Behavioural patterns
Deep drifts of snow around the dacha have silenced our Russian world, while the skis drip in the lobby and the dog snores by the stove. Inside, our heads are bent over a recreation of Hendrick Avercamp’s teeming landscape of a frozen river and a coloured multitude of ice skaters, reproduced as a jigsaw for the Rijkmuseum, in Amsterdam.
Bought in Schiphol Airport on the way to Moscow, it seemed an appropriate past-time for this Christmas holiday and has kept my granddaughter and myself, in daylight and lamplight, entertained, mystified and frustrated for more than a week. I have to leave it unfinished, yet the thought of its few final gaps makes my fingers itch to fill them in, to complete the pattern.
