7 May 2007. All sevens, sun-filled morning, warm wind from the east, from over the hills. Pool at dawn, turquoise, cool. "Like Chico when we were children." Last night: story of Tsvetaeva's daughter, Alya. Ariadna, by fate--except that her thread of red fleece lead to Krasnoyarsk--and up Yenisei, hundreds of miles, to Turukhansk. Vechnoe poselenie--eternal settlement. That's what they termed it--after one had already lost all else. Sixteen years in the far north--"rehabilitated" in 1955, she made one return trip, a decade later. Up that same river, on the steamer Matrosov. "As soon as Alya had climbed to the village plateau and again beheld the Yenisei--'the view imprinted in my heart forever'--she felt her soul lighten. 'I felt this physical lightness, this vast relief,' she wrote in a memoir of the pilgrimage. 'Why? I do not know and never will know. I did not understand where this sense of peace and clarity came from...'"
(From Andrew Meier, Black Earth)
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