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“You live downstairs from me?” I asked him when the fight was over.

“Yes,” he replied.”Our windows face Telegraph Lane.”

“I see. Your room’s underneath Aunt Katya’s. You live in one room?”

“Two. The second’s a dark one.”

“So’s ours. The light one looks out over the dump.” The opening small talk over, I introduced myself.”My name’s Yura. What’s yours?”

“Pavlik.”

That was forty-two years ago. Since then innumerable people have been introduced to me and innumerable names have sounded in my ear, but none of these experiences can compare with that moment in the snow of a Moscow street when my long-legged neighbor pronounced his name: Pavlik.

What a personality that boy must have been (he did not live to be a man) if he could have entered so deeply and permanently into the life of one who, with all his love of his childhood, has never been bound to the past. Undeniably I am fond of conjuring up the spirits of earlier days, yet I do not live in the shadows of yesterday, but in the harsh light of today. And for me Pavlik is not a memory but a part of my being. Sometimes this sense of his oneness with me is so acute that I begin to believe one does not wholely die if the matter of which one is formed can become part of the matter of those who live after. This may not be immortality, but it is something of a victory over death.

I am aware that I am not yet able to write worthily about Pavlik. Perhaps I never shall be able to. There is much that I do not understand—the symbolic significance, for instance, of the death of twenty-year-olds. Yet I cannot keep him out of this book; without him, the population of my childhood, to use the words of Andrei Platonov, would not be complete.
At first our relationship meant more to Pavlik than to me. I had already tasted friendship. In addition to the usual run of good companions, I had a bosom friend in Mitya Grebennikov, who wore his thick dark hair cut like a girl’s. Our friendship had begun at the tender age of four.

Mitya had lived in our house until his parents exchanged their rooms. Now Mitya lived in a big six-storied neighboring house on the corner of Sverchkov and Potapovsky lanes, and he was vastly proud of his new circumstances. Who wouldn’t be? The house was a grand one, with a handsome entrance, big heavy doors and a noiseless lift. Mitya was always boasting: “The view of Moscow from the sixth floor….” “How people can live without lifts….” I gently reminded him he had lived in our house until recently and managed very well without a lift. Mitya gazed at me with his moist dark eyes, the kind of eyes our elders were fond of comparing to sloes, and fastidiously remarked that that time seemed to him but a bad dream. He deserved having his face punched for that. But Mitya resembled a girl not only in looks; he was so sensitive, timorous and weepy, despite his hysterical fits of rage, that I could rarely bring myself to hurt him. This time, however, I let him have it. With an ear-splitting scream he snatched up a fruit knife and tried to cut me to pieces. Forgiving as a woman, he sidled up to me next day to make peace: “Our friendship is something bigger than us, we have no right to lose it.” Oh, he was a great one for throwing about high-sounding phrases! His father was a lawyer and Mitya inherited his gift for holding forth.