Kaliayev and Dora sit themselves around a table. Kaliayev leaves a packet in front of Dora. Silence.

Kaliayev
That’s all in all what was left to me from our home.

Dora
From your home in Ukraine?

Kaliayev
Yes. This gift is a remnant of my past.

Dora opens the package with gentility. It is a Icon (the Virgin of Vladimirskaïa).

Dora, surprised
Yanek! You are crazy! I cannot accept this.

Kaliayev
You ought to however accept it. From now on you are my only homeland. Time. There I lost everything, here, I have nothing but you.

Dora kisses the Icon and puts it upright, toward the audience, between them.

Dora, emotionally moved
From now on, it will constitute our treasure. How beautiful she is and simultaneously so sad.

Kaliayev
As if one cannot do without the other.

Dora
Within her glance I see all the suffering of the world.

Kaliayev
It is her knowledge without hope that makes her so humane. Within the whiteness of dawn, she recognizes the red of the sunset.

Dora
She looks at her child in her arms and observes her son upon the cross …

Kaliayev
Within the innocence of purity, the sacrifice of the just.

Dora
If our nation sees within her the mother of us all, it is because a wave of tears raised her sacredness .

Kaliayev
The river of bitterness runs within her veins, more bitter than even the blood of the one who could not hold on.

Dora
Don’t talk like that, my love. No desperate one could be without hope. And then, her tenderness, with a mere caress erases all the sufferings of life.

Kaliayev
You’re right. No one will ever love us as much as she does

Dora
Her sweetness is an appeaser, her lamentation a psalm.

Kaliayev
Her prayer brings constantly in mind that we ought to act today as if we were to die tomorrow.

Dora
As if the essence of our life was going to be lost.

Kaliayev, continuing in the same tone
As if the substance belongs merely to us ..

Dora
And as if the future was hidden within the distant past.

Kaliayev
Only our dreams are capable of building reality.

Dora
Our dreams and our memories…

Time.