The Perestroika Effect. Cecilia Tanner

obsessions. If you think about someone or something everyday for a long time – it’s an obsession. He thought about Standa, Maria’s husband, who lined up his rakes and shovels beside the house exactly so every morning and every evening. You saw the mentally ill here, more obvious in such a small village, and all the degrees of those illnesses. At least Sergey could turn off the recurring thoughts. How unbearable to live with thoughts you couldn’t turn off.

      Tracking back across the thin-packed snow, the snap in the air tingled his ears.

      He remembered one of the agents telling him of the first night he had spent in Siberia: “I got into bed between two sheets of ice, in two pairs of socks and my parka and waited for the sheets to melt.”

      Sergey was tempted to pull a cigarette out of the pack when he also remembered the list of survival rules for Siberia his comrades in Moscow had given him:

      1) Don’t smoke outdoors – pulling the cold air into the lungs is not good.

      2) Always wear a wide woolen scarf around your neck to cover the mouth and nose when necessary.

      3) Wear fur hats with flaps that protect the back of the head and the ears.

      4) At -25^oC, you can’t avoid frostbite and worse for longer than 20 minutes – 30 minutes the maximum

      5) The best investment is in expensive warm clothes.

      6) Take taxiis.

      Sergey hadn’t seen many taxiis, and wondered where in Siberia the list maker had lived. How many taxi drivers wanted to hang around in cold cars waiting for business?