"We haven't found your papers," he said, coming in.

Charlotte pressed him. What happened then was as unbelievable as it was logical. The leader vomited forth such a torrent of oaths that even after two months spent on crowded trains, she was shattered by it. He continued to shout at her while she already had her hand on the door handle. Then, suddenly bringing his face close to hers, he hissed, "I could arrest you and shoot you right there in the courtyard behind the shithouse! D'you understand, filthy spy!"

On her return, walking through the snow-covered fields, Charlotte told herself that a new language was in the process of being born in this country. A language that she did not know, and that was why the dialogue in the former governor's office had seemed to her incredible. But everything had its meaning: even the revolutionary eloquence that suddenly slid into gutter language; even his "citizen-spy"; and even the pamphlet regulating the sexual lives of party members. Yes, a new order of things was being established. Everything in this world, albeit so familiar, was going to acquire a new name; they were going to apply a different label to each object, to each being.

"And what about this lazy snow," she thought, "the thaw with its sleepy flakes in the mauve evening sky?" She recalled that as a child she was always happy to find the snow again when she came out into the street after her lesson with the governor's daughter. "Like today…" she said to herself, taking a deep breath.

A few days later life became frozen. One clear night polar cold descended from the sky. The world was transformed into a crystal of ice, within which were encrusted the trees bristling with rime; the still, white columns above the chimneys; the silvery line of the taiga stretching to the horizon; and the sun surrounded by a halo of moiré. The human voice no longer carried; its vapor froze on the lips.