Drawing his overcoat around his neck, Vikentiy kept his eyes firmly on the stack of newspapers sitting by his front door. They were hard to see in the dark of his small home, but he was standing near enough that he could make out the date on the top-most one from yesterday: 1 November 1949.

He stood there for a minute or two, in the dark, with his hands on the collar of his coat, his hat already planted firmly on his head. It had been a week, he thought.

Frozen, with only the sound of pattering rain against his kitchen pane, he relived the last moments of his wife's life. Her yellow skin. Her rasping voice. The incomplete and incoherent words that escaped her chapped lips. She suffered in pain until the very end, until she quietly passed away.

Vikentiy pulled himself suddenly into the present, finding that he now stood outside in the cold, fumbling with the key to lock his home. His eyes had blurred with tears but he dared not wipe them away. Slowly he turned and trudged through the mud to his small automobile, the gray raining sky above mimicking the man's broken heart.

Years later, Vikentiy would reflect on this moment as a turning point in his life. When he died in 1981 at the hands of an inexperienced surgeon after being brought in for medical help from a life on the streets, it was with this memory in mind.