In fact, I should have left, by whatever means I could, but I honestly believed—and my friends told me—that things would settle down. It was not that kind of revolution, they said, not the Russian kind where the Tsar and his family are put against the wall. It was the other kind, in which one mode of production supersedes another in the orderly progress of historical materialism. I should stay indoors and I should occupy myself and I should paint, but little by little the mood would calm and I would be a national treasure, a perfect example of a man who had freed himself from the oppressive system by the exercise of his mind. My work, after all, had flavours that might have been Soviet. A little careful construction could make me a hero, or at least a secret sympathiser. I need only wait, and pay no attention to what was happening outside my window; to the cries of men clubbed down in the street and the noise of bones breaking; to the wailing of women carried off to answer for their husbands’ imagined crimes; to the small shuffle of children too young for the task, picking their way down the alleys in search of missing parents.