At a certain moment the argument began to go around in circles. Elias remained lying there, and with his head tilted slightly backward, he saw the swirling of long plumes of snow around a lamppost. A simple and intense happiness was conjured up by this hypnotic movement. Their wanderings through Moscow beneath surges of white… The little circle of melted hoarfrost made by Anna’s breath on the window of a bus… He closed his eyes, tried not to hear the two voices down at the bottom of the lecture hall, discussing the pros and cons of his blackness.
Anna said very little, in fact. Elias thought he could make out the rather slow intonation that he often noticed when she was speaking. “Look, Gina, of course he s black and all that. But he understands me like nobody else…” There was an exaggeratedly scornful laugh from Gina, the click of a lighter, and this observation: “You’re really stupid, my little Anna. Though… come to think of it maybe you’re made for each another. He’s just climbed down from his baobab tree and you’ve just emerged from your bear’s den.” As if she had not heard, Anna continued in the same dreamy tone: “And then, don’t laugh, but he’s a bit like a knight in shining armor! Yes. You know, I read that poem a thousand times in my teens. You remember. A lady drops her glove into an arena full of lions and tigers. The beasts roar, but this knight goes to retrieve the glove and returns it to the lady… Yes, I know, I know… A childishly romantic German poem… But you see, with him I feel I’m never telling lies. While with Vadim everything becomes false. Even the way I walk. With Vadim even the snow smells like ice from the fridge…”
Elias saw this young man with Anna the following evening. Thanks to the conversation in the lecture hall he knew that Vadim was a Muscovite, the son of a senior government official. “If I were you,” Gina had yelled, Td stick to him like glue. In two years’ time hell have a diplomatic post abroad.” Elias had pictured him as tall, arrogant, athletic, a worthy representative of the capital’s gilded youth. He detested him before having seen him.
Vadim came into the entrance hall of the library and for a few seconds was blinded. He took off his misted-over spectacles, began wiping them, and, with his myopic eyes tightly screwed up, peered into the surrounding haze. He was tall, with a slight stoop and a handsome face spoiled by the childish softness of his lips. In taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his glasses he had dropped a small piece of card, no doubt his library ticket. He leaned forward, looking around him still with this tentative, myopic air. Elias, who was watching the scene reflected in a mirror at the end of the entrance hall, had an impulse to go and help him.
Anna arrived at that moment, picked up the card, walked with Vadim to the exit. They paused a few yards away from Elias, who caught the young man’s half wistful, half vexed words: “No. You know, Mama’s told me I’ve got to be careful about my bronchitis. Especially because out there, in midwinter…” They went out, and Elias noticed that Anna’s gait was indeed no longer the same: the measured steps you take alongside an old man.
Two days later he learned that during the vacation she would be going to her village in eastern Siberia. “Perhaps I could…” It did not feel as if he were asking her, it was the echo of a dream finding expression almost without his knowing it. “It takes seven days, and it can easily reach fifty below over there,” she replied, as if trying to dissuade him.
In the course of the umpteenth assault on the “presidential palace,” Elias stumbled, fell, and sprained his foot. Having succeeded in making the doctor believe this, he gained an extra week of leave.
They set off just as the weather had turned warmer. Moscow smelled of damp turf. During the second night, in a station close to the Urals, Elias climbed down onto the footboard of the coach and found he could not breathe. The frozen air had the cutting hardness of a crystal.
3
EXTREME COLD DARKENS THE SKIN more than sunburn. Elias learned this from observing the Siberian who got onto the train at Krasnoyarsk. A face burned by chilblains, hands rutted with swarthy cracks. “That’s right. It’s the true color of gold,” the man joked, in response to Anna’s quick glance. He was sharing a compartment with them. Out of his bag a meal appeared: an earthenware pot containing salted mushrooms (“We’ll give them time to breathe, the brine’s completely frozen”), smoked elk meat, a couple of pints of dark vodka infused with bilberries. He offered it, too, to an elderly woman who spent every day on her couchette opening and closing a little casket. He talked about his occupation, about extracting nuggets from the permafrost, about how his sleep was plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and the growling of bears. After the third glass he thumped Elias on the shoulder and proclaimed with warm, fraternal emotion, “Last January when it was sixty below and windy as well, I turned blacker than you in the -” He was about to say “face” but stopped himself and uttered a word that was incongruous, because too old-fashioned and poetic in the context, life, more appropriate for the countenance of an icon.
Everyone laughed, and Elias perceived the distance they had traveled since Moscow. His color no longer made a monkey of him, nor a propaganda symbol, nor a totem that required bowing and scraping from humanists. It was visible, of course, but just like the marks of frost on a face. All the man in his clumsy way wanted to say to him was: “The fact that you re black is nothing. Worse things happen.” He talked about one of his comrades who had had an arm torn off by an excavator. The woman told them that what she was carrying in her casket was her husbands ashes, as well as the fragment of a shell that had remained in the old soldiers leg for thirty years…
They were drawing close to the limits of the empire, a place where brutalized lives run aground, human beings considered undesirable in the big cities. This end of the world blended together a multiplicity of ethnic groups and customs, a variegated universe that embraced this African as one more nuance in the chaotic mosaic of humanity. Elias would become aware of this later. For the moment he was trying to befriend a Buryat child, who was out in the corridor staring at him from the narrow slits of his eyes. Who am I for this child? Elias wondered. Maybe simply the closest to what I am…
At the start of the journey Anna seemed tense, vigilant over every word spoken. Traveling in the company of a black man, that’s a bold exploit! he thought, with a smile. The “rutting orangutan” came to mind, and he guessed that she dreaded an even more extreme gesture, a remark that would put her on the spot. To be taken for a monster of lubricity amused him, especially since for days now the only question that had truly preoccupied him was how to explain what the scent of the snow in the folds of that gray woolen dress meant to him. And the footprints they left at a tiny remote station in the middle of the taiga. And the fragrance of the tea she brewed for him each morning. There was more truth in the headiness of these moments than in all the declarations of love in the world. But to say so would already have been a declaration.