Listening to the two geologists in the izba at the Edge, I told myself that they came from the same era as those objects being sold by the old men in the subway passages. They lived as if the five thousand miles of snow that lay between them and Moscow had slowed the passage of time. The sixties? The seventies? Everything in the way they lived, the way they talked, was twenty or thirty years out of date. That joke about the new arrival having sex with a bear – I had heard it more than once in my youth. Time here was twenty years slow. No, it was more like a time apart from time, a flow of days that took its tempo from the hissing of snow squalls against the window, the wheezing of the fire, the breathing of these three sleeping people, each so different and all so close. The two men, their faces burned by the Arctic, the huge woman with slanted eyes, asleep in the room next door. (What are her dreams? Dreams where all is snow? Or on the contrary, filled with southern sunlight?) A nocturnal time, its rhythm derived from the throb of our blood in the arm crooked beneath the head, a warm pulse, adrift in the endless white, in the depths of this cosmic darkness, turned iridescent by the Arctic phosphorescence.

Morning did not come. I was awakened by a storm hurling flurries of snowflakes against the windows and filling the house with a dull vibration. It took me several seconds to grasp that this was due to a helicopter landing close beside the Edge. I saw light behind the kitchen door and heard the clatter of aluminum plates and mugs. The geologists got up in a hurry and even, it seemed to me, in a kind of panic. Big Lev scrubbed his face furiously under the faucet. Little Lev hastily geared up the spring of his wind-up razor…

The door yielded with a noisy crunch of shattered ice, and now I believed I could guess the reason for their disarray. The man had to stoop as he made his way into the house, and when he paused at the center of the room, his face was level with the glowing lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.