‘I used only the best millers. What went wrong was that they decided to save money on building the ovens, and since no one knew the exact dimensions to build them, the bread wasn’t cooked properly and went off.’

‘And soldiers died of dysentery,’ said Chestov.

‘Is that what you think? Well, the merchandise was rejected and that was the end of it; it was unfortunate, but the bread had to be thrown away. I insisted upon it myself to the authorities. I don’t have the death of a single man on my conscience,’ said Slivker.

Karol laughed like a child, his face contorting in a malicious grimace; he reached over the table and gave a little tug at Hélène’s hair; she grabbed the tanned, dry hand as he was pulling it away and kissed it. She loved the fire in his eyes, his white hair and his smile: it could be so sad and so mischievous.

‘Although, whenever he looks at that woman, he melts,’ Hélène thought resentfully. ‘Is it possible he doesn’t see through their charade? He’s actually happy, happy in this chaotic household, among the new furniture, the dining service engraved with initials that aren’t his, betrayed by an unfaithful wife … You can’t say he doesn’t see it … No, it’s not that; he just brushes it aside, ignores it … In the end, there’s only one thing in the world he’s passionate about and it’s slowly eating away at his soul: gambling, whether on the Stock Market or cards. And that’s all there is to it.’

They ate the apple charlotte, which was covered in hot chocolate sauce. Hélène loved chocolate and for a moment she stopped ‘listening to the conversation of adults’ as her mother put it when reproaching her.

‘Max also says that you’re too interested in hearing about business deals,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘Are they any of your concern? Think about your lessons instead.’

Hélène, out of pure perversity, put her heart and soul into listening and understanding what she heard.

But she was tired; all she could make out was some vague mumbling.

‘Ships …’

‘Petrol …’

‘Pipelines …’

‘Boots …’

‘Sleeping bags …’

‘Shares …’

‘… Millions … Millions … Millions …’

This last word constantly returned, punctuating their sentences like the chorus of a song. ‘An old song,’ Hélène thought wearily.

Dinner was over; Hélène left the table, gave a shy little curtsey that no one noticed and went to bed. The smell of cigars and brandy wafted through the house until morning, slipping beneath her door and insinuating itself into her dreams. A faraway rumbling shook the paving stones: artillery detachments were passing by in the street.

3

The revolution hadn’t yet begun, but everyone could sense it was imminent; even the air they breathed seemed heavy and full of a kind of menace, as dawn is on the day of a storm. No one was interested in news from the Front; the war seemed to have retreated into the distant past; the wounded were looked on with indifference, the soldiers with sullen hostility. Hélène came into contact with men who were passionate only about money. They were all getting rich. Money flowed like the Pactolus River, with such an impetuous, stormy, capricious force that it terrified everyone who lived along its banks who quenched their thirst with its waters. It flowed too quickly, too easily … The moment you bought some shares on the Stock Market they shot up like a fever. People no longer took pleasure in shouting out the figures in front of Hélène: they whispered them instead. She no longer heard ‘millions’, but ‘billions’, spoken in low voices that were hesitant, breathless; all around her she saw only expressions of greed and fear.

They bought everything at once. Anything, anywhere. Noon until night, men would arrive, pulling packages from their pockets; behind closed doors, Hélène could hear muffled voices involved in rushed, intense discussions about numbers. They bought fur pelts that hadn’t even been cleaned or sewn, just tied together with string and hung on a long rod, the way salesmen from Asia had sold them in some faraway bazaar; they bought ermine and sable pelts, chinchilla in lots that looked like rat skins, gemstones, necklaces, antique bracelets, all valued according to their weight, enormous emeralds, but cloudy, since their greed and haste were stronger than their judgement; they bought gold: in bars, in ingots, but most especially they bought shares, piles and piles of them, representing holdings in banks, tankers, pipelines and in diamonds that still lay buried beneath the ground. Pieces of paper poked out of the furniture. They made the walls and beds bulge; they were hidden in the servants’ rooms, in the study, at the backs of cupboards and, when spring came, in wood-burning stoves; wads of shares were sewn into the fabric of armchairs and the men who came to the Karols’ house took turns sitting on them, warming them with the heat of their bodies as if they were trying to hatch golden eggs. In the corner of the sitting room great bundles of paper were rolled up in the Savonnerie carpet decorated with garlands of roses; they rustled whenever there was a draft. Hélène sometimes amused herself by stepping on them to make them crunch, the way you crush dead leaves beneath your shoes in autumn. The white piano, its cover closed, shimmered faintly in the shadows; on the walls were motifs in gold: reed-pipes, bagpipes, hats in the style of Louis XV, shepherd’s crooks, ribbons, bouquets of flowers, all gathering dust. Hélène’s parents, the ‘businessmen’ and Max spent every evening in the stuffy little room that Karol used as an office. It contained nothing but a telephone and a typewriter. They piled in there, happy to breathe in the thick cigar smoke, happy to hear the bare floorboards creak beneath their feet, happy to look at the plain walls that were thick enough to muffle their discussions.

Sitting side by side in that narrow room, Max and Bella took advantage of the chaos and the dim light, which came from a single light bulb hanging down on a wire, to press their warm thighs, their warm bodies against each other.