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didn’t happen on that sunny February day, but earlier, on a winter evening. Madame Panaget and I had been coloring pictures in coloring books. Then I had jangled awhile at the piano and drunk a glass of milk with my favorite Ciy biscuits. After that I was supposed to recite my evening prayer to Mama and then go to bed. But Father showed up. Without even taking his coat off he came over to Mama.
    “That’s it,” he said glumly, “there’s no more Duma.”
    Mama stood up quietly.
    “Miliukov and Rodzianko got what they wanted,” Father said, tossing his fur coat into the maid’s waiting arms and lowering himself into an armchair in exhaustion. “They killed off the Duma. The bastards. They managed to murder it after all. Buried it alive.”
    He pounded his fist on the armrest.
    I felt a chill: the Duma, that unseen and powerful Patsiuk who had lived with us for two years, was murdered and buried.
    “What will happen now, Dima?” Mama asked.
    “Revolution!” Father shook his head darkly, but with a kind of angry pride.
    And I, eight years old, suddenly imagined it, this mysteriously menacing Revolution, as the image of the Snow Queen, for some reason holding in her hand that very same “cockroach-eaten” sickle.
    If life in Petrograd before the Revolution had moved faster than usual, now everything fairly whizzed by. And immediately there were more people. The streets were almost always full. It became hard to drive, not only in an automobile but in a horse and buggy as well. I learned new words and terms: “sovdep,” “revolutionary masses,” “interim government,” and “queue.” The unfamiliar sovdep, in Father’s words, sat itself down in the Tauride Palace and, as the first order of business, drank up all the wine and stole the silver spoons from the restaurant. The revolutionary masses often drifted past our windows; everyone, including the cook, was continually talking about the interim government; and the lines for bread grew and grew. I couldn’t understand it: Why were people standing in line for bread? The adults’ explanations, that there wasn’t enough bread for everyone, didn’t satisfy me: there was always so much wheat after all; the wheat fields in the Ukraine were endless! I was certain that bread was limitless, like water, like the sky. We always had bread left over after dinner.
    And it was strange for me to hear “Give us a bit of bread!” on the streets.
    We spent the summer of 1917 in Vaskelovo. It was a surprisingly beautiful, calm, long summer. I had never had such a wonderful, free summer. It was as though I was saying farewell to my former carefree, happy life. And that life, departing forever, said farewell to me, through Vaskelovo’s huge, dark fir trees, still lake, forest berries, after-dinner naps on the veranda, my sisters’ innocent laughter, the glassy sounds of the piano, and rainbows after the rain.
    At the end of the summer I entered the lycée. A chauffeur with the funny surname Kudlach drove me there in a blue automobile. And he drove me every day. It was mostly the children of the rich who attended that school on Kriukov Canal. Many of them were driven in automobiles. But not right up to the school — that was considered “
inappropriate
.” The autos stopped a short distance from the school, and we would get out and walk the rest of the way. That was how it was done.
    The lessons were interesting for me. At the lycée there were teachers entirely unlike the homely Didenko and the quiet Madame Panaget. They knew how to speak well for a long time. I particularly liked the ever-cheerful mathematician Terenty Valentinovich; the small but incredibly active physical education teacher Monsieur Jacob, nicknamed the Pocket Bonaparte; and the loud Frenchwoman Ekaterina Samuilovna Babitskaya, who always smelled of rose oil. The lycée director, Kazimir Efimovich Krebs, a tall man with a huge head, thick beard, three-fingered left hand, and deep, sonorous bass