He, a famous poet who no longer had a single line in print, she, an actress, long since banned from the stage. Living reclusively in their flat in St. Petersburg, they could already picture themselves being condemned, imprisoned, perhaps executed. On the day when, miraculously, their authorization to leave the country arrived, the woman went out, while her husband remained behind in a daze of happiness. To do some shopping in preparation for the journey, he thought. She went down, crossed a square (the passengers on a streetcar saw her smiling), emerged onto the quayside, and hurled herself into the sea-green water of a canal…

The visitors who have been listening out of pure curiosity are beginning to leave. A moment ago one of them crunched a fragment of flint beneath his heel. The old man drew himself up to his full gigantic height and fixed them with a somber gaze, as if angered at seeing them all there around him, frozen in their falsely preoccupied poses. Clumsily they make off, in single file at first, dodging between the tombstones; then forming a little group in the avenue that leads to the exit… During those few moments of discomfiture facing the old man they felt the whole disturbing strangeness of their situation. There they were beneath the bare trees at that cold, clear day's end, in the midst of all those Orthodox crosses, a few feet away from this man in his unbelievable greatcoat, black and disproportionately long. A man who, as if talking to himself, summoned up these beings in their very swift, very individual transition from life to death… It all felt pretty weird!