Old Arbat

Old Arbat is one of Moscow's most famous pedestrian streets, lined with artists, musicians, street traders, and souvenir stalls. In the third story of The Night Watch, it becomes the stage for Anton Gorodetsky's solitary walk during a sweltering June afternoon, a walk that marks his decisive break from the Watch's chain of command and his preparation for a final confrontation with Gesar's plan to rewrite destiny.

Identity and Atmosphere

Old Arbat is depicted as a place of clichéd commerce and performative culture: artists sketching cartoon portraits, musicians playing predictable tunes, and stalls selling the same mass-produced souvenirs. The street is crowded with foreigners wearing the standard look of interest and Muscovites in their usual irritated mood, rushing past the sham craftwork. The atmosphere is one of weary, heat-soaked ordinariness, a world that has forgotten genuine magic. Anton observes the scene with bitter clarity, noting that the crippled beggars are healthier and richer than most passersby, and that the homeless urchins have learned long ago that there is no such thing as free cakes.

Anton's Walk and the Gathering of Power

It is on Old Arbat that Anton, having learned of Gesar's plan to use Svetlana and the Chalk of Destiny, begins to gather Power from ordinary people. He takes a little from a couple locked in each other's arms at the entrance to the metro, from a child running to buy ice cream, from an old woman whose grandson has visited her. He describes each act of taking as stealing a bouquet — scarlet roses, daisies, asters and autumn leaves. The trail he leaves behind is marked by slightly faded smiles, wrinkled foreheads, and lips pressed together in doubt. He knows that a Light Magician who draws Power from humans is gambling everything on a single throw of the dice, and that the usual balancing of accounts between the Watches does not apply. He continues anyway, walking along Old Arbat and beyond, gathering Power in crumbs, sometimes gently, sometimes in crude haste, until he is full to the brim.

The Twilight and the Encounter with Alisa

While on Old Arbat, Anton senses a surge of magical activity and steps into the Twilight. There he finds the Dark witch Alisa Donnikova using a prism of power to perform a third-level magical intervention on passersby. He arrests her, and the confrontation leads to a deal with Zabulon, who appears through a Dark Portal. Zabulon confirms that the Day Watch will accept any Light intervention up to the second level in exchange for dropping the charges against Alisa. Anton accepts the deal, sealing it with a handshake that joins Darkness and Light, and feels a stab of pain like a blunt needle piercing his flesh. This agreement gives him the right to perform a massive act of Good — but he suspects it is a trap, and that Zabulon has framed his own girlfriend to draw the lines of probability together.

Thematic Significance

Old Arbat functions as a microcosm of the human world that the Others claim to protect but cannot truly touch. Anton's walk there crystallizes his rejection of Gesar's grand project: he sees that the people on the street are already healthier and richer than most, that they would toss him a handful of small change for fireballs that should be used to kill creatures of evil, and that any attempt to force happiness upon them would be met with disbelief. The street's tawdry commerce and the people's obliviousness to the Twilight world reinforce Anton's conviction that the Light's experiments in changing human destiny are doomed to fail. His decision to use the borrowed Power not to stop a hurricane or bring happiness to thousands, but to remoralize himself — to avoid making a mistake — is made in the shadow of this realization. Old Arbat, with its fake Khokhloma boxes and bronze figurines, is the place where Anton finally understands that sometimes the most important thing is not to do something, but to do nothing at all.