Olya Demidova was totally caught up in this Olympic bustle, allowing herself to fall into a frenzy of happy exhilaration. She had completed her third year at the Institute and had reached that stage in English and French where you are suddenly seized with an irresistible desire to converse. She already spoke with the hesitant freedom of a child who is just learning to run and enjoying the ability to keep her balance.

The interpreters hardly slept now. But their youth and their feverish excitement kept them on their feet. It was such fun in the morning to leap onto the platform of a bus, to see the athletes' young faces, to respond to their jokes and then go flying through Moscow 's resonant streets. In the evening the atmosphere was quite different. Inside the bus, heated up during the day by the burning sun, there hovered the acrid smell of "Western deodorants and muscular male bodies exhausted by their efforts. The streets slipped past and the cool evening twilight swept in at the windows of the bus. The men, slumped in their seats, exchanged idle remarks.

Sitting next to the driver on a seat that swiveled round, Olya glanced at them from time to time. They made her think of gladiators, resting after the fight.

One of them, Jean-Claude, a typically Mediterranean young man (she was working with a French team), sat there with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed. She guessed he was watching her through lowered eyelids. He smiled as he watched her, and when the coach stopped at the Olympic Village he was the last to get off. Olya stood beside the bus door, taking leave of the athletes and wishing each of them a good night. Jean-Claude shook her hand and remarked carelessly, but loud enough for this to be heard by the keeper who escorted them: "I've got something that needs translating. Could you help me? It's urgent."

Olya found herself in his room, surrounded by all those beautiful coveted objects that for her symbolized the Western world. She understood at once that the translation was only a pretext and that something was going to happen which, only a short time before, had still seemed unthinkable. To quell her fear she repeated like an incantation: "I couldn't care less. It's all the same to me. If it happens, it happens…"