During the days that followed I was haunted by the notion that this death expected some gesture from me, some idea that I could not contrive to come up with. Some serious, significant gesture. But the trifling nature of everything that happened now was distressing to me. The next day, just as if nothing had occurred, the nurse opened the infirmary at nine o'clock precisely. Two days later they ordered us to carry out our old desks from the classrooms, and among the tabletops covered in drawings and writing, nobody took note of the one that had belonged to Village. Trifling, too, was my feverish speculation about the odds: what if I had had the idea of taking along the Misericordia dagger that day. Then, maybe… Yet I knew a blow from an iron bar would have smashed that slender blade like glass.

One evening at the beginning of June, I found a way to force myself from this verbiage of remorse as I remembered that little raft Village had launched on its nocturnal voyage. It suddenly seemed to me that it was very important to keep picturing this tiny craft with its freight of smoky charcoal. Not to allow its slow progress toward the Caspian Sea to be interrupted in my mind. To believe it was still afloat.

At the time of the funeral we had all noted that there was no one to inform about Village's death. For us this was not a new idea, but we were struck by the cosmic absoluteness of it: no one upon the whole terrestrial globe! That priest's words from the preceding winter came back to me then: "… Those who have no one to pray for them." Once more I pictured the little raft, the glowing embers drifting away into the night beneath the Volga 's immense sky.

The sky white with heat, the timeless lethargy of the steppes, a bird flapping its wings, unable to make any progress in a void that was too dense. Like the bird, we moved forward with no other point of reference than the vastness of the plains and a horizon made molten by the flow of overheated air. The gigantic excavator advancing in front of us ripped open the earth's crust with its bucket wheel, tracing an endless straight line. Covered in dust, deafened by the roar of the machine and the grinding of crushed rocks, we dragged along lengthy slabs of pine which the workmen used to reinforce the sides of this future irrigation canal. As if in the mad hope of containing the changeless surge of the infinite with this ephemeral casing… In the evening our weariness could be gauged by the buzzing of a bee that beat against the walls of the barrack hut and which no one had the strength left to chase away. That would have meant getting up, stepping over bodies stretched out on their bunks, flapping a shirt, steering the insect toward the door… But we were already asleep and its hum was blending into the beginnings of our dreams.

To melt into this desert of light was the best way to forget, the best way to mourn, the best way to forget mourning. We talked a good deal less than in previous years, when we had still viewed this summertime penal servitude as a purgatory with promise. Now we knew that the future would not be very different from this daily trudge of ours behind the disemboweling machine, from the absurdly stubborn line of this ditch, whose sides must unremittingly be strengthened.

One day, along with scoops of earth, the digger began hurling out human remains, skulls, soldiers' boots, helmets from the last war. On another occasion there were much older bones, ancient helms, swords brown with rust… possibly a millennium lay between these warriors and the others. A thousand years of sleep. Ten centuries of nothingness. The next day when the machine plowed on, away from these ransacked graves, we saw archaeologists moving into the area. A handful of black specks lost amid the sunlit void of the plain.

As in previous summers, our work was often interrupted: they would disguise us in white short-sleeved shirts and clean pants and take us to appear as extras on vast esplanades, where important visitors were making speeches in front of commemorative monuments and concrete obelisks. In this way we were privileged one day to see a certain North Korean leader, from a distance, as always. He spent a long time reading from a sheaf of papers that the warm breeze, very strong that day, threatened to snatch away from him at every moment. This man, puny and with a slight stoop, was battling to control the flapping sheets, like a seaman unable to master a shivering sail… There was also an African statesman, who decided to hold forth in Russian and spoke very slowly, detaching each syllable from the next and getting the stresses all wrong. The tip of the monument showed greenish white against a dark sky heavy with a storm. The lazy rumbling of thunder beyond the river sounded like muffled laughter someone was trying to repress. But we did not flinch: the photographers needed us in unmoving ranks, with faces all turned in the same direction… Many years later, when I chanced to meet my former comrades, we would regret not having paid more attention to all those V.I.P. guests. As time went by we would have been able to identify them, some still active in political life, some having passed into the pages of history books. But in those days we were simply waiting for the moment when our patience would be rewarded with a dip in the Volga. That summer, however, even these swims did not give rise to the shouting enthusiasm of past times.

The narrow transom window in our barrack hut was broken, and every evening before we went to sleep we would see a beautiful rainbow of light spawned by the crack in the glass, a long peacock's tail suddenly flooding the cluttered interior of our dwelling for a few minutes, slipping along toward the nails where our earth-stained clothes hung. One evening this solar spectrum did not materialize. We were at the end of June, the angle of the sun's rays had changed. Nobody said anything, but I frequently saw glances straying toward our "cloakroom," now left in shadow. Having been completely forgetful of time, that salutary forgetfulness the steppe bestowed on us, we suddenly remembered that this was the last summer we would spend together.

The next morning, very close to the line of the canal, we came upon a wooden cross with a helmet hanging from one of its arms. We gathered around it, intrigued by the anonymity and loneliness of this tomb amid the immensity of these plains blinded by the sun. What we were used to seeing were mountains of concrete celebrating death, gilded inscriptions, effigies of heroes. Here, just two lengths of birchwood with cracked bark, a mound long since leveled by the winds. Strangely enough, the sight of this tomb provoked no distress, offered no invitation to share pain. There was even something light and ethereal, almost carefree, about the cross. Its presence at this spot (why just here and not two hundred miles to the north or south?), the human randomness of its presence, seemed to indicate that what really mattered was happening somewhere other than beneath this rectangle of earth…

On the other side of the channel a supervisor called out to us: "Look alive! We're off now! There's a ceremony…" It was the hallowed formula for our work as extras.

It got off to a bad start this time. We took five hours to reach the site, and, disguised as Pioneers bold and true in our red neckerchiefs, we began to wait, cooped up in the bus at the side of a road. Evidently they were not certain whether they would need us or not. In the old days we would have hatched a rebellion, demanded bread, simulated a collective attack of diarrhea. That day each of us remained alone with his thoughts, some trying to sleep, others taking refuge in the memory of a special day, a special smile. The supervisors seemed more than usually on edge. Yet, according to the rumors, all that was involved was the visit of a general. And we had seen field marshals, even a cosmonaut…