CHAPTER TWELVE
Once he got to the village, he sent Lora a letter where impatient and sad words were accompanied by a cartoon with an inscription, ‘And that’s what’s happening to me.’ The picture showed a black onion field under drizzling rain and the tiny insect-like figures of students, laden with sacks and plodding unswervingly to the gigantic goal, a tractor-pulled trailer stuck in the mud.
He waited in vain for a reply to this letter – and the two following ones.
The lady of the house where he was allocated to stay, a large doughy woman of uncertain age, was observing Sidelnikov’s epistolary efforts with respect and afterwards, complaining about her broken spectacles, asked him to take down a letter on her behalf.
‘How do you do my elder daughter Lyudmila and your husband Vyachesla
