History will far exceed their dreams. Its onward march will change from fast to furious. The mortal poisons of existence once evoked in their poems will now have the humdrum and bitter taste of hunger and continual petty terror, sticky with sweat. As for that equality, whose name was so often invoked on the terrace of the house at Ostrov, they will now taste it complete-in the endless tide of refugees, streaming from town to town, toward the south, toward the void of exile.

At one of these staging posts in a little unknown town, its streets riddled with chaotic rifle fire, she takes refuge in a great izba that astonishes her with the cleanliness and calm of its rooms, where one can hear the sleepy ticking of a clock and the quiet creak of footsteps on floorboards. Suddenly the door, held fast by a heavy hook, begins to rattle beneath violent jolting. The hook gives way. The figure that appears in the doorway looks like a woman of gigantic stature. On account of all the disparate garments it is wearing, in particular the fur coat, a woman's coat, unbuttoned, because too narrow across the shoulders. Beneath the coat several layers of blouses, one of them trimmed with lace. It is one of the soldiers who were shooting in the street a few minutes ago… He catches her at the back of the house. His drunken eyes focus on a medallion under the collar he has just ripped with his hand. He tears it off with its little chain, stuffs it into his pocket, and freezes for a moment, as if undecided, looking at her with an offended air. She is astonished at the dull feebleness of the cry that her lungs manage to squeeze out. In a second her body is overwhelmed, split in two, pinned to the floor by a heavily writhing mass. For months she has heard the threats of the victorious soldiers. "We'll rip your guts out and hang you in them!" The picture conjured up by this one haunted her especially… Now the burning pain in her loins seems almost derisory compared with the tortures she had feared. She suffers more from the acid stench of the copper cross that swings out from her violator's ginger chest hair and which she can feel dangling on her lips. And also from the bitter stench of the great dirty body. Despite this breath suffocating her she is suddenly aware of a rapid footstep and out of the corner of her eye she has time to glimpse a knee touching the ground. A revolver shot fills her head with muffled deafness, makes her screw up her eyes. The only sensation she is still aware of is the slow softening of the hardened flesh thrust into her belly… And the thick trickle that begins to ooze onto her cheek from the soldier's temple. The enormous body becomes heavier still and finally releases her as it slips sideways, an inert mass. She takes refuge in another room. The sensation of a tensed member growing slack deep down within her imprints itself on her flesh… As she passes back through the house she sees her blood-soaked footprints. Out in the yard a man, a real giant with the dark eyes of an Oriental, signals to her to wait. The shooting slowly becomes more distant. The man's clothes are little different from the trappings of the soldier he has just killed. He stares at her and almost smiles. "Prince Arbyelin," he murmurs, inclining his head before disappearing in the direction of the gunshots. She does not know if she has heard him. Her body is still reliving the death of the other man's flesh inside her. "That was your first love!" whispers a mocking voice in her thoughts. "That little bitch!" She suddenly finds this name for it and all at once feels aged… Her pain is quickly dissipated by other pains…

At Kiev, where she spends several weeks hidden in a basement filled with water up to her ankles, she learns of her cousin's death. After the reds have been driven out of the city, but only for a time, the relatives of the victims make their way to the place of execution. It is the courtyard of the former school. Up to the height of a man the walls are covered in a thick layer of dried blood, fragments of brain, shreds of skin with tufts of hair. Blood, black, stagnates in the gutter… Later, when she is capable of thought again, the memory comes back to her of the poems that spoke of the "curse of princes." Now the hemophiliac's blood, the source of so many sorrowful verses, is mingled with the pulp of all these anonymous bloods in a gutter blocked with scraps of flesh.

At one moment she believes she has lost all feeling… She passes through a succession of towns ravaged by fires, houses gutted by pillage, lampposts overloaded with hanged bodies (one day one of these corpses, already ancient, no doubt, falls and brushes her with the shreds of its arms). To be able still to hurt her, pain must now be particularly sharp-the fabric of her dress sticking to a wound and having to be ripped off. Or quite squalid-the maddening itch from fleas. Or quite stupid-waiting, among other women, for some torture to be devised by this puny man, dressed in a leather coat and hence a "commissar," who is suffering from toothache and examines the female prisoners with extra hatred until the moment when one of them offers him a little bottle of perfume (her last talisman of femininity) that eases the pain and affords them an unhoped-for reprieve.

She recognizes herself less and less as this starving creature covered in rags, with inflamed eyes. Seeing her own reflection in a broken shop window near the harbor, she greets it and asks the way to the embarkation quay. She walks barefoot, she no longer has anything to carry. This city on the coast of the Black Sea is the last outpost of freedom. They are already fighting in the suburbs. From time to time she has to walk around a dead body or hide behind a wall to avoid a hail of bullets. Standing in front of the shop window, and realizing her mistake, she experiences a brief stirring of consciousness, feels a strange twitching of her lips-a smile!-and tells herself that in this city at war the freedom they dreamed of for so long has been achieved. Totally. She could pick up the gun from that dead soldier lying beside the wall and kill the first person who came along. Or even rally the besieging army: her rags make her look like one of them. Or she could take shelter in an empty house and resist absurdly until the last cartridge. Or just walk into that theater, settle down in a plush-covered seat, and wait. Or finally, kill herself.

This moment of clear reasoning revives the fear, the suffering. And above all the instinct for survival. Panic-stricken, she loses her way at the intersections of roads, runs, retraces her footsteps, sees the dead soldier again-someone has already taken his rifle. Suddenly she hears notes of music. The ground floor of a deserted restaurant, the windows shattered, the doors torn off. Inside, a man dressed in a fur coat with frayed sleeves, a fur hat on his head, is playing the piano. The mouth of a ceramic stove is belching forth black smoke, covering both the room and the musician in black strands of soot. He is playing a tragic bravura air, from time to time wiping his cheeks, wet with tears. His swollen feet are bare: they slip on the pedals; the man grimaces and crashes his fingers down even more furiously. His face is almost black. "Othello!" a very old memory exclaims within her. She walks out and sees the harbor at the end of the road. She no longer hurries. Indifference and torpor return. As she goes up the gangplank she directs her gaze down into the dirty water between the granite of the quay and the boat. She feels herself to be of the same consistency as this cold, glaucous liquid-foul with oil, with flotsam, with dead fish. There is an immense temptation to lose herself in this substance so close to her, so as to suffer no more, no longer to have to unstick her eyelids with their accretions of dry, yellow crust.

And when her own shuddering becomes one with the painful heaving of the boat ambushed by a winter storm and she weeps from those tortured eyes, it will be neither because of the pains in her body nor because of the fear that draws prayers and cries from some of the other refugees. She is overwhelmed by the feeling that there is no one in the universe to whom she can address a prayer. Her whole being now is nothing more than her raw wounds and her skin infested with lice. And all her thoughts can only lead to this one conclusion: the world is evil. Evil is always more deceitful than man can imagine. Goodness is simply one of its tricks. "I'm suffering," she will groan, knowing that there is no one under heaven from whom she can hope for compassion. All she will see of heaven is the rectangle of cold, of salt breakers and howling squalls outside the door that the sailors fling open as they come running through. Her only heaven. As for this world-this is how she wanted it. So it has become.