More about Lyoshka and the moonlit wasteland

Some days ago I chatted on Skype with a few Russian friends, and when one of them said a sentence in French I immediately thought of Lyoshka - he spoke some French as well, and how this young man sounded was very familiar in a comfortable, heart-warming way.
This led to more thinking about Lyoshka and, finally, to the emergence of the following flashback:

Maksim and Lyoshka are sitting in Lyoshka's living room, drinking tea and eating biscuits. Maksim is about twenty years old, so this is none of the after-school homework and repetition sessions of Maksim's schooldays. Maybe Maksim had just popped by for a chat; he liked Lyoshka, who was his brother-in-law's best friend very much as well.
They talk about this and that, and all of a sudden one of the two (I can't say if it was Maksim or Lyoshka) mentions the GULAG. Lyoshka quietly says: "The worst thing, Maksimka, the worst thing about it was that it made you lose your humanity. If someone in front of you collapsed with exhaustion, you didn't pity him, you just thought: 'Idiot, why do you have to do that here and lie in my way?' And then you'd raise your foot, step over him and march on as if he were just a log, a stone in the road..."
Maksim has a big lump in the throat as he imagines this, and he looks at Lyoshka's face - visible in profile from where he sits - and thinks: How can a person survive this? How can anyone survive this and still function normally, be a helpful, cheerful and compassionate friend? How can he still sleep at night? Like so often before, he feels great respect for Lyoshka and gets an inkling of the immense courage that must lie under Lyoshka's rather unobtrusive and ordinary exterior...

Flashback number two - I'm finally able to place that image of a moonlit wasteland across which Maksim walked one humid, muggy summer's night!
He was on the road with his ZIL and stopped for the night at the edge of this wasteland. It was an absolutely quiet night, he could hear crickets chirping and the sound of running water from the distance. Having driven in the stuffy heat all day, he was sweaty and dusty and longing for a wash, so he fetched his towel, soap and washcloth from the cab and set out across the wasteland (dry and cracked because it hadn't rained for a long time, bumpy and strewn with upturned roots that looked like driftwood as well as stones in various shapes and sizes) towards the sound of the running water. He took his tea kettle with him as well, the kettle dangling from the little finger of his left hand, the hand in which he was carrying his washing things.
It was a very beautiful in a moment, the pale, almost otherworldly light, the chirping of the crickets (a sound Maksim would of course never hear in Chelyabinsk), the smell of the water and the cooling earth...