The ruins of the church built by the descendants of the cossacks and dynamited during the Revolution. Or elsewhere rusty nails, as thick as a man's thumb, driven into the trunks of huge cedar trees. Even the old people of the village retained only a very vague memory of these: sometimes it was the Whites who had brutally executed a group of partisans by having them hanged from these nails; sometimes it was the Reds who had meted out revolutionary justice… The nails, and the bits of rotted rope, had risen, over long years, to twice a man's height, in accordance with the slow and stately growth of the cedars. To our marveling eyes the Reds and the Whites, who had gone in for these cruel hangings, had the stature of giants…

The village had not contrived to preserve anything of its past. From the start of the century, history, like a titanic pendulum, had begun to sweep fearsomely to and fro across the empire. The men went away; the women dressed in black. The pendulum kept the measure of passing time: the war against Japan; the war against Germany; the Revolution; the civil war… And then once again, but in reverse order: the war against the Germans; the war against the Japanese. And the men went away, now crossing the twelve thousand leagues of the empire to fill the trenches in the west, now disappearing into the misty void of the ocean to the east. The pendulum swung westward, and the Whites drove the Reds back beyond the Urals, beyond the Volga. Its weight returned, sweeping across Siberia: now the Reds drove the Whites back toward the Far East. They hammered nails into the trunks of cedar trees and dynamited churches – as if all the better to assist the pendulum in wiping out every trace of the past.

One day the mighty swing even catapulted men from our own village toward that fabled Western World that had long since marked itself off from barbaric Muscovy. From the Volga they traveled as far as Berlin, paving the route with their corpses. There in Berlin the crazy clock stopped for an instant – a short moment of victory. Then the survivors returned toward the east: now accounts had to be settled with Japan…