The goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything.

EDUARD BERNSTEIN

Three days later, Stasia received a visit from Peter Vasilyev, a master of the old school and former soloist with the Royal Ballet. He gave Stasia his hand and said, ‘Only Thekla would think of engaging a dancing teacher in times like these, but she thought it might provide me with a little distraction, too.’

The house’s large, empty rooms provided ideal practice space, and Peter Vasilyev brought new records with him for the gramophone.

Vasilyev had grey hair. He was tall, artificial, worldly, and authoritarian. Stasia worshipped him from the moment they met, and counted the hours until he arrived.

She had received basic training in classical ballet, but Vasilyev was quite different: imperious, demanding. He knew only the best exponents of his art, and had danced in a number of magnificent halls. If the revolution hadn’t intervened, Peter Vasilyev would probably be the director of the best ballet school in the city, Stasia thought.

With his tireless discipline, his talent, his awe-inspiring manner, and Stasia’s great determination to spend hours practising despite the bestial cold, her hopes for Paris had returned. Everything seemed possible again. With Simon, or without him.

Thus Stasia danced through the winter; through the snowstorms, the icy wind, the frosty days and nights; through the demonstrations and skirmishes, the uprisings, strikes, and — again and again — through the hunger. Simon did not come.

*

In March of the year 1919, workers began to strike in almost all the notable factories of Petrograd. And Masha finally left them. She had inducted Stasia into everything: she had twice taken her to buy bread, introduced her to a Siberian girl who knew people from the black market and would help her in emergencies, and explained the principles of shoving, shouting, and getting oneself noticed, which were needed in those times in order to survive. Then, with a small bag on her back, and showing hardly any emotion, she bade a cool farewell to the weeping Thekla and walked out of the door, which Stasia fastened behind her with numerous bolts.

In April, Simon’s next letter to Stasia informed her that his visit to Petrograd would be delayed further. They still couldn’t grant him leave, as they were currently anticipating an assault on Moscow, and he was being sent there. He put her off until the summer.

By this time, the chocolate-maker had somehow managed to send his daughter a large crate of groceries. God alone knew who he had had to bribe to get it to her. These groceries, together with the spring weather, which was finally starting to beat back the merciless winter cold, granted the two women a few weeks’ peace, and released them from their daily worries about how they would survive the following day.

Dance always helped. The taxing, monotonous exercises and the small successes. After every practice, Stasia felt a little happier, freer, more light-hearted. There had been many times when, had it not been for Thekla, who refused to admit defeat despite her loneliness, and the hard-working Peter Vasilyev, who doggedly made his way to the house by the Fontanka three times a week, Stasia would have thrown in the towel and either taken the next train south or simply gone to bed and never got up again.

Standing in the endless queues for bread, Stasia eavesdropped on people angrily discussing the country’s future. The front at the Don, the front at Kharkov, the front at Novgorod, the front near Minsk, the front near Irkutsk — the very word ‘front’ made her feel sick. The peasants just wanted to be left in peace. The Cossacks wanted to defend their independence and their worldly possessions; the monarchists didn’t want to cooperate with the Mensheviks because they were collaborating with the Reds; the Mensheviks were drawing ever closer to the Bolsheviks, to escape the chaos of the monarchists and the liberals; while people with no affiliations, anarchists, and criminals were taking advantage of the situation: they were seeing to their own prosperity and earning money on the black market.

‘Maybe we should go to Georgia together, Thekla. Unrest or no, we’d be safer there and we’d have no shortage of food,’ Stasia said to Thekla one morning in the kitchen, over insipid tea. (Unlike Masha, she was never able to get hold of the good, strong tea; she always got ripped off.)

‘Oh, my darling, I’m far too old to make a new start like that,’ Thekla replied.

‘Oh, come on. You’re not that old, Thekla. And anyway, nobody’s talking about a new start; this is more a case of getting through the winter, as you call it. Until all this is over.’

‘Will it ever be over?’ Thekla asked, with a harrowing sadness in her voice. And Stasia knew that Thekla would never leave this city and this house, and she also knew that it would be impossible for her to leave Thekla there alone.

And so Stasia and Thekla stayed together over the following months, in the shadowy, damp isolation of the big house, brought to life three times a week by Peter Vasilyev’s visits and his dance lessons. But the constant fear, and continually having to fend off the people who hammered on their front door looking for somewhere to stay, or simply wanting to loot the place, sapped Stasia’s strength. At these moments she would have liked to have boxed Thekla’s ears for leaving her to defend the house alone, as if it weren’t Thekla’s own beloved home.

*

In the summer of 1920, Stasia reached the second anniversary of her Petrograd imprisonment. A few days had become two full years since she had left her home and her family to be with a man whose wife she had been for only a matter of days. Sometimes Stasia seemed already to have forgotten why she had come to this city.

On one hot July evening, swarming with mosquitos, Peter Vasilyev appeared at the front door unannounced. He had a bottle wrapped in newspaper under his shirt, and was beaming from ear to ear.

‘Come, ladies. I would like to drink a toast with you and bid you farewell!’ he cried, walking triumphantly into the kitchen. There he filled three glasses with Crimean sparkling wine, and informed Stasia and Thekla that in two days’ time he would be leaving the country, and the lessons were therefore at an end.

‘I have a cousin in Baden-Baden. She has a shrewd banker for a husband; she’s offered to help me, and my two sisters are already there. I can’t stand all this any longer. They’ve sent money for my passage and arranged the necessary papers for me. For once, I’m glad that I never quite escaped my Jewish relations.’

Years later, when Stasia heard about Auschwitz and Birkenau, she often thought of Peter Vasilyev, whose fine-sounding Russian name was a pseudonym, and she hoped fervently that Isaac Eibinder, as Peter Vasilyev was called, was not numbered among those millions.

After Peter Vasilyev’s departure, everything suddenly seemed stale and futile. Thekla hardly left her bedroom, and Stasia wandered aimlessly about the house. To begin with, she practised and danced even without Peter Vasilyev’s strict instructions, as he had told her to do, but she found it increasingly difficult; her dream seemed to be fading again, as if she were constantly in need of allies to keep it alive. She started buying strong sailors’ tobacco on the black market, which she rolled into thin cigarettes and smoked (a vice that would stay with her all her life; even when she could have afforded to smoke better cigarettes, she never swore off the cheap, strong tobacco).

One morning, a few weeks after Peter Vasilyev’s departure, after a sleepless night, Stasia went into Thekla’s room and sat on the edge of her bed in the dawn light. Thekla lay with her back to her, asleep, or pretending to be. Stasia woke her.

‘It can’t go on like this. One way or another, they’ll take the house from you, or people will just break in and stay here. Only yesterday I had to threaten two of them with the carving knife again, when they tried to climb in through the cellar. If only I had a gun — they’re more afraid of those than of my knife … I don’t have the strength any more to stand in these queues for hours, to always be afraid that somebody’s going to break in and cut our throats. A silver ring and a chain are all that’s left in your casket. The bonds you still own are worth nothing any more, and the tsar is dead. I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true. You’ve always said, Nicholas will come back, he won’t hand over his country to these wretched drinkers, but that’s not going to happen. They shot the tsar almost two years ago. In Ekaterinburg. His children, his wife — they’re all dead. We’re at war. Everywhere is at war. It will never again be like it was before. Never. I’m sorry. But we have to do something, Thekla. I’m going home.’