You had to get inside the family, and as soon as you did, you understood. But in the street there was this sort of occluded mask. It's beginning to go now. In Siberia, people are showing more. There's more anger, there's more bitterness, there's more pleasure.
People sing, they beg.
All that public emotion was unimaginable 20 years ago. That'd I be a writer struck me very early on. I just loved words, I love the sounds of words. I didn't even know what they meant, often, but they had a kind of magic for me. The love of travel started consciously when I was a small kid.