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prodded Arkady with the gun. “Never mind him.”
    “Fedya, I just want to talk to Zhenya.”
    “You’re not listening,” Georgy said.
    “He plays chess,” Arkady told Fedya. “You should ask him to teach you how to play chess.”
    “Shut up!” Georgy said.
    Fedya stole a glance at the dark of a doorway, where a foot stepped back beyond the reach of the light. He felt Zhenya’s gaze and saw the scene from Zhenya’s point of view: the snow-covered battlefield, casualties nursing their dignity and winners dragging off packages like Christmas presents.
    A chorus of police whistles promised that authority was on its way. The militia had clubs but, in the dark, who could tell whom to beat? They did their best. Meanwhile, the boys disappeared, not so much retreating as dissolving into shadows. Georgy backed off, the gun still pointed at Arkady, who watched the boys gather and slip away.
    “Zhenya!”
    Georgy’s group slipped between trash bins, climbed a chain-link fence, and in a moment were gone in the direction of the railroad yard, a confusing array of sidetracks and trains on any night and now a white maze. Arkady followed their prints through the snow until all the footsteps went in separate directions and left him spinning.
    Arkady retreated to the station. He staggered into the still atmosphere of the station’s great hall, the suspended breath of the chandeliers, the rows of motionless bodies. As if sleep were the first business of the station, train departures were not announced. Take me to romantic Kazan, Arkady thought, to the land of peacocks and the Golden Horde. He was coughing so hard he dropped his cigarettes. Disgusted, he crumpled the pack and tossed it aside.
    As he came out the front of the station he saw—briefly, before snow obscured his view—Georgy and Fedya with a boy that could have been Zhenya crossing the traffic island in the middle of the square. Arkady stumbled down the steps and squeezed between parked cars onto the street. Even blinkered by snow the lights of the square were bright. No trolleys out yet, although overhead cables hummed. By the time Arkady reached the island the three boys were halfway to the opposite sidewalk, but he had caught his breath and was gaining with every step when the blast of a horn brought him up short.
    The three turned at the sound.
    “Zhenya!”
    Arkady retreated out of the way of a snowplow. The machine traveled in a haze of headlights and crystals, snow spewing from the blade. Arkady couldn’t run in front because a second plow followed at an angle, and a third, lumbering and grinding, walling off the sidewalk with snow.

4
    A rkady and Eva lay in a gray light that spread through rooms mostly bare of furniture. Arkady had inherited the apartment from his father; it was huge in comparison to his old flat, which they had left because there she felt the presence of Irina. “I won’t compete with a ghost,” she said. A table here, a portable television there were more like claims of residence than actuality. Arkady had disposed of all his father’s possessions, any toehold the dead man might retain, except for his books and pictures, which were boxed and sealed in the office closet.
    From the outside the building was an architectural collision of Gothic buttresses and Moorish arches, but, inside, the digs were fairly grand, with high prewar ceilings and parquet floors. The apartment house had been built for Party and military elite, who were proud of their address, although during Stalin’s time it was also where the most people were taken away in the middle of the night, not to be seen again for years, if ever. Residents had listened with dread for a knock on the door or even the ascent of an elevator. Rumor claimed that special passages had been built into the walls to accommodate the agents of the state. What Arkady found interesting was that, even knowing the building was a chopping block, no one had dared decline the honor of moving in.
    The