Ever since our childhood, however, the pendulum seemed to have stuck. It was as if its immense weight had become entangled in the innumerable lines of barbed-wire fencing stretched across its path. Indeed, there was a camp about a dozen miles from our village. There was a place on the road leading to the town where the taiga opened up and in the cold glitter of the fog you could see the silhouettes of the watchtowers. How many of these snares strewn across the empire did the pendulum encounter as it swung? God alone knows.

The village, depopulated, did not amount to more than a score of izbas. There, close by that pent-up mass of human lives, it seemed to be asleep. The camp, a black speck amid the endless snows…

A child needs very little in order to construct its personal universe: a few natural landmarks whose harmony it can readily uncover and which it arranges into a coherent world. It was thus that the microcosm of our young years organized itself. We knew the place in a deep thicket in the taiga where a stream arose, emerging from the dark mirror of an underground wellspring. This stream – the Brook as everyone called it – circled the village and flowed into the river near the abandoned bathhouse: a river that wound its way between two dark walls of the taiga, wide and deep. It had a proper name, Olyei, and figured in a broader geographical role, since the direction in which it flowed marked the north-south line, and a long way from the village it met up with a mighty river: the river Amur. This was marked on the dusty globe that our old geography teacher occasionally showed to us. In our primitive microcosm, the human habitations were also arranged according to this hierarchy of three levels: our village, Svetlaya; then, six miles from the village, farther downstream on the Olyei, Kazhdai, a district center; and finally, on the great river itself, the only real city, Nerlug, which had a store where you could even buy lemonade in bottles…