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the capital. At once, I saw a world of opportunity for self-indulgence. I did not have to go to Moscow for my debaucheries, I could just as well start right here at home.
    Consider an example of my activities:
    At eleven o’clock one January Sunday, I insist on combining a little red sleigh (hardly used) and a certain two-year-old mare (who never pulled that sleigh before). Disregard advice of the stablemaster. ( Shaves too short for her, he says. Bah! I say to that.) Charge off. Following a river, I encounter a hillock upon which stands a banya, where some peasant women dash out to gambol in the snow. I drive in and catch them unawares, most flee, one slips and falls. Her body is white and pink and veined, and freckled in places; it steams, and the snow that still clings to it is melting. I take my fur greatcoat off, lay it out at her feet, order her to step on it. Back up a pace, crouch, order her to stop stooping and covering her shame, order her to look me in the eye. When she does, her face is flushed, her stare defiant, though she is shivering already. She is older than I thought, a married woman, most certainly. She knows what I am about. I scoop snow into my hand and squeeze it. Open my hand. Ask, “What do you see?”
    She shrugs—and her breasts stir in double negation.
    I think I do not need to touch her, only to keep looking at her. I consider the biblical Onan. Consider snatching her and taking her someplace more convenient. Say, “Come here.” Stretch out my hand, snow in it, for her to see—as if it is an explanation for my imminent action. My mouth is dry. “Look at it! What do you see?” She cranes her neck, her eyes dart from my hand to my face and back. “Snow?” she says.
    “Do you see it is not melting?!”
    She returns a wary stare as the few vestiges of her snow slip most tantalizingly down her curves.
    “Pick up my coat, wrap yourself.”
    She obeys.
    I grab her.
    An earsplitting scream erupts from the sweat lodge. Startled, I release my prey and she runs away. My greatcoat falls into the snow. I see a crowdhas formed, watching me from the top of the hillock, men and women both. I flee to my sleigh, whip the mare, she bounces up and down on all fours wildly before she gets traction. As she widens her gallop under my whip, she hits the sleigh with her hind hooves—the shaves too short indeed—and so she scares herself into a frenzy. The sleigh overturns as the road curves away from a pond, I am dumped, the pull of the shaves and my clutching onto the reins bring the mare down, and both of us wind up sprawled below the road, in deep snow.
    Lying there in that snow, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I stare at the empty environs, at the sky splintered by an occasional crow. Then I roll over and, gritting my teeth, succumb to Onan’s ways.
    I growl angrily at my own hand and stare down—in a curious feeling of animalistic parity—the mare who is trying and failing to get on her own feet. Once I’m done I get up, unharness the mare, and let her climb out of the hole she’d made. I trudge to the pond and sit. There are sullen willows and crows that strain themselves cawing, a fisherman’s crooked shack on the far side. That’s how it is going to be, I say to the pond. God help me .
    The mare and I walk back to the mansion, where I learn the latest news: Andrei and his wife will arrive in days. He will stay just long enough to make sure she is settled, then leave for the war with the Ottoman Turks. How fortunate! Instantly, my existence receives new purpose: I will win the wife’s trust and she’ll tell me everything I wish to know about my brother but will never learn from him directly because I won’t ask and he won’t tell.
    Is he cold? Like me?
    • • •
    God help us.
    I watched, a part of the welcome committee, as they climbed out of a kibitka. My brother first, a solid man now, square-shouldered and unhurried, and then—the wife.
    “What are you doing here?” was