But as I grew older I began to detect quite a different reason for this French predilection in their interminable discussions. It was that Charlotte 's advent under the Russian sky was like that of an extraterrestrial being. The cruel history of this immense empire, of its famines, its revolutions, its civil war, was nothing to do with her… We Russians had no choice. But she? Through her eyes they could observe a country they did not recognize, because judged by a foreigner, sometimes naive, often more perspicacious than themselves. Charlotte 's eyes reflected a disturbing world where unforced truth abounded – an unfamiliar Russia that they needed to discover.

I listened to them, and I too discovered Charlotte 's Russian destiny, but in my own way. Certain details, hardly mentioned, became magnified in my mind and created a whole secret universe. Other events, to which the adults attached considerable importance, passed unnoticed.

Thus, strangely, the horrible images of cannibalism in the villages of the Volga affected me very little. I had just read Robinson Crusoe, and Man Friday's fellow countrymen with their joyful rites of anthropophagy had inoculated me, through fiction, against real atrocities.

And the feature of Charlotte 's rural past that made the greatest impression on me was not the hard labor at the farm. What I remembered above all was her visit to the young people of the village. She had gone to see them that very evening and had found them engaged in a metaphysical discussion: the topic was what kind of death would befall someone who dared to go to the cemetery on the dot of midnight. Charlotte had smiled and said she was capable of confronting all supernatural powers among the tombs that night.