I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then,” says Lewis Carroll's Alice. There's no time in the mind, and I can go back to yesterday, even as a different person. Traumas remain forever ready, their largely subconscious bulk triggered off instantaneously.

I've now been moved from my upstairs perch down to the office to sit with the four other people of our section. (I don't remember why: most likely because somebody left.) I'm lucky: I have the window seat, which has always been (and will always remain) my favorite place. Opposite me sits Ilga, a Latvian woman in her early thirties; to my right is Marina, who's twenty–two and Russian. Ilga and Marina are doing clerical work. Next to Ilga is Aaron, my boss, and after him the head of our planning section, Yevseev. The last two are very often absent from the room. I am twenty.

Along the corridor there's another section, and Vera Nikandrova is sitting there. She's also a clerk, like Marina. She's younger, nineteen, pretty and sweet. Occasionally I come out into the hall to smoke and sit down in an armchair. If she happens to pass by she sits down too and we chat. I like her and can see she likes me. She looks innocent, childlike, I'm sure she's never had a boyfriend. I've seen many like her among first–year students at Moscow University. I hardly pay any attention to Marina, who's over two years my senior and married anyway—to an army lieutenant, of all people. Even though he's a first lieutenant meant shortly to be promoted to a captain, I'm still unimpressed. The fact that she's studying for a degree in Russian at Riga University doesn't particularly sway me either, as she's doing this by taking evening classes or in some extracurricular fashion (I'm not sure which and am not interested in finding out); in my opinion, neither route really counts.

Then something happens. It's tempting to say something indefinable, but the truth is that I simply don't remember. It may have been a phrase she said or the way she moved close to me or a look she gave me or red spots appearing on her pale cheeks while we exchanged a few words. It may have been her quoting a line or two of poetry.