Summary

This section of the book begins with the narrator’s comment that sometimes, even though he does not understand the language and the ways of the country he is living in, he has an experience of his life there helping his life as a whole make sense. He then describes just such an incident, which took place some time after the end of his relationship with Mitko - on a train trip he took with his mother, who had come to visit him, a trip from the seaside back to Sofia.

The use of past tense in the summary of this section of the book reflects the somewhat more contemplative nature of the writing.

As he describes their accommodations on the train – undecorated, hot, somewhat crowded – the narrator comments that this trip was his mother’s first trip out of America...