For the third time the interpreter shouted her challenge into the megaphone.

Franz could not accept the fact that the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers, that the exquisite noise of European history was lost in an infinite silence and that there was no longer any difference between history and silence. He felt like placing his own life on the scales; he wanted to prove that the Grand March weighed more than shit.

That sudden desire of Franz's reminds us of something; yes, it reminds us of Stalin's son, who ran to electrocute himself on the barbed wire when he could no longer stand to watch the poles of human existence come so close to each other as to touch, when there was no longer any difference between sublime and squalid, angel and fly. God and shit.

The silence she again received in response suddenly turned Franz's depression into rage. Here he was, standing only a few steps from the bridge joining Thailand to Cambodia, and he felt an overwhelming desire to run out onto it, scream blood-curdling curses to the skies, and die in a great clatter of gunfire.

But man can prove nothing of the sort. One pan of the scales held shit; on the other, Stalin's son put his entire body. And the scales did not move.

Instead of getting himself shot, Franz merely hung his head and went back with the others, single file, to the buses.