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alive with trout. Villages clung to the slopes below dizzying ascents through forests and alpine meadows. It reminded him of Geneva and made him think of the Garden of Eden. It was the perfect place to begin the human experiment anew, without the sin of greed.
    Gabriel left the rented carriage at the end of the dark alley and waded through the snow to the back door of the tenement. Vera wasn’t there. Perhaps she had gotten cold and gone back upstairs to wait by the stove.
    He pushed open the door and climbed the stairs. His feet were wet and cold, and he thought he’d change into his boots, which were drying by the fire.
    Inside, the suitcase was open, its contents strewn across the floor, but Vera was gone. He looked down and saw a bloody mass beneath his shoes. He stumbled backward, then realized, to his relief, that it was a crushed pomegranate. He wondered where it had come from. Maybe Vera had kept the fruit until they could make their luck together. The pomegranate told him that she had struggled. He walked around the room, his fists balled, but there was nothing else to tell him what had happened.
    He ran down the stairs to the front of the house, noticing muddy smears on the treads. He peered out into the empty street. The snow gave off a nacreous glow. A glint of candlelight appeared in a window across the way. He could see carriage tracks, but snow had already filled them in, leaving only shallow depressions.
    He went back upstairs and examined the room again. An object on the floor, embedded in the crushed flesh of the pomegranate, caught his eye. He picked it up and wiped it clean. It was Vera’s passport. A corner of the first page had torn away.
    Gabriel pulled from his pocket the wool cap, a kind local workers wore, tucked his scarf around his face, and stepped into the street. He walked slowly and deliberately in the opposite direction from where he had left the carriage.
    He felt rather than saw the men behind him. Gabriel was skilled at evasion, learned as a boy in the brutal dockyards of Sevastopol and honed in two decades of political organizing. He leaped sideways into an alley, leaving no tracks, then moved from one doorway to another, trying to land on dry surfaces. Before long he had lost his pursuers.
    He walked much of the night, not daring to hail a carriage. Keeping the Bosphorus in sight to his right, he headed north. The road wound through a forest at the crest of the hill, then dipped steeply and rose again. He stumbled in the darkness under the trees and more than once became mired in drifts. In desperation, he left the road and struggled down the slope, pushing his way through undergrowth and brambles, toward the waters of the strait pulsing far below.
    He came to a village, dark and shuttered against the storm. A thin stream of smoke drifted from a stovepipe chimney protruding from the side of a house, and Gabriel was momentarily entranced by the scent of burning wood. He imagined his sister sitting beside him on a quilt. It was satin. He could almost taste the bright pink color. He had stolen it from a porch where it was being aired and brought it to their shack in the forest. Whenever his sister stroked the slippery surface, her face took on a soft, faraway look. Gabriel was gripped by a powerful impulse to sit down beneath the chimney and lose himself in his memories.
    The thought of his naïve childlike wife in the hands of the police pushed him forward. He stumbled past the houses and found a path that he thought might connect this fishing village to the next. It was barely discernible in the storm, but at least it was level.
    After several more hours, his hair and beard were frozen and he could no longer feel his limbs. Like a leper, he moved forward insensibly, not caring whether he was freezing to death. It didn’t matter. Why had he left Vera alone?
    He thought he felt the warm winter breeze of Sevastopol on his face, the wetness on his cheeks was salty sea spray. His sister