She lived through the spring and summer on the proceeds of these sales.
The town was getting emptier every day.
The front lay within an hour's train journey from Petersburg, beyond the river Sestra.
The government moved to Moscow.
The palaces looked down on the Neva from empty, shattered window frames.
The streets were not lit up.
The militia were not particularly interested in preserving the security of a bourgeoisie which was doomed anyhow.
Sinister beings, such as no-body had ever seen before, appeared in the streets.
They peered into windows, climbed dark stairways, tried the handles of doors.
Woe to him who did not take the precaution of locking and double-locking his door!
For he would soon catch the sound of surreptitious rustlings, and meet with strangers in his apartment.
With a cry of "Hands up!", the strangers would throw themselves on the tenants, tie them up with lengths of electrical cord, and bear away, at their leisure, bundles of property.
There was cholera in the town.
When the berries began to ripen it assumed terrible dimensions, people falling in contortions of pain in the streets and markets.
Whispered rumours spread like wildfire.
Incredible disasters were expected.
It was said that the Red Army men were putting the five-pointed star on their cap-bands upside down—the mark of the Antichrist—and also that a "White Man" was haunting a locked chapel on Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge, signifying that disasters from the sea were to be expected.
From the bridges people pointed to the cold factory chimneys sticking up against the crimson sunset like the devil's fingers.
The factories shut down.
The workers joined the food detachments, or went to the villages.
Grass began to show green between the paving stones.
Dasha did not go out every day, and then only in the morning, to the market where unscrupulous Finns extorted two pairs of trousers for a sack of potatoes.
Red Army men were seen with increasing frequency on the markets, where shots fired into the air dispersed the survivors of the bourgeois system—the Finns with their potatoes, and the ladies with their bundles of men's clothes and window-curtains.
It became more difficult every day to get food.
Sometimes the situation was saved by Matte himself, always ready to give tinned food and sugar in exchange for antiques.
Dasha ate as little as possible, to save herself trouble.
She got up early every day.
When she had thread she would sew, at other times she would take up some book published in 1913 or 1914, anything to stave off thought. But mostly she sat at the window, thinking—or rather allowing her thoughts to revolve around a dark spot.
Her recent spiritual upheaval, her despair, her misery, seemed now to be nothing but a kind of inert lump in her brain, a remnant of illness.
She had grown so thin she might have been taken for a girl of sixteen.
Indeed, she felt as if she had become a girl again, but without her girlish lightness of spirits.
Summer was passing.
The white nights were drawing in, and the sun set gloomily over Kronstadt.
There was an extensive view from the open window of the fifth floor— abandoned streets, on which the shades of night were descending, the dark windows of the houses.
No lights were lit.
The footsteps of a passer-by were seldom heard.
"What next?" wondered Dasha.
"When will this state of paralysis be over?"
It would soon be autumn, the rain would come, the chill wind would howl over the rooftops again.
There was no wood.
Her winter coat was sold.
Perhaps Ivan Ilyich would return.... But that would only mean the same old wretchedness, the dim red glow of the lamps, a useless existence.
Oh, to find the strength to shake off this paralysis, to leave this house in which she was buried alive, to get away from this dying town!
Then surely something new would happen....
It was the first time for a whole year that Dasha had allowed herself to think of "something new."
Catching herself in the thought, she was moved and agitated, as if reflections from some radiant expanse, like those which had once warmed her on a Volga steamer, had suddenly appeared through the curtain of hopeless misery.
Then came days of regret for Ivan Ilyich. She began to pity him in a new way, like a sister, remembering with tenderness his patient care, his imperturbable, innocuous good nature.
One day she went to the bookshelf and hunted out the three white volumes of Bessonov's poems, those receptacles of utterly burned-out memories.
She read them before the dark fell, in the stillness, with swallows darting past the window like black arrows.
In the poems she found the words of her own grief, her loneliness, the dark wind which would one day whistle over her grave.... Giving herself up to reverie, Dasha wept.