A bird frightened by the storm hurtles into the room, weaves a jerky flight through the darkness, and makes its escape through the gap.

"It's true that he has very few people around him," murmurs the man. "And, as for the English, I don't know if we can count on them… But you know, it's like a battle in the air. It's not always the number of planes that decides it, nor even how good they are. It's… How to explain it? It's the air. Yes, the air. Sometimes you feel the air is supporting you, playing on your side. The air or heaven itself. You just have to have great faith in it. For him, too, it's heaven that will play a greater part in this than anything else… That's what he believes."

Over the course op this journey I have often calculated the years that separated me from those two lovers.

"Fifty years, give or take a month or two…" I tell myself once more, watching through the aircraft's window the monotony of the night hours over Siberia. Fifty years… The number ought to impress me. But instead of amazement, I have a vivid sense of the presence of those two beings within me, of their deep connection to what I am.

Outside, one can only walk by thrusting a pike or a ski pole into the carapace of snow swept clean by the blizzard. Indoors, in the izba's long mess hall, the steel stove is red hot. The air smells of burning bark, dark brown tobacco, and ninety-proof alcohol laced with cranberry syrup. It is scarcely an hour since I arrived, the goal has been reached, I am there in the house that is known as "the Edge." ("It's right at the edge," a local inhabitant told me, as he showed me the way. "At the edge of what?" "Just at the Edge. That's what they call it. It's the last house. You'll see. There's a helicopter pad over there. Mind you, in this blizzard you won't see a thing now. Whatever you do, don't let go of the cable!") I began walking, bent double under the snow squalls, my knapsack swaying around on my back, one hand gripping an old ski pole, the other sliding along a thick rope stretched between one house and the next.