They turned the last corner and, still hand in hand, climbed the narrow stairs to the attic.

At the top, Ruzsky hesitated. To the right of the landing, behind a door that was now shut, had been Dmitri’s room when they were both children. Ilusha had shared it with him, because he hadn’t liked sleeping alone.

Ruzsky stepped toward it.

“Come on, Papa,” Michael said.

Ruzsky felt the nerves tauten in the base of his stomach as he depressed the metal latch.

“Grandpapa says that room will be for Dmitri’s son.”

Ruzsky pushed open the door, ducked forward, and opened the curtains. Gray light filtered through the dust that hung heavily in the air.

The two wooden box beds were still in place under the lee of the sloping roof. Ilusha’s tattered elephant lay on his pillow. A painted wooden soldier in the uniform of the Preobrazhenskys stood guard at the end of his bed. On a shelf, a black-and-white photograph of Ilusha, flanked by two short brass candlesticks, made the alcove seem like a shrine.

On the other side of the room, above Dmitri’s pillow, was the box in which all his toy soldiers were stored, arranged neatly by regiment. His tattered polar bear was sprawled across the lid, its head drooping.

“Grandpapa doesn’t like me to come in here,” Michael said quietly.

Ruzsky stared at Ilusha’s elephant. One ear had fallen off and his trunk had been loved almost out of existence. Its one remaining eye was fixed upon him.

“Grandpapa doesn’t like me to come in here,” Michael said again.

Ruzsky put his hand around his son’s head and drew him closer, then bent down and picked him up, holding him tight, the boy’s head resting upon his shoulder.

“I love you, my boy.”

“I love you, Papa.”

Ruzsky carried his son back out onto the landing, pulling the door gently shut behind him. He lowered Michael to the ground and let the boy lead him into his bedroom. An electric lamp spilled across the floor, which was littered with bits of train track and other wooden toys. Ruzsky saw his own bear sitting above Michael’s bed, also now a shadow of its former self. He picked it up, smiling.

“I always sleep with him,” Michael said. “And my bear, of course.”

Ruzsky felt the tears creeping into the corners of his eyes.

“What happened to Uncle Ilusha, Papa?”

Ruzsky wiped his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Michael asked.

Ruzsky sat down next to his son and breathed in. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like your uncle Ilusha?”

“Does that mean I’m going to die too?”

“Of course not.” Ruzsky leaned forward and started gathering together the pieces of track. “Of course not,” he said again.

“How did Uncle Ilusha die?”

“It was an accident.”

Ruzsky began to concentrate on assembling the track, and soon Michael was doing the same. The sections were beautifully made, and easy to fit together. There was a station, three bridges, a group of wooden houses, and a sprinkling of pine trees. The houses had been modeled on the village at Petrovo. There was even a replica of the big house itself, which Ruzsky set on top of a papier-mâché hill.

While Ruzsky assembled the track, Michael put the train together and began to push the engine around, imitating the sound of escaping steam as the wheels turned.

Ruzsky was working on the signal box when he looked up to see his father standing in the shadows by the doorway. He seemed to tower above him.

For a moment, Ruzsky tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t, so he returned to what he was doing.

The silence grew.

Did the old man expect him to stand and be polite? Did he expect him to apologize for coming to his own home to see his own son?

Michael was steering the train around the other side of the track, oblivious to any tension, as if having his father and grandfather alongside him was an everyday occurrence.

The old man sighed and then squatted down and took the signal box from Ruzsky’s hands. He looked at it for a moment and then slotted it together and placed it by the side of the track. He reached over, picked up the roof of the station building, and slotted that into place too, before gathering up all the people from the box beside him and placing them in position on the platform. There was a stationmaster, a newspaper seller, several passengers.

“No wounded soldiers,” Ruzsky said.

The old man grunted. His lined and distinguished face was solemn, the tension visible around his eyes.

“Why were you arguing with Dmitri?” Ruzsky asked.

“That woman will be the death of him.”

“Which woman?”

“You know damned well which one.”

Ruzsky flushed with embarrassment. He wondered if Dmitri’s affair with Maria really was common knowledge in the city.

The Colonel-as they had sometimes called him-examined his toy figures closely, then rearranged them so that the passengers were more obviously waiting for a train. “The world’s gone mad,” he said.

“Mad enough for you to be entertaining a man like Vasilyev at the opera?”

Ruzsky hadn’t intended to be this provocative, but his father didn’t flinch. “Vasilyev is a monster, but I don’t know if he is a necessary or a treacherous one.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I won’t, but this is a time of moral relativism.”

“What are you talking about, Grandpapa?” Michael asked. He had sat back on his haunches, his hand still protectively over the train, his face creased by confusion.

“What indeed?” Ruzsky’s father asked.

“Mama says that you hate each other.”

There was a long silence. Ruzsky rearranged some of the pine trees into a small coppice in front of the house. “Then Mama, on this occasion, is wrong,” his father said quietly.

Ruzsky didn’t dare meet the old man’s eye. He watched him check his gold pocket watch and then twist in his direction. “She’ll be back in a minute,” he said softly.

Ruzsky nodded and straightened, but his father got to his feet first and took a step back toward the door. “Have a few moments more in peace.” He took another pace away. “Come again… won’t you? Sandro?”

“Of course, Father.”

The Colonel hesitated for a moment longer. Ruzsky turned away, his heart beating fast, and, a few seconds later, he heard the sound of his father’s retreating footsteps.

25

A s the night train to Moscow prepared to pull out, Ruzsky and Pavel watched the last burst of activity on the platform from the red velvet window seats of their second-class compartment.

A pair of swarthy Tartars selling shashlik competed volubly with two Chinese touting illegal hooch in tin bottles. The last of the third-class passengers bustled past, clutching straw baskets and clumsy bundles. A newspaper boy running the length of the train, his wares held aloft to display the headline, was suddenly lost in a cloud of steam that billowed from the engine.

As the steam drifted slowly along the platform toward the rear of the train, all Ruzsky could see were soldiers in long greatcoats. Some were sitting on benches, others standing and talking in small groups, a handful lying crudely bandaged, on stretchers. They didn’t appear to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

But then, the train was already full of soldiers. Ruzsky and Pavel shared this compartment with four of them-rough peasant conscripts, uncommunicative and sullen, from south of Moscow, on their way back to the ancient capital. There were others in the corridor who had not found a berth, but showed no signs of disembarking.

“The country’s like a military camp,” Ruzsky said.

“You’re policemen?” the man next to Pavel demanded.

They didn’t respond.

“I thought so. I can smell it.”

The man nodded curtly at his colleagues. He had big, full lips and a greasy, unshaven face. He put his boots up on the seat opposite, forcing Ruzsky to move his own legs out of the way. He ignored the provocation and turned back to the window. It would be better after Moscow, he told himself. Most of the soldiers would disembark there. The train on to Yalta would be more or less empty.