In 1893 a new University Statute tried to break us down into separate “visitors.” A century before that Chelishchev noted the emergence of products of mental dissociation: He wrote about the “stay-in-their-studies.” It is we, members of the last-born generation, who evolved the philosophical principle about someone else’s “I”: The “I” that isn’t mine is seen as foreign and foreign-born, irreducible to you. People-drops know neither channels nor currents. For them, “I” and “we” are separated by gulfs. Gulfs into which successive generations of social waifs have fallen. They need only be buried. And forgotten.

Now I understand: Any “I” not nourished by “we,” not umbilically attached to the maternal organism enveloping its small life, cannot begin to be itself. Even the mollusk hidden inside tight-shut valves, if one helps those valves by binding them with a tight metal band, will die.

But at the time we were unable to fully grasp this thought because our very thinking was deformed; the routes of our logics had been severed.

A thought thought either no further than “I” or no closer than the “cosmos.” On reaching the “threshold of consciousness,” the line between “I” and “we,” it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into “the starry beyond”—the transcendent—“other worlds.”

Sight had either a microscopic or a telescopic radius: Whatever was too far for the microscope and too close for the telescope was simply lost to sight, and not included in any way by anyone in the field of vision.

It’s nearly dawn. I’m tired. I must stop for now. All around me, both through the walls and out the window, it is particularly quiet and still. My insomnias have taught me to make sense of the movements of nighttime minutes. Long ago I noticed that when the night is nearly gone, when a dark blue glimmer clings to the window and the stars go blind, there is always a particularly profound hush. As now, dimly through the frozen panes (I’ve put out the light), I can see in the dark blue gloom the dark steep slopes of roofs, exactly like the upturned hulls of sunken ships. And below them, rows of mute, black holes. Lower still, the bare, ice-covered branches of stunted city trees. Empty streets. And windless air steeped in deadness and silence. Yes, this is my hour: At such an hour I shall probably . . .

The text broke off in mid-sentence. The next seven lines had been carefully crossed out. Shtamm skipped over the inky parallels and went on reading. Through the wall a clock struck four.

THE SECOND NIGHT

All that playing at peacemaking might have gone on and on if not for the cannons that started to pound. At first the cannons hit somewhere far away, hit those people. Then they began pounding near at hand, pounding these people. And when the cannons had finished pounding, the stamping devices started to pound. The work of muzzles left round black craters around bodies; the stamps hit not people but their names. Even so, around their names, as around the broken bodies, were blue and black circles.

Chance threw me up on a southern beachhead. The city in which I lived changed hands thirteen times. Regimes came. And went. And returned.