Before falling asleep I have time to note that my command of this magic phrase sets me apart from the crowd. I am like them, certainly, but I can put a name to our human condition and therefore escape from it. The frail reed, which knows what it is and therefore… Hah, that old hypocritical device of the intelligentsia, a more lucid voice whispers within me, but the mental comfort afforded me by Homo sovieticus quickly silences this objection.

The music! On this occasion I have enough time to catch the reverberation of the last notes, like a silken thread emerging from a needle's eye. I remain motionless for a few moments, listening for a fresh sound amid the torpor of the sleeping bodies. Now I know I was not dreaming, I have even more or less grasped where the music was coming from. In any case, it was only the brief stirrings of a keyboard, very spaced out, muted by the clutter in the corridors, muffled by the snoring.

I look at my watch: half past three. Even more than the time and place where this music has emerged, what surprises me is its detachment. It renders my philosophical rage of a few minutes ago perfectly futile. Its beauty does not invite one to flee the smell of canned food and alcohol that hangs over the mass of sleepers. It simply marks a frontier, evokes a different order of things. Suddenly everything is illuminated by a truth that has no need of words: this night lost in a void of snow, a good hundred travelers huddled here, each seeming to be breathing gently upon the fragile spark of his own life; this station with its vanished platforms; and these notes stealing in like moments from an utterly different night.

I get up, cross the waiting room, and climb the old wooden staircase. Feeling my way, I come to the bay window of the restaurant. The darkness is complete. Running my hand along the wall, I reach a dead end, stumble over a pile of sleeping-car blankets, decide to abandon my investigation.