I can say you, when it comes to watching someone being arrested, I am, if only it could be otherwise, not a vestal virgin. I have already described the young lady I fell wildly, eternally, achingly in love with as she was being dragged by her hair across the cobblestones in front of the Smolny Institute. Also how I was hauled in for questioning when the second of my two signatures turned up on a petition. I did not look forward to witnessing the arrest of what the sheriff, with the bureaucrat’s genius for dehumanized jargon, called the perpetrator. (I suppose it is easier to arrest people, easier, in the end, to execute them, if they do not come equipped with a handle.) The trouble was I could not worm out of it without alerting N
