They had everything they needed. Zina told them they had not been troubled by looters or stragglers: too far off the road, and the French terrified equally of Cossacks and what they called Partisans – the returning peasants bent on revenge. There was firewood enough for the whole winter, if they needed it; there were roots and sacks of grain and smoked, dried meat in the cellar; and when the snow stopped, if they remained, Adonis and Stenka could go out into the forest and shoot game for fresh meat. Eventually, of course, they would have to leave. Anne supposed vaguely that they would go back to Tula in the first instance, for Shoora and Vsevka would need to know what had happened to them and to Lolya; but for the time being, they had reached a resting-place, and they were staying put.
The relief of being safe and out of the saddle was so great that they all experienced a kind of euphoria for the first few days. They discarded their travelling clothes, they bathed luxuriously – Nikolai shaved in hot water and emerged looking ten years younger, only very gaunt and hollow-cheeked. Anne washed her hair, and curled it, and when Nikolai saw her with it dressed for the first time in weeks other than in a plait, he smiled a long, slow smile and told her he’d forgotten how beautiful she was.
During those days of the blizzard when they were confined to the house, with nothing to do but sit by the fire looking into the flames, they talked. Not of the war, which was too horrible, and too unreal, nor of the past, which contained too much sorrow, but of their future together. They talked of Schwartzenturm, and what Nikolai meant to do to improve the land, the new succession-houses he meant to build, the modem crops he meant to try out.
‘Unless, of course,’ he said suddenly during one conversation, ‘you don’t want to live there? It occurs to me that perhaps you’d sooner we sold it and bought a new pomestia somewhere else.’
Anne laughed. ‘A fine time to have scruples, after you’ve planted acres of turnips and built a pinery! No, love, I’m happy to live there. I like Schwartzenturm.’
He smiled gratefully. ‘I don’t think Irina ever did,’ he offered, and she understood him.
‘I’m not jealous of her,’ she said. ‘I have you now – that’s all that matters.’
He put his arm round her and drew her against his shoulder, and she sighed comfortably. ‘We’ll be married as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘In Petersburg, I think. I don’t think Moscow will be a good place for either of us now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go back to Moscow. We’ll collect Rose, and go back to Petersburg. I wonder how she and Sashka will like each other?’ She smiled. ‘I shall have Sashka again! I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!’
‘I’m glad you feel like that. The poor child has lacked a mother so long. Even when Irina was alive, she never had any love for him.’
Anne grunted in acknowledgement, her eyes on the leaping flames. Outside the wind soughed around the house, but inside there was no sound but the conversational crackle of the fire, and the ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece.
After a while he said, ‘Where are you?’
‘I was thinking of Schwartzenturm,’ she said. ‘I was looking at the view from the top of the Black Tower; and taking Rose to see old Marya Petrovna and the tame pig; and going to mass in the little white church; and having guests to dinner, and sitting on the terrace in the White Nights.’
‘The White Nights!’ he said in a tone that told her how fantastic that seemed to him in the present circumstances. ‘Very proper, domestic dreams they are, too,’ he added. ‘Have you no higher ambition, Countess Kirova? Don’t you want to travel and see the world?’
‘I’ve done that already,’ she said. ‘Now I want to stay home.’ But the words had broken the mood. She thought of the rest of Europe, of England, of the seemingly endless war. ‘This will be the end of it for Bonaparte, won’t it?’ she asked him in a subdued voice.
He was a long time answering. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I think so. Even if he escapes with his life, I don’t see how he could survive politically, having failed, and having lost his whole army. It must be the end of him.’
‘And the end of the war?’
He didn’t answer that, deep in his own thoughts. ‘I told you once, didn’t I, that when a war is over, no one can really remember what it was all about. No one ever wins a war. We just survive it – or fail to.’
His son Sergei had died in this very room, turning his face away from his father, unyielding, unforgiving. The firstborn, dearest to the heart as the firstborn must always be: special, never-to-be-replaced. Without really being aware of it, he freed himself from Anne’s embrace and stood up, walked away towards the window, the pain of his thoughts needing movement. All his children lost: Sergei and Natasha – even Sashka, for he hardly knew him, the war having kept him so long away from home.
And Lolya, more lost than all, because she lived, and he would never see her again. Duvierge would survive, he was sure of that; he had the knack of it; and Lolya would survive with him. They would escape out of Russia, and she would be his, his possession, loved or unloved, trammelled by him, used by him; her youth and vitality passing untasted in the service of a man who could never deserve her.
He stared bleakly out of the window. Gone, all gone! Natasha and Yelena and Sergei; and how many others? So many thousands dead; and crops trampled, villages burned, lives torn apart, never to be put together again. No winners; only losers.
Anne got up and came to stand beside him, and seeing the blackness of his expression was afraid to touch him, though she needed him, needed his reassurance. The white wilderness of snow beyond the glass was an emptiness, a desert, as featureless as darkness.
‘We’ve lost everything,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. If he thought that, it was the worst thing of all. ‘No! We still have so much.’ He didn’t respond to her, and she grew afraid, and tugged at his arm to bring him back to her. ‘We survived.’
‘Did we?’
His eyes came back to her reluctantly, and for a moment he looked so old and so tired that she felt a kind of terror, that she would lose him, because he no longer had the strength to love her. ‘Nikolasha,’ she said, and reaching out wildly she took both his hands and placed them over her belly. ‘This is what we have! Our love for the rest of our lives; being together! And the child!’
He felt the tautness of her belly under his hands, the heat of her blood through the firm flesh and thin skin. He was tired, so tired – she seemed infinitely far away, and young, where he was old. Too old to begin again. Too old to try any longer. He could not bear to feel anything ever again.
But she called him, with the insistence of the life that was strong within her. Life cannot be ignored, he thought; it must be lived, it must be answered to. It was the condition on which they held the earth, the price of their tenure of the beautiful world God made: the beautiful world which would shake off the blight and horror of war which men had laid on it, and in a few years be green and blessed again, as though none of it had ever happened.
The glow of the firelight behind her lit the curve of her cheek and gilded her eyelashes; there were gold lights in her brown hair; she was beautiful to him. And like a miracle, he felt the stirring of life again within his weary body, and feeling her flesh under his hands, he wanted her. She was ripe with life, her belly was full of his child, and he wanted her, he wanted to hold her and fill her again and again, until black memory retreated; as every new day was filled with the light of the sun, driving back the darkness.