The river at this moment is lead-colored and the trees above it are bare and black. The apartment is unlighted and empty. When they left, Bruna Fabbre locked the door and dropped the key, which is on a steel ring along with the key to her desk at the lyceum and the key to her sister Bendika’s apartment in the Trasfiuve, into her small imitation leather handbag, which is getting shabby at the corners, and snapped the handbag shut. Bruna’s daughter Stefana has a copy of the key in her jeans pocket, tied on a bit of braided cord along with the key to the closet in her room in dormitory G of the University of Krasnoy, where she is a graduate student in the department of Orsinian and Slavic Literature, working for a degree in the field of early romantic poetry. She never locks the closet. The two women walk down Pradinestrade three blocks and wait a few minutes at the corner for the number 18 bus, which runs on Bulvard Settentre from North Krasnoy to the center of the city.

Pressed in the crowded interior of the handbag and the tight warmth of the jeans pocket, the key and its copy are inert, silent, forgotten. All a key can do is lock and unlock its door; that’s all the function it has, all the meaning; it has a responsibility but no rights. It can lock or unlock. It can be found or thrown away.

This is history.

Once upon a time, in 1830, in 1848, in 1866, in 1918, in 1947, in 1956, stones flew. Stones flew through the air like pigeons, and hearts, too; hearts had wings. Those were the years when the stones flew, the hearts took wing, the young voices sang. The soldiers raised their muskets to the ready, the soldiers aimed their rifles, the soldiers poised their machine guns. They were young, the soldiers. They fired. The stones lay down, the pigeons fell. There’s a kind of red stone called pigeon blood, a ruby. The red stones of Roukh Square were never rubies; slosh a bucket of water over them or let the rain fall and they’re gray again, lead-gray, common stones. Only now and then, in certain years, they have flown, and turned to rubies.