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Arseny slept for two or three hours each day but could not free himself from the sorrow around him, even when he slept. He saw swollen patients in his colorful dreams and they asked him for cures but he could not help them at all because he knew they had already died. There were no more fantasies in his dreams: these were true dreams, dreams about what had been. Time truly was going backwards. It did not accommodate the events designated for him—those events were too grand and raucous. Time was coming apart at the seams, like a wayfarer’s traveling bag, and it was showing its contents to the wayfarer, who contemplated them as if for the first time.
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