"I wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then…"

"I wouldn't have believed the letter…"

"Yes, I told myself that you wouldn't have believed it in any case…"

She threw down the branches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.

"Do you hear?" whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. "The mice, you remember? They're still there…"

Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life behind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: "That's how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out…"

Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In the darkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte 's body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.

"You've become very thin," Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.

Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother's lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room – the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch…