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shoulders. Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova was left standing there frozen in her smile. Though she had seen people behave coarsely, witnessing the insolence of a city was an utterly novel experience for her. Once she had managed to overcome her confusion, she closed down all the curtains, windows and shutters of her heart and instead got cross with the city. Such was her state of mind when she landed from the boat. Even after two months, when the swelling in her womb had grown in contrast to the one on her back which had shrunk in next to no time, she was still cross at Istanbul and Istanbul was still of an unknown colour and just as indifferent to boot.
    Unlike his wife, General Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not pay any particular attention to Istanbul, either that day or at any later point. He happened to be a man whose survival depended on his assuming responsibility for others – one of those who either loved weak women or ended up weakening the women they love. Hence that day as they alighted, he embraced Agripina with the warmest consideration. His grip held not only her but also their soon-to-be-born baby and the entire wealth they had been able to smuggle out of Russia.
    The pieces of jewellery Agripina had hidden at the back of her body corset would, however, soon be sold one by one and for much less than their true worth. Thousands of White Russians fleeing from their homeland after the Bolshevik Revolution had so far crammed into Istanbul and it was rumoured that thousands more were on their way. When the jewellery was being auctioned off, there were hardly enough buyers even for medals of honor, family heirlooms and decorations of nobility. And after two months, nothing remained from the wealth that the couple had initially hoped would enable them to live comfortably for at least two years.
    One morning at the dormitory converted from a decrepit detention centre provided by the French Red Cross wherein they slept with fifty people on stained, shallow mattresses, Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova vindictively pulled the silvery head of her husband who was thirty years her senior toward her and forced him to listen to the baby in her swollen belly. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov knew too well what this gesture meant. He had two options: to find a job as soon as possible or to write a letter to his disgraceful brother in France asking for help. Since even the thought of the second option was more than enough to wreck his nerves, he chose the first.
    Yet just as the military fails to provide one with a profession, neither does the rank of general constitute a job experience you can rely on when seeking employment. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov then realized two things about himself: he did not know what to do and he could not do what he did know. While everything that had ever happened to him up till now had fallen into place as arranged, the revolution had caught up with him just as he had been promoted to the rank of general, shattering the authority he had acquired and the life he had erected year by year. Yet even back in those days of pestilence, he had not had to face, as he did today, the malady termed ‘ambiguity’. In order to defeat ambiguity, he first had to know where to find it. Neither taking up a defensive position anywhere, nor acting in accordance with a particular strategy, it could attack from anywhere at any time, changing weapons all the while as it pleased. If this were an ongoing war, it had no battleground, no rules, no morals. If not a war, the situation would have been even worse as Pavel Pavlovich Antipov did not possess the knowledge to earn a living any other way. Until now, he had lost many things one after another, his property as well as goods, influence, privileges, esteem, friends, relatives, orderlies, the army he belonged to, the cities where his past was, the country where he had presumed his future would be… However, deep inside he assumed he was still what he had always been: a loyal