The Yellow Leaf, a fairly new student hang-out in St Petersburg, had a history analogous to much in Russia. Before the world entered into the terrible efficient nightmare of the twentieth century, the building had stood mustily and slept in the slow Victorian time, surrounded on all sides by Tsars and silly clothing, secure like a middle-aged accountant in the suburbs. Then there was a sudden quickening - poverty, violence, poverty, violence, like a bike looking for balance or a planet teetering on its mad orbit. A raggedly clothed family populated the one-storey building, always too many children, a great pot for all and little food for any. Desperation and starvation, anger, children slapped, arguments about money and because life was as it was. Then time passed and miraculously a little food came in - about the same time as the pamphlets. Words blared from papers strewn on the floor: glory, revolution, leader. But they were incidental, for now there was food. What also became incidental were the noises in the streets, the vibrant air of fear, knocks on the door and yelps for help that went meticulously unheeded. One night the father came in with bloody legs and turned off the lights and they all crawled into bed - their three beds - even though it was only six in the evening. And so they lived. And th

But that, too, had passed. Life became bearable. There was still the fear: the word 'hospital' replaced 'bogie-man' in the parents' lexicon of terror-words for children, they did not care to walk the streets, the world seemed grey. A radio arrived and told them all about the glorious regime that had given them such a radio. Newspapers blared as ever; now they had their own bogie-men: cruel fat Yankees who prospered while their brothers died in the gutter. A sickly child died one night; he was found in the morning on the floor, his thin forearm translucent in the winter light from the window. The other children went to school and learned what the radio had taught them since birth. Several entered mines, several factories, a couple offices. One tall boy told the father he would become a policeman and the father said that over his dead body he would, and so the boy walked out and did not return.

It seemed to last forever: the automatic existence in a world like a wire trap, the usual exigent voices bellowing inside one's head with that constant winter landscape outside that could never satisfy them. But that, too, had passed. A wall crumbled in the middle of the world and the Western wind streamed in. The now ageing man and woman read of black traitors everywhere: they surrounded and swamped the Kremlin. The children had all gone now - they were the 'black traitors' along with their parents, if not in deed, then in thought. A few old suited men cried sadly that Russians, who for years were reared on, tilled, and were buried in Russian soil, now forsook a whole ideology because the Yankees could give them nicer shops, sweeter food, and prettier televisions. The people did not listen. The spell of fear was broken, and they left the tired grey machine they had pushed and many ran west, leaving a whole world to rust and dust. Those who remain have a blueprint of America and the fragile timbers of their own broken country with which to work, and no past and maybe no future and much time to reflect.

So here stands the building. After its years aching under the torments and miseries and squalid, quietly pocketed joys of a family, only the mother and father remain. There is a new fresh sign out front painted with more delicate care than is expressed in the whole rest of the sagging structure. All but one of the paper-like walls within have been knocked out, and the old couple has retreated to by far the smallest of the two remaining rooms, the kitchen. There are their bed and the swept up remnants of their life together: the property of a modest little drawer. And that is all. Except for the pot, of course, always boiling under a stony mist.

And on the day I'm telling you about, Maria Rada snapped open the hatch-door communicating to the larger room. Through the steam from the pot, she could see little in the dark creaky space. She tried to remember where her sons' bedroom had been, but she could not. She found she was forgetting things more and more these days. Well, what was to be expected? But she still remembered the most important things, the things that had kept her alive when it would have been easier just to disappear: to kick a little and let herself be taken, or else to just fade gently away like a dog who has lost its master, as so many did back then.

Yes, she had survived. Her bright wily eyes took in the dark room of the recently opened 'club'. It had not been a crazy idea, as others had told her at the time. She understood people, she reminded herself - that was her quality. There was an acute sensitivity beneath the leathery exterior, the face of incipient wrinkles like a sun-scorched shell. You would have seen a little of it many hundreds of times a year, every year since she was, oh, seventeen, sixteen even, in the market just off --------- Street, haggling for black and tasteless bread and vegetables and meat. Proud, people called her. Humble, they called her. Noisy, they called her. Timid, they called her. In truth, Maria Rada was all these things when she needed to be. Hungry, she called herself and her family. And most of the time, very nearly all of it, she got what she had set out to get. She knew who would sell, and for what, and how low they could be driven: she saw in a stranger's eyes what a dozen graphs and many weeks might hint at to an eminent economist. She knew, and she still knew, still had the measure of most people. So she knew that people - above all the young, the idealistic, the students - would spend money even when they hadn't enough, and spend it on nothing, spend it on the freedom just to sit somewhere with others like themselves and forget. And so the club.

And so the club. And the students came every night, and Maria Rada was like a mother to them. Life was not good - it never had been, but at least there had been direction before - now there was nothing. They were a lost generation, with no expectations and no solid plans that lasted more than a few days. Therefore they played at things - became artists with the souls of accountants, poets who thought like politicians, philosophers whose hands wanted to build or to feed or to cure. Their airy ideas would part like mist at the harsh breath out of the Motherland, but for now at least she could take care of them - and profit too, for she could not exist without that - and let them see the fantastic ghosts of which they dreamed gain form, if only for a night at a time. She would care for them in her hard-eyed, beak-nosed way, a surrogate mother figure, by letting their games continue. For her part she had the privilege of seeing the wide world beyond her children's playpen, the innocence of their games, the beauty of their hopeless plans - but also the wearisome responsibility of never, never forgetting what had gone before.

Her bright eyes from the hatchway watched the hungry students seep in: little troops of tortured Raskolnikovs with slate-grey eyes, bony girls swathed in dark coats and scarves. Very hungry. Strange then that they should walk first of all up to the hatch and slide through little trinkets, as though they were savages before a totem making tangible offerings for intangible rewards. There came paper money like a preparatory bid, insignificant jewellery not yet pawned, and then the real currency: food. Dented tins, packets of crumbs, vegetables that had eluded the universal rot. For inflation did not alter the value of a gherkin - it did not depreciate like money or decompose and die like everything else; it was trapped in its little pickled world while outside Hell roamed the streets. Maria Rada knew the value of the jars of gherkins for which tonight she would exchange the use of the larger room - the 'lounge' - and economic cups of coffee spaced at wide intervals throughout the night. They had to pay, and they paid willingly: one boy, one who seemed earnest and surprisingly willing for one of his kind, even swept up after the meetings in return for entrance to the club, though he had never read there nor passed comment.

The door on the hatch shut. Yet you felt the eyes behind it never did. You could picture Maria Rada standing over her pot forever, or maybe going to bed just to lie awake with her knees drawn up to her chin and memories everywhere, or sitting on a chair and calculating prices or her children's ages or the hour of her husband's return. Whatever, she would do it with her peculiar quiet surety and calm, born of a mind that swam back and forth through decades of terror and pain, salvaging a precious image here, a tender moment there. Whatever, you knew that somehow, beyond comprehension, Maria Rada knew.

The students settling into their places now on their side of the hatch, in shadowy corners or prominent seats according to their wont, knew things too. They knew that life was more than work and pain and death; they knew the immutable and inscrutable power of language and art; they knew about God and existentialism and nihilism and atheism and communism and capitalism and materialism; they knew, with proud self-deprecation, only that they knew nothing. In a word, they followed the student fad of wisdom.

One of them took the stage with very little fuss on anyone's part. (For stage read platform, or rather dais of covered crates.) She was a small white-faced girl with long, carefully unkempt black hair. Snow was on her shoulders from the night outside. There was a glimpse of a thick blue jumper beneath her black coat, and she wore neat dark trousers that terminated suddenly in heavy brown boots many sizes too big for her. Her feet were set defiantly apart, in touching contrast to the eyes that wouldn't even meet those of the audience. The spread of floor between the boots held a singular appeal for the girl: there flickered the shadows of the ravenous oil-lamps leering around the stage. She produced a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket: it trembled in her hand as though in response to the play of the light. You thought of the new girl walking up to the sneering ring in the playground - wanting to beg for approval but knowing that to beg was to lose it right away.

'"L'��derni�e,"' she began tremulously, '"les feuilles sont tomb�s."'

From the darkness came a muffled phrase.

'"Sont tomb�s dans le jardin de mon coeur."'

A little snigger came.

'"Les arbres."' She stopped. It seemed a world of laughter waited in the wings.

The playground again.

'"Les arbres et le."'

Her lip curled in an odd, proud, pleading way, and she stuttered and stopped and left the stage suddenly. She was crying and after a moment a blond-haired young man stood and walked self-assuredly over to her where she trembled in the shadows. The others shared knowing looks as he led her out into the street, telling her she was no failure at all, but misunderstood. It was like a victory for decadence, and they praised it, typically, with disparagement.

Then they sat in the dim room and talked a little, but not much. What they did say was carefully ambiguous and on no subject anyone could isolate.

Wisdom again.

They sat and sat and waited. The girl returned and sat in a gloomy corner alone, hatred in her face, and the boy returned with her, wearing a smirk like a signal to his comrades: must be a nun. And the waiting went on. Their gatherings weren't official at all - they would pour purest scorn on anything as planned as a series of readings - but there was an etiquette and normally one act flowed easily into another. Not so tonight. They waited, adding to the vacuum with their cultured chatter.

And then - crack! The door fell open and in strode a man of twenty or so in rough clothes, made peculiar by his hair, which was grey at root and tip, but a vague brown for a space in between. He held in his hand more hair, which was attached to the head of a pathetically squirming figure in what looked like a dull purple dressing-gown. A few recognised in the latter figure a rather bad actor who had embarrassed himself regularly back when the University could still afford to put on such amateur productions as he could get a part in.

So this was the next piece. The unconventional opening caused a little initial unseemly interest, but the young students in the dark soon reassumed their pretended worldliness and sat back to criticise the show. They had produced stranger things in the past for their amusement.

It opened with surprising directness. 'You think,' said the man, as he and his burden took the stage, 'that you are so very clever.' He had a deep voice and spoke with a strange accent that was not at home amidst the coffee cups and intellectualism. As he walked towards the centre of the stage, the head of the student he dragged behind him met wood several times - thump, thump, thump - and a strange smile played on his dark stubbled face. It was not clear whether his words were addressed to the audience or the now bloody actor he had in tow.

'You think,' he went on, 'that because you are students you are not here and now. You think you have. transcended all this ugliness.'

'No. But we think your performance is very crude, friend,' said one of the people in the shadows, in a measured voice. There was a slight agitation of sound. The word 'derivative' fluttered about, looking for an open window.

'It is no performance,' responded the new arrival, in equally calm tones. 'I am here with a purpose, unlike all of you. I am here to - well, let me show you.' He pulled an old hunting knife from his coarse belt, holding it before his voice like a microphone. 'You see this young. man? You see him?' There was no reply. 'All right. What is he?'

'He is an actor who cannot act,' spoke a different voice from the shadows. A well-brought-up chuckle followed. The man on the stage released the actor's hair a little, letting him fall fully on to his knees, and the latter smiled aimlessly - either in gratitude or to show the others his strength. With his ragged clothes, flapping limbs, and sweaty hair he looked like a man trapped under water, face bloated into a moronic grin. He had always been fat like that, always borne that miserable smile - whether approaching a group bravely in one of the fashionable bars and trying to join in, or sitting alone before his mirror and learning his lines.

'He is less than nothing,' commented the man.

'Then why don't you kill him?' came the response from the crowd. 'Of course that is what you plan.'

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