“What else can I do? I have to go back. Here, take my ticket!” Clementine moves as if to get out of her seat. The driver declines, waving both hands.

“Don’t give me a thing. Let’s just pretend you didn’t take this trip, don’t get off….”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Don’t open your mouth, ma’am, don’t say another word, don’t test my patience. Just stay put.”

Grumbling who knows what between gritted teeth, the man adjusts the collar of his coat and steps off this old workers’ tram. He closes the door behind him.

Clementine settles in her seat. She shudders with nerves; she tries to shake them off. Beneath her cape she removes something from the bundle in her arms—the one she’s been carrying like a baby. It’s a homemade bomb. She carefully slides it down her torso, past her hips, her right leg, setting it gently beneath her seat, in between her feet. She stays hunched over, hiding the bomb with her cloak.

The driver opens the tram door and steps into his compartment, where he checks the tickets of the passengers as they board one by one until the tram is full. They set off.

They return to the jetty on the south bank of the river. The moment they arrive, the passengers rush to get off. Clementine leans over farther, remaining in her seat. Her hands beneath her cloak, she pulls the fuse of the bomb and pushes it to the back corner of the tram. She rises, adjusts her cloak, and, pretending to embrace what remains of her dummy babe, gets off the tram, the last passenger to disembark. The driver closes the tram door, and, striding briskly past her, he leaves the jetty, heading east.

The wind is ferocious, carrying sharp blades of snow. Clementine walks westward, each step longer than the last. As she moves farther away from the jetty, her expression changes from one of self-satisfied cunning to the anxiety of flight. She presses ahead, resisting the impulse to look back, listening closely. Her demeanor continues to change: from anxiety to fear, from fear to excitement, to impatience, to despair, to anger.

“Nothing!” she mutters. “It didn’t explode! What hopeless idiots we are! It was supposed to explode in sixty seconds, it’s already been …” She doesn’t finish her sentence, filled with rage. She raises the bundle in her arms (the dummy babe) to her neck, pulling her cloak around her. She continues walking. From the direction of the jetty, she hears a faint noise. Like an old man farting—the drawn-out, muffled sound of malfunction—it’s an absurd explosion, nothing like the burst of gunpowder Clementine hoped to hear and that would have blown the tram and the jetty to smithereens, splintering the rails and the frozen Neva. No one will rush to see what the noise was.