In the Steppe

“We left Perekop in the worst possible state of mind—hungry like wolves and angry at the whole world. For half a day we tried in vain to put all our talents and efforts to work, to steal or earn something. And when we finally made sure that neither one nor the other would work, we decided to go on. Where? Simply—on.

We were ready to go, in every respect, further along the path of life we had been walking for a long time—that was silently decided by each of us and shone clearly in the gloomy gleam of our hungry eyes.

There are three of us; we all met only recently, running into one another in Kherson, in a tavern by the Dnipro…”