The wind brought a puff of snow onto the porch as evenly as if someone had combed it with a juniper broom every night. The house stood by the frozen lake, tucked into a wall of spruce trees, and it smelled like what old houses smell like in December: wax, fried onions and needles. I hadn't been here for ten years. I came back on Christmas Eve. Grandma Hela was waiting at the door with a towel and a thermos. "You're going to get cold, girl". - she said, but not with reproach: with a tenderness capable of untangling hard knots in a person. Her hands smelled of marjoram. Behind her, in the semi-darkness of the corridor, stood Jan, my younger brother, wearing a reindeer jumper and with a smile that had something of the boyish winters in it, when we used to let the discs from the lids of the jars slide across the ice. Raven, the old cat, stretched and jumped off the sideboard like someone returning to a familiar place. In the living room, the Christmas tree was almost touching the ceiling. The glass baubles could be heard as a draught flowed past them. A cast-iron lantern from my great-grandfather stood on the windowsill, with its darkened glass, so heavy that even the wind did not move it. Grandma never threw it away; once a year she put it in the window "for the wanderer", as she used to say, even though the road under the house had ended for decades. When I took off my gloves, my skin baked from the heat. Clouds of steam rose from above the pots. Herrings were shooting up in the kitchen, the borscht promised holy peace, and the poppy seed cake looked like a stone on which a bridge could be built. Aunt Mira stirred the wrought iron with a will to win that never left her, even when she was sewing buttons. "So, what do you say we jump out on the lake?" - asked Jan, already in his boots, with his hat half an ear. "The wafer first," cut off her grandmother. Her "first" always meant "first what survives in us from childhood". We sat at the table where I used to count the stars, scraping the names of forgotten people from the glass. White wafers, thin as wings, lay next to the covers. And an empty space. My great-grandmother's lace tablecloth had an imperfection next to it: a pulled thread, which my grandparents corrected every year, and it still came back. As if she herself wanted to remember. When my grandmother lifted her head, I saw something in her eyes that I hadn't seen since my grandfather died: a string-tight calm. "Before we break the wafer, let me show you something," she said. From the cupboard by the cooker she took out a round enamel cocoa tin, the same one we used to pour shells into from the summer lakes as children. This time it didn't smell of summer. It smelled of old paper. Inside lay a letter. The paper was yellowed like the morning sky in frost, but the writing was even, strong. There was one word on the envelope: "Christmas Eve". Grandma held it for a moment, as if checking to see if the moment was right, and handed it to me. Her hand was cool. I peeled back the tenderness of yesteryear. Scrawled inside were sentences that great-grandfather Stefan had written in black ink a hundred years ago, in December 1923. I didn't hear my grandmother's breathing, I didn't hear the wood crackling in the cooker, only my own heart. "Who will sit here when the light is on again?" - he began. "When the ice sings and the spruces sound like an organ, light the lantern in the window for whoever comes from the water side. Listen. Don't be afraid of the first crack. There is something in the bottom drawer of the cupboard that will open what we closed that winter." I looked at my grandmother. Her eyelashes were down, as if she were reading along with me, but she was afraid to look straight at the letters. Jan was standing on the doorstep, turning a nut in his hand, as he usually did when he wanted to comment on something, and he was silent. Aunt Mira stopped stirring the kutia - the first time since I can remember. "In the bottom drawer?" - I repeated, and Grandma was already moving towards the sideboard, the one with the rubbed top on which Grandpa used to draw maps of islands with clumps of bushes for us. The drawer, despite its years, could be opened without a rasp. Inside lay some old spoons, crumpled blue string and a wooden pipe box. Grandma carefully lifted it. The box was cherry-coloured, smooth from many hands. It had a latch that gave way without resistance. Inside rested a small brass key, with teeth so intricate they looked like letters. Next to it someone had arranged a spruce needle and a lump of amber. The key was the temperature of the room, but when I took it, my fingers twitched as if they had touched a piece of night. "To what?" - I asked. "I don't know," - Grandma said. "Or I don't remember. Or maybe nobody remembered and that's why we didn't move it for so many years." Outside the window, the snow rustled, as if someone had run under the very windows. Everything in the house that was wood answered with a quiet sigh. Jan rested his forehead against the ice of the glass, leaving a round, milky stain. "Oi... look at the lake," he said. Dusk had descended, which in this area knew how to come all at once. On the lake, in the middle of the white, a point of light was moving. It was not the headlight of a car or the torch of an angler: the light flowed softly, as if someone were carrying a lamp with a honey-coloured flame. It was followed by a trail of sparks, although the snow muffled any flash. The light turned towards our shore. "Who at this hour? And after the ice?" - Aunt Mira put down her spoon, as if weighing whether she had the right to put it down at all, and became very quiet in an instant. Grandma put her hand on the windowsill, right next to the cast-iron lantern. The phrase, "Light the lantern in the window", passed through my memory. "Let it stand," my grandmother whispered. "It's not time yet." The cuckoo clock on the wall struck eighteen twenty-four and stood still. This did not surprise me; in this house things had a habit of stopping at times when sentences took too much air. The raven squatted in the doorway, raised its paw and looked at us like someone who has an opinion but will not be heard. "Let's break," Grandma said, and we did so, too focused to say anything while wishing. The wafer clattered against the teeth quietly, like the first ice against the shore. The plates waited. The empty space suddenly looked like an invitation that had finally found an addressee. When we returned from the kitchen with the borscht, a key from the box was lying on an empty plate that no one had touched. I don't remember putting it down. There was a green spruce needle stuck between two teeth, like a flag. "It's not me," - Jan said. "I wouldn't have done it myself." - added my aunt, and I lifted the key, even heavier than before. Grandma said nothing. In the window, on the lake, the light was approaching the line of reeds. "Lena," Grandma began, uncharacteristically uncertainly, "there's something else." She pointed to the back of the lighthouse. Between the cast-iron ornaments, at the edge of the base, there was a thin, almost invisible hole. When I slid my finger in there, I felt a smooth surface, like a closed compartment. I understood before she said anything: the key was to the lantern, and the lantern, which had stood in the window for a hundred years, was not just a lantern. "Why lock the light?" - I whispered before I could bite my tongue. "So that it comes when it needs to," - Grandma replied, and for the first time that evening she smiled. But the smile settled on her lips like frost. She glanced at the window. The spot on the lake had stopped. After a moment, the light began to rise and fall, as if someone was greeting the shore. In the silence that fell, we heard a long, drawn-out sigh of ice - that sound that, as a child, used to wake me up in the middle of the night and make me count my breaths. The spruce trees leaned into each other and murmured. Someone walked along the path beneath the window; we knew it by the trembling shadow on the curtain. "Do not go out on the ice," said John more to himself than to us, as if repeating a warning from years before. Suddenly the cast-iron lantern vibrated. There was no draught. No hand. Yet the lid, rusted at the corners, rattled slightly, as if something from within demanded attention. The key I was holding moved in my fingers. At the same moment, the lights throughout the house went out: first the chandelier, then the small lamp in the kitchen, and finally the match in my head flicked on. Darkness, with only the milky glow of the snow outside the window and the brightness on the lake - so close now that we could see the contours clearly. The shape. An arm raising a lamp. The footsteps tapped out a slow rhythm that I knew, although I could not attribute it to any familiar face. Someone stopped on the porch. The boards creaked the way they creak only under someone who knows the path. The front door handle moved tentatively, then harder. The raven snorted and jumped onto the sideboard. Grandma squeezed my hand and, before I had time to think, I felt the coldness of the brass under my fingers and heard something - very quietly - in the lantern lock respond to the touch of the key. The handle vibrated for the third time. And in the window, in the glass of the cast-iron lantern, something lit up that was neither fire nor lamplight, but a glow that I remembered from my childhood, although no one could show it to me then.