In the night Oleg understands why Eva seems to have grown younger. Playing Catherine in her mature years, she was made up as a woman of fifty, sixty, then seventy. His last memory of her relates to the journey to the Crimea in 1787, when Catherine was fifty-eight: a figure in a long dress between two lines of poplar trees on a road leading to the sea … There is an even more obvious logic: he was then twenty-eight, Eva ten years older. In the eyes of a young man, that made her a woman on the threshold of old age. Now that he is forty-two, a woman in her fifties seems to him almost of the same generation as himself …

He toys with these calculations, half mathematical, half romantic. From time to time he switches on the light, leafs through the notebook in which, before setting off, he had made a note of the trips he planned and the matters he was hoping to discuss with Pfister … Here, for example, are notes on what Luria had told him: Catherine learned that Peter the Great invented a mobile scaffold so as to be able to execute rebellious subjects throughout the whole of Russia—in no time at all the scaffold was set up and heads rolled. The tsarina condemns this itinerant barbarism. Before discovering, toward the end of her life, that in the land of her dear Voltaire the guillotine itself goes on the move. A much more efficient machine than the heavy, chipped execution block of the Russians …

This note, too: after Kiel, he would like to go to Kassel. Some of his ancestors came from that town.

And then, a note in red crayon: not to forget to send a card to Zhurbin’s child in Lugano. He will do it tomorrow.

It is already past ten o’clock when he wakes. He leaps out of bed, calling himself a fool, realizes he has missed breakfast and probably his train to Kiel as well. At all events, the morning train. He draws back the curtains and all at once his haste calms down. Snow is falling heavily, slowly, a city disappearing beneath the whiteness, and even the appalling motorbike he had spotted beneath his window now looks like a handsome, downy animal … That was the reason for his lethargic sleep: the thick layer of snowflakes deadening all sound, calming all speeds …

Outside, he is dazzled by the snow. He pictures Eva walking along in these white streets, in this hypnotic swirling. With an ease that surprises him, he changes his plans, walks into a florist’s shop looking for a bunch of flowers that might … He’s not quite sure what he’d like to give. The saleswoman in the store shows him a dry, gray woody plant. “Quite soon, in two or three weeks’ time, it’ll be covered in blooms,” she says. He emerges carrying a pot with what would, at a distance, look like a dead shrub protruding from it …

“If she’s not at home,” he says to himself, “I’ll leave it outside her door.”

And at that moment he sees Eva. She is waiting at the streetcar stop in a little crowd of people white with snow. He notices what he had not observed the previous day: the old overcoat she wears and her way of stooping a little, of shielding her face—not from the snowflakes, but from passing stares. Tucked under her arm she is carrying several files in a transparent plastic bag …

“I wanted to give you this before leaving … It’s not much to look at but it’s a shrub that will flower for a long time …” He holds out the plant to her.

The streetcar arrives. Eva hesitates, stammering out thanks, words of farewell, moves to get in, then steps back. Her voice is both firm and offhand. “After all, I can go later … Or even not go at all!”

The streetcar disappears, they remain facing one another, study one another intently, as if recognizing one another at last. Then, without conferring, they walk away from the stop.

“You’re covered in snow …,” says Oleg when they are back at the entrance to the apartment building.

And he sets about brushing the layer of snowflakes off Eva’s shoulders. She does the same for him, knocking away the white crust.

“Well, I’ll leave you now, Eva. I have to go to Kiel …”

“I can take you, if you like. I have a car …”

They sense that a threshold has been crossed—not in their relationship but in their freedom to do what they choose with their lives. Lives that, for all these years, had been concealed beneath a flood of nonsense, pointless waiting, greed, fears. Everything could go either way now. As it could have done one winter’s evening long ago, beside the little Swan Canal …

“Kiel’s really the other end of the world, Eva. Four or five hours in the car …”

“The hardest bit will be digging my old jalopy out of the snow …”

In the apartment she puts the plant in the middle of the room, like a Christmas tree, waters it and begins packing a traveling bag. Then breaks off: “No, if I start making preparations we’ll never get away. Let’s go. We’ll find what we need on the way …”

They set off, conscious that the life they are abandoning is still very close, with a slyly powerful gravitational pull.

They do not so much have to dig the car out as actually locate it again under a white burial mound. Its contours appear, Oleg recognizes the old station wagon he saw long ago at Peterhof … They manage to open it, settle into it, feeling as if they were in an igloo, waiting for the ice on the windows to melt.

“I forget the name of that French actor who always wore eccentric hats,” Eva says. “When they asked him where he found them, he used to reply: ‘I don’t find them, I hold on to them’ … Rather like this antique of mine.”

The deiced windows reveal a city that seems very different from the one they were looking at an hour ago.

This feeling will increase the farther they travel toward the Baltic. In fact, they will be thinking less and less about the world they have left behind.