Before going to the consulate Oleg nervously pictured his “return” to the land of his ancestors. The people he would be dealing with would be elderly, marked by the war. He would be speaking to them in German, and in their voices he would recognize the intonations of his father …

The person who hands him an application form is very young, barely twenty, an intern, certainly, and she addresses him in Russian. Her youthful chirping is painful. Oleg switches to German, the young woman follows suit with a smile. She must see this Russian German, who has retained some words of his mother tongue, as a strange survivor, like the man in the Hibernatus movie, still young after sixty years in cold storage.

While he is filling in the form the intern takes out her cell phone: an audio bombardment of onomatopoeia, giggles, and place-names. Broadly speaking, Oleg gathers she is talking about a visit to London during the vacation that has just finished.

He hands back his form and hears himself expressing the hope that for an “ethnic German” receiving a visa will not take more than a couple of weeks. The intern adds, in almost wheedling tones, that he might also like to consider moving there, yes, settling permanently in his “historic fatherland” …

This suggestion enables him to measure, with some force, the extent to which he feels Russian.

The days of waiting are marked by a feeling of dualism: over forty years of living in Russia and suddenly a German identity concocted for him with a wave of her hand by the young woman in charge of the forms—like those salesmen who drape a garment over your shoulders and, with a bit of sales talk, make it inseparable from your body. He knew from his reading that a short time after her arrival in Russia Catherine fell seriously ill. Thanks to being bled several times (or in spite of this), the princess survived. She even prided herself on what happened to her: “I’ve lost the last drop of my German blood!”

Oleg tells himself that the notion of having foreign blood has never occurred to him. And yet for families like his, the course Catherine’s life took has always counted. This distant Germanic kinship did indeed become a “family secret,” a private past, sometimes alluded to in that ironic saying (“all this on account of that little German princess”) sometimes by a disillusioned observation: whatever we try to do to be Russian, our origins will be against us, people will always see us as potential traitors …

After nine days he obtains his visa. The speed of the response ironically underlines his renascent identity: he’s one of the elect, an almost Westerner! The ticket he buys enhances the paradox. The date of February 3, printed in drab official type, signals a journey into a country his ancestors had left more than two centuries earlier.

The giddy feeling inspired by this notion prompts him to make one last visit to the crag-building.

The day, halfway through January, is vibrant with cold and sunlight. The suburbs he passes through are wreathed in columns of smoke, the industrial life breath of the big city. He is no longer amazed by the transformation wrought in this district, once squeezed up against the railroad tracks. The little alleyways have been replaced by broad traffic circles and residential enclaves. He encounters the luxury apartment buildings he had come across under construction the year before: penthouses, swimming pools … Wrought iron gates surmounted with gilded spikes, surveillance cameras, sentry boxes for security guards, pathways scrupulously swept …

A track through the snow skirts the enclosure, he follows it for a hundred yards or so and at first has trouble recognizing the structure he is looking for. The crag-building is still there, but its facade is blackened by fire. Dominated by tall new towers, its four stories look as if they are being thrust back down toward the earth. It is rather skimpily fenced off with strands of barbed wire attached to posts. “Danger! Building under demolition,” a signboard proclaims.

He is beginning to look for an opening when an old man, out walking with a husky dog, calls out to him: “Watch out, there are lots of hypodermic needles in there. Those goddamned druggies set fire to the place. Or maybe the developers did it, so as to take over the site without compensating the people who live there …” Pulled along by his dog the man trots off in the snow. Oleg parts two strands of barbed wire, performs contortions, manages to squeeze through.

The inside of the building is layered with soot, the wooden handrail has burned, but the staircases between the floors are intact. Oleg climbs up, stepping over bundles of charred clothing and the carcasses of furniture. The door to the attic consists of charred timbers. He pushes it gently with the toe of his boot, it opens, spilling long threads of ash.

The skylight window is broken, a draft sets the snowflakes whirling as they tumble in from the snow-covered roof. Everything has burned without collapsing—Oleg recognizes the black silhouettes of the chairs and the two couches. The zinc bathtub, equally blackened, is filled with a strange substance. The little child’s bath is full of potatoes, as hard as anthracite! The thought that somebody has been staying there does not distress him. On the contrary, he is touched by this pathetic effort at survival, establishing a supply of potatoes, breathing the snowy air coming through the skylight.

The table his father worked on has not moved. However, all that is left of the model is an irregular pyramid of dead embers. Ruins. The very things his father dreamed of. “Their existence freed at last from time’s petty frenzies,” he used to say. Oleg also recalls the lines of poetry his father used to murmur as he gazed at his strange edifice: “So hab ich dieses Schloss erbaut / Ihm mein Erworbnes anvertraut …” (Yes, he had built himself a castle and committed his worldly wealth to it …). These words, in the attic of an empty apartment building, have a poignantly ridiculous ring to them. That “worldly wealth,” this mountain of cinders!

Using a knife retrieved from the kitchen, Oleg prods the remnants of the burned model. The panels of its charred architecture crumble, revealing fragments of wood that the flames did not consume. Suddenly the metal encounters a more solid object. Oleg probes carefully, pushing aside the little mounds of charcoal. Finally he puts down the knife and extracts what was hidden at the heart of the ruin: two little porcelain figures. A musician with his violin tucked under his arm, and a singer with her hands clasped to her breast. Those objects that in the old days he mistook for a fragment of coral …

Two naive figurines that, as a tiny child, he used to see on his mother’s night table.