The USSR passed on, RIP, but the apartments didn’t get any bigger and young people didn’t get any more prosperous. Where the children’s playgrounds survived, they still served two shifts—infants during the day and senior-school pupils and students in the evening. The more stupid evening gatherings were rowdy, they dropped litter, played loud music and were aggressive with people walking by—for which they were dispersed by old grannies, who knew no greater joy than to ring the militia. The more cultured gatherings sat there quietly, concealed their alcohol, greeted passersby politely and cleared up their own litter. I used to sit in one of those gatherings too.

Well, at least it seems to me that our gathering was cultured and polite, and it didn’t get on anyone’s nerves. But, of course, it’s quite possible that the inhabitants of the houses round about might have had a completely different opinion.

Anyway, one thing I could never have imagined, neither as a young idler, nor even after I became a Light Other, was that late one evening I would find myself sitting in Princess Diana’s playground in Kensington Gardens, London, drinking beer with an ancient witch!

“Luckily for me the prophecy was pretty clear,” said Arina. “Masha was a diligent girl and she prophesied like that too—neatly. Only she tried to rhyme everything. She had it fixed in her head that a prophecy had to be in verse. So there I am, sitting in front of this nitwit and wondering what I should do. If I hadn’t understood who it was all about, I wouldn’t have taken any notice. What’s the point of complaining about what can’t be changed . . . right? But I did understand. It was 1915—everything was quite transparent: ‘With the loss of his heir, the tsar is deranged, Bolsheviks are hanged in the cells. War lasts nine years, Moscow is consumed by flames, and the country partitioned as well. Little Russia is German land, Siberia comes under the Japanese hand, a third of the people die of starvation, the world absorbs the rest of the nation.’ ”

“A genuine apocalypse,” I said sarcastically.

“I think that’s what it would have been,” said Arina. “The death of the Tsarevich Alexei could have affected Nicholas in an unexpected manner. He could have crushed the revolution . . . and then lost the First World War. And Russia would effectively have ceased to exist. The Japanese in the Far East, the Germans in the West.”

“It’s kind of hard to believe,” I remarked.

“It was a prophecy, Anton. It ought to have come true, people had heard it. But I intervened.”

“You cured the tsarevich?”

“Well, I didn’t cure him . . . let’s just say I prolonged his life. Nicholas dawdled and lost his nerve, the Bolsheviks took power. Blood was spilt, of course . . . but it could have been worse.”