In April 1917 everybody saw a Red Cavalry horseman riding across the moon: a portent of the October Revolution to come. One evening some townsfolk were walking through the forest near Gomel when all at once a huge wild man, his face distorted in a mad grimace, ran toward them. Taken aback—perhaps even frightened—they shouted to him to stop, but he paid no attention to them, as if they weren't even there, and went on running past them and into the thicket. Sure enough, hard on his heels came the Revolution with all its crazy and savage bloodshed.

Such were the stories my mother told me. She was bright and gifted, but uneducated, having finished only four years of primary school. Her superstitions had also touched me directly—and most painfully.

After my brother's death, Mother guarded me vigilantly. She wouldn't let me go on school outings, and I felt an outcast at school. Everyone else went: I was the only one left out. Mother's reasoning was particularly cruel. After I begged and begged and she still refused, on the very eve of one particular outing, she was gracious enough to explain to me her thinking on the subject.

“Had you simply asked, calmly and quietly, with no passion, ‘Mom, can I go?’ I might have agreed. But as you were all agog, so unhealthily bent on this outing, alarm bells began to ring in my head.”

Then, to illustrate her point, she told me a story.

It had happened in a little town or village in White Russia before the Revolution. Late one evening a young unmarried man living with his family became restless. He was dying to go out for a walk. His parents noticed that there was something overblown, worryingly exaggerated about that craving of his. It's late, said the young man's parents, why don't you go for a walk tomorrow morning? No, he said, I've got to do it tonight—and he rushed to the door. Fortunately, it was locked. Seriously alarmed now, suspecting perhaps some unclean otherworldly influence, they locked the windows too.