The only places where I truly felt at home once more were the subway passages and the pedestrian tunnels, now transformed into bazaars of poverty. Old men were offering objects for sale that shouted out their rupture from apartments or rooms where their absence now left gaps impossible to fill. This was not the cheerful jumble of a flea market, but the debris of lives destroyed by the new times. I recognized the worn china of a cup, the shape of the heels on a pair of shoes, the trademark on a transistor radio… These relics dated from my childhood. A whole era on sale in these old hands, blue with cold.
More than all the other changes, more even than the obscene flaunting of the new wealth, it was this dispersal of a human past that struck me. The feverish speed with which it was being made to disappear. This dispersal and also the beauty of the child in her makeup. And my ignorance of what ought to be done in these new times to protect that child.
Siberia made me forget my botched homecoming. Here nothing had changed as of yet. The handful of new republics, arisen from the collapse of the empire, had done no more than add colors to the geographers' maps. The earth remained the same: endless, white, indifferent to the rare appearances of men. Here, in the torpor of winter, they were watching out not for the latest upheavals in world news, but for the russet streak of sunlight that would graze the horizon in a few days' time, after a long polar night.