"The reds called this form of execution 'the hydra of counterrevolution.' They roped ten officers together in a closely packed group. Shoulder to shoulder, back to back. And they pushed them off the deck of a barge or from the top of a jetty. Some would struggle, others went rigid, trying to play dead even before dying. Still others wept, weakened by their wounds… This one here managed to break free underwater, his feet already trapped in the mud. He forced the wire off his wrists and reached the surface hidden behind a block of granite from the jetty. It was only later that the faces of the others began to haunt him. Especially the eyes of the man whose body he pushed down brutally in order to escape from the water."
The old man looks at them as if he were awaiting a question, a response. And his look is no longer that of a strange genius of the place, "a kind of half-crazed priest and at least a hundred years old," but of a fellow human being. His words cut through several periods of history they have never known. So very human is his attitude that their prepared questions stick in their throats. All at once they notice dusk has fallen; only a narrow strip of the setting sun now casts its cloudy red light over this place bristling with crosses. They suddenly feel themselves to be face to face with some dizzying intuition, an insight that cuts into their lives with a blinding thrust… The visitor in the dark blue overcoat notices that the woman has begun to walk down the avenue at a pace that is carefully restrained, so as not to seem hurried.