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overcoats were running along the lane. Somewhere beyond the houses shots rang out. A machine gun fired. The lady in the second carriage cried out and began to cross herself in a sort of mousy fashion. Dymbinsky swore in Polish. Father shouted at the driver. I felt a sudden, intense chill and moaned as I yawned with my whole mouth. A crack sounded right close by. The window glass in the houses rang. The horse whinnied and jerked. My tin with all my
beloved
things slipped out of my hands and rolled down the icy road.
    Both carriages stopped. Father, Uncle, and Dymbinsky screamed at the drivers; the drivers, not understanding where to go, pulled on the reins. The horses snorted and backed up. I watched my tin box rolling. Like a lemon-yellow wheel it rolled, rolled and rolled, rolled until I cried, until there were sharp pains in my eyes. And in it, like a tin drum, was my tin cap gun. Suddenly, as if obeying some unforeseen order, I jumped out of the swaying carriage and rushed after my box.
    “Alexander, come back! Come back this min — ” Father cried out.
    And his voice was
forever
drowned in a terrible crashing sound. This crash swallowed all the voices in the carriages. The crash struck me in the back as though I was a rug hung out for cleaning. And a huge rumble, like a giant, thumped the dust out of me in one blow. I
collapsed
.
    Then I opened my eyes. Very close to me I saw ice, soiled by horse manure. The ice was right near my nose. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t clear what stopped me. I couldn’t hear
anything
. I pushed against the ice. And with enormous difficulty I raised my head. In front of me was an empty lane. In the middle of it lay my yellow tin. I understood right away that
the most important thing
was behind me. So I began to turn my stiffened neck. It turned
very
badly. But it did turn.
    I saw: smoke, overturned carriages, people lying down, and the horse thrashing on its side with its guts sticking out. And black earth on the ice. And something else black that lay quite close to me. I squinted at it. It was a leg in a black boot. And a gray-blue-white-striped wool sock. A fashionable American sock. The sock of Ernestcubantwodonons. A red leg stuck out of the sock. Sticking out from the leg wa s... something else.
    I felt a warm trickle across my lips. I touched them and looked at my hand. It was covered in blood. I understood that I had to get up and go to Papa. Because he had called me. With great difficulty I managed to pull my legs up and rose to my knees. Then a carousel spun around me. Everything — the smoke, the house, the woman in the window, the earth, the leg, the horse and the men, the smoke, men, house, woman in the window — went around, and around, and around. From left to right. Left to right. Left to right.
    And I fell back on the ice.

The Road
    My childhood ended in Kiev on December 12, 1918. It was blown out of me by an exploding six-inch shell that took the life of my father, my brother Vanya, and Uncle Yury. One of the cabbies died as well. The servant Savely and the other cabby were injured, but they survived. Dymbinsky disappeared. Uncle’s mistress, Lidia Vasilevna Belkina, the widow of a staff captain in the czar’s army, received a serious concussion, as did I. The very same redheaded woman who had been closing her shutters picked us up and dragged us into her house. I couldn’t hear anything for three months. I couldn’t walk: my head spun, and I would have to sit down and close my eyes immediately. The most comfortable thing for me was to sit on the floor and stare at it. Over those three months I studied three floors: the clay wattle-and-daub floor covered with brightly colored homemade rugs, a parquet floor covered with huge Persian rugs, and the floor of a train car, covered in spittle and strewn with cigarette butts. The train floor swayed back and forth.
    Belkina told me that my relatives had been buried in the Baikov cemetery. She helped