All that is long ago now. Utkin writes. He asks me not to polish. I understand him; he wants to be the sole architect. He wants to outwit blind fate. And as for the sea's turquoise incrustations between the branches of the cherry trees – it is he who will add them to my story. I do not make refinements. I present him with my mass of red-hot glass just as it is. I do not engrave it with the point of my chisel or inflate it with my breath. Just as it is: a young woman with a bronzed back, a woman crying out, sobbing with pleasure and beating the clusters of her fingers against the keys of the piano…
2
Beauty was the least of our preoccupations in the land where we were born, Utkin, me, and the others. You could spend your whole life there and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, never seek out the secrets of the mosaic of the human face or the mystery of the sensual topography of the human body.
Love, too, did not easily take root in this austere country. Love for love's sake had, I think, simply been forgotten – had atrophied in the bloodbath of the war, been garroted by the barbed-wire entanglements of the nearby camp, frozen by the breath of the Arctic. And if love survived, it took only one form, that of love-as-sin. Always more or less fictitious, it brightened up the routine of harsh winter days. Women muffled up in several shawls would stop in the middle of the village and pass on the exciting news.