And it was so good, on returning from school, to climb up the old wooden steps that crunched under your feet; to pass through a dim entrance hall with walls made of great logs, which were covered in a thick coat of hoarfrost; and to push at the heavy door, which yielded with a brief, very lifelike groan. And there, in the room, one could remain for a moment without lighting the lamp, watching the little low window becoming suffused with the violet dusk, listening to snowy gusts of wind tinkling against the window-pane. Leaning back against the broad, hot flank of the big stove, Charlotte felt the heat slowly penetrating beneath her coat. She held her frozen hands to the warm stone – the stove seemed to her to be the enormous heart of this old izba. And beneath the soles of her felt boots the last lumps of ice were melting.

One day a splinter of ice broke beneath her feet unusually loudly. Charlotte was surprised – she had already been home a good half hour, all the snow on her coat and her shapkahad long since melted and dried out. But this icicle… She bent down to pick it up. It was a splinter of glass! A very fine one, from a broken medical vial…

It was thus that the terrible word morphine entered her life. It explained the silence behind the curtain, the seething shadows in her mother's eyes, a Siberia absurd and inevitable as fate.

Albertine no longer had anything to hide from her daughter. From now on it was Charlotte who would be seen going into the pharmacy and murmuring timidly, "It's for Madame Lemonnier's medicine…"

She always returned home alone, crossing the vast wastelands that separated their cluster of houses from the last streets of the town, with its shops and lighting. Often a snowstorm would descend on these dead spaces. Tired of struggling against a wind laden with ice crystals, deafened by its whistling, one evening Charlotte stopped in the midst of this desert of snow, turning her back on the squalls, her gaze lost in the giddy flight of the snowflakes.