By the beginning of our story, Elesh Maslov has firmly entered the age when waking up in the morning shocks you with universally unfair heaviness and stiffness, although, it would seem, it should give hope and fill you with a desire for life and joy. Whatever you drink the day before, even if you don’t drink at all, in the morning you will wake up completely wooden and dumbfounded, as we have already said, but you have not yet completely forgotten those young mornings that give you the strength and desire to live, create and prove your worth to the world, love and fall in love into yourself. Elesh Maslov still clearly remembered all this, but he had already firmly taken the path of oblivion and that spiritual emptiness, which at the age of deep maturity all the inhabitants of the Great North complain about, and which only the ancient old people do not complain about, because the spiritual emptiness has captured them completely and does not allow one to remember past high feelings: in its own way, senile happiness, why not. In general, Elesh Maslov was thirty-four.