The soldiers' boots clatter on the flagstones; one can sense, physically, the eagerness her body provokes, with its broad, heavy backside and thrusting bosom under the coat. And there, almost on a level with the boots, the face of a man asleep, partly slipped from his bench, his head thrown back, his mouth half open, one hand touching the ground. A dead man on a battlefield, I say to myself again.

My efforts to salvage a few individual figures from the anonymity of the whole begin to flag. Everything merges in the darkness, in the murky, dirty yellow glow from the streetlight outside, in the nothingness that extends, as far as the eye can see, around this town buried beneath a snowstorm. A town in the Urals, I say to myself, trying to link this train station to some place, some direction. But my geographical impulse turns out to be ludicrous, a black dot lost in a white ocean. The Ural Mountains, which stretch over a thousand (two thousand?) miles. This town somewhere in the middle of them, and over to the east the endlessness of Siberia, the endlessness of that snow hell. Instead of locating them, my mind mislays both the town and its station on a white, uninhabited planet. The shadowy beings around me on whom I have been focusing melt once more into a single mass. Their breathing blends together, the mutterings of nocturnal narratives are drowned out by the wheezing sounds of sleep. The murmur of the lullaby, recited rather than crooned by the young mother, reaches me simultaneously with the whispering of the soldiers as they follow hard on the prostitute's heels. The door closes behind them; a wave of cold sweeps through the room. The young mother's murmurings take shape as a faint mist. The man sleeping with his head thrown back utters a long groan, sits up abruptly on his bench, awakened by the sound of his own voice, stares lengthily at the clock, drifts back to sleep again.