tundra

A flat and treeless Arctic biome.

The hut's walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly until the problem of the roof confronted me. Of what use the four walls without a roof? And of what could a roof be made? There were the spare oars, very true. They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to cover them? Moss would never do. Tundra grass was impracticable. We needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.

A long stretch of something, such as time.

His wife and he were childhood sweethearts; he had known her for 25 years. (He will call her “my wife” throughout, just as he cannot bear to name his two sons, however carefully and lovingly he will eventually describe them. They remain “the older one” and “the younger one.”) There are tundras of time for him to cross and cross again as he recalls their life together and its sudden end: a quarter‐century of quotidian love and bruises and the ultimate estrangement of long familiarity.

When you stood at the gulf of unknowing, / When you saw the great tundra of time, / And you cried for the winds to come blowing, / And you called a monsoon from the tides of the moon, / 'Cause the roads were all dusty and dry.

A surname from Romanian.