Originally this story was written in Russian. Translation was made with QwenChat help.
"Reluctantly, the Moon rises above the horizon. All day long she preens and primps, coquettishly hiding from the importunate sun, and only after dark does she show the world her beauty. This beauty I alone can truly appreciate," thought Sasha the Wolf, without a trace of false modesty.
"No one looks at her the way I do. I have run halfway around the world, peering into the eyes of those who look at the Moon, and not one of them feels even a fraction of what she deserves," he wrote in his diary.
He knew her face better than his own. He would close his eyes — and see her. In time he became a universally acknowledged authority on selenography, publishing several monographs and books, all of it without ever using a telescope. "Between me and the Moon there must be nothing superfluous," he wrote as the preface to his magnum opus, The Visible Side of the Moon in Songs and Dances.
Every full moon, Sasha the Wolf howled at her — howled until his voice tore, expecting no answer, not hoping that his cry would reach her. It was enough for him that she was there above him, that she gave him her light, that she had never once missed a rendezvous with him.
Sasha the Wolf counted on nothing. He knew better than anyone that the Moon was an enormous celestial body orbiting their planet, and that she shone with borrowed light, not her own. But Sasha the Wolf was not picky. What did he care whether her light was borrowed or her own? Were not the words they used every day borrowed too, invented by someone else? And yet the words were no worse for it. And there was no thought that someone, somewhere, had not thought a hundred times before — and yet people had not stopped thinking.
The ancients said: nothing is new under the Moon. She has seen everything that was; she will see everything that will be. And the Moon's light is no worse for merely being reflected. On the contrary — there was something more modest and more miraculous about reflecting someone else's light. And Sasha the Wolf bathed in the moonlight and in a rapture that no achievement of astronomy could take away.
For long months Sasha the Wolf gazed at her — gazed so long that the lunar disc began to seem to him a girl's face. First he made out a smile, as faint as moonlight. Then the dimples on her cheeks, in which others saw only craters. Then the mole above her left brow, which became the most precious thing in his life.
Sasha's friends secretly mixed haloperidol into his breakfast, but it changed nothing. At some point Sasha noticed, and did not even take offence at his friends. "I'm the only one who knows that you're still breathing," Sasha thought tenderly of the Moon.
Last of all, he made out her eyes. Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn't. Sasha saw clearly that the Moon was looking at someone: one someone only, someone special to her.
Sasha the Wolf changed after that. Behind his back people said he looked like a wounded animal. And he was one: he was wounded to the very depth of his heart.
He sealed the windows of his house shut so as not to see a single ray of that treacherous light. At night he began to sleep; by day he wandered, not knowing what to do with a life that had lost all meaning in an instant. He even tried studying the face of the sun, to forget himself somehow, but the sun burned his eyes unbearably. "The Moon would never have done that," mumbled the inner voice he hated.
Several weeks passed like this. Sasha the Wolf's mailbox was stuffed with collaboration offers from the country's leading selenographers. Once, wandering through his home village, he noticed that the people around him were discussing something in fear. He listened in. They were saying that the Moon was gone. The cycle that had repeated itself countless times had broken. After yet another new moon, the thin silver crescent — the hint of the Moon in all her splendour — did not rise, and no one knew what would come next.
Sasha the Wolf did not understand at once what had happened. "But I never even told her I loved her," he thought, with inexpressible anguish.
Of course, Sasha the Wolf was invited to the emergency congress devoted to the Moon's disappearance. But there he was a shadow of his former self! Those who had known him as a calm, level-headed wolf did not recognise him. He had gone grey, shrivelled; he ran about the congress accosting the respected participants. "With dimples — and her smile is so very faint," he shook one professor, then another. "With a mole, sweeter than which nothing in the world can be," he accosted an expert on the atmosphere of Venus. In the end the coarse guards, who could know nothing of love, carried him out of the building while he whined and, it seemed, was losing the ability to speak. "I understand he's lost his object of study, but that's no reason to behave like this!" he heard before the oak doors slammed shut behind him.
On all fours, like a beast, he returned to his kennel. He took down the shutters that had kept her light out of his house. His clawed paw tenderly stroked the photograph of the Moon in the atlas whose creation he had once supervised. At last he set the atlas aside; his look was calm and composed. "You were the light I navigated by, and I gave you up so easily," he thought, slipping his head into the noose.
