On the Leningrad Road, armored personnel carriers stopped pedestrians but let cars drive through, so that there were long spaces of sparse traffic and empty sidewalks, then crossing spotlights and military vehicles proceeding slowly on a circular road. The Zhiguli, bent door and all, drew no attention. At night a driver noticed that Moscow was a series of concentric rings, and how much the city was orbits of light in a void.

The metro and buses were shut down, but people started to reappear out of the dark singly or in groups of ten or twenty, heading south. Troops were nonexistent at one corner, massed at another. In the Red Presnya district, Belovaya Street was blocked by tanks; the idling of their engines sounded like deep thought. Regular militia was off the street.

Arkady parked and joined the sidewalk traffic. A stream of men and women poured toward the river. Obviously some knew each other because there was quiet murmuring. Mostly they were silent, as if everyone were saving their breath for the walk, and as if that breath, visible in the rain, were enough communication. No one mentioned or looked askance at Arkady’s bloody shirt. To his relief, his leg functioned, knee and all.

Arkady let himself be swept forward. As the pace quickened, he found himself running with the crowd down a side street that had been turned into a dead end by army trucks parked bumper to bumper. But the canvas cover of one truck was pulled back and people helped each other up, as if climbing a country stile.

On the other side of the truck, the wide Red Presnya embankment road curved between the river and the White House. It was a relatively new building, a four-story marble box, with two arms that seemed to float lightly in the glow of thousands of people carrying candles. Arkady’s group squeezed single file between buses and bulldozers that had been set up as a barricade.

Along the way, he heard every rumor. The Kremlin was ringed by tanks ready to move down Kalinin Prospect to the White House. Riot troops were stationed outside the Bolshoi. The Committee was bringing gas canisters by barge to the embankment. Commandos had found tunnels to the White House. A helicopter assault would land on the roof. KGB agents inside the building would machine-gun the defenders at a secret signal. It would be like China or Rumania, but worse.

People hovered over small warming fires of trash, and around votive candles stuck into makeshift altars of wax. These were people who in all their lives had gone to no public demonstration that hadn’t been organized and herded. Yet their feet had brought them here.