Conquered City
Victor Serge
T.
I.
HE LONG NIGHTS
seemed to leave the city reluctantly, for only
a few hours. The gray of dawn or of twilight filtered through the
soiled white ceiling of the clouds and shone on everything like the
thin reflection of a distant glacier. Even the snow, which continued
to fall, was without light. That white shroud, soft and silent,
extended endlessly in space and time. The street lamps had to be
lit by three o'clock. Evening heightened the snow's colors-ash–
white, opaque, blue, the patient gray of old stones. Night imposed
itself, inexorable and calm, unreal. In the shadows, the delta
regained its geographical configuration. Black stony cliffs, cut up
in right angles, bordered the choked canals. A sullen phosphor–
escence rose from the frozen river.
At times the northern winds from Spitzbergen, or from still
further, from Greenland, perhaps, perhaps from the Pole across
the Arctic, Norway, and the White Sea, swept over the dreary
banks of the Neva. The cold suddenly bit into the granite, the heavy
fogs from the Baltic and the south suddenly disappeared, and the
rocks, the earth, the bare trees, were instantly covered with crystals
of frost, each one a scarcely perceptible marvel of numbers, lines
of force, and whiteness. The night's appearance changed, shedding
its veils of unreality. The Pole Star was visible; the constellations
revealed the immensity of the universe. The next day the bronze
cavaliers on their stone pedestals, covered with a silver powder,
seemed to have issued from a strange masquerade; the high granite
columns of St. Isaac's cathedral, from its pediment peopled by
saints up to the massive golden cupola, was completely frosted.
The red granite facades and wharves took on, under this magnifi–
cent veneer, tints of rose and white ash. The gardens, with the pure
filigree of their branches, seemed enchanted. That fantasy delighted
peoples' eyes as they stepped from their stifling houses, just as
when, a thousand years before, men dressed in furs ventured out
