The study of the degenerate part of the absolute of the discrete Heisenberg group required solving a problem on the number of geodesics in this group and in its semigroup. Analytically, this problem reduces to the study of the asymptotic behavior of Gaussian q-binomial coefficients, and the required property is the almost multiplicativity of group characters. The problem has a natural formulation in terms of an (apparently, new) asymptotic property of Young diagrams.