“It’s the same as with the European colonies in Africa and Asia, the English enclosures that ruined the peasants, the American slaves in the cotton fields . . . and the never-ending bloody wars all around the planet. First a country gets fat and flourishes—don’t confuse that with the people, it’s the country we’re talking about! Then the rulers mellow a bit, the people relax—and life gets free and easy. The Roman legions no longer march on the orders of Rome, but stagnate somewhere like Judea. The aristocracy devotes itself to its vices, the people to theirs . . . the only differences are the price of the whores and the types of gastronomical delicacies. And somewhere not far away the numbers of resentful, hungry people bound together by a single, inflexible will are already multiplying, and they regard the former mighty power as a tasty lunch. And then there are two possibilities—either the country will rouse itself and start to live again, even though that will be really tough on the people . . . or the country will die. And the people with it, of course. It will become a part of the dictatorship that it had left behind and to which it didn’t wish to return. The eternal cycle of strength and weakness, harshness and flabbiness, fanaticism and tolerance. People are lucky if they’re born at the beginning of an age of peace, when an aristocrat can no longer hunt down a commoner with his dogs and the commoner doesn’t yet insist on his right to be an idle drone. That’s what they call a golden age . . . only it doesn’t last long, not even a century.”

“And can a society where this balance has been achieved be happy?” I asked.

“Of course,” Arina said. “Only the balance can’t be achieved for long. I once argued about that with a student in St Petersburg—he was a bright young man. I explained to him that society balances on a razor’s edge. On one side there is inertia, apathy, and death, on the other there is harshness, severity, and life, and it would be good to walk the path through the middle—but you can’t balance on a razor for long. He didn’t agree, though: he was stubborn and he believed strongly in communism.”

“Yes, as far as I know, he never did agree,” I said thoughtfully. “All right, Arina, I’m not willing to argue.”

“You don’t agree either,” she said, nodding. “I understand. It’s youth, Anton. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

Chapter 6

Chapter 6