In the second to last room there’s an oil painting of an Alaskan landscape, the lands that the Russians recently sold to America. This canvas disturbs her more than any other. It’s almost completely white. But every color has been captured in the various tones of its whiteness. The stretch of snow conveys something like words, perhaps something even more precise. The canvas seems to speak words in a way that changes the quality of the silence. She’s afraid when she looks at this painting, afraid of this whole wing of the palace. It all scares her. She finds it hard to breathe.

She returns to the part of the palace she knows and shuts herself in her rooms.

She walks up and down a long hallway until she’s calm. She’s determined that this time she will not fall asleep and will return when there’s no one supervising her. But the night is cold, and her bones begin to ache. She’s alone; she’s said goodnight to Maslova. The cold that comes on when the sun sets is harder to bear, it doesn’t just seep through keyholes into your body, it’s like a claw.

She loosens her clothing. She gets into bed, wrapping herself in the covers. She doesn’t lie down; although her bones are begging her to, she remains seated. Forgetting what happened the previous night, she puts the key chain at her side, thinking that she’ll get up without lighting the candle, so the light through her window doesn’t alert people that she’s leaving this part of the palace. She plans to leave her room under the cover of darkness.

The keys don’t trouble her tonight. Is it because, after many years (decades) without turning the complicated mechanism of those locks, doing so has exhausted them? The previous day they had turned a lock twice. For the metal pins and tumblers of the second lock, the penetration of the key was a major event. When it felt the key’s metal teeth, the lock’s interior went wild, accustomed as it was to nothing more than a mild, gentle breath of air. For a fraction of a second, it wasn’t sure whether to seize up at the intrusion, forsaking the purpose for which it had been created.

The first pin in the lock tried to resist the key. Groaning, it attempted to halt the invasion. But the second piece of the mechanism gave the command that awoke the others, reminding them why they were created, moving them not out of duty but out of pleasure: the key had made contact. Air is just air; it’s not solid, but you can feel it, though the sensation is delicate. And words are to groans as the key is to the air that passes through the lock!