CAMELS in a snowstorm; frosts that froze the sap in the trees and caused their trunks to burst; Charlotte 's numb hands catching huge logs thrown down from the top of a railway truck…

It was thus in our smoke-filled kitchen, during the long winter evenings, that this legendary past was reborn. Outside the snow-covered window there stretched one of the greatest cities in Russia as well as the gray plain of the Volga; out there arose the fortress-buildings of Stalinist architecture. And inside, amid the chaos of an interminable meal and the iridescent tobacco clouds, the shade of this mysterious Frenchwoman, lost beneath the Siberian sky, made its appearance. The television was pouring out the news of the day, transmitting the sessions of the latest Party congress, but this background noise did not make the slightest impact on the conversations of our guests.

Squatting in a corner of this crowded kitchen, with my shoulder against the shelves on which the television was enthroned, I listened to them avidly while trying to make myself invisible. I knew that soon the face of an adult would loom up through the blue fog, and I should hear a cry of simulated indignation: "Hey, just look at him, the little sleepwalker! It's past midnight and he's still not in bed. Go on, off you go! Stir your stumps! We'll send for you when you've grown a beard…"