Ruzsky took out his cigarette case and reached for the box of matches. He lit up and exhaled heavily. He steeled himself for a long night.

He thought of his son’s face in the attic window.

At what point, he asked himself, should a man accept that his life had been a failure?

Ruzsky sat down. He cast his mind back to the summer of 1908 when he and Irina had fallen in love. Anton had still been a part-time lecturer in law at the university and Irina one of his students. She had been admitted to one of the special “courses for women” in law, since ladies were not officially enrolled in the university. Ruzsky recalled the long, heady nights in the back garden of Anton ’s small country home north of the city, the midnight sun bringing a soft glow to faces flushed with vodka and good food.

Ruzsky remembered Anton lecturing Irina on how much her clever paramour was admired in the department, how bright his future, even if it was not the one his father had wished for him.

Ruzsky got to his knees and put a light to the fire that Pavel had laid the previous evening. He sat cross-legged and watched the flames begin to climb from the kindling toward the blackened walls of the chimney. After a few minutes they died down again, the remainder of the wood too damp to sustain them.

Ruzsky tried to keep the fire alive, but was rewarded only by smoke and a low hiss.

He gave up. He took a full bottle of vodka from his bruised leather suitcase, and placed it on the table beside his bed.

12

R uzsky awoke to the peel of church bells across the city. He turned over onto his back and listened, his head pounding and his throat dry. It was still dark and he reached over to look at his pocket watch. It was just after nine.

He slumped back and stared at the ceiling. He was cold, but reluctant to move. The smell of damp cabbage from the stairwell was pervasive.

Ruzsky could not help recalling spring Sundays in Millionnaya Street when he would lie in bed with the windows open, listening to the sound of those timeless bells. He thought, too, about Petrovo, where there were no bells, no noonday guns, no shouts, no carriages rattling over cobbles, no horses or soldiers, neither opulence nor squalor-just the silence of the immense Russian forests.

Ruzsky got up, spurred by the recollection that he had once seen Maria in a quiet corner of the Kazan Cathedral on a Sunday morning.

It was a painful process, even for a man used to Siberia. Ruzsky lit a fire in the tiny stove and melted a bowl of ice. After half an hour the water was still only tepid, but he could wait no longer. He washed, shaved, trimmed his mustache with an old, blunt pair of scissors, then dressed and stepped onto the landing.

The stairwell was festooned with clothes hung up to dry, most of which had frozen overnight, and there was not a single light, so Ruzsky had to pick his way down with care. Most of the apartments had been subdivided so that each room was occupied by a different family, but at least no one was sleeping on the stairs this morning. Perhaps it was just too cold.

The stench of the hallway latrines and discarded refuse caught in his throat as he made his way toward the big oak door and stepped out into the chill predawn air of the courtyard. Ahead, two droshky drivers had upended their narrow sleds. The nearest was oiling the runners, while the other was packing the inside of his with hay for passengers to rest their feet upon. The horses stood in the corner, beneath one of the slimy, covered wooden staircases that led up to the rooms on the first floor on the other side of the yard.

Ruzsky pulled down his sheepskin hat and crossed the courtyard. A gas lamp glowed dimly through the archway from the street and he nodded to the lanky dvornik-yard porter-who sat in his cubicle by the gate.

He almost fell over the figure crouching in the shadows.

The man was wrapped in a blanket and had a long, unkempt beard, encrusted with filth. He stared up at Ruzsky with hollow eyes.

Ruzsky ignored him, but twenty paces down the street, he changed his mind, turned around, and went back. He pulled the man to his feet, ignoring the indignant shouts of the fat schweizar-the porter-who emerged from nowhere as Ruzsky half carried, half dragged the man up the stairs.

Ruzsky had intended to leave the man inside the entrance to the building, but dragged him instead up to his room and placed him in front of the stove.

Ruzsky straightened and looked at the man as he would a wounded animal. He stoked the fire, sighed, went to his bed and brought back a second blanket to put around the man’s shoulders. “What’s your name?”

The man just stared at the flame.

“When you are warm, I’d be grateful if you could leave. I have things to do.”

Ruzsky waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. He crouched down beside him. “I have work to do. There is nothing here of value, so I will leave you. Please let yourself out when you are warm.”

The man continued to stare straight ahead. Ruzsky moved to the door, wondering if he would return to find a corpse.

Outside, he stopped for a moment in an attempt to clear the foul smell of the hallway latrines from his nostrils and then began to walk.

Line Fourteen was close to Maly Prospekt, the seediest of the main three streets that cut across the island. Down at the far end, close to the great massif of the Stock Exchange and the honey-colored buildings of the university, around Bolshoy Prospekt and down to about Line Five, the island managed a faintly well-bred air. But the area around Maly was more or less a slum, run-down ochre-colored houses interspersed between shops with small grimy windows. Most had signs above their doors announcing Credit not allowed. Do not come in unless you can pay.

This had never been a good part of the city, but now it was downright depressing. It was close to the narrow streets of the Gavan, St. Petersburg ’s first port, which lay at the western tip of the island, and, as he walked, Ruzsky brushed past several merchant sailors emerging from the area’s seedy pubs.

Maly had no restaurants, but plenty of tea houses. However, even these chaynaya, which had once served basic fare at a reasonable price-before the war you could get a decent fried pot with sausages here for five copecks or so-no longer had anything appetizing to hang in the window. The only activity appeared to be in the secondhand clothes shops which had multiplied along the street.

Ruzsky was hungry, so he walked down to the St. Andrew’s Market, which ran in narrow alleys off the back of the cathedral on Line Six, but he was shocked to find that the war had stripped even this colorful quarter of its character.

If Irina had never gotten over having to move away from the south side, she had at least enjoyed helping the servants with the shopping here. It had always been bustling, loud peddlers touting their wares in competition with one another, but this morning a grim silence hung over the tiny square. The only stall holders were families trying to offload secondhand junk in return for a few copecks. In between the piles of old furniture and books, all Ruzsky could find was root vegetables, so he turned around and began to walk in the opposite direction.

He passed a group of students emerging from a café. There were four of them: a pretty girl in an astrakhan cap and three young men in tattered, worn-out clothing. As Ruzsky examined them, their anxious faces brought to mind the phrase put into Judge Porphyre’s mouth in Crime and Punishment: “Raskolnikov’s crime is the work of a mind over-excited by theories.”

As he reached the waterfront, he saw a few droshky drivers waiting for hire, but he ignored their shouts and continued on past Konradi’s sweetshop on the corner, where the servants had brought him and Dmitri to spend their weekend pocket money.