And here I am, driving down Arseniev Road. It’s pleasant and comfortable going by taxi, especially today, provided I ignore the disturbing feeling of there being no coming back here like fifteen years ago.

On the right an enormous public garden runs alongside the road – neat bushes with small pink flowers, wellkept paths roughly sprinkled with sand, freshly painted benches with grime already eating into the paint; the asphalt is smooth and there’s a pavement that was not here before, in those days there were cobbles, chipped, beggarly, and perfectly in keeping; indeed even now they would go well with the left side of the road: with the old paraffin shop which was new only fifteen years ago, though now there is no longer an opaque globe above the entrance, no more window panes clouded with splashes.

And those brownish brick walls which collapsed straight onto the pavement along with the rotten tree, all that was on the right, with the ancient wall of the Ilych Factory, which shared its name with the shop ‘on the arrow’ – the junction of Arsenev Road and Serpukhov Street. That old wall has been replaced by a new one, less sound perhaps but new, and the recently built shop section of the factory is thus hidden from the street, from this youthful looking street which I am now travelling along in my taxi, turning left by Police Station 3 and towards the maternity hospital.