There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.

A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.

I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.