I’ve never been able to comprehend life or the things around me according to logic. To everyone else around us, it seemed natural that my mother belonged to my father; but they didn’t marry because of love, they married because of ‘revolutionary necessity’. Mum said that for everyone in Father’s work unit, the organization decided whom they would marry. Potential partners had their political, social and family backgrounds vetted by the intelligence service; their present and past circumstances were thoroughly investigated. This was how Mum married Father: it was arranged by the Party. She was only twenty-two but Father was already past thirty. Mum also told me that she had met him only once before they actually married. They had spoken very little, perhaps only a sentence or two. I can imagine that Father must have been terribly embarrassed the time they first met; he probably didn’t dare look her in the face. I guess you could say that once outside those red walls, he was simply a man who didn’t know where to put his hands and feet. He didn’t come from the real world; he came from somewhere else – a special laboratory, outer space, some dark, hidden corner. If you forced him out past those red walls and into the real world, into the world under the sun and blue sky, he’d be like a fish out of water; he’d be all out of sorts, a sorry wretch of a man – this was something we could all imagine. But there was something we couldn’t understand: a month after they met, Mum married him. She believed in the intelligence service, more than she believed in her own parents. I heard that at the beginning, my grandmother had not been in favour of the marriage, but her husband had. He was an old Red soldier, an orphan at birth, a revolutionary by fourteen; the Party had raised him, educated him, given him a family, a fortunate life. Not only did he feel thankful to the Party with all his heart, but he wanted his children to feel the same, to consider the Party and the intelligence service more important than parents, more important than family. And so my Mum, from very early on, had complete faith in the organization. If they said that Father was a great man, she believed them. If they said he was exceptional, she believed that, too. So they got married. It wasn’t for love; it was for the Party, for the revolution. You could say that she married him out of political responsibility … If Mum could hear me speak like this she’d be angry, so let’s forget about it.