Uncle Petya’s size and bulk, Anne discovered, were certainly useful for thrusting a way through the crowds; and after a few minutes he swept Natasha up on to his shoulders, where she rode like a monkey clinging on to his huge fur collar and getting the best view. There was plenty to see. There were boxing-booths, musicians, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, dancing bears and dogs, acrobats and jugglers. There was a troop of Cossacks who did tricks on horseback, jumping on and off at full gallop, standing on the saddle, and jumping from one horse to another. They also gave a display of Cossack dancing, full of curious leaps and leg-kicks; and there was a troupe of gypsy dancers, too, all in red and gold, the women’s dresses sewn all over with shining metal discs, who twirled and clapped to a sawing tune on the fiddle.
There were wandering peddlers selling ribbons and trinkets and sweetmeats, and stalls where you could buy anything the heart desired, from a pewter plate to a handful of treacle cakes – pryaniki. Anne now discovered what the peasants did during the long frozen winter when they could not work the land. The fruit of the dark days was on sale all around: wooden shoes and valenki, gloves, stockings, furniture, pots and pans, blankets, toys, icons, preserved fruit, bead necklaces, decorated trinket-boxes, saddlery, dog collars, whips, painted baskets and bird cages.
Anne was enjoying it all enormously, and was guiltily glad that the Countess had not come with them. Everything was so much more fun as they were: Uncle Petya forced a way through for them, and the Count and Anne, with Yelena between them, slipped in after him like gulls riding a wake. Once when they were in a particularly dense part of the crowd, the Count took hold of Anne’s hand to stop her getting separated from them, and forgot to release it for quite a time. There was no reserve or tension between them. She felt, as she had felt that time at the waterfall, that it was they who were the family, they and the children.
They wandered amongst the stalls and watched the displays, marvelled at the acrobats, laughed at the puppet-play, clapped in time to the stamping of the dancers, ate hot pasties and roasted apples and pryaniki, and drank hot tea sweetened with raspberry jam. Uncle Petya bought Natasha a wooden doll, and Lolya a coral necklace; and the Count bought Anne a cross of blue enamel from Kiev set in delicate gold filigree. Uncle Petya bought a flask of vodka from a drinking booth, and the Count tasted it and pronounced it vile stuff, and then, laughing, produced a small flask of his own from under his coat.
The short day darkened, and flares and torches were lit. On the frozen river, skaters danced to the music of a band playing in a wooden shelter with charcoal braziers all around to keep their instruments from freezing. Dominating the scene was the great artificial ice-hill, a stout wooden frame covered with packed snow, down which the fur-hatted citizens were tobogganing with wild shrieks of glee on to the three-feet-thick ice of the river. ‘Oh Papal’ Yelena cried, turning a passionate face up to him.
‘What, risk your beauty, my little rose petal?’ the Count smiled, cupping her pink cheek with one hand. ‘Suppose you overset? What would Grand’mère say if I brought you back all black and blue?’
‘Oh, I don’t care about that. And anyway, we won’t overset. Oh Papa, please let’s! Uncle Petya, please!’
The Count smiled at Anne. ‘What about you, Anna Petrovna? Are you pining to try it?’
‘It does look very exciting,’ Anne said, ‘but I don’t know if it’s quite proper. Do ladies toboggan in public?’
‘Now you have said the one thing that would persuade me,’ he grinned. ‘Proper? Is that my English Anna, two thousand miles from home, wondering about propriety?’
‘I have a reputation to preserve, sir,’ Anne laughed. ‘What would Basil Tchaikovsky say?’
‘After I danced with you at the Embassy Ball at the Tuileries, you had no reputation left to lose,’ he said firmly. ‘Come on then, let’s to it! We’ll scale the mountain! Uncle Petya, hold tight to Nasha. Lolya, give me your hand.’
There were toboggans to hire at the foot of the slope for those who had not brought their own. Anne, still wondering if it were quite the thing, and perfectly sure that Lady Murray would have had ten fits if she had been here to see it, took charge of a battered red one and climbed, not without apprehension, to the taking-off stage at the top of the hill. The Count showed her how to sit on the sled and how to hold the rope, set her straight, and pushed her off.
There was a moment of sinking terror as she lurched over the rim of the slope; and then a mixture of wild exhilaration and fear as she gathered speed and the little wooden frame rocked and rattled over the streaked and glassy surface of the hill. The icy air streamed past her cheeks and tears broke from her eye-corners, and she had a brief watery impression of the lights and colours and pink faces of the crowds below rushing up towards her; and then it was all over. She was jolting over level ground, and two huge men in peasant tunics and sheepskin gloves had halted her, and were helping her to her feet.
She staggered a little, feeling dazed and dizzy. Her lungs seemed to be full of ice-cold space; there were tears on her blood-burning cheeks; and she felt horribly disappointed that it was over.
The Count and Lolya appeared beside her, having come down together. He grinned at Anne, and she knew by the cold air on her teeth that she was grinning too, in a ridiculous, exhilarated fashion.
‘You were shrieking all the way down,’ he said.
‘Was I? I didn’t know.’
‘Again! Papa, again!’ Lolya cried urgently, tugging her father’s sleeve. Uncle Petya appeared with Natasha.
‘Just once more, then,’ the Count said. ‘Coming, Anna?’
‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘And I won’t scream this time.’
The same fear and excitement as before; and as she hurtled down, Anne could feel herself shrieking, though she could not hear it, and could not have stopped herself. ‘It’s better than galloping on a fast horse,’ she said afterwards.
‘Not better – different,’ the Count said.
‘Again, Papa! I want to go again!’ Lolya shrieked.
Anne shook her head involuntarily – the child seemed too excited – and the Count hesitated too, but Natasha was tugging at Uncle Petya’s sleeve, her face turned up urgently like a pink flower, and he said, ‘Oh, once more won’t hurt them, Nikolasha.’ He touched Natasha’s head. ‘You’d like to go just once more, wouldn’t you, Nashka maya?’
‘Very well, but this is the last,’ the Count said.
‘Enough for me,’ Anne said. ‘I’ll wait here.’ Her legs were trembling. She caught the Count’s eye, pleading caution. It was too exciting to be entirely safe.
She stood at the bottom of the slope, waiting for them to appear up above. It looked very far away, and it was hard to tell one black shape from another in the crowd at the top by the wavering light of the torches. Each sled as it came down made a thud and a hard swishing sound; a hurtling, rigid bundle of colour with a pink circle at the top of it. All around her there were people talking, laughing, shouting to one another; stall holders crying their wares; music from three different bands crashing together like waves hitting a rock; and suddenly all the sounds merged into something solid, a single seamless thing, like a wall of silence.
In that silence, she saw the Count and Uncle Petya with the children starting down. They were too small and bundled up for her to be able to recognise their features, but she knew it was them; and with another part of her attention she saw also the two young men, laughing and probably drunk, run on to the slope from the bottom, towing their toboggans, trying to climb upwards, slipping back helplessly and falling over on the glassy surface. It all happened so quickly, that she could not understand afterwards how there seemed to be time to notice everything: the thin, fair beard of one young man, and the slate-blue colour of the other’s greatcoat, and his gloved hand dark like a starfish against the ice as he fell sprawling, the bottle he had been holding slithering and spinning like a live thing down the slope away from him.