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WHEN THE grey winter day was darkening; when the street lamps were freshly lit and their gas flames burned with a cold radiance while warm light filled the storefronts and the shops; when the day’s demands finally let go and Moscow’s evening life began to stir; when the cabbies drove with extra energy and bustle, and their horse-drawn sleds began to fill the streets; when the vague, dark figures of pedestrians moved with new vitality along the snowy walks; when the roar of packed trams plunging down the tracks grew stronger, and green stars were visible, already, as they fell hissing from the cables in the heavy dusk—always at that hour my driver whirled me through the streets, always at that hour I was sailing in a sled, pulled fast by a strong and spirited trotter from Krasnye Vorota to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which stood directly opposite the building where she lived. And every evening I took her to dinner at the Hermitage, the Prague, or the Metropol, then to the theatre or a concert, and finally to the Strelnya or the Yar. I didn’t know where all of this would lead, and I didn’t want to think about it, for I could come to no conclusion, and there was little point in trying—just as there was little point in asking her about the future: she’d ruled out all such conversations. She was enigmatic, at times inscrutable to me. Our intimacy was incomplete, and our relationship resisted definition: thus I was wracked by hope, suspended in a state of constant, painful expectation. And still, every hour spent near her brought me a joy beyond all words.

For some reason she was studying at the university. She rarely went to classes—but she went. When I asked her why, she shrugged and said: “Why do we do anything on this earth? Do we really understand anything about our actions? And anyway—history interests me.” She lived alone. Her widowed father, a cultured man from a distinguished merchant class, lived a quiet life in Tver, where, like all merchants, he collected something. Primarily for the view it afforded of Moscow, she rented a fifth-floor corner apartment in a building that faced the Cathedral of Christ the Savior; it consisted of only two rooms, but they were spacious and well furnished. The first was largely occupied by a wide ottoman; it also contained an expensive piano, on which she constantly practiced the beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata”—playing again and again those slow, enchanting, dreamlike notes, and nothing else. Elegant flowers stood in cut-glass vases on the piano and her dressing table; fresh bouquets were delivered to her every Saturday by my order, and when I arrived in the evening to find her lying on the couch, above which hung, for some reason, a portrait of Tolstoy in his bare feet, she would slowly extend her hand for me to kiss, and say distractedly, “Thank you for the flowers.” I brought her boxes of chocolates, new books by Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmajer, and Przybyszewski—and always I received the same “thank you”, the same warm, extended hand, an occasional order to sit beside her on the couch without removing my coat. “I don’t know why,” she’d say pensively, looking at my beaver-fur collar, “but it seems there’s nothing better than the smell of winter air that you bring into this room from the street.” It seemed she needed none of this—not the flowers or the books, not the lunches or the theatre tickets or the dinners outside town—and yet she strongly preferred certain flowers to others, read every book I brought her, consumed each box of chocolates in no more than a day. At lunch and dinner she ate as much as I, having a particular affection for burbot pasties with eel-pout stew and pink hazel grouse in heavily fried sour cream. Sometimes she would say, “A whole lifetime of lunches and dinners—I don’t understand it. Why don’t people get tired of this?” And yet she ate her own lunches and dinners with all the zest and understanding of a seasoned Muscovite. Her only glaring weakness was for clothes—expensive furs, velvet, silks.

We were both rich, healthy, and young—and so attractive that people often turned their heads to look at us in restaurants and concert halls. Although born in the Penza province, I for some reason possessed the flamboyant good looks of a southerner. Indeed, an acclaimed actor—a monstrously fat man who was famous for his wit and gluttony—once told me I was “obscenely handsome.” “Only the devil knows what you are-some kind of Sicilian or something,” he added in his drowsy voice. And it was true—there was something southern about my character, something prone to easy smiles and good-natured jokes. She possessed a kind of Indian or Persian beauty—a complexion like dark amber, hair so black and full it seemed almost sinister in its magnificence. Her eyebrows gleamed softly like sable; the rich blackness of velvet and coal filled her eyes. One had to overcome a small spell to look away from her mouth, her rich red lips, and the dark, delicate down above them. When we went out, she usually wore a garnet velvet dress and matching shoes with golden clasps, but she attended lectures dressed as modestly as any student, and afterward ate lunch for thirty kopecks in a vegetarian cafeteria on the Arhat. She was as taciturn and introspective as I was voluble and blithe—forever disappearing into her own thoughts, carefully exploring something deep inside her mind. As she lay reading on the couch, she’d often lower her book and stare meditatively into the distance: I observed her doing this several times when I stopped to see her in the afternoons, for each month she refused to leave her rooms for three or four entire days, and during these periods I was forced to sit beside her in an armchair, reading silently.

“You are awfully talkative, you know. And you fidget constantly,” she’d say. “Just let me finish this chapter.”

“If I weren’t so talkative and fidgety, I might never have met you,” I answered, reminding her of our first conversation. Sometime in December I’d wound up sitting next to her at a lecture by Andrey Bely, which he delivered in song as he ran and danced around the stage. I shifted in my seat and laughed so hard that she looked at me in surprise for some time, then also broke into laughter—and I immediately began to chat lightheartedly with her.

“True enough,” she said. “But please be quiet for a little longer. Read a little more. Have a cigarette.”

“I can’t be quiet! You don’t understand how intensely I love you—you have no idea! And you clearly don’t love me.”

“I do understand. And as for my love, you know perfectly well that I have no one on earth other than you and my father. You’re my first and last—isn’t that enough? But let’s stop talking about this. Reading with you is clearly impossible, so let’s have some tea.”

I would get up then and put water on to boil in the electric teapot that stood on a small table beside the couch, take cups and saucers from the walnut cabinet in the corner—and all the while say whatever came into my head:

“Did you finish reading The Fire Angel?”

“I skimmed through it to the end. It’s so pretentious I’m ashamed to read it.”

“Why did you leave Chaliapin’s concert so abruptly yesterday?”

“It was such a display—too much for me. And I’ve never been a great fan of all that dreck about ‘Fair Haired Rus’.”

“You don’t like anything.”

“Not much.”

“A strange love,” I would think to myself, as I stood waiting for the water to boil and looked out the windows. The scent of flowers filled the room, a scent inextricably linked to her in my mind. Beyond one window, a huge panorama of the city sprawled far beyond the Moscow River, all of it blue-grey under snow. The other window, to the left of the first, looked out onto a section of the Kremlin, across from which stood the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: its white mass seemed excessively close to the fortress wall, and all of it looked too new. The reflections of jackdaws hung like blue spots in the golden cupola as they flew in endless circles around it. “Such a strange city,” I said to myself, thinking of Moscow’s old streets, thinking of St. Basil’s Cathedral and Iverskaya Chapel, thinking of the church known as Spas-Na-Boru, the Italian cathedrals inside the Kremlin—and then, those fortress walls before me, their guard towers and sharp points like something from Khirgizia.

Arriving at dusk, I sometimes found her on the couch wearing just a silk gown trimmed with sable fur—a gift she said her grandmother from Astrakhan had bequeathed her in her will. I’d leave the lights off and sit beside her in the half dark, kissing her arms and legs, her stunningly sleek and graceful body. She resisted nothing but maintained a steadfast silence. Again and again I’d seek out her warm lips with my mouth, and she would give them to me, breathing fitfully—but never uttering a word. And when she finally sensed that I would soon lose all control, she’d push me aside and sit up, ask me to turn on the light, her voice completely calm. I’d do as she requested; she would rise and go into the bedroom while I sat on the piano stool, like someone waiting for a drug’s hot flush and delirium to pass. Fifteen minutes later she’d come out dressed and ready to leave, calm and matter-of-fact, as if nothing ever happened.

“Where to today? The Metropol, perhaps?”

And again we’d talk all night about something unimportant and extraneous. Soon after our affair began, I’d spoken about marriage, and she’d said, “No—I’ll be no good as a wife. I’ll be no good at all.”

But this did not eradicate my hopes. “We’ll see,” I told myself, and talked no more of marriage, hoping she would change her mind eventually. There were days when our incomplete intimacy seemed unbearable, but then, what remained for me, other than the hope held out by time? Once, sitting near her in the evening semi-dark and silence, I clutched my head in my hands. “No, this is beyond my strength,” I said. “Why, why should you and I be tortured this way?”

She didn’t speak.

“And really, all the same—this isn’t love. This isn’t love.”

She answered calmly from the dark. “Maybe not. Who knows what love is?”

“I do! I know what love is—what happiness is,” I exclaimed. “And I’ll wait for you to recognize it too.”

“Happiness,” she said. “Our happiness, friend, is like water in a fishing net. As you pull it in, the net seems full. But lift it out—and nothing’s there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Platon Karataev says that to Pierre.”

I waved my hand. “Oh, please—spare me the Eastern wisdom.”

And again I talked all night about something peripheral to our lives—a new production at the theatre, a new story by Andreev. And again it was enough for me to know that I would sit close to her in the sleigh; that I would hold her in soft, rich furs as we rocked from side to side and the runners sailed along the snowy streets; to know that I would enter a crowded restaurant with her while an orchestra played the march from Aida; that I would eat and drink beside her; that I would hear her slow voice, look at her lips, remember how I kissed them an hour ago—yes, I kissed them, I would say to myself, looking with gratitude and joy at those lips and the soft down above them, looking at the rich red velvet of her dress and the slope of her shoulders, looking at the oval of her breasts as the light, almost spicy fragrance of her hair penetrated my senses, and I thought “Moscow, Astrakhan, India, Persia!” Sometimes in restaurants outside town, toward the evening’s end, when the room was filled with smoke and noise—and she was tipsy, had herself begun to smoke—she’d lead me to a private room and ask to hear the gypsies sing. They’d come to us with a deliberate racket, overly familiar and relaxed. A woman with a low forehead and tar-black bangs would lead the small choir while before it stood an old man wearing a knee-length coat with galloons, a guitar on a blue ribbon over his shoulder, his dark, hairless scalp like cast iron, his blue-grey face resembling a drowning victim’s. She always listened with an enigmatic, languid, almost mocking smile. At three or four in the morning I’d drive her home; on the steps of her house I would close my eyes from happiness and kiss the damp fur of her collar—and then, plunged into some strange mix of ecstasy and despair, I’d sail home to Krasnye Vorota. And it will be the same, I always thought, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that—the same torture and the same joy. What else is there to say? It was happiness. Great happiness.

So January and February passed. So Maslenitsa came and went. On the Sunday of Forgiveness she told me to come to her after four in the evening. When I arrived, she was already wearing black felt boots and a hat and short coat made of dark astrakhan fur.

“All in black,” I said, ecstatic as always.

A tender, quiet expression played in her eyes.

“Well, tomorrow’s Cleansing Monday,” she said, drawing her gloved hand from her muff to give to me. “Lord God, master of my life,” she said in Old Church Slavonic, reciting the first words of St. Yefrem Sirin’s prayer. “Let’s go to Novodevichy,” she added suddenly. “I’d like to walk around the graveyard and the abbey. Will you go with me?”

I was surprised but answered hurriedly, “Yes, of course.”

“What are we doing, after all?—every day another meal in some seedy tavern somewhere,” she added. “Yesterday morning I went to Rogozhskoe.”

I was even more surprised. “The cemetery? For schismatics? Why?”

“Yes, the schismatics. It’s old Russia—Rus before Peter. They were burying an archbishop. Just try to imagine it: the coffin’s made from the trunk of an oak, just the way they did it in ancient times; it has a gold brocade that looks like it’s been hammered out. The dead man’s face is covered by a white pall that’s patterned with rough, black thread. Everything about it’s beautiful and terrifying. The deacons stand beside the coffin, holding Ripidas and Trikirys.”

“How do you know all this? Ripidas, Trikirys!”

“You just don’t know me—that’s why you’re surprised.”

“I didn’t know that you’re so religious.”

“It’s not religiousness. I don’t know what it is, exactly. But, for instance, sometimes in the morning—or in the evening, if you aren’t dragging me off to some restaurant—I go to the cathedrals in the Kremlin. You never suspected that, I’m sure. But I listen to the rest—about the funeral: you just can’t imagine the deacons there. It’s like you’re looking at those monks who drove the Tatars out five hundred years ago—it’s as if Peresvet and Oslyabya themselves were standing in front of you! There were two, separate choirs, and all the singers were like Peresvet as well—tall and powerful, wearing long black caftans. They sang in answer to one another—first one choir, then the other. They sang in unison, but they weren’t following the kind of musical notes you see today; they were singing by kryuk—those ancient notes without lines. The grave was covered with fresh, bright branches from an evergreen. And outside—a heavy frost, sunlight, blinding snow. No, none of this makes any sense to you. Let’s go.”

It was a peaceful, sunny evening, with frost hanging in the trees and jackdaws perched on the blood-red walls of the convent, lingering in the silence like little nuns. The sad and delicate chimes of the clock tower played over and again as we passed through the gates and set out along the silent paths between the graves, our shoes squeaking in the snow. The sun had recently set, but the evening was still bright. And it was stunning how the icy boughs became grey coral before the gold enamel of the sky, how the undying flames of icon lamps glimmered all around us, like furtive, wistful lights scattered among the graves. Walking behind her, I looked at the small stars her new, black boots left in the snow, and a great tenderness welled up inside me: she felt it too, and turned.

“It’s true, you really do love me,” she said, shaking her head in quiet amazement.

We paused at the graves of Ertel and Chekhov. She stood for a long time, looking at Chekhov’s headstone, holding her muff low, her hands clasped together inside it.

“The Moscow Art Theatre and a saccharine Russian style,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “What an irritating mix.”

It began to grow dark and cold. We slowly left through the gates and found Fyodor, my driver, waiting patiently nearby with the sleigh.

“Let’s drive around a little more,” she said. “And then go to Yegorov’s for our last blini. We’ll take it slowly, though, all right Fyodor?”

“As you wish.”

“Somewhere in Ordynka there’s a house where Griboyedov lived. Let’s go and look for it.”

And so we went for some reason to Ordynka, where we drove for a long time along alleys that looked onto private gardens and backyards. We even came to Griboyedov Alley, but not a single passerby could point us to the house in which he’d lived. What did Griboyedov mean to them? It had grown completely dark a long time ago, and the lights of the rooms that we glimpsed through the trees glowed pink behind rime-covered glass.

“There’s an abbey near here too,” she said. “Marfo—Mariinskaya.”

I laughed. “Again to the nunnery?”

“No, I just…”

The first floor of Yegorov’s Inn at Okhotny Ryad was as hot as a sauna and completely packed with rough-looking cabbies wearing bulky coats as they cut into big stacks of blini drenched in butter and sour cream. The low-ceilinged rooms of the second floor were warm as well; there, old-style merchants ate their blini with large-grained caviar and cold champagne. We passed into the back and sat on a black leather couch before a long table; in one corner of the room an icon lamp hung before the blackened image of The Virgin with Three Arms. A delicate frost had gathered in the slight down above her lip, and a soft pink flush had risen in her amber cheeks; her pupils seemed to merge completely with the black rings of her irises. I couldn’t take my ecstatic eyes from her.

“Just right,” she said, drawing a handkerchief from her perfumed muff. “Completely savage mouzhiki downstairs, while here we have blini with champagne and The Virgin with Three Arms. Three Arms! It’s India! You, my dear friend from the nobility—you cannot begin to understand this city the way I do.”

“I can, and I do,” I said. “And now let’s order an obed silen.”

“What’s that?—’silen‘?”

” ‘Mighty’—a ‘mighty feast.’ Don’t you know that? It’s Old Church Slavonic: ‘So spake Gyurgy.'”

“Oh, that’s nice—’Gyurgy.'”

“Yes, Prince Yury Dolgoruky—Gyurgy. ‘So spake Gyurgy to Prince Svyatoslav: “Come to me, brother, in Moscow,”‘ and he commanded that they prepare an obed silen—a mighty feast.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Where can you hear words like that now? And you can find that old Rus only in a few monasteries in the north. And in the church songs. I went to Zachatyevsky Monastery the other day. You wouldn’t believe how beautifully they sing there! It’s breathtaking! And it’s even better at Chudov. I went there every day during Holy Week last year. Oh, it was lovely. Puddles everywhere, the air already soft—already filled with spring. There’s something tender and sad that enters your soul. And you sense all the time that this is your homeland—this is its ancient past. All day the cathedral doors stand open; all day ordinary people come in and out; all day the services continue. Oh, I’ll put on the veil one day! I’ll enter a convent in the middle of nowhere—some place deep in the heart of Vologda or Vyatka!”

I wanted to tell her that then I too would enter a cloister—or slit someone’s throat in order to be shipped away to Sakhalin. Distracted by the sudden surge of emotion her words brought on, I forgot where we were and started to light a cigarette—but the waiter came immediately.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but there’s no smoking here,” he said respectfully. He wore a white shirt and white pants, belted with a bright red braid. “What would you like with your blini?” he asked quickly, and launched into a complicated list with marked diffidence: “Herb vodka? Caviar? Salmon? We have an unusually good sherry to go with the fish stew, and for the cod.”

“Sherry for the cod as well,” she interjected, delighting me with this lighthearted banter, which she kept up all evening. I listened to her happily, not caring what she said. “I love Russian chronicles and legends,” she continued, a quiet light playing in her eyes.” In fact, I’m rereading my particular favorites until I’ve learned them by heart: ‘There once stood on Russian soil a city known as Murom. Over it reigned a prince named Pavel, a follower of God. The devil sent a winged serpent to tempt his wife with fornication. And as a man most alluring did the serpent come to her.'”

I opened my eyes wide with mock horror. “Oh, how terrible!”

She ignored me and continued: “God tested her that way. ‘And when the time of her passing came, that prince and his wife beseeched God to take them on the same day. Together they agreed to lie in one grave. They deemed that two chambers be carved in one tomb. They put on the clothes of the cloistered.'”

Again my idle listening turned to sharp surprise, even alarm—what was going on with her?

I took her home that night sometime after ten, an extraordinarily early hour for us. As we parted, she suddenly called out from the steps to her house:

“Wait, wait. Don’t come before ten tomorrow. There’s an actors’ party at the Art Theatre.”

I was already sitting in the sleigh again. “And so? You mean—you want to go to a kapustnik?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve always said there’s nothing more vulgar or more stupid than those actors getting drunk and acting like fools on stage.”

“There isn’t. But I want to go all the same.”

I shook my head to myself: What caprice this city breeds! But I called out cheerfully in English: “All right.”

At ten o’clock the next evening I took the elevator to her apartment, opened the door with my key, and paused in the darkened foyer: it was surprisingly bright in the rooms before me. Everything was lit: the chandeliers, the candelabra on the sides of the mirror, the tall lamp with the cloth shade that stood behind the ottoman. I could hear the beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata” being played on the piano—each slow, invocatory note unfolding with the mystic logic of a sleepwalker’s steps, each growing stronger, almost overwhelming in its sorrow and its joy. I closed the foyer door heavily behind me: the music broke off and I heard the rustling of a dress. When I entered the room she was standing very straight and somewhat theatrically beside the piano in a black velvet dress that made her look even more slender than usual. She was radiant in all her finery, with her pitch black hair elaborately arranged, with the dark amber of her arms and shoulders and the delicate, full beginning of her breasts exposed, with the fractured light of diamond earrings playing on her lightly powdered cheeks—with the coal black velvet of her eyes, with the deep velvet-red of her mouth. Fine glossy braids hung from her temples, curling up toward her eyes like the hair of exotic, Eastern beauties in those simplistic prints so popular among the masses.

“If I were a singer on stage,” she said, looking at my dazed expression, “this is how I’d answer the applause—a friendly smile, a light bow to the right and to the left, then to the balcony and the floor. And at the same time I’d very carefully, very discreetly be using my foot to slide the train of my dress back a safe distance—to make sure I didn’t step on it.”

At the kapustnik she smoked a great deal and steadily sipped champagne, watching intently as the players on stage shouted and sang in little outbursts while performing something supposedly Parisian, and Stanislavsky, with his white hair and black eyebrows and big frame, performed a can-can with Moskvin, who was stocky and wore a pince-nez on his big washtub face: together they pretended to struggle desperately with the dance, eliciting loud, raucous laughter from the audience as they fell back from the stage. Pale from drink, Kachalov approached us with a wine glass in his hand. A lock of his Belarus hair fell across his forehead, which was damp with large beads of sweat.

“Queen Maiden Shamakhanskaya! Tsarina! To your health,” he said in his low-pitched actor’s voice, looking at her with an affected expression of gloom and greedy desire. She slowly smiled and touched glasses with him. He took her hand and almost toppled over as he lurched drunkenly toward her, then righted himself and shot a glance at me. “Who’s this little beauty?” he said, clenching his teeth. “I can’t stand him!”

A barrel organ began to wheeze and whistle, then broke into the driving rhythms of a polka: Sulerzhitsky came gliding through the crowd toward us, laughing and hurrying somewhere as always. He bent his short body low before her, like an obsequious little merchant at an outdoor market.

“Permit me to invite you to dance the polka,” he mumbled hurriedly. Smiling, she rose and went with him, her diamond earrings, her dark arms and bare shoulders gleaming in the lights. Together they moved among the tables, where people clapped their hands or stared with rapt attention as she stepped lightly to the music’s rhythm, and he threw back his head to shout like a bleating goat: “Come, come, my friend—it’s time to dance the polka!”

Sometime after two she rose and put her hand over her eyes. As we dressed for the sleigh ride home, she looked at my beaver-skin hat, stroked the fur collar of my coat.

“Of course, you are a beauty. Kachalov’s right,” she said as she moved toward the exit, her voice equally serious and lighthearted. ” ‘And as a man most alluring did the serpent come to her.'”

During the ride home she sat without speaking, hiding her face as we drove into a bright stream of snow blowing through the moonlight. “Like some kind of luminous skull,” she said later, watching the halfmoon plunge in and out of the clouds above the Kremlin. When the bells in Spasskaya Tower struck three, she spoke again:

“What an ancient sound. Some kind of tin and cast iron. They rang with the same sound when it was three o’clock in the fifteenth century. In Florence the bells sound exactly the same—they always reminded me of Moscow there.”

When Fyodor stopped before her house, she said lifelessly: “Let him go.”

I was stunned—she never allowed me upstairs at night.

”I’ll walk home, Fyodor,” I said, bewildered.

Without speaking we rode the elevator to her floor, entered the silence and dark warmth of her apartment, where little hammers tapped inside the radiators. I took off her snow-slick coat, and she cast into my hands the wet down shawl she’d used to cover her hair, then walked quickly to the bedroom, her silk slip rustling. I took off my coat and hat, went into the living room, and sat down on the ottoman, my heart going still, as if I’d come to the edge of an abyss. I could hear her every step through the open doors to the bedroom, where a light was burning—could hear her dress catching on her hairpins as she slid it over her head. I got up and went toward the doors. Wearing only swan’s-down slippers, she stood before the pier glass with her back to me, running a tortoiseshell comb through the long, black strands of hair that fell along her face.

“And all that time he kept complaining. Kept saying that I don’t think of him enough,” she said, dropping the comb on the table, tossing back her hair. “No, I thought of him,” she said, and turned to me.

*  *  *  *  *

I felt her moving at dawn and opened my eyes: she was staring fixedly at me. I raised myself up from the warmth of her body and the bed. She leaned closer.

“This evening I’m leaving for Tver,” she said in a quiet, even voice. “God only knows for how long.” She laid her cheek against mine. I felt the dampness of her lashes as she blinked.

“I’ll write everything as soon as I arrive. I’ll write everything about the future. But forgive me, I need to be alone now. I’m very tired.” She laid her head back on the pillow.

Timidly I kissed her hair; carefully I dressed—and quietly stepped out into the stairwell, already bathed in pale sunlight. I walked in fresh, damp snow. The storm from last night had already passed, and now everything was calm. I could see far into the distance along the streets; the scent of the new snow mixed with the smell of baking from the nearby shops. I walked as far as lverskaya Chapel: the heat inside was heavy, almost overpowering, and the candles blazed like banked fires before the icons. I knelt in the melting snow that had been tracked inside, knelt in the crowd of beggars and old women, removed my hat. … Someone reached out to my shoulder and I turned: a miserable old woman was staring at me, crying out of pity.

“No, no—you must not grieve this way,” she said, her face contorted by her weeping. “Such black grieving is a sin. A sin!”

The brief letter I received some two weeks later was tender but unyielding in its request that I wait for her no longer—and make no attempt to find or see her. “I won’t be coming back to Moscow. For now I’ll serve as a lay sister, then, perhaps, put on the veil. May God give you the strength to make no answer to this letter. It’s pointless to intensify this suffering, to prolong our torture.”

I complied with her request. I lost myself for a long time in the most squalid bars and taverns—drinking each day, letting myself sink deeper and deeper each day. And then, slowly, bit by bit, hopelessly, indifferently, I began to recover. Almost two years had passed since that Cleansing Monday, that first day of the Great Fast.

In 1914, just before the New Year, there was another quiet, sunny evening—much like that evening I cannot forget. My driver took me to the Kremlin. There I went inside Arkhangelsky Cathedral. It was empty; I stood for a long time without praying in the twilight, stood and looked at the dull gleam of the old gold in the iconostasis, the stone slabs above the graves of Moscow tsars: it seemed that I was waiting for something in the silence—that silence which occurs only in an empty church, when you’re afraid to breathe. I climbed back into my sleigh, told the driver to continue at a walk to Ordynka—and slowly I followed the same little side streets as before, passing gardens and backyards beneath lit windows, traveling an alley named for Griboyedov while I wept and wept.

At Ordynka I stopped the driver near the gate to Marfo-Mariinskaya Abbey. Black carriages stood in the courtyard; beyond them I could see the open doors of the small, brightly lit church, from which the singing of a female choir drifted mournfully into the open air. For some reason I felt an urge to go inside immediately. The groundskeeper blocked my way at the gate.

“It’s closed, sir,” he said in a soft, imploring voice.

“What do you mean ‘closed’? The church is closed?”

“Well, you can go inside, sir, of course, but I’m begging you not to. Not now. The Grand Duchess Elzavet Fyodorovna is there, sir, with Grand Duke Mitry Palych.”

I stuck a ruble in his hand; he sighed as if stricken with grief, and let me pass. But as I entered the courtyard, a procession carrying icons and holy banners came from the church, followed by the duchess, who wore long white robes and a white veil with a golden cross sewn into its front. Tall, thin-featured, she carried a large candle and walked slowly, devoutly, with lowered eyes. Behind her stretched a long row of women identically dressed in white, singing as they walked, their faces illuminated by the candles they held. I couldn’t tell if they were nuns or women of the laity, and I didn’t know where they were going. But for some reason I watched carefully as they passed. And suddenly, near the middle of that line, one of them raised her head in its white veil as she walked. Shielding the flame of her candle with one hand, she aimed her dark eyes into the darkness, as if staring straight at me. What could she see in the darkness? How could she have felt my presence there? I turned. I went quietly back through the gate.