Mia feels the coolness of the clay doorstep. Women are not supposed to sit on cold stones, on clay floors or on cement steps. Women have to be careful. The cold sneaks in and freezes life juices. Mia contemplates a pulsing vein at her right ankle. A tributary of a river? No, only a small cog in the wheel of a well-constructed mechanism. It turns at its required speed.

Rhythmically touching others. Mia is an ascetic clock built into a wooden casing. Without deeply carved ornamentation, without rosy Cupids to defend it, or lovely porcelain ladies, who in days gone by would indolently laze on the edges of splendid clocks. Mia simply ticks.

She has not noticed that her father has returned from the pond’s edge and is now standing a bit to the side looking at her.

“You’ve got two grey hairs,” he suddenly observes. Mia instinctively touches her temples.

“They’re easily seen in the sun – one on the right side of the part, the other, on the left. The full length.” Her father sighs. “From much heartache.”

Mia does not respond. They nonetheless understand each other. They can almost read each other’s thoughts.

“Let’s go and do some planting,” her father says.

Mia pulls the plough. Her bare feet sink into the yet cold earth. They plough and level, plough and level. Even small plants require loose and well worked soil so they may root and breathe.

Her father’s hands are like weeding tools – hard and bruised.

Every few inches or so he hollows out a handful of earth to form a bedding hole for a plant. Mia places the plant, around which her father packs some soil, which Mia then presses down with her knuckles. One after the other. One after the other. They plant in the silence.

When Mia first came to visit her mother, she was sitting in the hospital garden at the edge of a litter-strewn pool, talking with animation to some odd women.

“Moja dochka,” her mother proudly explained in Russian to her two feeble-minded friends. “My daughter.” One asked for permission to smell Mia – she did smell good. Another requested some cigarettes, and a third wanted to touch Mia’s hair. Mia acquiesced, while her mother looked on with satisfaction. Generously, like a master who, in an onrush of kindness, has allowed his slaves to partake of mountains of delicacies threatening to almost collapse a table.

Mia met an eminent poetess, who had not wished to make her talent known to the public at large, a baroness, who only by some misunderstanding found herself in this era, and an altogether jolly country woman who constantly called out for her little boy Janis. She saw young girls who sat all day long at the edge of the pool, swinging their legs back and forth and gazing into nowhere. When the girls invited her for a walk, they circled a tree in a single direction until someone turned them around. She saw groups of strollers, who were being watched by two orderlies. There was an aura of totally mindless frivolity alternating with chilling apathy.