I tell myself that, when it comes down to it, nothing better evokes this landscape for me than the memory of Jacques Dorme's life.

JACQUES DORME'S STORY HAD KEPT ME COMPANY all along my route. The intensity of it turned any given town I was passing through, any railroad station, into a blur; it isolated me in the midst of crowds. From Paris I traveled to Warsaw, reached the Ukraine (which had recently proclaimed its independence) without difficulty and was then held up for several hours at the brand-new border of Russia. When pronounced in front of a small hut darkly stained with damp snow, the words "border" and "visa" seemed to come out of one of Chekhov's satirical short stories. As did the uniforms of the border guards, which were of a strangely effeminate cut, and the eagles on their shapkas, cheap gold braid reminiscent of Christmas tree decorations. And, even more so, the document I offered them. This stateless person's passport, authorizing me to visit "any country except the USSR." The USSR no longer existed, and this prohibition had now taken on a disturbing, almost metaphysical meaning. Poorly covered in plastic by an old Algerian on the Boulevard Barbès, the document had suffered from the damp, and the thin, buckled cardboard, with its blurred stamps, was bound to provoke suspicion. Taking pity on my innocence, a truck driver finally explained to me the amount of alcohol required to cross the border. I had two bottles of brandy with me. In his view one of these would suffice. A flat bottle, which the boss of the border patrol slipped into his greatcoat pocket before breathing onto a little indigo ink pad.

It was the first time I had gone back to Russia and I was returning in secret. However, the strangeness of my arrival was soon eclipsed by the bizarre nature, now comic, now painful, of the new state of things. The monument in a Ukrainian town… two figures shaking hands and the legend in letters of gold: "Long live the Union of the Ukraine with…" The rest of it ("… Russia ") had been torn off.