‘You don’t understand anything, you . . . you . . .’

She couldn’t think of anything sufficiently insulting to say. She slapped him across the face and he slapped her back, twice. Aunt Raissa separated them.

‘Stop it, both of you! Go with Nastasia! Quickly now!’

She kissed them and left. Nastasia walked swiftly; the children ran alongside her, clinging on to her skirts. They looked around them aghast. Was this really their own street? They didn’t recognise it. It seemed entirely different, frightening and strange. The buildings that had three or four floors hadn’t been damaged much – a few windows were broken – but the run-down houses, so numerous in the poor neighbourhood, the street stalls, the kosher butchers, the shops with only one room, an attic and a worn-out roof looked as if they’d been ripped out of the ground and thrown on top of each other, as if there had been a cyclone or a flood. Other houses were missing their doors and windows: burnt out and charred by the smoke, they looked dark and menacing. On the ground, bits of metal, tiles, cast iron, wooden planks, bricks lay in chaos – endless debris in which they could make out a boot here, a shattered clay pot there, the handle from a saucepan, and further along, the twisted high heel from a woman’s shoe, broken chairs, a nearly new ladle, what used to be a blue earthenware teapot, empty bottles whose necks had been shattered. It had all been left for the looters, but inexplicably certain things had been spared, just as in a fire a fragile piece of furniture sometimes escapes unscathed. All the shops were empty, their windows dark and gaping.

White and grey feathers floated slowly down through the air: torn eiderdowns shed them gently from top windows.

‘Faster! Faster!’ said Nastasia.

They were afraid of these deserted streets, the dark, ravaged houses.

The lower town was separated from the upper levels by a flight of steps, where women hunched over their baskets and buckets on market days to sell fish, fruit, and wafer-thin, crumbly little croissants dotted with poppy seeds that tasted of water and sand.

The children and Nastasia vaguely hoped they were leaving the terrifying sight of the pillaged streets behind them, that everything would once again be back to normal as soon as they set foot in the upper town: the colourful sleighs, people calmly walking along, shops full of merchandise. But here, too, it all looked different . . . Perhaps it was because of the early morning light, but everything seemed deathly pale, blurred, as if it were twilight. A few street lights still shone here and there. It was freezing cold with a bitter feel that meant it would soon snow. Ada had never felt so cold, even though she was dressed in warm clothes; for the first time in her life, she found herself outside without having first had some hot tea. The bread was a day old and difficult to swallow; her throat felt sore.

The avenue they were crossing was deserted, the shops barricaded, the windows barred; certain shopkeepers were Jewish; the others feared the riff-raff, the beggars who followed along with the soldiers and pillaged everything, not caring what religion their victims practised. The houses where the Russian Orthodox lived all displayed icons on their balconies, in the hope that respect for the Holy Images would prevent them from being attacked.

The children tried to get Nastasia to talk to them, but she seemed not to hear. She wore the same wooden, bleak, cruel, impassive expression as when Aunt Raissa scolded her for having had a man stay the night, or for burning the roast, or for getting drunk. She wrapped her shawl more tightly under her chin and kept walking without a word.

In front of the church they saw the first human faces; several women stood at the entrance, gazing into the distance and talking excitedly. One of them spotted Nastasia. ‘Where are you going?’ she shouted.

Nastasia gave the name of the street where Lilla’s friends lived.

The women surrounded her, all chattering at once:

‘May God protect you! Don’t go that way . . . Some drunken Cossacks knocked a woman over and their horses trampled her . . . She hadn’t said a word to anyone, she was just walking past . . . They rode their horses on to the pavement . . . No, they thought she was running away: she was carrying a packet of clothes under her arm and they wanted to have it; she didn’t give it up willingly, so . . . No, no! That’s nonsense, the horse took fright . . . She was running across the road and fell . . .