"They've just announced the Moscow train! If it's yours, you'd better hurry. It'll be the storming of the Bastille out there."

He's right. It's a mob scene. A mad scramble of faces, with huge suitcases shuttling back and forth, shouting, and the tramp of feet along the trenches excavated through the deep snow on the platforms. In the midst of this jostling I quickly lose sight of the man who has just woken me up. A ticket inspector stops me in my tracks on the steps to a coach where I was about to climb in. "They're completely packed in there like sardines, can't you see?" The door to the next one is locked. Around the third is gathered a crowd from which a hubbub arises, alternately wheedling and menacing. The inspector checks everyone's ticket, now and then allowing some lucky souls to board, according to some criteria it appears even he would find hard to explain. Stumbling in the snow pitted with footprints, I rush down the length of the train. An old woman stuck in a snowdrift is bewailing the fact that she has dropped her glasses. A soldier, on his knees, digs in the snow like a dog. A few yards from there his comrade urinates against a lamppost. The first one fishes out the glasses with a long string of triumphant oaths…

I tramp from one car to the next, increasingly convinced I shall have to spend another day trapped in this town. My verdict of the night before returns, revived by the cold and my rage: Homo sovieticus! That says it all. At this point you could tell them to climb onto the roofs of the cars, or worse still, run behind the train, and not one of them would complain… Homo sovieticus!

Suddenly this whistle. Not the whistle of the train. A short street urchin's whistle, a piercing, peremptory summons, intended for an accomplice. I raise my head above the crowd besieging the steps to the coaches. At the end of the train I see the pianist waving his arm.

"They sometimes add one on, especially when there's a holdup like this," he explains to me as we settle into an ancient third-class coach. "We won't be warm, but you'll see, the tea's even better here."