In the street Charlotte stopped, overcome with perplexity. She should have bought much more bread! Two, three, no, four loaves! She should have noted the name of the street where this excellent bakery was located. She approached the corner house and looked up. But the letters had an odd, hazy look: they merged into one another, twinkled. "Oh, how stupid I am!" she suddenly thought. "This is the street where my uncle lives…"

She woke with a start. The train, stopped in open countryside, was filled with a confused hubbub: a gang had killed the driver and was currently working its way through the train, confiscating everything it could lay its hands on. Charlotte took off her shawl and covered her head, knotting the corners under her chin as old peasant women do. Then, still smiling at the memory of her dream, she placed on her lap a bag stuffed with old rags wrapped round a stone…

And if she was spared during those two months of her journey, it was because the immense continent she was crossing was sated with blood. Death, for several years at least, was losing its attraction, becoming too banal and no longer worth the effort.

Charlotte walked through Boyarsk, the Siberian town of her childhood, without wondering if this was still a dream or reality. She felt too weak to think about it.

On the governor's house, above the entrance, hung a red flag. Two soldiers armed with guns were stamping their feet in the snow on either side of the door… Some of the windows in the theater had been broken and blocked, for want of anything better, with pieces of scenery as reinforcement. Here one could see foliage covered with white blossom, probably from The Cherry Orchard, there the facade of a dacha. And above the gateway two workmen were engaged in stretching a long strip of red calico. "Everyone to the People's Meeting of the Atheists' Society!" Charlotte read, slowing her pace a little. One of the workmen took out a nail he was holding between clenched teeth and drove it in with force beside the exclamation mark.