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arrange to send me with her cousin to Moscow. I set off but I didn’t get there. Armed men on horseback stopped the train. And it went off in an entirely different direction. First I ended up in Poltava, then in Kharkov. Then in Kursk. Then Rylsk. Then came the stations Krasnoye, Morshansk; the villages Golubino, Serpukhov; the settlements Pekhterevo, Podolsk.
    I finally arrived in Moscow on August 2, 1922. During that time I had grown up. The explosion knocked not only childhood out of me but something else as well. It was as though it cut me off from my past. And along with my past — any love for it. Throughout four years of drifting I never once cried about my dead father. I remembered my mother frequently, I thought about her. But it didn’t occur to me to try and find her, to search for her. She had become
inaccessible
not only in the world around me but inside me as well. Only hunchbacked Nastenka, my favorite sister, reached out to me from the past that the explosion had cut off; she would appear at night and live for long periods in my tormented dreams of the familiar and what had been lost. I would awake in tears.
    For the entire four years I was constantly on the move, traveling and traveling. One enormous, endless road stretched under my feet and pulled me, tearing me away from every comfortable situation, promising and menacing, scary and calming. I didn’t understand
where
I was going or
why
. I was simply led. I was never alone, I never suffered from hunger, and I never once passed the night outdoors under a fence or in a haystack. I was never robbed, never beaten in the face, never stabbed with a knife. People took care of me. I was passed from hand to hand, like some precious thing forever lost by its owner. A thing that
for some reason
definitely had to be preserved. There was a kind of miracle in all of this. Mama’s dependents, hopelessly distant relatives, Father’s passing acquaintances and business associates, colleagues of my late brother Vasily, a teacher’s sisters, and simple strangers turned out to be in the necessary places at the necessary times in order to help “Snegirev’s son.” Some made sure I got on an overfilled train, others chanced to meet me on the platform, some called to me on the street, and still others arranged places for me to pass the night. Coincidence became the norm. I stopped being surprised by it. I just traveled. But I didn’t know where I was going or for what reason. Turning up in some city, town, or village, I knew immediately that I wouldn’t stay there forever. The blast had knocked a sense of home out of me. I no longer had any home. There was no longer anywhere I yearned to be. Vaskelovo and Basantsy remained only in memory. And I understood this.
    Having lived a month or two in a new place, with new people, I would feel that it was time to move on. So I’d say, “It’s time.”
    Surprisingly, my words had an effect on host after host. Without asking
where
I was heading, they would immediately begin to figure things out, get moving, undertake something, send someone a note, make an agreement with someone else, and a day or two later I would be on the train or catching a ride with some freight to a place where I was expected.
    The road led me.
    It took me four years to get to Moscow.
    During that time a lot of things happened. The Bolsheviks won a definitive victory. The war ended.
    Russia became Red.

Petrograd
    Having ended up in Moscow, I set off for Ostozhenka Street, to find my grandmother’s cozy wooden house. But grandmother wasn’t there anymore. Nine worker families lived in the house. A woman washing clothes in the courtyard told me that “the old lady died as soon as the authorities ‘condensed’ the living space.” That had happened a year earlier.
    I knew no one in Moscow.
    Aunt Flora remained in Petrograd. I made it to there on a freight train and found my aunt’s apartment on the Moika. Aunt Flora was alive, although she had aged