The Shepherd and the Shepherdess

Across the lonely steppe along the railway line, under a sky where the ridge of the Urals shows through in heavy, clouded haze, a woman walks. Tears stand in her eyes; breathing becomes harder and harder. By a tiny one-kilometer marker she stops, moving her lips, repeating the number written on the post. Then she climbs down from the embankment and, on the signal mound, searches for a grave with a small pyramid. The woman drops to her knees before the grave and whispers, “How long I’ve been looking for you!”