One day I came upon a photo I should not have seen… I was spending my holidays with my grandmother in the town at the edge of the Russian steppe where she had been stranded after the war. A warm, slow summer dusk was drawing in and flooding the rooms with a mauve glow. This somewhat unearthly light fell upon the photos that I was examining before an open window, the oldest snapshots in our albums. The pictures spanned the historic watershed of the 1917 revolution; brought to life the era of the tsars; and, moreover, pierced the iron curtain, which was then almost impenetrable, transporting me at one moment to the precinct of a gothic cathedral and the next into the pathways of a garden where the precise geometry of the plants left me perplexed. I was plunging into our family prehistory.

Then suddenly this photo!

I saw it when, out of pure curiosity, I opened a large envelope that had been slipped between the last page and the cover. It was that inevitable batch of snapshots that have not been judged worthy to appear on the rough cardboard of the pages, landscapes that can no longer be identified, faces that evoke neither affection nor memories. One of those batches you always tell yourself you must sort through one day, to decide the fate of all these souls in torment…

It was in the midst of these unknown people and forgotten landscapes that I saw her, a young woman whose attire jarred oddly with the elegance of the people who appeared in the other photos. She was wearing a big dirty gray padded jacket and a man's shapkawith the earflaps pulled down. As she posed, she was clasping to her breast a baby muffled up in a wool blanket.

"How did she slip in," I wondered in amazement, "among all these men in tails and women in evening dress?" And all around her in other snapshots there were these majestic avenues, these colonnades, these Mediterranean vistas. Her presence was anachronistic, out of place, inexplicable. She seemed like an intruder in this family past, with a style of dress nowadays adopted only by the women who cleared snowdrifts from the roads in winter…