ALTYAZI: Smoke

  PAUL                           
It's 1942, right? And he's caught in Leningrad
during the siege. I'm talking about one of the
worst moments in human history. Five hundred
thousand people died in that one place, and
there's Bakhtin, holed up in an apartment,
expecting to be killed any day. He has plenty
of tobacco, but no paper to roll it in. So he
takes the pages of a manuscript he's been
working on for ten years and tears them up to
roll his cigarettes.

 RASHID
(Incredulous)
His only copy?

 PAUL
His only copy.
(Pause)
I mean, if you think you're going to die,
what's more important, a good book or a good
smoke? And so he huffed and he puffed, and
little by little he smoked his book.