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newspaper stories were written.That the sequence could be staged—events made to happen so that stories would be written—had simply never crossed his mind.
    “The murder was their alternative, a second scheme to try in case their first one failed.”
    Khristo squinted with concentration. The world Antipin was describing seemed obscure and alien, a place to be explained by an astrologer or a magician. Violence he knew, but this was a spider web.
    “You see,” he continued, “they meant for all of us to die in that house. An accident, they would say. Those pigs were swilling brandy and some lout knocked over an oil lamp and whoosh, there it went and too bad. But you see, Khristo Nicolaievich, I repeat only their words. And words may be spoken in different ways. Their fine faces would tell a much different story. The wink, the sly look, the flick of a finger that chases a fly, would give those words quite another meaning. We burnt them up , they would say, with pride in their eyes. That’s how it is, boys. We take care of our own problems around here. We don’t go crying to the politsiya . We see something wrong—we go ahead and fix it.”
    Khristo nodded silently. Veiko, the others, were like that.
    “So, you can see how it works? They had the policeman ready in case we got out of the house. Sent him down to arrest me. Knew very well he was too stupid to manage it. A simple provocation. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round.”
    Khristo was both flattered and a little uncomfortable to be addressed in this way. One didn’t hear compliments. He took a drag at his cigarette, feeling very much the man. There was something so admirable about Antipin. The local toughs were blowhards, dangerous only in a group. Antipin was strong in another way entirely, he had an assurance, carried himself like a man who owned the ground wherever he stood. The notion that he, son of a fisherman in a little town at the end of the world, could win the respect of such a man was definitely something to be thought about.
    “I try to understand things,” he answered cautiously. “It is importantthat people understand”—here he got lost—“things,” he finished, feeling like a bird with one wing.
    “Naturally,” Antipin said. “So you see their intention. Get rid of a problem, let everybody here and about know you got rid of it, and perhaps others will not be so quick to cause problems. Bravery is a quirky thing at best—you know the old saying about brave men?”
    “All brave men are in prison?”
    “Just so. We have it a little differently—all brave men have seen heaven through bars—but the thought is almost the same.” He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. “We Slavs have suffered. God knows how we have suffered. In the West, they say we cannot be bothered to count our dead. But we have learned about human nature. We paid a terrible price to learn it, because you must see desperation before you can understand how humans truly are. Then you know. Lessons learned in that way are not forgotten. Do you see this?”
    He paused a moment, then continued. “I will tell you a story. When Catherine was empress of Russia—you’ll remember, she was the one who fucked horses—she chanced to be wandering one day in a wood some distance from St. Petersburg and found a beautiful wildflower. She was enraptured by it, such a tiny, perfect thing, and so she decreed right then and there that a soldier be assigned to guard the spot just in case, in future days, it should bloom again. Eighteen years later, someone chanced to find that order in a file and went out there, and there was a soldier guarding a spot in the forest, in case a wildflower might bloom, in case, if it did bloom, some shitfoot of a peasant might come along and stomp on