She saw a group of villagers, under the direction of a man in a black leather jacket, pulling on a thick rope wound round the cupola of a church, round the cross. The repeated cracking sounds seemed to fire their enthusiasm. And in another village, very early in the morning, she saw an old woman kneeling before the dome of a church cast down among the tombs of an unfenced cemetery, open to the fragile resonance of the fields.

She went through deserted villages where the orchards were glutted with overripe fruit, falling into the grass or withering on the bough. She stayed in a town where, one day at the market, a salesman mutilated a child who had tried to steal an apple from him. All the men she encountered seemed either to be rushing toward an unknown goal, mobbing trains, getting crushed on landing stages, or else waiting, one never knew for whom, before the closed doors of shops, at gates guarded by soldiers, and sometimes quite simply by the roadside.

The space she confronted knew no happy medium: incredible throngs of people would suddenly give way to a complete wilderness where the immensity of the sky and the depth of the forests made the presence of man unthinkable. Then without transition this emptiness would run into a ferocious jostling of peasants, slithering about on the muddy bank of a river, swollen by the autumn rains. That was something else Charlotte saw. Angry peasants with long poles pushing away a barge, from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying from hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, woken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves, would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea…