Furthermore, in those long nocturnal narratives, all was not always clear to my childish ears. That sudden rush of blood to the head of Charlotte's father, for example… One day this respectable and wealthy doctor learns from one of his patients, a senior official in the police, that the big demonstration by workers, which at any minute was about to spill onto the main square at Boyarsk, would be met at one of the crossroads with machine-gun fire. As soon as his patient has left, Dr. Lemonnier removes his white coat and, without summoning his driver, leaps into his carriage and hurtles through the streets to warn the workers.

The massacre did not take place… And I often wondered why this "bourgeois," this privileged man, had acted thus. We were accustomed to seeing the world in black and white: the rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited – in a word, the class enemies and the just. Charlotte 's father's action confused me. Out of the mass of humanity, so conveniently divided into two, suddenly arose a man, with his unpredictable liberty.

Nor did I understand what had happened at Bukhara. I guessed only that it was a terrible occurrence. It was surely not by chance that the adults only hinted at it, shaking their heads eloquently. It was a kind of taboo, which their narrative skirted around by describing the setting in the following way. First I saw a river flowing over smooth pebbles, then a path running beside the endless desert. And the sun began to dance in Charlotte 's eyes, and her cheek was inflamed with the burning of the sand, and the heavens resounded with a neighing… The scene, the sense of which I did not understand but whose physical density I entered, was blotted out. The adults sighed, changed the subject, and poured themselves another glass of vodka.