collect his newspapers and things. Then he looked around at everyone in turn, as if he were standing in front of columns, not people. “Whatever… I feel sorry for your subordinates… And you too,” he said quietly but distinctly to Karatai and moved through the retinue, behind the head of the station. Karatai sank heavily onto his seat. There was no triumph on his face, not even satisfaction. On the contrary, Bagila understood this, he painfully worried about the words of the random man. When the man was leaving the compartment, Bagila finally got a good look at him. As long as he took the suitcase with him, the girl wanted him to disappear quickly, and then, as if a beam of light fell on an ice floe frozen in her soul, she looked at him with pity. And again, she looked into his eyes, in the expression of his face, in his entire posture, the painful pride, the eternal fear of being hurt and offended, and Bagila experienced surprise and compassion for the stranger at the same time. The train started moving. Only now Bagila noticed that there were a lot of people who were seeing off her father. She knew everyone too, but it was somehow embarrassing to see them together on the station platform, at the same time, as if on command, they were waving to one person her father. “Dad, are you tired?” Bagila asked, unable to endure the heavy silence that arose in the compartment after the man left. The father looked at his daughter with a smile, as if he wanted to say: “Don’t worry about that nonsense!” and shook his head negatively, but his eyes were sad. An attendant came and changed Karatai’s bed again. When the attendant took hold of the pillowcase, a sheet of paper was found underneath. One side of it was completely written on. The guide tossed the sheet onto the table, as if making it clear that at the moment there was nothing more important than changing the pillowcase. Karatai didn’t see any importance in the fact that someone’s notes were found in his compartment. Bagila did not yet know and could not know that there was only one step from love to hate and vice versa, but from that moment she felt that all her attention had shifted to the sheet of written paper. What could this

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