The firing squad shot him like a dog!" Or another time when, out for a stroll, I chanced upon a woman deep in the long grass of a gully, half naked and drunk, being taken in brutal haste by two men, who puffed and panted with little false laughs and oaths. Against a dark background of lush June vegetation, her rotund, obese body was blinding in its pallor. She turned her head, and I recognized the simpleton whom the townspeople called by a little girl's pet name, Lyubochka. And then there was that birthday party with dishes of silver plate. Everyone tried to behave as if I were just like the others, tried not to notice my clumsy actions or to anticipate them. And their kindness was so evident that there was no longer any doubt: I would never be like them, I would always be that youth whose hands were red with cold, dogged by his past, who, if asked about his background, would sometimes stammer out truths that people took for wild lies and sometimes lie to reassure the curious. And there would always be, as there was that day, a very young child who would tug at his sleeve and ask him, "Why aren't you laughing with us?"

After each of these deaths I would once more find myself in my Caucasian night: I would see the face of the white-haired woman, her eyes fixed on my eyelids; I would listen to her song, crooned in a language whose beauty seemed to stand guard over this moment in the darkness.

Later on, when studying medicine, I tried to put an end to these returns to the past, seeing them as a sign of sentimental weakness, shameful for a prospective army doctor. I stopped being ashamed of them when I realized that night had had nothing in common with the soft-heartedness wrung from us by a happy childhood. For there had been no happy childhood. Only that night when, venturing across the frontier into the world, the child took fright and, through the magic of an unknown language, was able to retreat for a little longer into his earlier universe.