The redhaired woman smiled to herself as she listened to the stranger reading from his book.

She knew that the inhabitants of this house found her a bit bizarre,
but she was glad that they respected her privacy and her strangeness.
They thought she was merely someone who was glad to have found refuge, and that in return for that she was prepared to attend to domestic duties in the house.
While the stranger was reading she took down her mother's coffee pot from the shelf and started to polish it lovingly.

No one realised that she also could understand every word the stranger read. When he asked her if she could speak Russian she replied that she couldn't, but she didn't volunteer the information that she had a good understanding of it, and could read it also.

She could see that the rest of the household were entranced by his story, but little did they know that the redhaired woman knew how it was going to end, or at least she thought she did.

She continued to listen to his voice and when he mentioned the role a swan was going to play in the story she was transported back in time to another country, where the fate of four swans touched the hearts of many.