Which is more or less all he says to me throughout the day His nocturnal recital already hardly seems real to me. In any case, questioning him about that silent music would be to admit that I had seen him crying. So… stretched out on the hare wood of the bench, I set about conjuring up images of the human caravanserai I had observed camped in the waiting room, who are now having a fabulous experience, without paying the slightest attention to it: crossing from Asia into Europe! Europe… Outside the window, in the small rectangle left clear by the frost, what rushes past is always the same infinity of snow, as far as the eye can see, impassive before the breathless advance of the train. The white undulation of the forests. An icebound river, immense, gray, reminiscent of an arm of sea. And once more the sleep of the white, uninhabited planet. I turn slightly, study the old man, motionless on the opposite bench, his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced on his chest. Fingers that know how to play silent melodies. Is he thinking of Europe? Is he aware that we are approaching civilization, cities where time can have a value in stimulating social intercourse, meetings, the exchange of ideas? Where space is tamed by architecture, curved inward by the speed of a highway, humanized by the smile of a caryatid whose face can be seen from the window of my apartment, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt?

Curiously enough, it is on the subject of the beauty of certain streets that our conversation finally takes off, when it is already nearly evening. We have just pulled out of a large city on the Volga. The train has been reorganized, and for a moment I was even afraid we might be abandoned on a siding. There is plenty of room here, as if people considered it beneath them to enter this archaic third-class coach.