They stopped a few yards away from me, and the child looked at me inquiringly I smiled at her. And suddenly I realized that this incredibly beautiful little face was made up. Discreetly, and by an expert hand, an adult's. Not daubed with a carnival mask, but transformed into the thrillingly angelic face of a doll-woman. I also noticed that dusk was beginning to fall, that the booths had closed. My head was still ringing with laughter and sunlight… The first streetlights were flickering with a mauve glow. The woman turned and stared at me with an appraising eye. Then, fondling the child's chin, murmured: "The fair's over. You won't get your candy now…" The child looked hard at me. At the last moment I bit back the words that were already on the tip of my tongue: "You have a very pretty granddaughter…" I thought I had guessed what was afoot. The woman tugged at the child's hand and I saw them making their way toward a great prefabricated shed, the "beer bar." In a hissed conversation behind my back, two market women were heaving outraged sighs: "Did you see that? The old woman's back again with the kid." "Well, what do you expect? That child's her meal ticket…" "I'd hang them, the bastards who do that…"
I saw their two figures at the end of the alleyway, the big one and the little one, silhouetted against the lights of the "beer bar." I should have caught up with them. Given them all the money I had. Warned the police. Carried off the child… But could all this really be a figment of my imagination? All along the alleyway the shutters of the booths were already closed, rays of light filtered out from inside. One could sense the silent presence of the stallholders. The fairground in darkness, these little wooden huts, each with its own secret, the child in her makeup, who had given me a smile… I preferred to believe it was a misunderstanding…
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.
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. He wore a black jacket of reversed sheepskin, and boots of reindeer hide. From his great height he studied the room, noting the disorder left by the previous night's bender, but said nothing, waiting for the two Levs to come to him. This they did, greeting him with assumed nonchalance, but with shifty eyes. "Hi there, Chief!" "Just five minutes, Captain, and we're ready!" Big Lev almost looked small. Little Lev had to reach up with his arm to shake the pilot's hand. The man eyed them in silence, then picked up the empty brandy bottle. "I see you've been ready since yesterday," he said in a deep voice that sounded like the clutch being let in on an army four-wheel drive on a bitterly cold day. "I'm warning you, if I hear the slightest hiccup during the flight, I'll throw you out, along with your firecrackers…"
The kitchen door opened, and Valya came in carrying a huge kettle from which a wisp of steam emerged. I recalled my earlier astonishment: "What man could make love to her?" Now her body seemed to take on normal proportions, the pilot's presence made her feminine, even seductive. "Would you like a bite to eat?" she asked him. Smiling, he replied rather gruffly: "No, we don't have time. They've forecast heavy winds late in the day… Just dose these two boozers with a bit of brine, otherwise they'll foul up the plane and half the Arctic…" He waved the brandy bottle and growled, still smiling: "Look at this. They get themselves drunk on imported hooch these days. Goddamn aristocrats…"