They were coming in faster now. They always did. Summer was over, and autumn was curling dreadfully, inevitably down towards winter; the deep, long dark of winter in northern Russia, where the cold was so desperate it ran down into your bones, and the beautiful blanket of snow wrapped the frozen earth up, hard as death. No wonder people drank.

It was a prosperous business, selling vodka and beer to miners and party officials, on the outskirts of Minsk. The tavern had a supply of alcohol, a blazing fire, tables for cards; it wasn’t hard to fill, even in the long summer evenings. But when winter came around, the place was packed. Men didn’t want to go home to their fat wives in the dark. They chose to drink a little, gamble, look at the blaze, laugh, talk about women. Leer at women, if any were ever brave enough to show their faces. Mostly it was just the whores, and Pyotr discouraged them inside his bar; he didn’t want any trouble for the party bureaucrats. They could drum up their trade outside the door.

Vladek despised those women, too. Young and desperate . . . and selling their bodies. Why should those sluts pollute the bar? If they were poor, then they could work. They could make something of themselves, the way he,Vladek, had done.

His real name wasn’t Vladek. But he had decided to call himself that. Vladek means “ruler.” He had learned that in the orphanage, along with many other facts taught by Mr. Kovec and others—the history of the glorious Communist revolution, with geography, with tales of capitalist aggression. And while the other kids sat there, sullen, thinking of nothing but the hunger that gnawed at their bellies,Vladek had sucked it in. He would better himself, for such was his destiny.

Vladek swept the floors for the eighteenth time that afternoon. He smiled, nodded at the patrons as they swaggered in, blowing on their hands and calling at Pyotr to pour them a shot—or six. Blowsy, rolling drunks, they were all peasants. Like the other kids at the orphanage, mining or chopping wood, manual labour, that was their destiny.

He had noble blood in his veins, though; things were going to be different for him.

“Vladek! Get over here.”

Pyotr bellowed at him. “The latrine backed up again. Sort it out before the first shift clocks off.”

“Sure, Pyotr,”Vladek said. The boy gritted his teeth; shoveling stinking human refuse, that was what Pyotr thought he was good for!

But he didn’t show his disgust. There would be no complaints. Whatever Pyotr wanted done, he did. It was why Pyotr hadn’t thrown him onto the street that first night, when he ran away from the hated iron gates of the orphanage, struggled ten miles into the settlement, in his thin, darned pants, terrified he might faint from cold. Because had he done so, of course, he would have died.