It was from this station that I used to set out for the township where Alexandra lived. I had not been back to see her since the May celebrations, and it was already the end of the month. The passengers were talking about a fire that had just destroyed a railway depot; the warm breeze carried a bitter taste of charred resin… Not finding Alexandra at home, I went downstairs, walked around the house, and caught sight of her in the distance, standing beside the railroad tracks. I saw her from behind but guessed at her gesture: her hand shading her eyes, she was looking up at the clouds of smoke above the long buildings of the depot. The train traffic had been interrupted, the firemen's helmets were glinting amid the tracks. You could hear the crash of beams collapsing, the hiss of fire hoses. From time to time the murk framed a ghostly sun through the smoke, and the day froze into the contrasting black and white of a negative. Then the vividness of the flames and the intensity of the sky would flood back into this momentary dusk. The clusters of flowers on a lilac bush next to a buffer stop between the tracks seemed to be blooming on another day in another world.

Alexandra looked like a tiny figure beside the soaring clouds of smoke against the plain horizon, toward which led the deserted tracks. I stared at her and, more clearly than ever, believed I understood who she was. I recalled her neighbor, the old Tartar, Yussuf, once remarking to her: "You know, Alexandra, you Russians…" He was right, this woman standing among the railroad tracks, her gaze fixed on the flames, was Russian. Time had erased in her everything that could still distinguish her from the life of this country, its wars, its sufferings, its sky. She was as much a part of it as the quivering of a blade of grass on the endless ocean swell of the steppe. She had invented a remote homeland and a language for herself. But her real homeland was that tiny room in an old wooden house, half destroyed by bombs. That house and the infinity of the steppes all around. The place where she would remain forever incarcerated, the prisoner of an era made up of wars and suffering. I felt myself reeling on the brink of this past, in danger of letting myself be drawn into its yawning darkness. I must distance myself from it, flee.

A ball of fire, fringed with soot, billowed up over the depot. Alarmed, I drew back, and focused an uneasy gaze once more upon the figure of Alexandra, who was still there, unmoving. And I made off very quickly, jumping over the ties. I was afraid I might see her turning, calling me…

In the train I thought about the language she had taught me. Its words, I knew, had no bearing on anything in the world that surrounded us. I remembered Muza and her beauty, the beige man, the story told by the boy who had spied on them… One of the last poems I had come across in the ruins of Samoylov's library spoke of a pair of lovers disporting themselves in "a meadow shimmering with a thousand flowers." I suddenly felt something akin to disgust for the affectation of this torrent of words. Outside the carriage window lay the monotonous expanse of the steppe, dry and rough, stained blood red by the sunset.

So what I had learned was a dead language.

On my return to the orphanage I noticed that Village was absent. He had not come in to supper. I caught up with him among the willow groves on the riverbank at one of his fishing spots. He was embarrassed to be discovered constructing a child's toy: a tiny raft made of sticks that he was binding together with strips of bark. The remains of a fire were smoldering gently. So as not to lose face, he explained to me with a wink: "Look at this. It'll float down our river first. Then, zip, on to the Volga. And then, so long as a pike doesn't have it for breakfast, straight on to the Caspian Sea. One day those Persians'll be picking it up, you mark my words!" Using a piece of wood, he lifted several still glowing brands out of the embers, laid them on his raft, and put it in the water. We stayed for a long while, watching these tiny lights as they drifted away in the purple air of dusk.

On the footpath that led back up to the orphanage, he confided to me in somewhat embarrassed tones: "You know that boat where that bastard and Muza… Well, I've sunk it now."

Twenty years later, when I was beginning to write, I contemplated turning that evening spent in the company of Village into a short story about the last twenty-four hours in the life of a young man. For he was to die at the end of the following day. A striking subject, I thought, the quintessence of a life revealed amid the mellow banality of a May dusk. I never wrote it, no doubt sensing the falseness of a contrivance of this kind. Instead of reinventing those twenty-four hours in such a way as to milk them for significance, I needed to hold on to what little I knew of them, tell that and avoid the temptation to wax philosophical.

The following evening (it was a Sunday), the same gang of loutish "recruiting sergeants" appeared and this time invited us to have a drink with them. It was clear that – between the stick and the carrot – they were seeking our weak spots. We did not refuse, some of our number eager to act like hard men, and others, perhaps all of us, eager to respond to the least promise of friendship. They drank, too, and had probably not even foreseen the brawl that erupted on account of an overturned glass, an oath, a slap. Or else, on the contrary, everything was calculated, to divide us up into those who would nibble the carrot and those who would resist.

The only weapons we had were our five-kopeck pieces sharpened into blades, along with an iron bar snatched from one of the louts and a broken bottle. I already knew that hand-to-hand combat only looked good in films and that this brawl would be much like the previous ones: clumsy shuffling, blows missing the target, no mercy for those who fell, animal glee at any sign of weakness. The alcohol made the fight even uglier; we all simply felt we were saving our own skins. One of our number was already on the ground, huddled in on himself like a scarab to ward off blows to his head.

I noticed Village during a moment's respite as, with broken bottle in hand, I contrived to keep at bay an adversary as out of breath as I was. Village was coming up from the river, doubtless attracted by our gasps and groans. I saw him drop his lines, pick up a big stone, rush toward us. Then a few minutes later (finding I had time to spit out a fragment of broken tooth) I saw him again. Inexplicably the assault by the louts had just started to falter, they were retreating; one of them, tapping the others on the back, was urging them to leave. At length they all ran across a patch of waste ground, leaving us an unhoped-for victory. Now we were laughing, wiping away the blood, discussing the best bits of the fight… Suddenly we heard this voice. We saw Village sitting there, his arms lolling on the ground, and – as it seemed to us – glassy-eyed with astonishment. He was not groaning but from his lips came forth a wet babbling, like that of a babe in arms. Someone touched his shoulder, and Village toppled gently backward. We gathered around him, crouching, made uneasy by this fixed stare, clumsily felt his chest, his head… All the arms clutching at him seemed to be straining to hold him back on a slippery slope. There was still time for one of our number to jokingly suggest a glass of vodka, but already beneath the unbuttoned shirt a fine trickle of blood was to be seen and the gray glint of a blade – that of a "Finnish knife," which had snapped at the hilt.

All I can remember of our headlong run to the orphanage and the minutes that followed it is the desperate hammering on the sick-bay door: we had forgotten it was a Sunday.