One purple, dim day much like the rest, a villager appeared at the edge of the double apron-wire. He was a small man, tiny even, his feet making deerlike tracks. He walked thirty feet away, seemed swallowed by snowbanks, then returned with a tenacious shuffling gait to stare directly at Hugo. He removed his gloves. Hugo watched him bite his thumb.

“Yes?” Hugo said, raising his rifle barrel.

The man raised his hands over his head. Fully extended like that, the tips of his fingers were about as high as Hugo’s shoulders. Hugo noted the lines on his beefy face and decided that he not only looked fifty years old, but probably was fifty years old. He had somehow managed to live a Russian life whose hardships aged him only a normal amount.

“Amerikanski?”

Hugo jerked his mitten westerly, to point out the American flag flying outside the barracks. “Dah,” Hugo said.

The small man quickly fell into a rush of language, eager to share something.

“I can’t— Put your hands down— English? Speak English?”

The man dropped his hands. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked. Hugo shook his head. There were a few other attempts—perhaps Czech, perhaps Polish. “Italiano?” the man then asked, brimming with hope, but Hugo had to shake his head again. The man snapped his fingers. “Ah! Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui, je parle français toute la journée et toute la nuit longtemps.” Hugo said it more through his nose than his mouth, as if the whole world spoke French, and spoke it better than his interlocutor.

The man lit with understanding. “Alors, vous êtes parisien?”

Hugo couldn’t tell if the man was making fun of him. He rubbed his red hands together and spoke to Hugo rapidly, with a precise yet accommodating accent. He sounded learned but not conceited. The man praised the French language as one of fraternity and liberty. As for equality, that led to contempt, but he could bear it.

Soon enough, he was talking to Hugo about Solnechny Strana, the views one should try to see from the timber drive, the best place to find a coffee, the honest tradesmen Hugo could purchase herring from, should he be so inclined. Hugo was reminded of taking afternoon tea in Grosse Pointe. The man—his name was Aarne—was being polite in a way that Hugo missed.

Hugo felt his own personal judgments were acknowledged as merciful and precise, and he and Aarne were only a few gambits away from discourse on music and art and psychology and the poetry of dreams and ballet. Ballet, especially: Hugo had never seen Nijinsky, though he felt qualified to critique him. Then Aarne shook his hand goodbye.