning somewhere, to be where I am today, but it has to be possible to find my way out.

He realised he was back on Kanatnaya Street, not far from his apartment. He hadn’t noticed his surroundings, lost in thought. The wind had died down, and the snow had almost stopped. A yellow minibus chugged by, its sides coated with dirty slush. A crow called from overhead, the first he had heard that day. So, black bird, you’ve turned up to sneer at me, eh?

His phone rang. He fumbled for it; he’d forgotten it was in his pocket. It was his ex-wife. She didn’t bother with greetings. ‘Look, I’m not coming to the meeting today. My Kyril says it will shame him if I go to court over such small money as you’ve got. Just give me twenty thousand for pocket money, can you do that? You can keep the flat. I’ll ring the attorney, tell him I agree, and he can have the papers ready for you to sign.’

Andrei pushed the phone back into his jacket. Even now, she had to belittle him, but of course he had accepted; to get away with paying out only twenty thousand was something like a miracle. Why things had fallen out like this, he couldn’t imagine. Perhaps God had decided to look after him. Andrei had never thought much about God. Occasionally, when things had looked perilous at sea, he’d crossed himself, but that was only out of superstition. Now, though, he wondered if he should drop in to a church and light a candle in thanks.

He still had problems, of course, but they were for another day. He had been wrong to take the dead cormorants as a bad sign; it was simply nature in action, after all. Omens are only what you take them to be, he’d read somewhere. And next week, he started a twenty-three-day voyage, which would go some way toward paying off the divorce settlement. Once he got home from the attorney’s, he would certainly have a drink, to celebrate his deliverance.

An image from his dream floated into his mind; at one point, the fish-girl he had chosen as messenger must have taken off her red sweater, because he’d noticed her gills, faint parallel lines on her smooth throat, and that her breasts had pale-blue nipples. There are some things we keep hidden, and only allow husbands and lovers to see, she had told him.

Andrei was sure that this too was some sort of sign, but he wasn’t going to try to interpret it. Leave things to God from now on, he told himself, and maybe everything will turn out all right.