Avdotia got up, embraced my grandmother, and continued on her way, which led her across endless fields, beneath the sun of the steppes, on a farm wagon submerged in the ocean of tall plants and flowers… This time, as she was leaving the room, I saw her great peasant's fingers touch, with tentative hesitation, the delicate statuette on the chest in our hall: a nymph with a rippling body entwined with sinuous stems, that figurine from the turn of the century, one of the rare fragments from bygone days that had been miraculously preserved…

Bizarre as it may seem, it was thanks to the local drunkard, Gavrilych, that we were able to gain insight into the meaning of that unusual "strange elsewhere" that our grandmother carried within her. He was a man whose very teetering silhouette, looming up from behind the poplar trees in the courtyard, inspired apprehension. A man who defied the militiamen when he held up the traffic in the main street with his capricious zigzag progress; a man who fulminated against the authorities; and whose thunderous oaths rattled windowpanes and swept the row of babushkas from their bench. Yet this same Gavrilych, when he met my grandmother, would stop, attempt to inhale the vodka fumes on his breath, and articulate with an accentuated respect, "Good day, Sharlota Norbertovna!"

Yes, he was the only person in the courtyard who called her by her French Christian name, albeit slightly Russified. What is more, he had got hold of Charlotte 's father's name – no one knew any longer when, or how – and formed the exotic patronymic "Norbertovna," on his lips the pinnacle of courtesy and eagerness to please. His cloudy eyes lit up, his giant's body recovered a relative equilibrium, his head sketched a series of somewhat uncoordinated nods, and he forced his alcohol-soaked tongue to perform this act of verbal acrobatics: "Are you well, Sharlota Norbertovna?"