Status Updates From Lasnamäe lunastaja

“The thing that everyone thought was love was not in fact true love – the love that people feel for their dogs or cats or husbands or wives or even the love that they feel for their children. All that was just learning to love. The truth was that people lived solely in order to learn to love, to love truly – but true love was like a light that spilled over everyone equally.”

“She went to the window. Beyond it was the great, black sky, and far below, eight storeys down, dots of light moving, dot-like lanterns cleanly puncturing the darkness, the burning eyes of the windows of buildings lining the road, the lights of cars travelling along the long boulevards – twinkled and dotted roads flowed up into the sky and back… Like rivers.”

“Sofia liked to see them in a vase at home though; they were like an embodiment of her mother, white and pink gladioli… Only they always began wilting from below, just as the last blooms were emerging from the top. Time seemed to flow through their stems, and they had to cut off the wilted blooms at the bottom to persuade time that the gladioli were still flowering, otherwise they wilted as they bloomed…”

“Nowadays you have to settle for what there is and use it to the best economic advantage; you can’t let anything go to waste or just stand idle these days – people need to provide a service whether it be using their brain, their hands or their crotch… What do you think it is that politicians do? They sell their brains – everyone sells what they have.”

“She had half a mind to walk into the sea, the cold grey sea, go as far as she could, first wading and then drowning, going ever onwards for as long as she could – until it was so cold already that she would just freeze to death and have no more worries.”

“Natalya (…) liked these independent-minded women. Why couldn’t she live like that too? She had the feeling, however, that it was only here in this wet, grey land that she would be able to think and live that way – if she went back to somewhere in Russia, perhaps beyond the Urals again where she had come from, she would have to live life differently, accepting, putting up with… But she did not want to!”

“Natalya Filippovna had little reason not to be content with her life: she earned the average wage in Estonia, sometimes a shade more. No small thing for a woman on the wrong side of forty-five who couldn’t speak the official language(…) and after all there’d been no need for it before: the Estonians all used to speak Russian, but now–well, the younger ones couldn’t… and the older ones wouldn’t…”