They were going to Finland. Karol would take them there and then come back to collect the gold ingots he’d left with a friend in Moscow. Max was leaving with them. His mother and sisters had fled to the Caucasus but he refused to join them. Karol looked the other way. Hélène heard her parents in the next room; they were sorting through Bella’s jewellery and sewing it into their clothing. She could hear their muffled whispering and the clinking of gold.

‘If only I’d known,’ thought Hélène. ‘If only I’d understood that the poor woman was going mad, I could have told the grown-ups. They would have taken care of her, made her well again, she’d still be alive …’

But then she immediately shook her head with a sad little snigger. Who, for God’s sake, would have had the time to take care of her? What was the health and life of a human being worth these days? What did it matter whether one person lived and the other died? All over the city people carried dead children to the cemetery tied up in sacks, for there were simply too many to afford a coffin. A few days before, during a break between lessons, she herself had watched a man being executed; and she was just a little girl in a smock, with fat curls round her neck and fingers stained with ink; she stood glued to the window, staring out, without looking away, without crying out, with no outward sign of emotion except for a gradual draining of colour in her face until her lips turned white. Five soldiers were lined up opposite a wounded man who stood against a wall, his head bandaged and bloody, swaying as if he were drunk. He fell to the ground; they carried him away, just as on another day they had carried away some dead woman on a stretcher, wrapped in her black shawl, just as a starving dog had come to die beneath that very window, his emaciated body cut open and bleeding. And the child returned to her desk and mumbled her way through her lesson by the faint light of a candle: ‘Racine depicts men as they are, and Corneille as they should be …’

Or: ‘The father of our current beloved Emperor, Nicholas II, was called Alexander III and ascended to the throne in …’ for the history books hadn’t yet been updated.

Life, death, they were so insignificant …

Her heavy head fell down on to her chest, but what she feared most was sleep. She didn’t want to fall asleep, didn’t want to forget, didn’t want to wake up when her consciousness of unhappiness was still only vague and hazy, and look around for that familiar face in the other empty bed …

She clenched her teeth, looked out into the night, but the darkness was terrifying, full of sneering faces and swirls of black water, or so it seemed. The fog clung to the windows with its pale mist, lit up by the moon. The dank smell of water seemed to seep through the closed windows, rising up from the street, slithering towards her. And when it filled her with horror, she would turn away and see the empty bed once more.

‘Go on,’ a voice within her whispered, ‘call your parents, they’re here, they’ll understand that you’re afraid, they’ll let you sleep somewhere else, they’ll take away that other bed, so flat, so empty …’

But she wanted at least to hold on to her pride.

‘What am I, a child? Am I afraid of death, of unhappiness? Afraid of being alone? No, I won’t call for anyone and certainly not for them. I don’t need them. I’m stronger than all of them. They won’t see me cry. They aren’t worthy of helping me. I’ll never say her name again, never. They aren’t worthy of hearing it.’

The next day it was Hélène who sorted out the chest of drawers and put Mademoiselle Rose’s meagre belongings into a trunk; it was she who packed away the linen, then the books, then the blouses whose every pleat, every careful stitch were so familiar, then the coat that had been returned to them, still steeped in the smell of fog. She closed the lid, turned the key and never again spoke the name of Mademoiselle Rose in front of her family.

PART III

1

The sleigh rushed towards a faint light that seemed to disappear then return, happily twinkling through the falling snow. The night was crystal clear and bitterly cold. The snowfields of Finland were endless, without a single rock, a single hill, just an enormous expanse of ice as far as the eye could see; at the horizon the ice seemed to curve slightly, as if it were embracing the entire world.

Hélène had left St Petersburg that morning. It was only the beginning of November, but here it was already the dead of winter. There was no wind, but an icy mist blew joyously from the ground, rushing towards the dark sky, towards the stars, making them flicker like candles in a breeze. For a while the stars looked duller, glimmering like mirrors when you breathe on them; but when the freezing mist dissolved they shone even more brightly and the snow took on a kind of bluish glow that seemed very close by.