We waited hours.
"Can't you hurry our passports?" Marie asked an official. "We want to leave on this train."
The official raised his shoulders helplessly.
"Seichas," he replied.
"What does that mean?"
"Presently—immediately—never," Marie replied in exasperation.
The train we were to have taken for Kiev left without us, on tracks twice as wide as those of the Roumanian toy railroad. Only a courier with a diplomatic pouch got on.
"It's like that here, always," Marie said. "No system, no economy of time, or anything else." Suddenly she began to laugh. "Everything gets on my nerves as soon as I get into Russia."
We left late in the afternoon. The air in our compartment was hot and stale. When we opened the window, the wind blew in on our faces in parching gusts. But it was grateful after the smells of cabbage, soup, tobacco, and dirty Jews that we had been breathing for five hours in the douane.
We sat by the window, cracking dried sunflower seeds, and looking out at the steppes of Little Russia. The evening shadows were already lying in the hollows of the fields of ripening wheat, but the late sun still reddened the crests and the column of smoke from our engine. Frightened larks rose from the tall grain. We passed patches of dark woods, scattered thatched huts. Along a road came a man and a woman in peasant dress. The train seemed to slow up on purpose to let us have a glimpse of them through a thin, fine powder of golden dust, in their dark homespuns, with patches of red embroidery on the white sleeves and necks of their blouses. They carried a green box between them. Once we passed through a wood of pale-green birches with thin silver stems. It was a relief to see lines going up and down after the wide, level lines of the steppes.