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"Ah, gracious Lord, Alexandra Anatol-l-lievna, would you just look!"
A corpulent, excessively corpulent, lady in a dress the color of old blood flew up to Fyodor with such speed that the candles in the candelabra trembled in terror, their little flames wavering. With a speed physically impossible for a lady of such proportions, especially one wearing a bustle.
"Alexandra Anatol-l-lievna!" cried the lady, whose name stubbornly refused to surface in Fyodor's mind, now growing tipsy from the sudden attention. "Come over here, you wretch!"
The lady leaned confidentially toward Fyodor, spilling her abundant bosom onto his elbow. He closed his itching eyelids in suffering. He had been in his father's house for only a few minutes and had already earned himself a migraine. Somewhere deep in the manor, in the ballrooms, a piano passage thundered, and there was a vague, merging rumble of voices – that very sound of Society which Fyodor hated more than the roar of a howitzer.
"Fyodor Mikhailovich, do not be of-f-fende," she whispered ardently. A gust of damp air, smelling of musty hay, heliotrope, and just-eaten pickled grouse, insistently thrust itself against Fyodor's pursed lips. "She is simply an ab-so-lutely dreadful hostess, cannot receive guests at all. Lucky for her my Nikolai Stepanovich let me come – otherwise what would she do here without me, oh heavens!"
In the narrow hallway, paneled in dark oak, where biscuit porcelain figurines of ballerinas gathered dust on consoles, the light trembled again. Alexandra Anatolyevna – "Anatol-l-lievna" to the corpulent lady – was rushing toward them, almost tripping over the skirts of her gown.
"Evdokia Ivanovna, thank you for greeting my invité, you have done me a great service," Alexandra Anatolyevna wheezed, smiling tightly, as she pried the lady's fingers – Evdokia Ivanovna's – from Fyodor's forearm. Evdokia Ivanovna held on with all her might, digging her nails into the fabric of his uniform. "If she tears off my cufflinks," Fyodor thought phlegmatically, offering no resistance, "I may just cut her down."
But a healthy lifestyle, Sylvester Graham, and the iron grip, tempered by thirty years of managing a disheveled estate and a "difficult" nephew, finally pried Evdokia Ivanovna's sausage-like fingers from Fyodor's shoulder.
Defeated and humiliated, Evdokia Ivanovna greeted him once more and flew back to the ballroom: to break up the parquet flooring laid down in the time of Alexandra Anatolyevna's late father-in-law. The latter sighed just then, her glassy little brilliants glinting on her rumpled neck, and turned to Fyodor.
For several seconds they silently examined each other in the twilight of the vestibule.
They stood silently for a few seconds, studying one another in the half-light of the vestibule.
“I’m glad… to see you,” Alexandra Anatolyevna finally muttered, offering him Smile Number Five from her catalogue of polite expressions. Though it was unlikely it included instructions on how to smile at a nephew she had long considered lost in the Caucasian mountains.
The unspoken “alive” hung in the air like a cloud of poisonous gas.
“Likewise, Auntie,” Fyodor inclined his head. “I didn’t think I would miss your balls so much.”
Alexandra Anatolyevna waved it off. Adjusted his epaulettes. Plucked a speck of dust from his chest. Sighed.
“Oh, stop it, mon chou, I know you hate them. As you do all of Petersburg, with its fogs and gossip. I’ve always been amused by you: you turn your nose up at everything, yet somehow always manage to make things work.”
“Well, why would I…”
“But I am very grateful you came,” she cut him off, not allowing him to weave any foolish lies. Fyodor gave a short laugh. “And since God and the Tsar have returned you alive, it is time we thought again about your marriage. Your Spasskoye Estate is languishing without a mistress, and there are your father’s debts… we need a match.”
“As you wish, Auntie.” Fyodor caught himself feeling dismayed that the plump lady, whose name he had already managed to forget, had not blown out all the candles in this whole house with her bulk, so that Alexandra Anatolyevna would not see his tightly pressed lips.
She patted his cheek with a withered little hand. Thick powder drifted like soft snow onto the dark collar of his uniform.
“All right, mon cher, let’s go,” she sighed, taking him by the arm. “You are just in time. Do you remember the Stepánovs’ daughter, who studied at Smolny? Ah, what a beauty she has become! They say even the Empress herself noticed her at the last court appearance. And her fortune… her father is a monopolist in candle heating. She is in the Blue Drawing Room now, listening to that new dandy, a literary man, declaim something…”
Fyodor counted the little fir trees in the parquet underfoot, no longer listening to his Auntie. Ever since he, at ten years old, had learned to speak French properly, she had been scouting a bride for him from among the provincial gentry. Whether she was unobtrusively trying to drive him out of the house, or was simply an unhappy, early-widowed woman for whom matrimonial plans had become an obsession, the sole sphere of power in a world run by men – he could not tell.
Auntieie chattered and chattered like a mechanical bird – a wondrous toy from Eastern masters, bought once at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. But his consciousness was oozing, unable to contain itself within his skull.
It seemed to Fyodor that all of this was a dream, only he couldn’t tell whether it was a good one or a nightmare. Any moment now he would wake up, and behind the closed doors of the ballroom there would be no velvet and gilt, but the breath-stealing wind from the mountain ridges. It howled in the gorge, smelled of wormwood, smoke, and blood; it stung his cheeks with prickly dust. Any moment now, instead of the sickly-sweet stench of wooden rot and perfume, he would breathe in the pungent odor of horse sweat and garlic. And the quiet rustle of dresses would turn into the whisper of dry nettle stalks on the slope of a ravine, where he had lain for two days and nights without daring to move, catching in the mountain noise the soundless steps of strong feet in tatar ichigi.
He blinked, and for another instant before his eyes floated bloodless stars in a narrow strip of sky between the black silhouettes of rocks – but even those quickly became candles in the wall candelabra.
“…and she, Fedenka, has a fortune! A fortune! Three candle factories alone!” Auntie’s voice, like a persistent fly, beat against the clouded glass of his detachment.
The doors creaked. A wave of warm, breathed air, a thick hum of voices, a splash of laughter. All of it greedily thrust itself into Fyodor’s chest. He narrowed his eyes.
In the middle of the main hall, right in the center of the dance floor, stood a Christmas tree of unimaginable size, decorated with a dizzying jumble of everything from tender pink to the color of a rotting pancreas. Auntie herself was wearing a peach-colored dress that Fyodor seemed to remember seeing on her eight years ago. Young officers strutted like roosters. Ladies giggled. Old campaigners had already clustered on the balcony by the card table. The crowd swayed absentmindedly, not knowing where to thrust its snout; a crowd red, pink, raspberry – skin sprinkled with irritation-freckles.
“A wonderful evening, Auntie,” Fyodor remarked incongruously, hoping he hadn’t interrupted her, simply so as not to seem entirely ungrateful.
Alexandra Anatolyevna beamed. Her small face, resembling a spoiled nut, smoothed out its wrinkles for a moment.
“Mon cher, oh, how glad I am!” She flung up her hands, nearly catching Fyodor’s cheek with a nail, but he drew back just in time. Auntie seemed not to notice.
“Truly, wasn’t it a splendid idea to arrange a New Year’s ball for the officers in honor of your return? And that chatterbox Evdokia even tried to talk me out of it.”
And again, unspoken, hung the words “in your memory.” She had never planned on any return of her hero-nephew; otherwise she would have poached a master of ceremonies from some count and made every arrival kiss Fyodor’s lily-white hand. She knew all about spectacles and public interest.
Behind him some young fop with a loud guffaw hurled a crystal glass to the floor. The ringing, sharp sound of breaking glass.
Fyodor did not hear the ladies’ squeals or the cavalier’s apologies. Only a dry, swift shot – the click of flint on steel in the silence before an ambush. The sound sliced through the morning in the gorge, tore the tunic at his side, gnawed into the soft tissues of his belly. The space around him contracted and bent.
Golden gleams on officers’ epaulettes turned into the flash of sabers in the winter sun. The thunder of hooves echoing in the mountains. A grassy film on his teeth. Three days lying motionless, afraid to cause an avalanche. Afraid of sound. The highlanders had halted twenty sazhens from him.
Fyodor drew a breath.
He stood in the middle of the ballroom, and down his back, beneath the thin cloth of his uniform, an icy drop of sweat crawled like a drowsy cockroach.
Fyodor paused for a second, gently disentangling himself from Auntie’s grip. He inhaled the hot air of this place through his nose – alien breath, the sharp sweat of young bodies, clouds of toilet water.
He – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the youngest lieutenant colonel in the history of the Tenginsky Infantry Regiment, the “Demon of War” in distant mountain villages, a symbol of the steadfastness of the Russian spirit, son of a collegiate assessor – was certainly not the sort of man who, having survived Chechen captivity, would fall apart at his aunt’s ball. That, after all, would be simply stupid.
Fyodor gave a quiet snort and ran his hand over his hair, stiff with wax. Survive one wretched evening in a wretched society with these wretched little people, quickly find himself a bride, throw together a wedding, then children, then become a fliegel-adjutant, and then one could die. The main thing was not to return to the war. Anything but the war.
Alexandra Anatolyevna, already swept up in the excitement of the wedding hunt, didn’t stop talking for a second and, it seemed, didn’t even notice that her nephew’s hand was missing from her elbow. She dragged him through a sea of silk and glitter, just as she had once led him through the Nizhny Novgorod fair, clutching his little hand tightly in her fluffy sable glove. Back then, too, he had looked around with detachment, not understanding why he needed these carousels, these colorful rags, these sweets that made him feel sick. He wanted to go home, to the silence of the library, to the crackling of logs and the dry rustle of the pages of his father’s military manual.
The Blue Drawing Room – an annex to the ballroom, where potential brides and old maids had languished since time immemorial – turned out not to be quite as blue as he remembered it. The silk on the walls had faded to a dreary shade of blue. A group of guests crowded around the fireplace, where heavy birch logs were making a sad attempt to smolder, but it seemed they were mostly just smoking. Taking center stage, sprawled in a Voltaire armchair, sat that very dandy-literary figure. A young fellow with a face expressing a lofty yet slightly weary sensibility, and with meticulously slicked-back temples. He dripped thick, sweet syrup of words before his listeners with self-admiration.
“…and thus the soul, wrenched from the vise of the quotidian, soars above the mortal vale, gazing with a tear of tenderness upon these pale countenances…”
“These pale countenances” – several young ladies and a pair of elderly women – listened with mouths agape. One had even pressed a handkerchief to her moist eyes. Fyodor automatically searched for his target – the Stepanovs’ daughter. She sat on the edge of a sofa, taut as a bowstring, in a dress of violently ginger color. The girl looked more like a soldier carrying out a dull but necessary watch. Her hands, folded on her knees, seemed excessively large and strong, not at all maidenly. Hands that could probably manage quite deftly the hauling of account ledgers at some vast factory.
“…oh, that moment of revelation, when…”
The poet was interrupted by Fyodor. He said not a word, merely stepped into the circle. Once, he had known how to merge with a crowd, to become invisible, dissolving into a passing glance – but now it was as though black smoke from his military past poured from him without cease, betraying him everywhere. Among these clean little people, there was suddenly no place for him.
The poet fell silent, his velvety lashes trembling, from afar more like the wings of an exotic butterfly.
“Forgive me,” Fyodor’s voice sounded hoarse and muffled, as though he had not made use of such a useless thing as vocal cords for several years. “Please, continue.”
But it was no longer possible to continue. The magic had torn like a wet maple leaf under a heel. The poet helplessly moved his thin lips. Auntie, seizing the moment, glided forward.
“Sofya Stepanovna, allow me to present my nephew, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Lieutenant Colonel of the Tenginsky Regiment, a hero of the Caucasus,” she pronounced it with such pride as though she herself had personally taken Gunib.
The young lady – Sofya – slowly raised her eyes to him. Her eyes were dark brown, like the water of the Neva in spring. Not poetic eyes at all. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“An honor,” Fyodor murmured, inclining his head.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she replied. Her voice turned out to be low and almost smoky, though she was only twenty and not a prostitute – where could such a voice have come from? “Your aunt has told me much of your exploits.”
“She has told nothing,” Fyodor realized at once. “She only just learned I was alive.” But he merely nodded again.
“There is no need to exaggerate. Service.”
The poet, sensing himself entirely superfluous, flung himself back into the armchair with indignation and began spitefully pushing air through his thin nose.
Society began to whisper. Alexandra Anatolyevna, beaming, launched into a rapid babble to Sophia about the social climate of Spasskoye and the prospects of the garden. Fyodor listened to this muttering with one ear. With the other he heard a distant but distinct sound – a staccato, rhythmic thud. The clatter of hooves. Several horses. Moving at a walk. Along a stony path. Very near.
He turned sharply toward the tall window, beyond which bluish smog billowed. There was nothing there, of course. Only a solitary mooring lantern and his own reflection – а pale face with cruel eyes.
“Fyodor Mikhailovich, did you see something?” Sofya rasped.
He turned away from the window, twisting his face into the most amiable expression he could recall.
“No, nothing. Just my imagination. In the fog one can see all sorts of things.”
“There is probably no fog in the Caucasus?” she asked without much curiosity.
“There is,” Fyodor answered shortly. “Mountain fog.”
“A candle monopolist. Three factories. A gaze like a regimental paymaster’s. Perhaps she will not even demand that I sleep with her. Only that I give her my name and appear on time at official receptions. And she will count money and keep Spasskoye in order. And I will be able to leave. Anywhere.”
“Dearest Sofya Stepanovna, would you grant me a dance?” Fyodor предложил with a quiet sigh, vaguely hoping the musicians would not take it into their heads to play some quadrille – he would not survive dancing in hessian boots.
She extended her hand with the bored expression of a person who has seen through another’s poorly stitched lie. Her fingers settled confidently into his gloved palm.
The musicians in the opposite corner struck up a mournful waltz. They ought to tune the violin – and drive out the flutist by the scruff of his neck: Fyodor could not see from here, but he would have sworn it was some young boy accompanying the choir of Saint Helena.
He encircled Sofya Stepanovna’s waist with formal, almost official politeness. She placed her heavy, unexpectedly bony hand on his shoulder. They began to turn.
Fyodor moved automatically; his body remembered the steps learned in deepest childhood, hammered into the muscles at the level of instinct, though his dulled, exhausted mind tried to throw him off. Mirrors in gilded frames drifted past, multiplying the already endless crowd. In their glass flickered his own gaunt face, Sophia’s fish-like eyes, blurred patches of dresses, the glimmer of epaulettes, the crystal of glasses, and the candle stubs of an evening that would not end. Couples merged into a vast bloody whirlpool, like wound-up mechanical monkeys circling a Christmas tree. A dance of worship before the great social idol.
One-two-three. The feet of a dozen couples whisper in unison. The ladies laugh. Especially the one in the right column, whispering into her little officer’s ear. The officer has flushed so deeply and his movements are so stiff that Fyodor makes wagers with himself as to when he will give in and drag the giggler into some dusty corner.
One-two-three, and, Lord, how tedious and monotonous these balls now seemed to Fyodor. He recalled that a couple of years ago, here at least they argued about politics, read deviant poets, Russia would arise from its sleep, and so on. But now even that was gone. Everyone so decorous it made you drowsy. And no duels at all. Not even a drop of blood, he thought – they might spill a little to liven up this oak parquet; but no, not at all.
One-two-three. Here are skirts – taffeta, moiré, heavy silk; the swelling waves of crinolines, funnels ready to swallow an unwary cavalier; here the whalebone creaking beneath the fabric like the skeletal frame of an invisible monster; here uniforms – dark green, azure, scarlet, with aiguillettes like gilded entrails, with epaulettes biting into the shoulders; here bows on old women’s caps, limp and sorrowful; here fans snapping in time like the gill slits of a dying fish; here sweaty palms in white kid gloves; here glints in the crystal pendants of chandeliers; here jesters’ shoes with curled toes, absurd and ominous as an inverted crescent.
Serafima collided with him, apparently tearing open an old suture on his side with her corset, but Fyodor did not so much as wince.
Where had a jester come from?
Strange, thin and tall, like a solitary stalk in a reaped field. Entirely black and white. Not a single drop of brightness in his time-faded costume: perhaps his gloves had once been blood-red, perhaps his hair had once been fair and clean, like that of Karelian peasants. But now he was washed-out. His face pale, narrow, with a sharp chin and disproportionately large eyes the color of cloudy amber. And that long, absurd braid…
He did not laugh, did not grimace, did not juggle, did not do what old tales prescribed for him – he only sat, propping his cheek on his hand, and watched. Straight at Fyodor. That gaze was empty and concentrated at once, like a cat watching a fly in a web. And Fyodor’s head began to ache from that gaze. He had seen it somewhere… where…
A jester. But not a court one, not one of serf stock – such had not been kept in respectable houses for forty years. This was a phantom, come from the times of Potemkin villages, or even from pre-Petrine, boyar Rus’. And here he seemed like a staffage figure torn out of a painting. He could not be real. He could not be real.
The more the gaze clung to his ungainly figure, the more Fyodor’s temples throbbed. He felt the tips of his fingers grow cold. In the jester’s enormous eyes, in their liquid semi-precious gleam, he saw the reflection of a boundless dark field strewn with crooked crosses, and a low, leaden sky. A gaze from another world, from that Russia which they preferred not to notice in ballrooms – the Russia of rutted country roads, leaning huts, and silent, all-consuming despair.
“Are you staring at that freak?” Serafima Stepanovna inquired dryly. “It’s some sort of malentendu, God knows. He was brought by Prince Valkovsky, that Slavophile of ours who is obsessed with antiquity. He claims he found him in Little Russia, with some retired philosopher-Mason. Eccentric, but harmless.”
Harmless. Sofya’s words hung in the air like a pitiful, naive lie.
The jester sprang lightly to his feet. His movements were angular, abrupt, and absurd, like those of a marionette with tangled strings. He made several hopping steps to the side, and the little bells on his jacket cried out thinly and mournfully, not at all festively. The orchestra thundered, the trombone strained – but Fyodor still heard the ringing of his every motion. Like a postal troika bringing a dispatch of a soldier’s death. Like the bell of a tormentress in a women’s monastery. Like the little chime on a coffin-maker’s door.
Fyodor slowly peeled his body away from the puzzled, frowning Sophia Semyonovna.
“Excusez-moi, I need to speak to someone,” he threw over his shoulder, not even hoping she would hear.
Nimbly weaving between the dancing couples, he hurried toward the jester. Something about him was not right. But what? Fyodor had not felt such confusion in many, many years – even in childhood nothing had been able to unsettle him. No living creature had ever seen Fyodor Mikhailovich… at a loss. Except, perhaps, that mountain boy into whose eyes he had looked before shooting him. But no one else.
He halted before a flock of giggling young ladies, who had already – as sparrows to crumbs, by God – gathered around the merry monkey. The dandy-literateur had been briskly pushed into the background to endure professional hatred. The living jester smiled, made faces, kissed white little hands in silk gloves, yet in each of his actions there seeped something swiftly doomed. One sees such a thing on the faces of soldiers with a cannonball in place of a stomach, who fling themselves bodily onto the enemy’s bayonets.
At last he noticed Fyodor. He bent in an absurd, exaggeratedly respectful bow, and his top hat slipped sideways. White – almost gray – hair spilled onto his forehead in a lively, unruly fringe. Such hair might belong to an ermine. Or to a creature that had never seen the sun.
“Your Excellency,” he whistled. “Captain-commandant – look at you, alive. Very much alive. Oh, forgive me – you are a lieutenant colonel now, aren’t you.”
The ladies, spotting a new participant in the performance, rustled their satin and turned porcelain faces toward Fyodor with an expression of dull curiosity.
“And shall I not tell you, sir, a story?” the jester continued, paying no heed to the girls’ giggles. “A story about a soldier who fell into captivity among the infidels.”
Something clicked softly in his head, just behind the right ear. As though an inner guard had cocked the hammer and pressed a revolver to Fyodor’s temple. For a second he closed his eyes.
Ah. So that was it.
“Good heavens, how many times has that story already been told,” Fyodor replied, stretching the vowels. Suddenly he was flooded with the habitual indifference of the strong. The shameful fear that had been gnawing at his insides mere seconds ago rotted away with the speed of a cherry plum fallen at the foot of a mountain. “So, we are acquainted, are we?”
The jester felt it too. He narrowed his eyes – and his lashes just as pale – and grinned from ear to ear. Something sharp and sly kept flickering across his face.
“So we are,” he nodded, twirling the crimson tassel on the fringe of his cloak. “Will you introduce me to the ladies? I must confess, it is rather awkward: I stand at the center of attention, and yet no one knows my name. As though I were not a man, but merely…”
Fyodor might have rolled his eyes, if he were given to such things. But putting on a circus is for clowns.
“Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol,” Fyodor said evenly, not taking his eyes off his face. So that is how you named yourself then? In delirium? Or did I christen you so myself, mistaking you for a phantom from a book read in childhood, and you agreed? “An old comrade-in-arms of mine”
One of the young ladies, a blonde skinny to the point of blueness in strawberry-red, squeaked. Only now did Fyodor realize who the spectators were, and to whom this performance was, in essence, addressed. Society. That very Society for which he had come here.
"A military friend?" said another, a faded little mouse whose father, it seemed, kept half a dozen taverns near the Nikolsky Market. Her voice dropped to a frightened whisper. "But, Fyodor Mikhailovich, he is, forgive me, a buffoon?.."
He laughed, baring his small teeth. In his sharp, evil laugh, one truly wanted to take aim and shoot him dead, like some painfully insolent little beast. The young lady immediately wilted.
"Ah, madame!" he exclaimed, bending his knees in a crooked curtsy. "I am the very same and not the very same! The writer is in Rome, but his shadow, his unfinished thought, his rough draft – here he is, before you! I have been written off, madame, done away with! And unfinished thoughts, you know, have a habit of wandering the wide world, seeking someone to attach themselves to. And they find someone, indeed! Oh, how they find someone!"
This indifference – cheerful and light – exploded in Fyodor's throat in champagne bubbles. The weariness, the irritation at human stupidity and vulgarity had vanished somewhere. So that was why Pyotr Alexeyevich had loved his d'Acosta so: when a seven-colored core of pure absurdity is bustling about beside you, other people's faces cease to irritate by the absence of thought on their smooth foreheads.
"Now that's enough, Nikolai Vasilyevich, don't frighten the ladies," Fyodor snorted, adjusting his collar. Nikolai Vasilyevich. Nikolai smiled brightly. The corners of his mouth spread apart, cutting through the muscles of his cheeks with a shrill, radiant joy.
"Dear ladies, can you truly be afraid of me? Oh-oh-oh, woe is me, woe, unhappy creature that I am!" he exclaimed, searching with his eyes for somewhere to fall in a fit of "woe." Fyodor prudently stepped back a pace, which did not escape the eyes of Nikolai Vas-… Nikolai. Of Nikolai 's eyes. "Tell me, do I horrify you?"
The girls remained silent, having decided that the less you goad a mad dog, the less often it barks. Unfortunately, that left only to stab it.
"Fyodor Mikhailovich," he rustled with his plaster lips. The longer Fyodor studied him up close, the more he suspected that instead of blood, milk flowed in this devil's veins. Surely a man could not be so pale. "It seems you are right. I frighten young, charming creatures."
The girls, catching the pause in the conversation with their sensitive social hearing, hastily took their leave and fluttered away, leaving them alone. Through a fogged consciousness, Fyodor thought that he should find Sophia? Sofya? Serafima? – well, the one with the mannish hands and the candle factories – and apologize, appease her, and apologize again. Though the ladies of the capital did not forgive such things.
Nikolai fell silent, tilting his head like a large, well-fed cat, listening to the sounds of quadrille. They were enveloped by a murky, churned-up silence – the kind that covers anyone who has fallen through the ice. His transparent eyes slowly, with the unbearable languor of a victor at the card table, surveyed the great ballroom: the gilding of the frames, the velvet of the curtains, the well-fed, self-satisfied faces of the men, the powdered decolletages of the ladies.
"It's frightening here," he concluded quietly, with sincere amazement. "Downright eerie. Little clocks tick, dresses rustle, people whisper about money and ranks. The soul grows chill. But in Rome, you know, there is sun. And it smells of warm stone and sea. But it's frightening there, too. There, thoughts overwhelm one. They, Fedenka, have teeth. And they bite. Thoughts, I mean."
He suddenly stepped toward a nearby console table, where two dozen stearin candles burned in a massive candelabrum – products of the Stepanov factories, as his former companion might have noted indifferently. Nikolai brought his finger to the flame of the thickest candle, then snatched it away, clicking his nails.
Merciful Lord, Fyodor suddenly thought, he'll melt. For some reason, it seemed that his skin was so pale because it was made of wax, and his movements so jerky because the wicks inside his sinews were breaking.
"Look," Nikolai whispered, beckoning to Fyodor as if displaying a curious beetle. The tips of his fingers were covered with a pinkish, fleshy crust. "And what are candles poured from? From the tallow of dead sheep? Or from the wax that bees gathered from flowers on spacious Alpine meadows?"
He exhaled tenderly. The flame wavered, stretched into a bluish thread, and went out, releasing a thin stream of acrid smoke. No one but Fyodor noticed this in the general radiance of the hall. But in the corner, it became slightly darker.
"Have you come to talk nonsense?" Fyodor inquired politely, and no socialite would have found any disrespect in his tone at that moment.
"I, Fyodor Mikhailovich, have been written off, done away with," Nikolai repeated, no longer jokingly but with a businesslike frankness. The way drunken stonemasons change when they enter a deaf workshop where one cannot take a step without tripping over a gravestone. "You see, everyone's like everyone else – only I distinguished myself: with my own hands I threw a chain around my own neck and handed the end to a vile little man. And what I was thinking at the time, what I was planning – that, Fyodor Mikhailovich, concerns no one. Don't think it's about you." Nikolai blew on his hand, and it became marble-white again. "Though it might be about you, after all. It's just that for once in my life, I needed freedom. Which, of course, pleases no one. So now I have to play a game with you. And here we are, two unquiet souls, trapped on this chessboard."
Fyodor stood, his hands clasped behind his back.
"What do you want from me?" he asked directly, dispensing with all ceremony. "Specifically. What is this 'game'? A duel? The fulfillment of a wish? Or simply a slap in the face of public taste that you wish to deliver with my hand?"
Nikolai laughed.
"Ah, Fеdenka, my straightforward one!" Nikolai skipped so easily from the familiar to the formal tone, poured forth nonsense so filigreely, dusted his interlocutor's brains so deftly with incoherent absurdities, that for an uninitiated person to take offense at him would have seemed sacrilegious. One could only take offense at a holy fool. To Fyodor, it simply seemed futile. Nikolai would make a performance out of that, too. "No, not a duel. A duel is for them, for the living, for those who are afraid to die. You and I are already on the other side. I propose a wager to you. I don't like the arrangement in which your fate hangs on the tip of my tongue. It's so easy to choke, after all."
Fyodor winced.
"Has anyone told you that you make a terrible poet?"
Nikolai, not taking offense, shrugged and blossomed into a smile.
"Well, what kind of wager?" Fyodor sighed, stroking the hilt of his sword. "What piece of foolishness will you offer me this time?"
"My last 'foolishness' pleased you greatly," Nikolai interrupted. His tone, for some reason, reminded Fyodor of the greasy innuendos of men dead drunk. "Don't worry, nothing that might harm your honor and dignity. Do you remember what you promised me then? In that cave?"
"Something doesn't come to mind. Refresh my memory?" Fyodor raised his eyebrows. He knew from experience how to deal with such types – even devils and mountain spirits broke down in the face of bluntness and the absence of emotion on one's face.
And indeed, Nikolai faltered for a second. His fingers, like a nervous bird, fluttered up to the fringe. The faded red drowned in a pale burgundy.
"But never mind, it's not important – I see you're being sly and remember everything," he chirped in a rapid patter, and his eyes darted hungrily across Fyodor's face. "So then, the wager. I shall offer you a choice: to remain here, in society, in the fragile happiness of humanity. Not for long, though: in about two years you will die of a fever in this house, in your very own childhood room."
"Or?" Fyodor asked coolly. Nikolai smiled again.
"Or you can return to the front. In a few days you'll be seconded to Turkey, to an infantry regiment. You will live a long life, full of meaningless slaughter of the innocent and the guilty. And I will be your guardian angel. Always over your left shoulder."
With a light hand, Nikolai reached out to adjust Fyodor's epaulettes, but Fyodor reflexively caught him by the wrist.
Fyodor felt the air around them grow thick and viscous, like molasses.
"An interesting choice," Fyodor drawled, and his own voice sounded alien to him. "Two years in Petersburg, or a long life in mud and blood. And all of it – under your supervision? No, Nikolai Vasilyevich, this sounds more like a sentence."
"All of life is a sentence, Fedenka," Nikolai objected softly. He cheerfully twisted his wrist, still trapped in Fyodor's tenacious grip. Fingers lay on his palm. Fabric to fabric. Skin to wax. "It's just that some are hanged immediately, and others – with a reprieve, on a long, silken little rope. I'm offering you the chance to choose your own noose. Okhta parquet or campaign mud? Decay here", he nodded toward the ballroom, "or burning there."
He leaned in closer. Fyodor could see the soft tremble of the fine hairs on his cheekbones, and the warm light shimmering on his eyelashes.
"And I," Nikolai whispered hotly. His breath, smelling of a wet wick, struck Fyodor sharply on the cheek, "will give you something more than life or death. I will give you knowledge. You will see skeletons in golden clothing, dolls with porcelain faces, beneath which worms of vanity and fear are writhing. You will hear not music, but the creak of their joints and the whisper of their little, filthy secrets. War, Fyodor Mikhailovich, is honest. There, they shoot at you, and you shoot back."
Fyodor was silent. Somewhere deep down, beneath layers of fatigue, cynicism, and military bearing, something dark and hungry stirred. That very thing that had once made him trade the silence of his study for the thunder of cannonade. Boredom. The deadly, all-consuming boredom of this gilded life. Death by fever in the nursery… it sounded so vulgar, so meaningless. Almost insulting to someone who had survived captivity in the highlands. But what was the catch, then?
"You speak like a tempter from a cheap novel," Fyodor said at last. "The Devil, I believe, started out the same way. Surely you don't think I'm your Faust?"
Nikolai laughed, and in his laughter one could hear the jingle of Persian coins, the clatter of blades warped by battle, and at the same time – the dry crack of a breaking goose bone in a wealthy house.
"The Devil? Oh, no! The Devil is grandiose. He soars above abysses, he commands the immortal! I am merely a petty demon. I cannot take your soul, Fеdenka – I have no right to it, you see. After all, you refused to give it to me back then, eh? In exchange for…" Nikolai took a theatrical pause, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "For, my God, fifty corpses! And what a bloodbath I staged there, in your honor. Remind me, wasn't it for that they gave you your promotion? That proud rank by which they now hail you at balls?"
Fyodor grimaced and released Nikolai's hand from his grip. The cold air seared his palm.
He remembered much of what had happened in the Caucasus. Too much, even. What woke him at night, what earned him his promotion, why both enemies and his own men feared him.
But what had happened that night – he did not remember. And thank God.
"Don't lie. I earned my rank myself, and I've traded my life for anything but my soul. I don't forget my contracts," he stepped back. Another couple of centimeters and Nikolai would have pressed his lips to the bridge of Fyodor's nose. "And what do you get out of it?" Fyodor asked, not taking his eyes off the polecat face. "What do you gain by becoming my personal mourner?"
In Nikolai's eyes flickered a spark of something alive, hungry, and infinitely lonely.
"As I already said, I gain freedom, Fyodor Mikhailovich. No more deals with drunken lieutenant ensigns whose wives have cuckolded them. No more snot-nosed little squealers who want to bewitch a beau. No more failed exams. No more money trades. I don't like taking souls from people, believe it or not, but I have no other way. I am meant to deprive those who have stumbled of their most precious thing, to show them in advance the hell in which they will find themselves, simply for having called on me in a moment of despair instead of our Lord God," he cast a mocking glance at the ceiling moldings. "But if I entrust myself to another person, become his… then I will no longer have to serve others."
“Oh, come on, Nikolai Vasilyevich,” Fyodor snorted sarcastically. He thought of the sable gloves and the jewellery that had lost its lustre. His auntie would be astonished. “Are you actually trying to propose to me? Asking me to steal from your tyrannical père’s house and run off somewhere far away?”
Nikolai, catching his mood, modestly lowered his eyes, shuffling his foot on the parquet.
"So, I have to choose between two unbearably boring years of life here and forty years of torment at the front?" Fyodor clasped his hands behind his back. "But since I have only two paths, why don't I simply shoot myself right here and now?"
Nikolai broke into a smile.
"My dear soul, for the same reason you didn't dash your head against the rocks in highland captivity and didn't agree to give me your soul, giving rise to all this bother," as if a comrade sharing a secret, Nikolai winked at him. "You fear god."
"I am not afraid of Him," Fyodor answered calmly.
Nikolai shrugged, leaning his back against a column – for which, in polite society, he would surely have been thrown out by the scruff of the neck, but all the officers were so drunk that they themselves were already suspiciously keeping their hands in their pockets and pressing giggling girls close while dancing.
Suddenly his face changed. For the second time, the mental sentry pulled the trigger on an empty chamber; Fyodor's mind was playing emotional Russian roulette with him, where it was unclear how many bullets were in the cylinder. In one moment, Nikolai appeared to him so cosmically tired, so gaunt – rather, even shot full of holes, from all those bullets that had been driven into him while grinding crumbling teeth. So miserable? His whole face had fallen and turned gray, lost the demonic gloss and glitter that sparkled with a thin layer of goose grease beneath the crystal chandeliers. In that short moment, he was no different from a wet puppy thrown by his master to be devoured by pigs because his legs were too short for a hunting hound.
"Look at me." His hoarse voice cut through the noisy chaos of the ball like a damask blade. "I am a mistake; I am a smudge in the margins of the Great Design. I'm cold – if you only knew, I'm always so cold. And you… your hands are warm."
The whole image cracked loudly. Fyodor snorted right into his bewildered face.
"I almost believed you, well done," he drawled in a tone so icy that the glasses of those accidentally eavesdropping on their conversation bloomed with frost. "But I was diagnosed with anemia as a boy."
In a burst of obscure delight, Fyodor pulled off his glove with his teeth, catching it by the finger, and with a quick, precise motion, the kind used to slash a carotid artery with a dirk, pressed his palm to the other man's neck. He was choking on merriment, a hot, wicked merriment that comes the moment you've lopped off someone's head with a saber while galloping full tilt on horseback. He wasn't thinking about what he was doing; wasn't thinking that he would never have done such a thing, that it was stupid, wasn't thinking that he would never have done such a thing, and that if someone other than Nikolai had been in that place, Sofia (or Sofya?), any of the potential brides, light as meringues, those girls in a cloud of tulle,if his palm had pressed against a rosy, peach-fuzzy, warm cheek; if his fingers had touched skin that creaked with powder; if his hand had not encountered a stiff lock of straw-like hair behind an ear, those sharp cheekbones cool as the surface of a wine glass; if those amber eyes, flaring up like smoldering coals, centuries-old congealed resin, the skeleton of an ancient two-headed bird; if those lips, bloodless and bitten like those of a dead poet, lips such as Ekaterina Karamzina must have kissed; if that face were surprised and joyful; if the sentry's revolver fired blanks, ah, after all…
Fyodor snatched his hand back. Nikolai was grinning with satisfaction, rubbing his cheek with the back of his hand.
"Don't you dare do that," Fyodor growled, hiding his hand back in the saving warmth of his kid glove.
"You have remarkable self-control," Nikolai purred, stretching as if he'd had a hearty meal. "Usually, after the first touch, they throw themselves at me."
Fyodor grimaced.
"Spare me your vulgarities." He straightened the tails of his uniform and adjusted the smallsword in scabbard. "You disgust me."
“You wouldn’t know it to look at you,” Nikolai shrugged, but stepped back a few paces. Apparently, he had a good idea which end of a sword was the pointy one. Fyodor was clearly not the sort to trim down the blade, leaving only the hilt to save carrying an extra two kilos.
Fyodor drew back, feeling the air between them discharge again, becoming the ordinary, stuffy air of the ballroom. The noise returned: the laughter of ladies, the creak of parquet under heels, a distant piano chord that might have been a gunshot if you closed your eyes. But he didn’t close his eyes – he looked at that waxen demon with the sly grin of the smallest predatory mammal in nature.
“Are you really a fiend?” Fyodor asked for some reason, casting a critical glance over Nikolai. The latter, just in case, also examined himself, as if unsure of his own existence.
“You may consider me the ghost of Christmas future,” he leered, folding his arms across his chest.
“And I thought you were just an ordinary petty imp who’s read too many Frenchmen,” Fyodor answered coldly. He fought the fire-breathing serpent of demonic slyness with hit‑and‑run attacks, now ducking under a jet of flame, now scratching its scaly neck with his blade.
Nikolai flinched, and the bells on his cloak jingled cheerlessly, like small coins in a beggar’s pocket.
“Walk under god’s eye – don’t consort with unclean spirits.” A sad sigh. “So let me be the spirit of Christmas instead. I could even show it to you, if you like.”
Nikolai pulled off his fur‑trimmed glove and slowly reached out to him, just as Fyodor himself had done a moment ago. Fyodor did not recoil, only tensed his whole body and narrowed his eyes. He had seen it too many times – and why hide it, had taken off heads himself – to mistake a hostile knife‑hand thrust for a friendly pat on the shoulder. What’s frightening is what’s behind your back. What’s frightening is what you don’t see. But once you manage to look death in the eye, terror retreats, leaving you face to face.
The unfamiliar fingers faltered right at Fyodor’s neck, meeting the crimson, new‑crisp cloth lapel of his uniform. For a second, Nikolai’s face twisted with an incomprehensible, pitying tenderness.
And then he lightly, almost weightlessly, touched the line of Fyodor’s jaw with the tips of his suddenly hot fingers. And the St. Petersburg ballroom crawled away somewhere. Walls crumbled, crumbling earth rustled. Light refracted, leaped, darted about, seeking somewhere to alight, but time and space mercilessly compressed it to the size of a kerosene lamp swaying beneath a ceiling of damp logs and stretched canvas. Underfoot, the reddish‑brown slush of Anatolian mud squelched.
The perfumes, wax, pomade vanished. In their place came a heavy, layered stench: the acrid reek of cheap shag, the suffocating smell of fried eggplants, the sour sweat of unwashed bodies, the sweetish‑cadaverous fume of oleander blooming somewhere in the distance, and over it all – the thick, metallic odor of raw clay and rust. The smell of earth turned inside out. The smell of the trench.
Fyodor froze in the narrow slit of a trench. Somewhere nearby, beyond the thick wall of sandbags, a cannon growled gutturally – the familiar, habitual muttering of a siege mortar. From the entrance, draped with filthy tarpaulin, came muffled voices, a hoarse cough, the clank of a mess tin. A hot, stray wind whistled, carrying with it fragments of a breeze from somewhere impossibly far away. If only they'd push us back to the sea, thought everyone who, day after day, year after year, hid in the cockroach hovels of occupied, deserted towns, with superstitious shame.
It was Christmas.
He didn’t realise it straight away. It was hard to make sense of anything in this chaotic, death-filled war zone. But there stood an icon: a small, soot- and fingerprint-blackened paper icon of the Nativity, pinned to a rafters with a rusty bayonet. In front of it, in a large-calibre empty cartridge case, a wick smouldered in a funnel; its flame flickered, choking on the thick smoke, but held out.
Around the little fire, on ammunition crates, on rolled-up greatcoats, sat soldiers. Their bodies pressed together, fusing into one enormous wounded beast, spitting out its last breath and will along with blood. Sunburnt, weather-beaten, with eyelids grown together from constant peering into the distance. Fyodor narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the faces of those sitting closer to the candle stub. One, a grey-haired non-commissioned officer with ravines for wrinkles, was quietly, monotonously humming either "Shchedryk" or "Holy Night" – impossible to tell: the old man's jaw had been blown off. Another, a young one, with inflamed, still-childish eyes, diligently, with some desperate fervor, was cleaning a bayonet. A third just sat, leaning against the wall, chewing on a stale ration, staring at one spot with vacant eyes. Fyodor remembered him: the man was an ensign, knew how to make soup from mud, and had lost his little and ring fingers on his right hand. Blown off by a shell in the Caucasus.
On a makeshift table cobbled together from rotten planks stood a bottle of murky liquid, a loaf of bread blackened at the edges, a lump of cheese, a few onions, and a piece of dried beef as tough as a shoe sole. A festive supper. Somewhere beyond the wall, in the night, a shot rang out with a dull thud, then another. No one even flinched: the usual accompaniment in this place. Here, in the pit, Christmas did not smell of incense and pine needles, but of wet straw and fear
And then Fyodor saw himself.
He sat in a corner, on an upturned crate from artillery shells marked with the Ottoman arsenal's stamp. It was him, without a doubt, but somehow settled, compressed by the years. From his face, against all common sense, wind and time had licked away the wrinkles, leaving it like a Byzantine statue that had sunk centuries ago, with sunken cheeks. On his chest, tarnished, filthy insignia of a major general occasionally flared with a lazy glint – only these insignia looked more like convict brands. No matter how high he had climbed, the front line would never release him. The Demon of War.
And on his knees lay someone. Shrunken, in a tattered soldier's uniform and a sun-faded Turkic red-and-blue kerchief. With beaten, bloody fingers, Fyodor was stroking the stiff grey hair, mechanically numbly – the way one peels potatoes absentmindedly. The straw-like locks broke in his palms, crumbled, fell to the floor like shed feathers. In Fyodor's hands remained whole strands, snow-white and fragile. Wings. Feathers. Someone pressed their cheek to the rough trouser leg, and softly sang along with that old soldier.
This other Fyodor raised his head. Their gazes met across the cramped dugout, across the soot, across the years. And in the eyes of that future self, Fyodor saw neither horror nor despair. Only a complete, icy, frozen-to-the-bottom indifference. A reconciliation with the fact that there would be no more balls, no more brides, no more Spasskoye. Only this hole, these faces, this little flame in the shell casing, and the war. A long war. An endless war
Nikolai stood nearby, ghostly and pale in the wavering light. He was staring at Fyodor – at his Fyodor – point-blank, and for the first time that evening, his face bore neither mockery nor triumph. He had grown haggard under the weight of a universal weariness that this time he was not faking for pity's sake.
"There it is, Fedenka," came a rustle like frozen straw by Fyodor's left ear. "Christmas."
And he again reached out his icy hand, not to Fyodor's cheek this time, but to his forehead, as if wishing to carve into his consciousness that smell of a doomed, underground holiday. And everything turned over.
It was not the ground giving way beneath his feet, but rather the opposite – it was pressed back down. The trench dampness, the suffocating stench of shag and clay, the hoarse whispers of the soldiers – all of it drained away like dirty water into a sewer. But what came in its place was not the ballroom's radiance. Nikolai was not finished tormenting him.
A dead, oppressive silence, broken only by a labored, wheezing sound.
Someone's breathing. His own.
The light did not expand, filling the lungs, but contracted even further. The lively, stubborn little flame of the shag turned into a dim half-light seeping through the frosted glass of a tall window. The light of a winter Petersburg morning, hopeless and flat. Outside, surely, the wind was blowing, and the whole sky was overcast with heavy clouds; snow had been falling for four days straight, like down from a pillow stabbed with a knife.
Fyodor stood in the middle of the nursery. The same nursery where once, behind a thick door, the floorboards of his father's library had creaked, where it smelled of bookbindings and the dry wood of the fireplace. Now it smelled of medicines. The sharp, alkaline smell of quinine, the mustiness of stagnant water in a decanter and – most of all – that pungent, animalistic stench of illness, the smell of sweat, excrement and quiet decay, the sort not found in state hospitals, but only in church-run hospitals
The same pink-and-white striped wallpaper, though now it was stained with dampness near the ceiling and peeling at the corners. The same oak shelves of books, all dusty, standing in disarray, as if someone had hastily tried to reconstruct a stage set from memory; and between the books lay scattered vials, little bottles, a saucer with dried mustard for a poultice. On the table where little toy soldiers had once marched in a toothy formation, there now crowded jars with leeches in murky water, a mortar with ground powder, and a cup of unfinished broth on whose surface congealed greasy corpse‑spots.
And in the midst of this desolation, on a high pile of rumpled pillows, lay he. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. But not a major general. Hardly even a man, in fact.
Bone wrapped in yellowish, transparent skin, through which veins showed like blue seams. His eyes had sunk so deep it seemed a wild dog had gouged them out a couple of months ago; and the sockets stared at the ceiling with a dull, lifeless absence of thought. On his forehead and upper lip glistened a cold, sticky perspiration. His hands – once capable of twirling a saber for hours – lay on top of the quilted blanket: thin, with yellow nails, the fingers convulsively clutching and unclutching a fold of the fabric in some meaningless, feverish rhythm.
In the corner of the room, in a rocking chair, an elderly woman in a bonnet dozed. Not his aunt – some nurse with a puffy face. No one was praying. Fyodor was absolutely. Disarmingly. Terrifyingly. Alone.
It was Christmas.
Laughter, the clink of glasses from the first floor, and the bare paw of a fir tree stuck in a pitcher of water on the dressing table. The needles had fallen off, turned yellow. Only that single branch, which, presumably out of pity, one of the servants had brought.
"Look," Nikolai whispered, and for the first time that evening, his breath seemed to Fyodor not damp and icy, but fresh. Fyodor barely restrained himself from reflexively jerking backward and crashing his left shoulder into Nikolai's chest. "Your own walls. A warm blanket. A hospital doctor comes every other day. Your aunt visits every evening, weeps into her handkerchief, whispers about 'poor Fyodenka' and is already scouting out in her circle a new candidate for the role of nephew‑heir. And Sofya – clever girl, your wife – manages Spasskoye. A sturdy wench. Well, look: everything in order, everything proper."
He took a step closer to the bed, leaned over the dying face.
"It’s just a fever. It eats you up from the inside, slowly, a gram at a time. You lie there listening to the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. One. Two. Three. Every tick is another second of the two years you have left. You hear the guests gathering in the drawing room, laughing, the clink of crockery. Your ball. Only you no longer dance at it. You’re a ghost in your own home. They whisper about you, down there. ‘Ah, poor Fyodor Mikhailovich, just look at that,", Nikolai, contrary to his habit, did not mimic voices or grimace, "‘He could have become the youngest colonel under the Tsar; they say he was aiming for the aide-de-camp corps. Ah, what a tragedy, so young, and we loved him so much. But they won’t be coming in, will they?’"
Fyodor closed his eyes. It was hardly fear. It was disgust. Disgust at this feebleness, this helplessness, this quiet, passive fading amid dust, medicines, and indifference. A long, humiliating decay, when the consciousness, still sharp as a razor, is locked inside a body that is already decomposing alive.
Nikolai walked over to the fireplace and scraped his fingernail against the wick of an unlit candle. It flared up for a moment with a bright, poisonous‑yellow flame, then settled into an even, dull burn, smoking black soot that immediately soaked into the stale air of the room. Above the candle appeared a dusty icon: probably the nurse, herself a former peasant woman, had brought it. The flame tenderly caressed the crude features of Christ.
Two men watched the flame. One – from the bed, with an empty stare. The other – from the depths of the room, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
"Choose, Fyodor Mikhailovich," Nikolai's voice became very quiet, and a wave of anguish washed over Fyodor. That must be how priests felt when hearing the confession of buffoons. "Two years of this… a decorous end for a Russian officer, in the bosom of his family. Or forty years of penal servitude under the Turkish sun, where if anyone remembers you at all, it will be as the 'Black Colonel', by your own, hated by your enemies. Both paths lead to the same point. Which is more honest?"
He turned around, and in his pale eyes reflected the flame of the candle, doomed to burn out in this room where even the holiday was like a funeral.
The music and laughter from the first floor beat more and more insistently against the wooden doors, dried and shrunken with time, thrusting their spider‑like fingers through the cracks under the jambs. Nikolai straightened up, and in an instant, all the predatory seriousness left his face, replaced by his familiar mask of a lively, pampered darling.
"And now," he said, grabbing the brass handle, "I beg your pardon for this little… private conversation. They must be waiting for you."
He flung open the door. The noise of the celebration flooded into the room like a warm wave, the hum of voices, laughter, the patter of heels on parquet, and the insistent wailing of strings. After the silence and the weight of the words just spoken, these sounds seemed unnaturally loud, almost vulgar.
Fyodor stepped out after him, and the light of the chandeliers struck his eyes, making him squint. The room full of dancing couples, gleaming aiguillettes, and rustling dresses now appeared to him like a crudely painted backdrop. Laughing faces, easy bows, playful glances – all of it now seemed drawn on grainy canvas. He walked through the crowd, feeling the admiring and wary gazes of the guests upon him. Have you heard? Yes, three years in captivity. Fifty men gone, just like that. In six years he rose to lieutenant colonel. Have you heard? Darling, there's nothing to him, really. They say he surrendered on purpose, to spy from behind enemy lines. They say he made a deal with the devil to advance his career. They say he lost his soul in the Caucasus. They say he himself is a devil. Dostoevsky the Demon. Ah, don't look him in the eyes. Smile, really.
The Demon.
Nikolai emerged from the silence, deftly catching Fyodor by the elbow as if supporting an old friend, and whispered in his ear:
"Look how beautiful they all are in their ignorance. It's almost a pity that you can no longer become one of them. But can their sweet dream compare to what awaits you?"
Fyodor swayed, caught between two realities: the tenuous but still tangible fabric of the ball – the rustle of silk, the trembling of candle flames in the chandeliers – and the nightmare he had just lived through, which was neither a dream nor a delirium, but something far more vile.
Time in the ballroom flowed strangely, thickly. It dripped like a heavy syrup, flooding everything around with that golden, false radiance. Fyodor saw faces. There she was, the bride with the inheritance and a name beginning with, it seemed, "F" (or was it "S"?); her smile suddenly struck him as terribly fragile, like a porcelain trinket about to be dropped. They'll drop you, my dear. You won't see Spasskoye or the title of colonel's wife. Everyone here lived in their own simple, comprehensible world, where the future was measured by the next ball season or an advantageous match. There was the dandy, who'd smashed another glass, now laughing with his head thrown back, the light playing on his moist teeth. There was the lady in a dress the color of soured wine, whispering something greedily into her neighbor's ear, her eyes glittering with petty, visceral spite. There was his aunt, nodding to him from behind the guests' backs, and her smile now seemed not merely false but monstrous, like a ritual mask on a living face. They all moved in a strange, slow-motion dance of natives, and the Christmas tree, their wooden God on its marble pedestal, glared carnivorously in the quivering light.
Fyodor straightened up. The tremor in his hands subsided. He caught Nikolai's eye, looked into those murky eyes that had seen thousands of corpses, thousands of people on the brink of despair, but had never seen a choice. People were always too quick to part with their souls to give any thought to choice. To freedom?
"Very well," he said at last, his voice dry and strained. "I choose war."
Nikolai froze. A spasm ran across his face. He bowed slowly, theatrically.
"Oh, Fyodor Mikhailovich!" he whispered, straightening up. "You won't regret it."
He extended his hand – fingers in an old glove, like broken wicks. Fyodor did not shake it. Instead, he turned and walked away without looking back. His aunt caught him at the exit from the drawing room, her face sparkling with a mixture of triumph and anxiety.
"Well?" she hissed, grabbing his sleeve. "What about Sofya? Did she agree? Ah, mon doux garçon, what a match!"
"No, Aunt," he answered, gently freeing his arm. His aunt smelled of dust, powder, champagne, and something Fyodor would not smell again for the rest of his life. He would not come to the funeral of the woman who had read him Charles Perrault at bedtime as a child. When the priest was chanting the service over her corpse on money sent anonymously from abroad, Fyodor would be slashing open an Ankara boy to extract the location of a supply train for the partisans. "I'm leaving the day after tomorrow. For the front."
She went pale.
"But… but what about Spasskoye? The debts? The bride?"
"I'll sign Spasskoye over to you, you'll manage it more sensibly than I ever could. I'll settle all the debts; give me a couple of years. And the bride…" He grinned. "I already have a companion."
She did not understand. Fyodor stepped out into the vestibule, where the air was colder and cleaner, without the admixture of alcoholic perfumes. Behind him, in the hall, a shadow flickered – white, angular, with a long braid. It followed him, as promised. Over his left shoulder.