This song always haunted me from the very first time I heard it at a dissident-run language course in Neustadt. A. Galich paints a scene of "voluptuous melancholy", if I may borrow the phrase of E. M. Cioran. The nuances are very hard to translate precisely, especially since the same word takes on meanings in different contexts where the English speaker must use a different word. I apologize if I got anything wrong. When you read it or listen to the song, imagine the rehabilitated "enemy of the state" in his basement dive looking from his table up through the window well to the clouds floating by, just like those he saw in his personal hell in the camps at Abakan and Kolyma. He's been sitting in taverns for three years now, a regular lord with his pension, but he's still frozen through in the sleigh tracks pecking away at the ice, snow-blind, with the din of that morning's shakedown still ringing in his ears. His only consolation for this prison of mind is that those voluptuous clouds still move on placidly, free, beyond any need. On they move peacefully, effortlessly changing with the wind until they disappear over the horizon without any regrets. He wishes he were like those clouds. Don't we all?