... I have only just heard that you have divorced your husband. The Ostroumovs saw Sergei at the embassy - he was leaving for Paris with the Hertz family; they say he's going to marry Lydia Hertz. What strange things happen in all this muddle and chaos. I'm sorry you didn't leave Russia, sorry for all of you left behind in the clutches of the muzhiks. The newspapers here are saying that Petlyura is advancing on the City. .We all hope the Germans won't let him . . .

A march tune which Nikolka was strumming next door thumped mechanically in Elena's head, as it came through the walls and the door muffled with its tapestry portiere that showed a smiling

Louis XIV, one arm thrust out and holding a long beribboned stick.

The door-handle clicked, there was a knock and Alexei entered. He glanced down at his sister's face, his mouth twitched in the same way as hers had done and he asked:

'From Talberg?'

Elena was too ashamed and embarrassed to reply at first, but after a moment she pulled herself together and pushed the sheet of paper towards Alexei:

'From Olga ... in Warsaw . . .'

Alexei stared at the letter, running his eyes along the lines until he had read it all, then read the opening words again:

My dear Lena, I don't know whether this will reach you, but . . .

Various colors played over his face: against a background of ashen-yellow his cheek bones were tinged with pink and his eyes changed from blue to black.

'How I would like,' he ground out through clenched teeth, 'to punch him in the teeth . . .'

'Who?' asked Elena, twitching her nose to keep back the gathering tears.

'Myself, Alexei replied, deeply ashamed. 'Myself, for having kissed him when he left.'

Elena burst into tears.

'Do me a favor,' Alexei went on, 'and get rid of that thing.' He jabbed his finger at the portrait on the table. Sobbing, Elena handed the portrait to her brother. Alexei immediately ripped the photograph of Sergei Talberg out of the frame and tore it into shreds. Elena moaned like a peasant woman, her shoulders heaving, and leaned her head against Alexei's starched shirt-front. With superstitious terror she glanced up at the brown image in the ikon, before which the lamp was still burning in its golden filigree holder.

'Yes, I agreed ... when I prayed to you ... on this condition . ..

don't be angry with me, Mother of God, don't be angry . . . thought the superstitious Elena. Alarmed, Alexei said:

'Hush, my dear, hush ... it wouldn't do for the others to hear you.'

But no one in the drawing-room had heard her. Nikolka was thumping out a march tune, 'The Double-Headed Eagle', and the others were laughing.

Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, but the year 1919 was even more terrible.

On the night of February 2nd to the 3rd, at the snow-covered approach to the Chain Bridge across the Dnieper two men were dragging a man in a torn black overcoat, his face bruised and bloodstained. A cossack sergeant was running alongside them and hitting the man over the head with a ramrod. His head jerked at each blow, but the bloodstained man was past crying out and only groaned. The ramrod cut hard and viciously into the tattered coat and each time the man responded with a hoarse cry.

'Ah, you dirty Yid!' the sergeant roared in fury. 'We're going to see you shot! I'll teach you to skulk in the dark corners. I'll show you! What were you doing behind those piles of timber? Spy! . . .'

But the bloodstained man did not reply to the cossack sergeant. Then the sergeant ran ahead, and the two men jumped aside to escape the flailing rod with its heavy, glittering brass tip. Without calculating the force of his blow the sergeant brought down the ramrod like a thunderbolt on to the man's head. Something cracked inside it and the man in black did not even groan. Thrusting up his arm, head lolling, he slumped from his knees to one side and with a wide sweep of his other arm he flung it out as though he wanted to scoop up more of the trampled and dung-stained snow. His fingers curled hook-wise and clawed at the dirty snow. Then the

figure lying in the dark puddle twitched convulsively a few times and lay still.

An electric lamp hissed above the prone body, the anxious shadows of the two pig-tailed haidamaks fluttered around him, and above the lamp was a black sky and blinking stars.

As the man slumped to the ground, the star that was the planet Mars suddenly exploded in the frozen firmament above the City, scattered fire and gave a deafening burst.

After the star the distant spaces across the Dnieper, the distance leading to Moscow, echoed to a long, low boom. And immediately a second star plopped in the sky, though lower, just above the snow-covered roofs.

At that moment the Blue Division of the haidamaks marched over the bridge, into the City, through the City and out of it for ever.

Behind the Blue Division, the frost-bitten horses of Kozyr-Leshko's cavalry regiment crossed the bridge at a wolfish lope followed by a rumbling, bouncing field-kitchen . . . then it all disappeared as if it had never been. All that remained was the stiffening corpse of a Jew on the approach to the bridge, some trampled hay and horse-dung.

And the corpse was the only evidence that Petlyura was not a myth but had really existed . . . But why had he existed? Nobody can say. Will anybody redeem the blood that he shed?

No. No one.

The snow would just melt, the green Ukrainian grass would grow again and weave its carpet over the earth . . . The gorgeous sunrises would come again . . . The air would shimmer with heat above the fields and no more traces of blood would remain. Blood is cheap on those red fields and no one would redeem it.

No one.

#

That evening they had stoked up the Dutch stove until it glowed, and it was still giving out heat late into the night. The scribbled inscriptions had been cleaned from the tiles depicting Peter

the Great as 'The Shipwright of Saardam', and only one had been

left:

'Lena . . . I've bought tickets for Aid . . .'

The house on St Alexei's Hill, covered with snow like a White general's fur hat, slept on in a long, warm sleep that dozed away behind the blinds, stirred in the shadows.

Outside, there flourished the freezing, all-conquering night, as it glided soundlessly over the earth. The stars glittered, contracting and broadening again, and especially high in the sky was Mars - red, five-pointed.

Many were the dreams dreamed in the warm rooms of the house.

Alexei slept in his bedroom, and a dream hovered over him like a blurred picture. The hallway of the school swayed in front of him and the Emperor Alexander I had come down from his picture to burn the list of names of the Mortar Regiment in the stove . . . Julia Reiss passed in front of him and laughed, other shadows leaped out at him shouting 'Kill him!'

Soundlessly they fired their rifles at him and Alexei tried to run away from them, but his feet stuck to the sidewalk of Malo-Provalnaya Street and Alexei died in his dream. He awoke with a groan, heard Myshlaevsky snoring from the drawing-room, the quiet whistle of breathing from Karas and Lariosik in the library. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, remembered where he was, then smiled weakly and stretched out for his watch.

It was three o'clock.

'They must have gone by now . . . Petlyura . . . Won't see him again.'

And he went to sleep again.

#

The night flowed on. Morning was already not far away and the house slept, buried under its shaggy cap of snow. The tormented Vasilisa lay asleep between cold sheets, warming them with his skinny body, and he dreamed a stupid, topsy-turvy dream.He dreamed that there had been no revolution, the whole thing was pure nonsense. In his dream a dubious, insecure kind of happiness