CHAPTER FOUR
Of the time that he lived at Rosa’s, Sidelnikov remembered remarkably few days in the same detail as this one, during which the intimate subcurrent of life showed itself with uninvited bluntness.
He learnt to distinguish the private from the formal quite early, before he even knew those words. The world was distinctly divided into two parts, the permitted and the concealed, outlawed, of which one could tell no one. Sometimes, both realms began to converge alarmingly and would even touch each other, and that caused him either dismay or strange rapture. He also happened to make mistakes that completely muddled his already overworked head, closely shorn apart from a short fringe.
For example, he knew exactly that the private word “bogeys” meant snot in the nose, and did not me
