Mr Myshlaevsky, gripped in Maxim's left hand, had a split upper lip and his left sleeve was dangling by a thread. Mr Turbin, a prisoner of Maxim's right hand, had lost his belt and all his buttons - not only on his tunic but his fly-buttons as well, revealing a most indecent display of underwear.

'Please let us go, kind Maxim', begged Turbin and Mysh-laevsky gazing beseechingly at Maxim with bloodstained faces.

'Go on, Max, wallop him!' shouted the excited boys from behind. 'That'll teach him to beat up a junior!'

Oh God, the sunshine, noise and bustling of that day. And Maxim had been very different from this white-haired, hunched and famished old man. In those days Maxim's hair had been as thick and strong as a black boot-brush, scarcely touched with a few threads of grey, Maxim's hands had been as strong as a pair of steel pincers and round his neck he had worn a medallion the size of a wagon-wheel . . . Yes, the wheel, the wheel of fate had gone on rolling from village 'A', making 'x' number of turns on the way . . and it had never reached village 'B' but had landed up in a stony void. God, it was cold. Now they had to defend . . . But defend what? A void? The sound of footsteps? . . . Can you save this doomed building, Tsar Alexander, with all the regiments of Borodino? Why don't you come alive and lead them down from the canvas? They'd smash Petlyura all right.

Turbin's legs took him downstairs of their own volition. He wanted to shout 'Maxim!', but he hesitated and then finally stopped. He imagined Maxim down below in the janitors' quarters in the basement, probably sitting huddled over his stove. Either he would have forgotten the old days, or he would burst into tears. And things were bad enough without that. To hell with the idea -sentimental rubbish. They had all ruined their lives by being too sentimental. So forget it.

*

Yet when Turbin had dismissed his medical orderlies he found himself wandering around one of the empty, twilit classrooms. The blackboards looked down blankly from the walls, the benches still stood in their ranks. He could not resist lifting the lid of one of the desks and sitting down at it. It felt difficult, awkward and uncomfortable. How near the blackboard seemed. He could have

sworn that this was his old classroom, this or the next one, because there was that same familiar view of the City out of the window. Over there was the huge black, inert mass of the university buildings, there was the lamplit avenue running straight as an arrow, there were the same boxlike houses, the dark gaps in between them, walls, the vaulted sky. . . .

Outside it looked exactly like a stage set for The Night Before Christmas, snow and little flickering, twinkling lights ... 'I wonder why there is gunfire out at Svyatoshino?' Harmless, far away, as though muffled in cotton wool, came the dull boo-oom, boom . . .

'Enough of this.'

Alexei Turbin lowered the desk-lid, walked out into the corridor and through the main lobby, past the sentries and out of doors. A machine-gun was posted at the main entrance. There were hardly any people out on the streets and it was snowing hard.

#

The colonel spent a busy night, making countless journeys back and forth between the school and Madame Anjou's shop nearby. By midnight the machinery of his command was working thoroughly and efficiently. Crackling faintly, the school arc-lights shone with their pinkish light. The assembly hall had grown noticeably warmer, thanks to the fires blazing all evening and all night in the old-fashioned stoves in the library bays of the hall.

Under Myshlaevsky's command several cadets had lit the white stoves with bound volumes of literary magazines of the 1860's, and then to a ceaseless clatter of axes had fed the flames by chopping up the old school benches. Having swallowed their ration of two glasses of vodka (the colonel had kept his promise and provided them with enough to keep the cold out - a gallon and a half), Studzinsky and Myshlaevsky took turns as officer of the guard. They slept for two hours, wrapped in their greatcoats, lying on the floor beside the stove with the cadets, the crimson flames and shadows playing on their faces. Then they got up, moving from

sentry-post to sentry-post all through the night inspecting the guard. Relieved every hour, four cadets, muffled in sheepskin jerkins, stood guard over the broad-muzzled six-inch mortars.

The stove at Madame Anjou's glowed infernally, the draught roaring and crackling up the flue. A cadet stood on guard at the door keeping constant watch on the motor-cycle and sidecar parked outside, while four others slept like logs inside the shop, wrapped in their greatcoats. Towards midnight the colonel was finally able to settle down at Madame Anjou's. He was yawning, but was still too busy on the telephone to go to sleep. Then at two o'clock in the morning a motor-cycle drove hooting up to the shop. A military man in a gray coat dismounted.

'Let him pass. It's for me.'

The man handed the colonel a bulky package wrapped in cloth, tied criss-cross with wire. The colonel personally deposited it in the little safe at the back of the shop and locked it. The gray man drove off again on his motor-cycle. The colonel mounted to the balcony, where he spread out his greatcoat and put a bundle of rags under his head. Having ordered the duty cadet to waken him at precisely 6.30 a.m., he lay down and went to sleep.

Seven

The coal-black gloom of the darkest night had descended on the terraces of the most beautiful spot on earth, St Vladimir's Hill, whose brick-paved paths and avenues were hidden beneath a thick layer of virgin snow.

Not a soul in the City ever set foot on that great terraced mound in wintertime. Still less was anyone likely to climb the hill at night, especially at times like these, which were grim enough to deter the bravest man. There was no good reason for going there and only one place that was lit: for a hundred years the black, cast-iron St Vladimir has been standing on his fearful heavy plinth and holding, upright, a twenty-foot-high cross. Every

evening, as soon as twilight begins to enfold the snowdrifts, the slopes and the terraces, the cross is lighted and it burns all night. From far away it can be seen; from thirty miles away in the black distance stretching away towards Moscow. But here on the hilltop it lights up only very little: the pale electric light falls, brushing the greenish-black flanks of the plinth, picking out of the darkness the balustrade and a stretch of the railings that surround the central terrace. And that is all. Beyond this - utter darkness. Out there stand strange trees capped with snow, looking like chandeliers wrapped in muslin, and neck-deep snowdrifts all around. Terrifying.

Obviously no one, however courageous, is going to come here. Chiefly because there is nothing to come for. The City, though, is another matter. A night of alarm, of military decision. Street-lamps shining like strings of beads. The Germans asleep, but with half an eye open. A blue cone of light suddenly flashes into life in one of the City's darkest streets.

'Halt!'

Crunch . . . crunch . . . Helmeted soldiers, with black ear-muffs, walking down the middle of the street. . . Crunch . . . Rifles not slung, but at the ready. The Germans are not in a joking mood for the moment. Whatever else may be in doubt, the Germans are to be taken seriously. They look like dung-beetles.

'Papiere!''

'Halt!'

A cone from the flashlight . . .

A big shiny black car with four headlamps. No ordinary car, because it is followed at a brisk canter by an escort of eight cavalrymen. The Germans are not impressed, and shout at the car: