Happy Moscow

A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street on a bleak night in late autumn. The little girl saw him through a window of her home as she woke from a bleak dream. Then she heard a powerful shot from a rifle and a poor, sad cry–the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon afterwards came the sound of distant, repeated shots and of uproar from the nearby prison. The little girl went back to sleep and everything she saw during the following days got forgotten: she was too small, and the memory and mind of early childhood became overgrown for ever in her body by subsequent life. But until her last years the nameless running man would appear unexpectedly and sadly inside her–in the pale light of memory–and perish once again in the dark of the past, in the heart of a grown-up child. Amid hunger or sleep at a moment of love or some youthful joy–suddenly, the sad cry of the dead man was there again in the distance, deep in her body, and the young woman would immediately change her life: if she was dancing, she would stop dancing; if she was working, she would work more surely, with more concentration; if she was alone, she would cover her face with her hands. On that rainy night in late autumn the October Revolution had begun–in the city where Moscow Ivanovna Chestnova was living.

Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov, English excerpt from here