Jerald: Would you like to leave a message? buy provigro Lyuba, my hostess, was celebrating her 56th birthday. Her skin was smooth, her eyes a cerulean blue, her hair white as snow. She lived with her sister, Natasha, who conversely sported a moustache and whose smile revealed gold incisors flanking a gap where her front teeth formerly resided. Icons gazed from the walls, china figures adorned a cabinet, and a translation of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe squatted among a row of paperbacks. In the corner, a wood-burning stove protected against sub-zero winter temperatures, aided by radiators, heated by steam from the nearby hydroelectric power station. As we sipped tea from a samovar and munched cabbage pierogi (dumplings), Lyuba chatted about her life as a postal worker. “We’ve always lived here,” she said. “But young people now go to the cities to seek work, and return only to retire. And though our houses are modest, they were rebuilt by German prisoners after the village was destroyed in the Great Patriotic War – so they are solid.” I tried to imagine the house in winter, buried under three metres of snow.