Zmyeevich had one final guest to invite into the room. It was Iuda. He walked up to Domnikiia, but did nothing more than bow slightly and tip his hat. Then he went over to the window and flung the curtains wide open, filling the room with light. Through the window I saw the winter scene outside. A small pond sat in the middle of a snow-covered garden. A wide, jagged crack split the sheet of ice that lay on top of it. Iuda turned away from the window and towards me with a triumphant smile on his face, his arms still raised in the air from where they had clutched the curtains, accepting the cheers of a crowd that I could not hear or see, but that I knew was there.

He stood behind Domnikiia and bent over her, not to kiss her or caress her as the others had done, but simply to take a grape from the bowl in front of her. He walked over to me and casually offered me the grape, which I took in my hand, but did not eat. I held it between my thumb and fingers and offered it back to Domnikiia, but she refused, shaking her head and backing away from the death that she was well aware the grapes would bring and which I had so calmly accepted. Iuda again stepped behind her and held her head still, allowing me to hold the grape up to her lips, but still she kept them tight shut, squeezing her eyes shut as well, as if to add to her impregnability.

I crushed the grape against her lips and, though she tried to turn her head away, she could not. Iuda's grip held her firm. I saw my two remaining fingers rubbing the skin and crushed flesh of the grape against Domnikiia's lips, trying to force her to accept even the slightest morsel of the poison. I looked at the stumps of my two missing fingers and thought how much easier it would have been, had my hand been complete, to force her lips open and make her taste the fruit.

And then I noticed, curled around my middle finger, a ring shaped like a dragon, with a body of gold, emerald eyes and red, forked tongue.

I woke up.

Whether a dream is a nightmare is a question not of content, but of mood. Nothing in my dream had been conspicuously horrifying, but I awoke with the feeling – as certain as any knowledge I have ever had – that something irredeemably awful had taken place, something that had destroyed my whole world. Had I been asked what that thing was, I would have been unable to say, and in the time it would have taken me to recall what it was, I would have woken up enough to realize it was nothing. But for a few seconds after waking, I had no doubt as to either its existence or its enormity.

At the moment of waking I leapt out of bed, instinctively feeling that my fear would require a remedy of physical action. My surroundings were strange. I had to do something to fight off the terror that confronted me. But I couldn't remember what I had to do – or even what that terror was.

Within seconds, wakefulness returned to me fully. I was in a bedroom in the abandoned house in Zamoskvorechye. This was the fourth night I'd been there. I recalled my dream, and could have recited every detail of it. Rationality took control of me as I understood that the fears were in my own mind – that they had no other reality. The sense of relief permeated both mind and body like a warming glass of vodka. But still it had been a nightmare. Still I was haunted by the childlike fear of going back to sleep and possibly returning to that horrifying place from which, by waking, I had just escaped.

I lay back down on the bed. I had no idea what time it was – outside, it was still dark as pitch and I felt no urge to light a candle. I wondered whether I would be able to return to sleep. As a young child, when I'd had a nightmare, my mother had sometimes let me sleep in her bed until morning. My father would not hear of such mollycoddling, so it was only when he was away that it was allowed. After he died, I grew up very quickly and so the need no longer arose. Even then I would fail to go back to sleep, but I would lie awake in terror in my own bed, like a man.

And now I was a man, and still I lay awake. I went over the dream again and again in my mind, trying to determine which specific element it was that had turned it into a nightmare, or to fall back to sleep in the attempt. It was something about the grapes that seemed most resonant with the sense of fearfulness that still lingered in me; something in the act of Domnikiia's offering them, of my taking them, although the prospect of my death from the poison held little apprehension for me.

I may have dozed as I lay there, yet I would swear that I was wide awake throughout; just as curled up in the safety of my mother's bed I had still never felt safe enough to slip back into the world of unconsciousness. The horror would always be ended by the sound of birds. As dawn broke, birdsong would hail the resurrection of the sun and the beginning of the new day. Time – which had stopped in the continual, unchanging darkness of the early hours, when there was no way of telling whether one's last thought had occurred a second ago or an hour ago – would begin again.

And so there in Moscow, the dawn chorus, which I still, as I had since childhood, associated both with being terrified and with the termination of that terror, eventually heralded the new day. Time began again and the night, and the nightmare, could be forgotten.

As rationality at last became fully resurgent in me I realized that a rational man should find much more to fear in that particular day than there had been in the night before it. That was the day that the French would enter Moscow.

It was well into the afternoon when the French finally arrived from the west, even as the last brigades of what remained of the Russian army scuttled away antipodally to the east. Amongst the last to leave, so the rumour-mongers would have it, had been Count Rostopchin, the city's governor. Fearful that the Russian mob would not let him depart, he had delivered to them a restaurateur by the name of Vereshchagin who was accused of being a French spy. The mob had torn Vereshchagin to pieces, while Rostopchin slipped away to freedom, unmolested. It was not the only time that I would find parallels between myself and Moscow's governor.

When they did arrive, the invaders were led not by Bonaparte, but by his brother-in-law, Marshal Murat, whom Bonaparte (ashamed, as any republican would be, of having a common soldier marry his sister) had elevated to the rank of King of Naples. Bonaparte himself was to follow Murat into the city the following day. I secreted myself among a small crowd of inquisitive Muscovites who witnessed Murat's arrival with more curiosity than fear or respect. Many thought that they were seeing Bonaparte himself, but I had seen enough pictures of the Little Corporal to know that this was not he. The flamboyant uniform and loose, curly, almost feminine hair were styles that Bonaparte would have abhorred, and left me in no doubt as to which one of France's marshals this was.

French troops spread in waves across the deserted city, showing little concern for the few Russians that remained. I was stopped occasionally, but there were far too few Russian speakers amongst them to accompany every platoon. When challenged I, like others I saw in the city, had merely to reply with a stream of suitably grovelling Russian babble and I was allowed on my way.

That day was a Monday, and our arranged meeting place for Mondays was Red Square itself. In more conventional times, it was an ideal location for a covert meeting, thronged as it was with crowds from which two or three figures in conversation would not stand out. Today, however, the crowds were crowds of French soldiery. To meet there would have been brave, and when carrying out acts of sabotage in an occupied city, bravery is not a quality that goes hand in hand with success.