After the death of my great-grandfather Norbert, the white

immensity of Siberia had slowly closed in on Albertine. True, she returned to Paris two or three times more, taking Charlotte with her. But the planet of the snows never relinquished its hold on the souls who had fallen under the spell of its uncharted spaces and its slumbering time.

Furthermore, the visits to Paris were marked by a bitterness that my grandmother's stories did not manage to conceal. Some family quarrel, the reasons for which we were not given to know. Or perhaps a very European coldness in the relationships between close family members, inconceivable to us Russians, with our exuberant collectivism. Or quite simply the understandable attitude of unpretentious people toward one of four sisters, the adventuress of the family who, far from returning with a fair dream of gold, each time brought back the anguish of a barbarous country and a broken life.

In any event, the fact that Albertine preferred to live at her brother's apartment and not in the family home in Neuilly did not go unnoticed, even by us.

Each time she returned to Russia, she felt more and more fated for Siberia – it was inevitable, a part of her own destiny. It was not only Norbert's grave that bound her to this land of ice, but also that somber Russian life experience, whose intoxicating poison she felt entering her veins.