My son swiftly taps away on the keyboard. I Beg A Saint for a Miracle and He Hears Me, but Still I Can’t Get a Simple Certificate They are waiting for me there: my husband, my daughter, and my son.ġ. And no struggles at all! Oh please, just let me go there, for a couple of days! But who am I begging? I would never leave, even if I could… It’s just a dream, and that’s all there is to it. Can you imagine how quiet it would be there? Only the cat purring loudly, and the firewood crackling in the stove. Not high-rise anthills, but old near-sighted cabins out in the forest. And now someone else’s life is moving away from me, to the other coast… I am drifting in the darkness like an ice floe that’s broken away from the mainland. And it’s not their lives I am fantasizing about - it is my own one, so that for a short time, for the few seconds when I see someone’s silhouette there in a window, I could live this invented life so different from mine. Oh, Lord, what am I talking about? What if a real lonely woman, who’s cried into her pillow many a night, heard me now! No, I am not being ironic, I am hiding behind these stories. So what if she is single, who cares? Personally, I envy her… Her apartment is so cozy and quiet as though angels themselves were flying under the ceilings. An old one, from the Soviet era, or maybe a Hollywood one made before the war. She will drink hot tea and read her favorite book. She will now take off her slippers and make herself comfortable in her armchair. Just now, a shadow flashes in a window, and I already know that she is a single woman and she has come to draw the curtains. What kind of people live there, I wonder, and I come up with stories about them. When I sit in a bus travelling through the city in the evening, my eyes follow every window glowing in the dark. The one who has left home until he comes back. «Which of your children do you love the most?» The names of the characters have been changed.Īny similarities are purely coincidental.