Boris TibanLeaving the voices behind him, he plunged into the darkness beyond Stroganov’s shadowy monuments. The faces were silent and grim, accusing him. He listened to the wind carried up over the edge of the crevasse. Against his modified adin ears, the air seemed to be whispering in the voices of those who had disciplined him in the past, or cursed his name.
Boris Tiban. Little man. Listen to what your superiors tell you. It is not your place to disagree. We don’t want to hear your objections.
That was what the dominating people had said to him in the freezing Siberian labor camp, in the sweltering and smelly oil refineries by the Caspian Sea, in the foster homes of his childhood in Georgia and Armenia—before he truly learned how to make people notice him, before he had learned the p
