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live on the fifth floor of one of those buildings from
Khruschev’s time. I go to work like regular people, come
back in the evening, have dinner, rarely breakfast, and
have a cat. My mother and sisters sometimes come to clean
my house, so that I can write. If there is a mess around me,
I don’t tidy it up, but I don’t write either. The messy house
stops me from writing, but laziness stops me from tidying
up. I have a cat because it washes and cleans itself. It’s a
pretty cat, with gray fur and even grayer eyes. It lies on the
window sill, under the sun. It is even prettier under the sun.
I photograph it and it closes its eyes and curls up with the
click of the camera. My mother has come and removed the
curtains, so that she can get them washed. She says,
“Writers are lazy people, they’ll sit around doing nothing all
day if you let them, just thinking, thinking… What do they
think about so much? Two plus two is four, after all.” I’m
standing in front of the mirror and have spotted some
white hairs on my head, so I’m plucking them out. I’m
plucking and at the same time saying, “Mom, what are your
thoughts on sparrows, then?” and she says, “A sparrow is
just a bird, nothing more,” and starts to clean the windows
even more fervently. The glass is so clean, that I hit my
head against the window as I try to look out into the yard. I
go out onto the balcony. There is a woman sitting on the
balcony of the building opposite mine, also on the fifth
floor. She has white hair. She is smoking. Our buildings are
so close that I can see her smoke, but I can’t tell whether it
is a regular cigarette or a slim, and whether there is smoke,
or not.
I