A silence followed, which I rounded off with the following words: “That makes me think of a certain young girl. It could be said that in the first seventeen years of her life, all she had done was look. Her eyes were such big, independent things that they themselves used up everything they took in, and the life in the rest of the young creature’s body went on quite apart from them, nourished by its own simple inner movements. But at the end of this time some overly intense event disturbed this double life, the two aspects of which were scarcely in contact with each other. It was as though her eyes broke through to the inside of her and the whole weight of the outside world tumbled down through them into her dark heart; and each day crashed with such force down those deep, precipitous shafts of sight that it broke to pieces like a glass in her narrow chest. The young girl lost her color, became sickly and solitary, began to think, and finally sought out for herself that stillness where, hopefully, one’s thoughts are no longer disturbed.”

“How did she die?” asked my friend softly, in a slightly hoarse voice.

“She drowned. In a deep, still pond, and on its surface there arose many rings that slowly broadened and spread in among the white water lilies, causing all those waterborne blossoms to bob up and down.”

“Is that a story?” asked Ewald, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the silence behind my words.

“No,” I replied, “that’s a feeling.”

“But couldn’t one also convey that to the children?”

I thought about it. “And by what means?”

“By means of another story.”

And I began to tell it. “It was during the time that the people of southern Russia were fighting for their freedom.”

“Excuse me,” said Ewald. “What do you mean by that? Do you mean that the people were trying to get free of the czar? That wouldn’t fit with the way I think of Russia, and would also conflict with your own earlier stories. In this case I would rather not hear your story, because I like the picture I have created for myself of things there, and I’d like to keep it intact.”

I had to smile. Reassuringly I told him:

The Polish pans (I should have told you this to begin with) were lords in southern Russia and in those silent, lonely steppes that are known as the Ukraine. Their oppression and the greed of the Jews—who even held the keys to the churches, which they gave out to the Orthodox believers only for a fee—had made the young people around Kiev and all the way up the Dnieper weary and thoughtful.

The city itself, Kiev the Holy, the place where Russia first showed itself in its four hundred domed church towers, sank ever more into itself and was consumed by fires as by sudden insane thoughts—behind which the night only became ever more boundless. The people of the steppe did not clearly know what was happening. But seized by a strange restlessness, the old men came out of their huts at night and silently contemplated the eternal windless heavens, and by day figures could be seen appearing on the tops of the kurgans, where they stood outlined against the distant flatness. These kurgans are the burial places of long-gone tribes that are strewn over the length and breadth of the plain like frozen, sleeping waves. And in this land, where the graves are the mountains, the people are the abysses. Deep, dark, and silent are these people, and their words are no more than weak, unsteady bridges over their true beings.