The Secret City | Page 8

known that
Petrograd had its own grace and beauty, but it was not until, sore and
sick at heart, lonely and bitter against fate, haunted always by the face
and laughter of one whom I would never see again, I wandered about
the canals and quays and deserted byways of the city that I began to
understand its spirit. I took, to the derision of my few friends, two
tumbledown rooms on Pilot's Island, at the far end of Ekateringofsky
Prospect. Here amongst tangled grass, old, deserted boats, stranded,
ruined cottages and abraided piers, I hung above the sea. Not indeed the
sea of my Glebeshire memories; this was a sluggish, tideless sea, but in
the winter one sheet of ice, stretching far beyond the barrier of the eye,
catching into its frosted heart every colour of the sky and air, the lights
of the town, the lamps of imprisoned barges, the moon, the sun, the
stars, the purple sunsets, and the strange, mysterious lights that flash
from the shadows of the hovering snow-clouds. My rooms were
desolate perhaps, bare boards with holes, an old cracked mirror, a stove,
a bookcase, a photograph, and a sketch of Rafiel Cove. My friends
looked and shivered; I, staring from my window on to the entrance into
the waterways of the city, felt that any magic might come out of that
strange desolation and silence. A shadow like the sweeping of the wing
of a great bird would hover above the ice; a bell from some boat would
ring, then the church bells of the city would answer it; the shadow
would pass and the moon would rise, deep gold, and lie hard and sharp
against the thick, impending air; the shadow would pass and the stars
come out, breaking with an almost audible crackle through the stuff of
the sky... and only five minutes away the shop-lights were glittering,
the Isvostchicks crying to clear the road, the tram-bells clanging, the
boys shouting the news. Around and about me marvellous silence....

In the early autumn of 1916 I met at a dinner-party Nicolai
Leontievitch Markovitch. In the course of a conversation I informed
him that I had been for a year with the Ninth Army in Galicia, and he
then asked me whether I had met his wife's uncle Alexei Petrovitch
Semyonov, who was also with the Ninth Army. It happened that I had
known Alexei Petrovitch very well and the sound of his name brought
back to me so vividly events and persons with whom we had both been
connected that I had difficulty in controlling my sudden emotion.
Markovitch invited me to his house. He lived, he told me, with his wife
in a flat in the Anglisky Prospect; his sister-in-law and another of his
wife's uncles, a brother of Alexei Petrovitch, also lived with them. I
said that I would be very glad to come.
It is impossible to describe how deeply, in the days that followed, I
struggled against the attraction that this invitation presented to me. I
had succeeded during all these months in avoiding any contact with the
incidents or characters of the preceding year. I had written no letters
and had received none; I had resolutely avoided meeting any members
of my old Atriad when they came to the town.
But now I succumbed. Perhaps something of my old vitality and
curiosity was already creeping back into my bones, perhaps time was
already dimming my memories--at any rate, on an evening early in
October I paid my call. Alexei Petrovitch was not present; he was on
the Galician front, in Tarnople. I found Markovitch, his wife Vera
Michailovna, his sister-in-law Nina Michailovna, his wife's uncle Ivan
Petrovitch and a young man Boris Nicolaievitch Grogoff. Markovitch
himself was a thin, loose, untidy man with pale yellow hair thinning on
top, a ragged, pale beard, a nose with a tendency to redden at any
sudden insult or unkind word and an expression perpetually anxious.
Vera Michailovna on the other hand was a fine young woman and it
must have been the first thought of all who met them as to why she had
married him. She gave an impression of great strength; her figure tall
and her bosom full, her dark eyes large and clear. She had black hair, a
vast quantity of it, piled upon her head. Her face was finely moulded,
her lips strong, red, sharply marked. She looked like a woman who had

already made up her mind upon all things in life and could face them
all. Her expression was often stern and almost insolently scornful, but
also she could be tender, and her heart would shine from her eyes. She
moved slowly and gracefully, and quite without self-consciousness.
A strange contrast was her sister, Nina