I saw the halo of a candle and the face of the red-haired woman – an oval, calm, subdued. Her hand was lightly stroking my head.

Seeing me awake, she smiled at me and blew out the candle. I quickly screwed up my eyes. I wanted to go to sleep again before she took away her hand…

After tea in the morning she said to me in a neutral voice, as if it were a trivial daily occurrence: "We've got snow up to the chimney. It's midday already, but look at the windows: it's pitch dark."

"I'll make a passage!" I exclaimed joyfully. "I know how to do it! You'll see…"

"No, no! You just dig a hole for yourself and then go…"

I did not argue. I understood that my joy was stupid. I must go. Quickly. Without looking back…

With my snowshoes attached to my belt, I hurled myself at the wall of snow that rose outside the front door. I became mole, snake, and dolphin all at the same time. I dug, wriggled, swam. I battled away at the heart of a white landslide, climbing up within its tide, which grew darker the farther I moved from the house. The rush of snow even penetrated my body, burned it, making my progress more fraught. I opened my mouth to inhale rare puffs of air and swallowed spurts of crystals that stung. My eyelids were immobilized, weighed down with minuscule ice diamonds. At one stage I felt as if I no longer knew the right direction and had lost my sense of up and down. I was surely crawling horizontally, within this mass where there was less and less air left. Or, worse, I was thrusting down into its depths. Such moments of panic are almost inevitable for someone clearing a way for himself after a great snowstorm. My heart thumped. Convulsively, I realigned the angle of my scaling upward. I mounted toward the light like a fish thrusting upstream against the current in a waterfall…

With a resounding crack, my head broke the fine layer of ice.

Dazzled, I stretched out on the smooth, sparkling surface. The sunny air resounded with freshness, seemed as if it were quite a different substance from what I had been breathing hitherto. The sky, revitalized by the mild spell, extended as far as the eye could see. The silence of the taiga was so deep that all the little sounds gathered around me, coming only from my movements – the crunch of snow under my elbow; the echo of my hungry breathing; the resonant slithering of white slabs breaking as they fell from my shapka, from the collar of my sheepskin…

All I could see of Kazhdai was a few dark patches: the roofs of the tallest houses. Some straight outlines as well: the buried trains sleeping on the tracks. I could identify streets thanks to the columns of white smoke rising from the chimneys. The tiny black dots were the inhabitants busy around these columns, making passageways.

The house I had just left was a little distance from the town, at the edge of the taiga. Its smoke seemed as if it were rising from the midst of a deserted plain. And on the branch of a birch tree, buried in the snow, I saw a miniature house designed to give shelter to the birds.

I put on my snowshoes and went up to the solitary chimney. Bending toward its mouth, which was shielded by a pitch-black iron cap, I uttered a resounding yell. It was the custom. The signal for the person left behind… I heard the creaking of the stove door, then an echo that seemed to come from the depths of the earth. A kind of slow sigh that was dissipated in the dazzling clarity of this day after the storm…

I glided briskly along on my snowshoes, crossing the valley that ran down to the Olyei. The taiga, half awake, stayed beside me at a distance. Great pine trees covered in snow had within their shade the brilliance of a bluish, transparent silver. And their tops glittered, dusted with nuggets of gold.

From time to time I glanced behind me. The column of smoke in the midst of the plain still marked the entombed izba, that room buried beneath the snow, the flickering light of a candle, that interior where the darkness of a winter's night still reigned. An unreal evening spent beneath the compact silence of the snows… The red-haired woman!

I remained still for a moment. I gazed at the plain with its thousands of crystals, flooded with sunlight, the endless sky extending its blue freshness; the mother-of-pearl shadow of the taiga. And in the distance, that column of smoke, white, all alone, in the midst of it all… Suddenly, with an unbearable clarity, I understood: I am condemned both to this beauty and to the suffering that it conceals. The snow would melt. Kazhdai would become a dark little town once again. The Transsiberian would move off and make up for its delay. And the red-haired prostitute would return to the waiting room. There could not be any other life.

For some time I followed the ample curve of the Olyei, overhung with immense dunes of snow.

Passing close to the three legendary cedar trees, where they hanged the men in the civil war, I stopped, stupefied. This morning the great rusty nails, which I was used to seeing high above me as I tilted my head back, were within easy reach. Yes, they were there, immediately before my eyes. I went up to them and, taking off my mittens, touched the rough brown metal. A slow cold, accumulated over long decades, invaded my fingers. I quickly withdrew my hand. I caressed the rough scales of the trunk. They seemed to harbor a warmth that was sleeping but alive. And suddenly what had happened long ago at the foot of these giant trees – that brutal but swift death – did not seem to me all that terrible. A moment of sharp pain and then this silence in the sun-drenched air, this secret life, sleeping, in perfect fusion with the breathing of this great trunk, with the sharp smell of the clusters of needles, with the glittering of the resin frozen in the indentations on the bark. This life without thoughts, without memories. This oblivion.

I gripped the great nail, I leaned my full weight on it. With half-closed eyes, I tried to enter into that narrow zone which separated me from the blissful silence of the trunk…

Suddenly, through my closed eyelids, I saw them: two black specks were following the blue ridge of the snowdrifts above the riverbank. Soon they were on a level with the three cedars. They hurtled down the ridge and crossed the Olyei. Their tiny silhouettes were becoming more and more distinct. The first of them moved forward with long strides, stopping at intervals to wait for the other one. I recognized them. And I was struck by their rustic and naive appearance. There was something childish about their sheepskins and their faces, which I could see more and more clearly. The earflaps of their shapkas bounced up and down – dogs' ears. They turned the corner by the forest, and in a few moments they were going to pass beside me. I wanted to run away. To hide deep among the snowy pine trees. I was certain I could no longer be a part of their lives…

But already the first of the skiers, Samurai, had noticed me. His harsh cry broke the silence. He came toward me.

Smiles, greetings, teasing. They gave me friendly pats on the shoulder. Told me the latest news from the village…

"They are children," observed some voice deep within me. "Absolute children, carefree and divinely insubstantial."

It seemed inconceivable that only yesterday morning we had been at school together. That only yesterday I had been like them.

"Have you swallowed your tongue or what?" exclaimed Samurai, shoving my shapka down onto my eyebrows. "Look at him, Utkin. He's not a Don Juan anymore. He's a bear that's half asleep!"

Tears came to my eyes. I was so jealous I could have howled. To be like them once again. To glide across the plain, light as the wind, as translucent as this sun-drenched air, as fresh as the breath of the taiga. Innocent!

Samurai must have noticed my tortured expression. He turned away and called out as he sped off, without looking at me: "Come on! There's no time to lose. Otherwise there won't be any seats left. Get going, you sleeping bear! You sleeping beauty!"