. .' a voice groaned from the switches as the blistering gust of a snowstorm lashed the railroad cars housing the cadets. That night Post was snowed up.

   In the third car back from the locomotive, in a compartment upholstered in checkered calico, smiling politely and ingratiatingly, Talberg sat opposite a German lieutenant and spoke German.

   'Oh, ja', drawled the fat lieutenant from time to time and chewed his cigar.

   When the lieutenant had fallen asleep, when all the compartment doors were shut and all that could be heard in the warm, brilliantly lit car was the monotonous click of the wheels, Talberg went out into the corridor, opened one of the pale-colored blinds with their transparent letters 'S. - W.R.R.' and stared long into the darkness. Occasional sparks, snow flickered past, and in front the locomotive raced on and with a howl that was so sinister, so threatening that even Talberg was unpleasantly affected by it.

Three

   In the downstairs apartment at No. 13, which belonged to Vasily Lisovich, engineer and householder, absolute silence reigned at that hour of the night, a silence only occasionally dis-turbed by a mouse in the dining-room. Busily and insistently the mouse gnawed and gnawed away at an old rind of cheese, cursing the meanness of the engineer's wife, Wanda Mikhailovna. The object of this abuse, the bony and jealous Wanda, was sound asleep in the dark bedroom of their damp, chilly apartment. Lisovich himself was still awake and ensconced in his study, a draped, book-lined, over-furnished and consequently extremely cosy little room. The standard lamp, in the shape of an Egyptian queen and shaded in green flowered material, lit the room with a gentle mysterious glow; there was something mysterious, too, about the engineer himself in his deep leather armchair. The mystery and ambiguity of those uncertain times was expressed above all in the fact that the man in the armchair was not Vasily Lisovich at all, but Vasilisa ... He, of course, called himself Lisovich, many of the people he met called him Vasily, but only to his face. Behind his back no one ever called him anything but Vasilisa. This had come about because since January 1918, when the strangest things began happening in the City, the owner of No. 13 altered his distinctive signature, and from a vague fear of committing himself to some document that might be held against him in the future, instead of a bold 'V. Lisovich' he began signing his name on questionnaires, forms, certificates, orders and ration cards as 'Vas. Lis.'

   On January 18th 1918, with a sugar ration card signed by Vasily Lisovich, instead of sugar Nikolka had received a terrible blow on his back from a stone on the Kreshchatik and had spat blood for two days. (A shell had burst right over the heads of some brave people standing in line for sugar.) When he reached home, clutching the wall and turning green, Nikolka had managed to smile so as not to alarm Elena. Then he had spat out a bowlful of blood and when Elena shrieked: 'God - what's happened to you?' he replied: 'It's Vasilisa's sugar, damn him!' After that he turned white and collapsed. Nikolka was out of bed again two days later, but Vasily Lisovich had ceased to exist. At first only the people living at No. 13, then soon the whole City began calling him Vasilisa, until the only person who introduced him as Lisovich was the bearer of that girl's name himself.

   After making sure that the street was quiet at last, with not even the occasional creak of sleigh-runners to be heard, and listening attentively to the whistling sound coming from his wife in the

   bedroom, Vasilisa went out into the lobby. There he carefully checked the locks, bolt, chain and door-handle and returned to his study, where he produced four shiny safety-pins from a drawer of his massive desk. He tiptoed away somewhere into the darkness and returned with a rug and a towel. Again he stopped and listened, even putting his finger to his lips. He pulled off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and took down from a shelf a pot of glue, a length of wallpaper neatly rolled into a tube, and a pair of scissors. Then he sidled up to the window and, shielded by his hand, looked out into the street. With the aid of the safety-pins he hung the towel over the top half of the left-hand window and the rug over the right-hand window, arranging them with care lest there should be any cracks. Taking a chair he climbed up on it and fumbled for something above the topmost shelf of books, ran the point of a little knife vertically down the wallpaper, then sideways at a right angle; next he inserted the blade under the cut to reveal a small, neat hiding-place the size of two bricks, made by himself during the previous night. He removed the cover - a thin rectangle of zinc - climbed down, glanced fearfully at the windows and patted the towel.