Nora Ikstena

d on the waste heap of our times.

In the end I was heartily grateful to Russia’s diplomatic courier for getting shot precisely at our railway station, and even more grateful to Mayakovsky for giving my mother and me such moments of rare happiness.

I never went with my daughter, because I didn’t want to darken their meeting times, which were too brief already.

were cut off from the world.

, unlike me, she was such a good and caring mother. She cherished me – just as my daughter now cares for and cherishes me.

chap, we all have to live in a cage. Get used to it.’

I despised Bambi. I wished he had died. What had he lacked in his cage? Food, a warm lair, a wife and children: had he ruined it all solely because he wanted to run around in my room?

The years of exile had brought us closer.

My head was fit to burst. This damned cage, in which I could do nothing.

The large oval mirror should have shown me full-length, but I could only see half of me. My hands were crossed over my chest. At first I seemed to see my grandmother. I had her face – her prominent cheekbones, humped nose, grey eyes and high forehead. Then the image in the mirror changed and I saw myself as my mother, her eyes closed, asleep. And then I saw myself with a lightly glowing skin as if taken from a greetings card, but nonetheless myself.