Lida is the Polish frontier station where the narrator and his mother were quarantined during their westward flight from Moscow. In his recollection, it is both a place of acute bodily hardship and the setting for his mother’s stories of a distant France, a remembered contrast that makes Lida a formative scene in the book’s account of exile and imagined belonging.

The Journey and Quarantine

The family reached Lida on a three-week journey west by cattle-and-goods train, with typhus among their fellow travelers. The station was not a settled home but a stopping place on a refugee route, where the mother and child were held in quarantine at the Polish frontier. The account places their arrival within the wider journey from Moscow toward the country the mother had described as the destination of her son’s future.

Life at the Railway Station

The recollection gives the station a crowded, makeshift character: the pair lay on a straw mattress among a hundred other refugees. The child’s head was shaved, and he screamed when given an anti-cholera injection. These details make illness and confinement immediate rather than abstract; Lida is remembered through what was done to a vulnerable child’s body and through the pressed-together lives of those waiting there.

The Mother’s Stories of France

Against that deprivation, the mother continued to whisper tales of wonders awaiting her son. She pressed him to her and spoke of legendary figures and imagined abundance: Chevalier Bayard, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sarah Bernhardt, and shops filled with butter and sugar. The boy tried to see the places she described beyond the station’s dirty wall, following her faraway gaze toward Parisian landmarks and scenes of French history. Her storytelling did not remove the hardship of quarantine; it supplied another world to inhabit within it.

Memory and the Promised Homeland

Lida returns in the narrator’s later account as one of the scenes through which his mother’s France took shape: a country of freedom, equality, and fulfilled dreams, conveyed to a child even in a refugee station. The recollection belongs to a larger contrast between his mother’s radiant vision and the difficult realities they eventually encountered. In adulthood, he describes himself as having devoted his strength and courage to making that fairy tale come true. Lida therefore matters not as a detailed portrait of the town, but as a remembered threshold where exile, maternal imagination, and the promise of a future homeland meet.