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to watch the boys grow up with at least distant pride. But boys are fated to grow into men, and a mother has to follow this tragedy as a silent bystander. And now it seems they will kill each other, and then this, too, can be added to my never-ending list of losses.
    I know now what I will do with the musty clothes in the chests. I will ask the Farmhand to build a bonfire.

ERIK
    Anna will hardly even look at me. Her hips escape my hands. Her hair keeps back its scent. If I speak to her, she replies to the nearest saucepan. Does she already know? Has Mother gone and told her, after all? Should she not offer me support, particularly now that Henrik has turned up at the house, as if we did not have enough misfortunes? I feel as though, after two days’ absence from home, I have lost my wife.

HENRIK
    This house is a cadaver. The others are too close to see it, but it has already begun to decompose. I flinch from its decay. It is as if a collection of bones had been unearthed and dressed up in fine clothing to create the illusion of a real body. The wallpaper and chandeliers make no difference. Anyone who is even slightly in the know can scent at a ten-verst distance that the ceiling is leaking, the ridge beams are rotting and the drawing-room floorboards are as bent as an old jetty.
    Fortunately, I did not come here because of the house.
    On the other hand, I would rather live here than in that windowless hole in a backstreet of St Petersburg. Reeking of cabbage, the building was so labyrinthine, so full of narrow passages and steep stairways, that I often had trouble finding my room. As I searched, I would have to pass doorless nooks whose occupants would put their whole miserable lives on show, without a trace of shame. In one opening, you would see a couple copulating wildly, in another, a man emptying his bowels into a wooden tub. Then there were the rats, and the pigeons that nested in every cranny of the façade, producing the slippery sludge that coated the entire front of the house and the steps leading up to it.
    The place was fine if you wanted to forget. You just needed to learn the art of forgetting to begin with. I tried with vodka. The memories failed to dissolve, though; they simply went into hiding to await the soot-coloured mornings. I tried with cheap women, but that did not help, either; I was merely left with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Finally, I could resort only to loneliness, echoey with emptiness. That lasted a while, but then grew unbearably familiar. I was too glued onto myself, I was twitching in my hole to get rid of myself. Eventually, I enlisted in the army. I do not think I have ever done anything so desperate, but at least I received decent clothes and enough food to stop the howling in my guts.
    How could I have known there would be a war? It never occurred to me that this godforsaken land would drive great rulers mad. I did not consider that even a peasant nation pays taxes and is good for cannon fodder, that its barren fields and swampy forests are as well suited to become part of the domains of kings and emperors as any wilderness or desert. Nor did I understand that wars are being waged all the time, that lines of men marching with their muskets are merely the visible culmination of constant power struggles, and that actual warfare takes place in salons lit by oil lamps in which liveried flunkeys pour expensive champagne into crystal glasses, and wasp-waisted women wave their ivory fans languidly, and gentlemen sitting amidst thick cigar smoke – heirs of noblemen knighted by Gustav I of Sweden, or offspring of the Grand Dukes of Novgorod, owners of tens of thousands of souls – realize that they suddenly hanker after a ninth city palace or a sackful of diamonds, or that their lives have simply become too monotonous. And furthermore, every man wages his own wars, small, grubby battles that may be as senseless as the rulers’ troop concentrations and fire commands but that he is