The pre-war grandeur of the flat had been modified to reflect the Kyrgyz woman’s idea of beauty. Her slant-eyed little girl sat on the windowsill, slurping borscht and cheerfully inviting everyone into their home. She had come from Kyrgyzstan with her family and been allocated a flat in our building at 20 Mičurina Street. Probably leaves were falling, and our bad-tempered concierge raked them up in the courtyard. It’s a kind of boundary month, at least in the climate of this latitude, where seasons change slowly and autumn only gradually gives way to winter.
I do remember, or at least I can picture, the golden, tender calm of October, alternating with forebodings of a long period of darkness. Her mental state, though, was not so healthy, as I learned later. My mother was twenty-five, young and healthy. Not particularly long, or particularly short, with the last contractions coming every five minutes. It’s likely that I was well positioned in my mother’s womb, because the birth was normal. There are people who swear they remember their birth. Yet just beneath the surface lies something far more positive: the story of three generations of women, and the importance of a grandmother in giving her granddaughter what her daughter is unable to provide – love, and the desire for life. At first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother–daughter relationship set in the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 19.
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