Several kilometers before reaching the village, the passenger asked to stop the car.

"Please, stop here, please," he said hoarsely, looking around. "Right, right…just here. And wait for me, please."

The passenger exited the vehicle and confidently surged through the untouched snow. It was clear that he wasn’t new to this area, because the visibility was no more than a few dozen meters in any direction. When he confidently stepped into deep snowdrifts, the Indian shivered – he hated the cold.

Almost twenty minutes had passed and the Indian decided to leave his taxi and see where the man went.

Fifty meters from the car, the passenger stood silently on the edge of the abyss, not moving, staring into the distance with his hands in his coat pockets.

The Indian returned to the warm car and slammed the door. He looked at the fuel gauge and shook his head, smacking his lips in dissatisfaction.

The passenger continued to stand like a statue over the river, listening to the loud torrent of its dark waters.

Some weirdo I’ve come across, pondered the taxi driver, shrinking from the cold. It’s night out, freezing and snow, and this guy doesn’t seem to care. What can anyone think about in this cold?

The dark figure of the man, like a pagan idol, towered over the ravine. He tried to understand where the first time 'this' had happened to him. It was ‘where’, not ‘when’, because the exact time was embedded in his memory forever. He also remembered the exact place where 'this' had happened, and a hundred times he had thought back to that day in the distant past, trying to understand where 'this' was happening, because knowing the place where everything happened did not give him the answer to the question: in which one of his lives did 'this' happen for the first time.

He had long become used to not having the answer to the question 'where'. He tried to recreate the situation WHERE EXACTLY everything began so many times, but as soon as it seemed that the answer was attainable and the situation was becoming clearer, everything would instantly recede and become even more confusing and incomprehensible. It seemed as if he was climbing barely visible stairs towards the answer, but the stairs never ended, flowing into more steps and then swerving into the opposite direction. Every next step only made things more confusing, the thread was lost, and everything would return to the beginning.

The man was reminded of the work of the paradoxical world of Maurits Cornelis Escher[4] that hung in the hall of the first floor of Les Mondes Office on August Blanc Boulevard in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Instead of the mannequins in the picture, where his memory took him, however, he saw himself mindlessly wandering up and down the ungodly stairs without handrails in a world where the laws of reality appeared not to work, just as in his own life. It seemed that the answer was obvious, but turn the picture ninety degrees and everything again becomes unclear and the answer to the question – further away from the truth.

No, he was not suffering from amnesia or some memory loss, or even its weakening. On the contrary, he extremely enjoyed sifting through his recollections. Sometimes a small memory from faraway childhood would surface as a result of the exercise, become supplemented with a plot, conversations, people and even feelings he had once experienced, and together serve to restore the past up to the smallest detail in his memory.

But this was something different. In his life, the laws of reality had gotten mixed up, and so in order to remain true to himself and not go crazy he had to cling to all the memories, clearly divide his life and control himself and everything that was happening to him. In time, he managed to do just that, although it was extremely hard to live in this kind of fragmented existence.