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question. But to keep mortifying yourself over her is just unhealthy. She was not your wife.” Again, he checked the effect and baited me, “She was not bearing your child . . . I assume.”
    I lunged at him like a cornered wolf. I struck him in the chest and called him an unscrupulous lecher and an insensate fool. As he swung his arms to avoid my grabbing him by the lapels, I demanded that he challenge me to a duel, and when he cried, What for? I answered, For calling you a fool, you fool! and by then other officers came upon our spectacle and held us back while I shouted, Fine, then I will challenge you—for speaking lowly of the late countess Tolstoy!, and when everyone heard that, they just shook their heads. Their hands shrank from me, and Svetogorov righted his dislodged jacket and muttered, “I won’t duel with you, Alexander Mikhailovich. Foremost you need to fix yourself.”
    I strode out, chased by reproachful stares. I sprinted along the Winter Canal to the Neva, then tumbled down the bank onto the Neva’s frozen bed. On my hands and knees, I wanted to wash my face with snow—and that was how I learned that rage made me cold too. The snow would not melt against my skin.
    I howled. I cursed the river, the night, the city. I cursed until nothing and no one else was left to curse at, but me.
    • • •
    From then on it became a matter of finding what else would provoke my body. I was no black swan. I was a mangy wolf. I picked fights in St. Petersburg’s seediest taverns. I dressed as a commoner for those adventures, but I fooled no one who mattered. The next day the whole regiment could see my black eye or squashed lip. I remember myself crouching in someone’s yard one night, whether thrown out of a drinking establishment or hiding from a ruffian’s chase, my heart thumping, my hand squeezing snow, my mind noting with malicious satisfaction that, once again, the snow did not melt. Fear made me cold too.
    And I never, ever felt it.
    It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. I may have misunderstood altogether, I realized, what others meant by saying they were cold . When I used the word, it could mean a pang of anxiety, or discomfort. Or unwelcome weather. Even so, I believed I hadn’t been cold as a child. Maturing into a man was what had brought it about, and provoking it now only made it stronger.
    At last my commanders ordered me to take leave. Officially, they were rewarding me for my smallpox heroics. Unofficially—if I did not mend my shaken constitution, my leave could well become expulsion from the regiment. And yet, all I thought about was the multitude of things I could do back home—hail the labyrinthine, crooked-streeted, humpbacked Moscow with her high fences, deep cellars, and dark taverns! She’d turn her blighted eye on my histrionics. She would not fuss about me the way pretentious St. Pete’s did!
    • • •
    My childhood home, the estate of Velitzyno, lay just outside Moscow proper and encompassed fields, groves, a river, several lakes and villages. Two elders, my father and uncle, or rather, somnolent inertia, ran the estate; other Velitzyn males of service age were all dispersed, either throughout the empire in its numerous garrisons, holding the borders, or at court, in the Senate, in collegiums (i.e., ministries), holding the rudder, or as ambassadors in Europe, holding fingers on her political pulse. The old mansion meanwhile was filled with nieces of all ages and a few prepubescent nephews, tended by a company of seven ladies and an army of house folk. The days were spent having meals or talking about them,except on Sundays, when there was also church in the morning, and the banya, a bathhouse with a steam lodge, at night. Into this bliss I descended, a mangy wolf with little else to do but roam and sniff for blood.
    My father was not pleased to see me. But to the resident flock, I, an elite officer in the prime of his late twenties, was still a shiny gift from