Ice Trilogy Read Online Free Page A

home, saying that now he “lived on the road.” Various thin-eared, energetic young men darted about him; he called them his commissioners. Now he was
involved
not only in sugar but in many other things as well. When he shouted into the telephone, bizarre phrases would reach my ears: “American rubber will grab us by the throat one of these days,” “There’s a shipment of crackers gone criminally missing in the warehouse,” “Those scoundrels from the land committee of the southwestern front are cutting me without a knife,” “Six cars of soap shavings have been delayed at the junction,” and so on.
    My grandmother, who was quietly living out the remainder of her life in the house on Ostozhenka, said one time at Easter, “Our Dimulenka has completely lost his head with this war: he’s chasing seven rabbits at one time.”
    And at the time Father really did remind me of a man in torment, racing hopelessly after something nimble and elusive. He himself grew no livelier for the race; on the contrary, he seemed to ossify, and his immobile face frowned even more. It seemed that he had completely stopped sleeping. His eyes shone feverishly and settled on nothing, roaming constantly when he had tea with us.
    Another year passed.
    The war had made its way into all the cracks. It had slithered out onto the streets. Columns of soldiers marched in the cities; at the station, cannons and horses were loaded onto the trains. Mama and I stopped visiting Basantsy — it was “restless” there. Our entire family settled in Petersburg. Relatives were left behind on the estates. The wartime capital taught me three new words: unemployment, strike, and boycott. For me they were embodied in the dark crowds of people on the streets of Petersburg who wandered about glumly, and whom we tried to pass by as quickly as possible in the dark, in our automobile.
    Petersburg began to be called Petrograd.
    In the newspapers people wrote mean poems about the Germans and drew caricatures of them. Vanya and Ilya liked to read them aloud. All Germans were divided into two types for me at that time: one was fat with a meaty, laughing face in a horned helmet, a saber in hand; the other was thin as a stick, in a peaked cap, with a monocle, a riding crop, and a sour, disdainful expression on his narrow face.
    My older sister Arisha brought home a patriotic song from school. In her singing lessons, the whole class was composing music to the verses of some provincial teacher:
    Arise, Russia, oh great and spacious land,
    The mortal fight is now at hand,
    With the Germans’ dark force,
    With the Teutonic knights’ horde!
    Nastya and Arisha accompanied with four hands, and I sang with pleasure, standing on a chair.
    When we moved to the big city, I noticed that everything happened faster than in Basantsy or Vaskelovo: people moved and talked more quickly, drivers raced along and hollered, automobiles honked and rattled, gymnasium students hurried to school, newspaper hawkers shouted about “our losses.” Father would enter the apartment, throw off his sheepskin coat, eat hurriedly, close himself in his office with his assistant, and then take off in the automobile with his commissioners and disappear for a week. Mama also moved much faster; she was always going somewhere and buying something. We went visiting often and quickly. I had a lot of new friends — boys and girls.
    I was being intensively prepared for the high school: I studied Russian and arithmetic with Didenko, and French and German with Madame Panaget. Lessons progressed much faster than before as well.
    Even our two pugs, Kaiser and Shuster, ran faster now, barked louder, and pooped on the rug more often.
    We celebrated Christmas 1917 at the large house of Father’s new friends. By that time Father had suddenly stopped all his trips and given himself over entirely to a new, menacing word which, like a powerful broom, had swept “trains of chipped lump sugar” and “cars of soap