The workers’ parade was already nearing the square. The first thing Ri saw was a blur of colour, predominantly red, but with streaks of blue, green and yellow. These were the colours of models, flags and emblems, striking against the black background of human figures. Posters were being carried in almost every row, huge portraits of leaders inked onto canvas, portraits so large that Ri could make out Stalin’s face though she was far from the parade below. Weaving through the crowd of colours, his face was always the same, stern, with a wry smile. She could see the eyes clearest of all, eyes narrowed into an expression that was at once reproachful, and yet somehow benevolent and encouraging, and it seemed to her that those eyes were focusing directly on her, Ri, the wife of a foreign engineer on the third floor of the foreigners’ hotel. She could not avoid their gaze, duplicated as it was by the many thousands of posters. And still the human stream continued to flow, new waves always appearing, the parade apparently endless. Ri was overwhelmed, crushed, silenced and helpless. She felt as if she were staring into a tornado, a natural disaster which was about to sweep away everything that stood before it; there were so many people that they ceased to be individuals, becoming instead an unknown and incomprehensible force, unearthly, uncontrollable. Ri is still alive only because the stream cannot rise to such heights and drag her down, though she fears it is somehow still possible and so grips the edge of the desk by her window. She now knows that there can be no thoughts of battle. How foolish she feels! To struggle against a tornado that destroys everything in its wake! She is humiliated, silent. She must resign herself to doing everything, anything. She will go to a factory, become a cleaner perhaps, or a labourer, she will lug timber in the factory courtyard or work the lathe, everything is at an end. She must serve, humbly serve this world, she cannot fight it, she wants simply to live. Live as the lowliest of the low, live, breathe and eat. There is no battle, there is no reconciliation, only servitude remains. She can escape from her solitude through humility alone, she cannot hide or close herself off, there is no hiding place or den into which the narrowed, hawk-like eyes from those posters cannot peer. But to love this world as Robert does, no, she cannot love this world; is it even possible to love a tornado, is it possible to scream into the storm for it to stop?