And without being able to reach the logical conclusion of my thought, I was feeling: Now I am like him; yes, I am in the same boat he is; in his skin, pretty much. Instead of the immense joy that, for years, I expected at this turning point of my life, a cruel despair! Like him… Soon the same tattooed hands on the steering wheel of a heavy truck, the same face, the same smell of vodka. But above all the same experience with women. I gave a sidelong glance at his heavy legs and imagined the force with which they would part a woman's thighs. The thighs of a woman… Of the red-haired woman! I felt something tremble inside me: of course he had "had" her. Before me…

"So what are you gawking at me like that for?" he muttered, noticing how intently I was staring at him. "One thing's for sure: we can't go any faster. Have you seen the road?"

At each stroke the windshield wipers flung aside a thick layer of clinging snow. It seemed as if only the taiga was guiding the truck, as it plowed on into the storm.

I looked away. No further need to look at my man: he was an exact replica of me in a few years' time…

Now I knew precisely what was going to happen. I knew that we had only a few minutes left to live!

I was waiting for the Devil's Bend. Drunk as he was, the driver was sure to miss it. I could already picture the long sideways slide of the truck, the frantic and useless wrenching of the steering wheel; I heard the engine choking in an impotent roar. I saw the black breach in the ice, which was always very thin at that point on account of warm springs in the bed of the Olyei.

I swallowed my saliva nervously, focusing on the road. I was like the bullet in a revolver primed for firing. Abrupt burning thoughts, searing images, propelled the tension to its peak. Those hands resting on the steering wheel had crushed the breasts of the red-haired woman. We had both of us been ensnared in the same moist wound at the base of her belly. We would both of us be forever floundering in the same narrow space at the edge of the endlessness of Siberia: the dreary streets of the district center; the cabins of trucks stinking of diesel il; the taiga – wounded, pillaged, hostile. And that red-haired woman. Open to all. And this stormy night that cut us off from the world. And this tiny cabin crammed with homogeneous soiled flesh that was going to disappear. As my fingers gripped the door handle, the nails became white…

The driver braked and shouted at me, grinning: "Before that bitch of a corner I need to take a leak…"

I saw him open the door, climb onto the running board, and begin to unbutton his padded pants. My anticipation had been so frenzied that I perceived in his smile a hidden meaning, which seemed to be saying: Ha ha! So that's it, you little squirt – you thought you had me with your goddamned bend. Well, I'm not stupid.

I understood that this dark and absurd world was also endowed with wily and sly cunning. It wasn't so easy to annihilate it by killing yourself. Even as it slid along the razor's edge, this world knew how to stop abruptly and smile with cunning geniality. "A red-haired woman, you say? Some photos spread out on a blanket? First love?

Solitude? Well, look at me! I'm going to unbutton my pants and piss on every one of your first loves and solitudes!"

I jumped down from the truck and began to run in the opposite direction, following the tracks of its wheels…

Against all expectation, I heard neither shouts from the man nor the noise of the engine. No, the driver did not call out, did not rush off in pursuit of me, did not make a U-turn to catch up with me… When I stopped after twenty yards I could no longer see the outline of the truck, could hear no noise. The white blizzard, the fierce whistling of the wind in the branches of the cedar trees, nothing more. The truck had vanished! As I continued on my way, I wondered whether the red-haired woman, the bridge, and that drunken driver had not been a dream. A kind of delirium similar to the one I had once had when ill with scarlet fever… Even the wheel tracks I was following were becoming less and less visible and soon disappeared…

I found the dark streets of Kazhdai again. Instinctively, I headed for the station. I went into the barely lit main hall. In fact, it was largely the white reflection of the blizzard that filled this deserted space with a somewhat ghostly luminosity.

I went up to the clock. It was half past ten. The Transsiberian had left at nine. Dumbfounded, I could not manage to do the simple arithmetic, so astounding did the answer seem to me. All that had been lived through in no more than an hour and a half! The interminable wait in front of the newsstand; the Redhead's izba; her body and that pain they called "love"; my flight; the frozen eternity on the bridge; the drunken truck… Its disappearance. My return.

Then, as if to add to the unreality of what I was living through, I heard a voice behind my back, probably that of the deputy station-master, explaining to some passenger: "Oh, you know. It'll be when it stops snowing… As you saw, even the Transsiberian had to come back. It'd hardly left the station and there was already three feet of snow on the track…"

I pushed open the glass door and went out onto the platform. So this mass of sleeping coaches was the Transsiberian. Its windows gleamed feebly with the blue reflection of the night-lights on the compartment ceilings. Behind the tracery of hoarfrost you could sense the silent comfort within. And the presence of the beautiful Western woman, who had kept our rendezvous after all. I remembered her, or, more precisely, how I used to spy on her in the old days near the switch operator's izba. My memories of all that were so intense that the events of this evening were now firmly transformed into no more than a particularly vivid daydream. Afraid of shattering this certainty, I went back into the station. So nothing at all had happened. Nothing… Nothing!

The door opposite, the one that led out onto the square in front of the station, opened. In the dim light of the main hall I saw a woman coming in, glancing rapidly around her. She was wearing an autumn coat and a thick woolen shawl. She came up to me, as if finding me there were the most natural thing in the world. I watched her approaching. It seemed to me that she no longer had a face. Her features, without makeup, washed out – cleansed by the snow or by tears – were only pale watercolor outlines. All one saw of her face was the expression: an intensity of extreme suffering and weariness.

"Come on. You're going to spend the night at our house," she said in a very calm voice that could only be obeyed.

7

In my dream the corridor of the sleeping car led to a compartment that was a replica of the switch operator's izba, but still smaller. As if that house, being a part of the corridor, were perched on the track, waiting for an improbable departure. A woman was seated at the little table under the window of this strange – but quite natural – compartment. She seemed to be staring out into the darkness of the night outside the window. Not in order to see what the thick hoarfrost was hiding, but so as to avoid seeing what was happening around her. At the center of the little table there was an extraordinary fleshy bulb, cut in two. Inside it could be seen a kind of cocoon composed of semitransparent leaves, delicately folded over one another. It resembled a carefully swaddled baby.

I was supposed – I did not know why – to unwrap its fragile leaves without attracting the attention of the silent passenger. My numb, clumsy fingers were fumbling with this cocoon, this silken cone. I already sensed that what would appear would be painful to see… The further I progressed with my meticulous efforts, the more my anxiety about this revelation increased. I was going to see a living thing whose birth would be compromised by my curiosity but whose vitality I could ascertain only by stripping off the leaves. I was killing it by opening the bulb. But it would not have existed if I had not dared to rip open the cocoon. In my dream the tragic significance of my action did not appear so clearly. It was the slow upsurge of a harrowing cry that expressed it. A cry that rose to my throat – a dry, strangled cry. My fingers were stripping off the leaves with scant ceremony. And the woman sitting by the window began, at that moment, to turn her head slowly in my direction… The cry burst forth, shook me, woke me up…