I HAVE JUST AWOKEN, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.

A woman’s face, there, close by the window. Her body has just been giving pleasure to one more man; her eyes are searching among the passengers for her next lover. A railroad worker comes in quickly, crosses the room, leaves through the big door that leads out onto the railroad platforms, into the night. Before closing, the door hurls a violent flurry of snow into the room. The people settled near the door stir on their hard, narrow bench, tug on their coat collars, shake their shoulders with a shiver. From the other end of the station comes a muffled guffaw, then the crunch of a fragment of glass beneath a foot, an oath. Two soldiers, their shapkas pushed back on their heads, their overcoats unbuttoned, beat a path through the mass of huddled bodies. Snores call out to one another, some of them comically in harmony. The wail of an infant rings out very clearly in the darkness, fades into little whimperings as it sucks, falls silent. A long argument, dulled by boredom, is taking place behind one of the pillars that hold up a varnished wooden gallery. The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room. But the truth is that no one expects anything anymore. “Six hours’ delay” — it could be six days or six weeks. Numbness returns. The wind whips heavy white squalls against the windows. Bodies settle down against the hardness of the benches, strangers press close together, like the scales of a single protective shell. Night fuses the sleepers into one living mass — a beast savoring, with every cell in its body, its good fortune at being under cover.

From my position I can hardly see the clock that hangs above the ticket windows. I turn my wrist, the dial of my watch catches the glow from the nightlight: quarter to one. The prostitute is still at her post; her silhouette stands out against the window made blue by the snow. She is not tall, but very broad in the hips. She towers above the ranks of sleeping travelers. It looks like a battlefield strewn with dead…. The door leading to the town opens, new arrivals come in, bringing with them the cold and discomfort of open spaces scoured by snow flurries. The human protoplasm shivers and grudgingly makes space for these new cells.

I shake myself in an attempt to wrest myself away from this conglomeration of bodies. To wrest those immediately around me from the blur of the whole mass. The old man, who has just arrived and lays no claim to a seat in this crowded station, spreads a newspaper out on the tiled floor, filthy with cigarette butts and melted snow, before lying down, his back against the wall. The woman whose features and age are concealed by her shawl, an unknowable being swathed in a huge, shapeless coat. A moment earlier she was talking in her sleep, a few pleading words that doubtless surfaced from many years back, from her life long ago. The only clue to her humanity I’ll ever have, I muse. This other woman, this young mother, bowed over the cocoon of her baby, which she seems to envelop in an invisible halo made up of anxiety, wonder, and love. A few steps away from her the prostitute is busy negotiating with the soldiers: the two men’s excited jabbering and her whispering, a little disdainful but warm and as if moist with luscious promise. The soldiers’ boots clatter on the flagstones; one can sense, physically, the eagerness her body provokes, with its broad, heavy backside and thrusting bosom under the coat. And there, almost on a level with the boots, the face of a man asleep, partly slipped from his bench, his head thrown back, his mouth half open, one hand touching the ground. A dead man on a battlefield, I say to myself again.

My efforts to salvage a few individual figures from the anonymity of the whole begin to flag. Everything merges in the darkness, in the murky, dirty yellow glow from the streetlight outside, in the nothingness that extends, as far as the eye can see, around this town buried beneath a snowstorm. A town in the Urals, I say to myself, trying to link this train station to some place, some direction. But my geographical impulse turns out to be ludicrous, a black dot lost in a white ocean. The Ural Mountains, which stretch over a thousand (two thousand?) miles. This town somewhere in the middle of them, and over to the east the endlessness of Siberia, the endlessness of that snow hell. Instead of locating them, my mind mislays both the town and its station on a white, uninhabited planet. The shadowy beings around me on whom I have been focusing melt once more into a single mass. Their breathing blends together, the mutterings of nocturnal narratives are drowned out by the wheezing sounds of sleep. The murmur of the lullaby, recited rather than crooned by the young mother, reaches me simultaneously with the whispering of the soldiers as they follow hard on the prostitute’s heels. The door closes behind them; a wave of cold sweeps through the room. The young mother’s murmurings take shape as a faint mist. The man sleeping with his head thrown back utters a long groan, sits up abruptly on his bench, awakened by the sound of his own voice, stares lengthily at the clock, drifts back to sleep again.

I know that the time he has just seen on it made no sense to him. He could not have shown more surprise on learning that a whole night had gone by. A night, or a couple of nights. Or a month. Or a whole year. A snow-filled void. Totally off the map. A night without end. A night discarded on the verge of time …

Suddenly this music! Sleep retreats like the undertow of a wave in which a child grasps at a half-glimpsed shell, as I do at this cluster of notes, just heard in a dream.

A sharper cold: the door has opened and closed twice. First, the soldiers coming in and disappearing into the darkness. One can hear their embarrassed laughter. A few minutes later, the prostitute … So I had dozed off for the duration of— of their absence. “Of their couplings!” a voice exclaims within me, irritated by that prudish “absence.”

This is certainly a place to dream of music. I remember how at nightfall, when there was still a slight chance of my getting away again, I ventured onto the platform, superstitiously calculating that I could will a train to arrive by scorning the cold. Bowed down under the violence of the squalls, blinded by the volleys of snowflakes, I tramped along beside the station building, but hesitated to venture any farther, so much did the far end of the platform already resemble a virgin plain. Then, noticing a faint rectangle of light in one of the outbuildings swamped amid the dunes of snow, I started walking again, or rather swaying, as if on stilts, plunging in up to my knees, striving to place my feet in a set of now almost obliterated footprints that had followed the same course. The door beside the little lighted window was closed. I took several steps toward the tracks, which were already invisible beneath the snow, hoping at least for a mirage — a locomotive headlight in the white chaos of the storm. My only consolation, on turning my back to the wind, was recovering my vision. Thus it was that this man suddenly caught my eye. It looked as if he had been thrown out of the little annex. The door, blocked by the snow, had resisted him, and to escape he must have flung himself against it with all his might. Several times, perhaps. Eventually the door had given way, and he had toppled out into the night, into the storm, his face buffeted by snow flurries, his eyes dazzled by the white flakes, losing all sense of direction. Disconcerted, he took a moment to close the door again as it dragged against a thick layer of snow. During these few seconds, while he was pushing at the door, I saw the inside of the little place. A kind of hallway flooded with bright light, lemon colored from the bare bulb, and beyond it a room. And, framed by this inner doorway, I saw a flash of ponderous nakedness, the massive whiteness of a belly, and most notably, the rough gesture of a hand that grasped first one breast, then another, vast breasts, worn out by brutal caresses, and thrust them into a brassiere…. But almost at once, with a screech of panic, a woman had appeared on the threshold, muffled up in a padded jacket (the keeper of the storeroom, who rents it out as a trackside love nest, I said to myself), and the door had closed with an angry slam.

The human mass sleeps on. The only new sound is of munching in the darkness: the old man, stretched out on his newspaper, has propped himself up on one elbow, has opened a can of food, and is lapping it up, as people do who have very few teeth left. The metallic clatter of the lid being closed makes me wince at its grating ugliness. The man lies back down, seeks a comfortable position, with much rustling of sheets of newspaper, and soon begins to snore.

The judgment I have been trying to keep at bay floods in on me, a combination of sympathy and rage. I contemplate this human matter, breathing like a single organism, its resignation, its innate disregard of comfort, its endurance in the face of the absurd. Six hours’ delay. I turn and study the waiting room, plunged in darkness. The truth is, they could all easily spend several more nights here. They could get used to living here! Just like this, on a spread-out newspaper, backed up against the radiator, with nothing but a can of food for nourishment. The notion suddenly seems to me perfectly plausible — an all-too-plausible nightmare. For in these small towns a thousand leagues from civilization, this is what life consists of: waiting, resignation, hot stickiness in the depths of your shoes. And this station besieged by the snowstorm is nothing other than a microcosm of the whole country’s history. Of its innermost character. The vast spaces that render any attempt at action absurd. The superabundance of space that swallows up time, that equalizes all delays, all lapses of time, all plans. “Tomorrow” means “someday, perhaps,” the day when the space, the snows, and destiny allow it. Fatalism …

Mainly from vexation, I take a turn along the well-trodden paths of the national character, those accursed questions of “Russianness” that so many brilliant brains have grappled with. A land outside history. The crushing inheritance of Byzantium. Two centuries of the Tartar yoke. Five centuries of serfdom. Revolutions. Stalin. “East is East” …

After a few such laps around the circuit, the mind comes back to the dull geniality of the present day and lapses into helpless silence. These fine phrases explain everything and nothing. When confronted by the evidence of this night, this sleeping mass, with its smell of wet overcoats, weary bodies, alcohol fumes, and warm canned food, they fade away. For how can one sit in judgment on this old man as he lies there on his open newspaper, a human being touching in his resignation, and quite insufferable for the same reason, a man who has certainly been through the empire’s two great wars, survived the purges, the famines, but who nevertheless thinks he deserves nothing better than this resting place on a floor covered with spittle and cigarette butts? Or the young mother who has just metamorphosed from Madonna into wooden idol, with slanting eyes and the features of a Buddha? If I woke them up and asked them about their lives, they would unflinchingly declare that the country where they live is, give or take a few delayed trains, a paradise. And if in steely tones the loudspeaker were suddenly to announce the outbreak of war, the whole mass of them would set off, ready to endure the war as a matter of course, ready to suffer, ready to sacrifice themselves, with an utterly natural acceptance of hunger, of death, or of life in the filth of this station, here amid the cold of the great plains that stretch out beyond the tracks.

I tell myself there is a name for such a mentality. A term I have recently heard on the lips of a friend who listens in secret to Western radio stations. A formula I have on the tip of my tongue, that only fatigue prevents me from calling to mind. I pull myself together, and the phrase, luminous and definitive, bursts forth: “Homo soviéticas!”

The force of it pins down the whole impenetrable collection of lives around me. Homo sovieticus covers this human stagnation, down to its tiniest sigh, down to the clink of a bottle against the edge of a glass, down to the pages of Pravda under the scrawny body of the old man in his threadbare overcoat, pages filled with stories of targets achieved and perfect bliss.

With a childish delight I spend a moment playing with it: this phrase, a veritable key phrase, slips readily into all the keyholes of the country’s existence, unlocking the secrets of all lives. Even the secret of love, such as it is lived in this country, with its official puritanism on the one hand, while on the other this prostitute plies her trade — a virtually licensed contraband — a scant few yards away from those great panels with their images of Lenin and their edifying slogans….

Before falling asleep I have time to note that my command of this magic phrase sets me apart from the crowd. I am like them, certainly, but I can put a name to our human condition and therefore escape from it. The frail reed, which knows what it is and therefore … Hah, that old hypocritical device of the intelligentsia, a more lucid voice whispers within me, but the mental comfort afforded me by Homo sovieticus quickly silences this objection.

The music! On this occasion I have enough time to catch the reverberation of the last notes, like a silken thread emerging from a needle’s eye. I remain motionless for a few moments, listening for a fresh sound amid the torpor of the sleeping bodies. Now I know I was not dreaming, I have even more or less grasped where the music was coming from. In any case, it was only the brief stirrings of a keyboard, very spaced out, muted by the clutter in the corridors, muffled by the snoring.

I look at my watch: half past three. Even more than the time and place where this music has emerged, what surprises me is its detachment. It renders my philosophical rage of a few minutes ago perfectly futile. Its beauty does not invite one to flee the smell of canned food and alcohol that hangs over the mass of sleepers. It simply marks a frontier, evokes a different order of things. Suddenly everything is illuminated by a truth that has no need of words: this night lost in a void of snow, a good hundred travelers huddled here, each seeming to be breathing gently upon the fragile spark of his own life; this station with its vanished platforms; and these notes stealing in like moments from an utterly different night.

I get up, cross the waiting room, and climb the old wooden staircase. Feeling my way, I come to the bay window of the restaurant. The darkness is complete. Running my hand along the wall, I reach a dead end, stumble over a pile of sleeping-car blankets, decide to abandon my investigation. A very slow chord resounds lingeringly at the other end of the corridor. I make my way toward it, guided by the fading sound, push open a door, and find myself in a passage into which a little light now filters. Lined up along the walls stand banners, placards with portraits of the Party leaders, all the apparatus for demonstrations. The passageway leads to a room that is even more cluttered — two wardrobes with open doors, pyramids of chairs, piles of sheets. From behind the wardrobes shines a beam of light. I move forward, feeling as if I had caught up with the tail end of a dream and were taking my place in it. A man, whom I see in profile, is sitting at a grand piano. A suitcase with nickel-plated corners stands beside his chair. It would be easy to mistake him for the old man sleeping on the pages of his Pravda. He is dressed in a similar overcoat, longer perhaps, and wearing an identical black shapka. An electric flashlight laid to the left of the keyboard illuminates the mans hands. He has fingers that are nothing like a musicians fingers. Great, rough, lumpy knuckles, tanned and wrinkled. The fingers move about on the keyboard without depressing the keys, pausing, springing to life, accelerating their silent course, getting carried away in a feverish flight: one can hear the fingernails tapping on the wooden keys. Suddenly, at the very height of this mute pandemonium, one hand loses control, crashes down on the keyboard; a shower of notes bursts forth. I see that the man, doubtless amused by his own clumsiness, breaks off from his soundless scales and begins emitting little suppressed chuckles, the quiet mirth of a mischievous old man. He even raises one hand and presses it to his mouth to restrain these splutters of laughter…. All at once I realize he is weeping.

I withdraw with awkward, hesitant steps, one hand behind my back, feeling for the door. Just as I am close to the exit, my foot catches against a flagpole; it falls, bringing a whole string of portraits on their long staffs toppling down in a noisy chain reaction. The beam from the flashlight sweeps along the wall and dazzles me. The man at once lowers it toward my feet, as if to apologize for having blinded me. A moments embarrassed silence gives me the chance to notice the deep groove of a scar, whitened with age, across his brow, and his tears.

“I was just looking for a chair,” I stammer, glancing away. “Its absolutely packed downstairs.”

The man switches off his flashlight, and in the darkness I hear his words and, in particular, a brief rubbing sound that enables me to guess at his gesture: he is swiftly wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his overcoat.

“Oh, well, if its a chair you’re after, there’s all you could want up here. Only be careful, most of them have broken legs. I’ve got a whole sofa to myself, though there are several springs coming through, I have to admit.”

I notice that the room is not totally dark. Two windows stand out in the blackness, illuminated by a streetlight and by the unremitting tornadoes of snow whirling about in the beam of light. I see the silhouette of the man as he makes his way around the wardrobes and disappears into a corner from which comes the shrill creak of springs.

“If they should happen to announce a train is coming, kindly wake me up,” he says from his sofa.

And he wishes me a good night. I pull up a chair and settle down amid the scattered portraits, resolved to maintain the pretense to the end, that I had just come in looking for a chair and had not caught sight of his tears.

I pretend so well that I very quickly fall asleep, overcome by that deep slumber of the small hours that follows a sleepless night. It is the pianist who wakes me, his hand on my shoulder, the little flashlight throwing shadows onto the wall cast by tangled chairs, a suitcase, the open lid of the piano.

“They’ve just announced the Moscow train! If it’s yours, you’d better hurry. It’ll be the storming of the Bastille out there.”

He’s right. It’s a mob scene. A mad scramble of faces, with huge suitcases shuttling back and forth, shouting, and the tramp of feet along the trenches excavated through the deep snow on the platforms. In the midst of this jostling I quickly lose sight of the man who has just woken me up. A ticket inspector stops me in my tracks on the steps to a coach where I was about to climb in. “They’re completely packed in there like sardines, can’t you see?” The door to the next one is locked. Around the third is gathered a crowd from which a hubbub arises, alternately wheedling and menacing. The inspector checks everyone’s ticket, now and then allowing some lucky souls to board, according to some criteria it appears even he would find hard to explain. Stumbling in the snow pitted with footprints, I rush down the length of the train. An old woman stuck in a snowdrift is bewailing the fact that she has dropped her glasses. A soldier, on his knees, digs in the snow like a dog. A few yards from there his comrade urinates against a lamppost. The first one fishes out the glasses with a long string of triumphant oaths….

I tramp from one car to the next, increasingly convinced I shall have to spend another day trapped in this town. My verdict of the night before returns, revived by the cold and my rage: Homo sovieticus! That says it all. At this point you could tell them to climb onto the roofs of the cars, or worse still, run behind the train, and not one of them would complain…. Homo sovieticus!

Suddenly this whistle. Not the whistle of the train. A short street urchins whistle, a piercing, peremptory summons, intended for an accomplice. I raise my head above the crowd besieging the steps to the coaches. At the end of the train I see the pianist waving his arm.

“They sometimes add one on, especially when there’s a holdup like this,” he explains to me as we settle into an ancient third-class coach. “We won’t be warm, but you’ll see, the tea’s even better here.”

Which is more or less all he says to me throughout the day. His nocturnal recital already hardly seems real to me. In any case, questioning him about that silent music would be to admit that I had seen him crying. So … stretched out on the bare wood of the bench, I set about conjuring up images of the human caravanserai I had observed camped in the waiting room, who are now having a fabulous experience, without paying the slightest attention to it: crossing from Asia into Europe! Europe … Outside the window, in the small rectangle left clear by the frost, what rushes past is always the same infinity of snow, as far as the eye can see, impassive before the breathless advance of the train. The white undulation of the forests. An icebound river, immense, gray, reminiscent of an arm of sea. And once more the sleep of the white, uninhabited planet. I turn slightly, study the old man, motionless on the opposite bench, his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced on his chest. Fingers that know how to play silent melodies. Is he thinking of Europe? Is he aware that we are approaching civilization, cities where time can have a value in stimulating social intercourse, meetings, the exchange of ideas? Where space is tamed by architecture, curved inward by the speed of a highway, humanized by the smile of a caryatid whose face can be seen from the window of my apartment, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt?

Curiously enough, it is on the subject of the beauty of certain streets that our conversation finally takes off, when it is already nearly evening. We have just pulled out of a large city on the Volga. The train has been reorganized, and for a moment I was even afraid we might be abandoned on a siding. There is plenty of room here, as if people considered it beneath them to enter this archaic third-class coach.

My companion gets up, fetches two glasses of tea. On learning that I know Moscow well, he becomes animated, talks to me about the capital with an unexpected precision, with a fondness for this street or that subway station. It’s the fondness of a provincial who has lived in the capital, I say to myself, and who likes impressing the people he is talking to with the originality of his personal guided tour. But the more he talks, the more I become aware that his Moscow is quite an odd city, with obvious gaps, with little networks of streets where my memory sees only broad avenues and open spaces. Paying closer attention, I notice several hiatuses in his narrative that the man attempts to avoid, sometimes by breaking off in mid-sentence, or again by telling an anecdote. “Before the war,” “During the thirties;” these traces of the past slip out and suggest to me that he is strolling through a city that no longer exists. He finally becomes aware of this, falls silent. At this moment of embarrassment his ear must have detected the same discordant tonality as last night, when I came upon him at the piano. To change the subject, I begin cursing the weather and the delays that will make me miss my connection in Moscow. We prepare our supper: hard-boiled eggs that I take out of my bag, the bread he says he has in his case. He produces a parcel, unwraps it. Half a loaf of black bread. But it is the wrapping that catches my eye — crumpled pages of old sheet music. He looks up at me, then begins smoothing the pages with the rough edge of his hand. He no longer speaks in the tones of a sentimental traveler as he did just now. And yet he is still talking about the same narrow Moscow streets — and about a young man (“In those days I counted myself the happiest man in the world,” he says with a bitter smile), a young man wearing a pale shirt soaked by a late spring shower, a young man stopping in front of a poster and reading his name with a beating heart: Alexeï Berg.