As the weeks go by and the characters in the
book appear to learn nothing from each other, you become less sympathetic towards their complaints. Of course Dima, and all the other Russians who appear in the book, retain the ability of any native to vanish from their foreign friends' sight. There is much discussion and resentment of this 'sudden fade', a point of view which reveals the narrow extent of the ghetto inside which the narrator and his group exist. For the native who fades from the foreign visitor's view, as the Cheshire Cat faded from Alice's, is after all only with- drawing from the visitor's Wonderland in order to exist and do business in his own real world: to complain that he has `disappeared' and is 'incomprehensible' or `Slavic' is to view the world from Alice's solipsistic angle.
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