Nina Mikhailovna

My family are massively unsupportive. They live in the deep deep deep south-eastern Siberia hours away from what is commonly referred to as civilization. I cracked up and strated uncontrollably weeping at the end of my journey there last summer. So exhausting it was.

There's nothing there but vast, infintely grand, primeval landscape. There are no people there. Settlements are sparsely scattered between ancient sandy hills along the remains of the Great Paleocenic River.

The River that millions of years ago washed sand into the giant velvety waves also left some fine tiny grains of soft and rare metal still shifting in what is now left of those masses of water.

This is what people in these small and well-spaced settlements do. Fish out those golden grains from those prehistoric streams and dig them out of those sandy hills. This is what dad does. This is what his former General Manager does.

My dad has a wife. My mother. But that's irrelevant for now. The Manager also has a wife. I met her once. A very nice lady. Really nice and warm and kind. The only time I met her, she was packing up her home to move with her husband, The Manager, to some other place not far from where they lived. She wanted me to have a few garments she had knitted.

I do not wear anything like that. Nor would I ever have wanted to wear anything like that. Of course, the darned yarn was dutifully tried on, appreciative remarks made, genuine gratitude politely expressed, all items brought to parents' home and securely left there. What I had known about his woman before I met her was that she was schizophrenic. Or just not really 'right in the head'.

She was fine to me.

Yesterday, her husband, The Manager, asked dad to take her to the railway station in a couple of hours drive. On the phone, dad sounded like he would have sounded - suppressively apprehensive. Concerned about having to be all alone for a few hours in a car with a woman 'not really right the head'. Disgustedly scared. Therefore, bluntly aggressive. Denying her the right to be her 'not really right' self. He was going to take my mother with them. To keep her company. And save him from the difficulty of dealing with potential abnormality.

He sounded quite relieved this morning. She was ok. Absolutely normal, he said. She was totally fine when I saw her, I said. I do not know what you are talking about. He had only seen her in some 'weird circumstances' before... weird circumstances?... yeah... either reciting Borodino for the 23rd of February... or trying to start a ballroom dancing club...

... Your daughter is just like her, papa...

- NO SHE IS NOT!!!

Dad really thinks he is normal. You and I are normal, he said.