She would know, she knew already, that the émigrés, the moment they returned to Russia, had been stripped of their luggage, screened, loaded into long boxcars. And that it was on the day of the first snowstorm that they had separated father and son. The adults had continued their journey farther eastward, crossed the Urals, traveled up beyond the Arctic Circle as far as the camps of the far North. Young people who had not reached the age of sixteen were considered still capable of purging their "bourgeois past" in reeducation centers. It was at the moment of separation that the father, after a solitary and futile rebellion, had almost died under the heavy rifle butts of the guards…

She would also learn that Li had followed the same route to the North. And that her painted panels had been thrown into the snow behind the railroad station where they were sorting out the prisoners.

For a while the vivid colors of these panoramas were to be seen amid the frozen wastes: a pianist in tails accompanying a monumental prima donna; two vacationers beneath a tropical sun… But little by little the local inhabitants had carried these panels away and burnt them during the great frosts at the end of the winter.

She understood that not knowing what had befallen her son was for her the only chance of believing that he was still alive. And the more improbable this hope was, the more confident she became. He was somewhere beneath the sky; he saw the trees, the light, heard the wind…

One day she finally decided to speak in her turn. She knew that for the man to understand her she must tell everything in a few brief words and speak no more. And then speak again, until her words became fire, darkness, sky… Until that other life, the one they had so clumsily sought together, and that she had so briefly known, was finally made manifest to them in the fragile eternity of human language.

He opens the gate at the moment when the aureole of the streetlamps is beginning to waver and is extinguished. For some moments the darkness seems to have returned. I look back: the door to the keeper's lodge has been left open; and I can see the lamp that lit up his face all through the night. Our two chairs. Our cups on the table. And all about the little house dark tree trunks, the upright stones of monuments, tombs, crosses…

He stays beside me for a moment between the two halves of the gate. Then shakes my hand, moves away, and soon disappears among the trees.