Twilight were thickening I got in the yard where an old woman, a small, gray-haired one, was making apricot jam on a tripod. I walked over to her. The old woman looked up and suddenly waved a skimmer and exclaimed,
"Oh, Frosenka! How happy Alexandra Alexandrovna will be when she hears you are alive!"
Everything got spinning in a vortex in front of me... The old woman, the pan with jam, the tripod... Yes, she is Smolinskaya, my mom's friend! Apricots slipped from my hands and rolled over the grass. On the grass I found myself too...
"Mom? Mom is alive? Where is she?.."
But Elena Georgievna could not answer that question. Three years ago, she heard on the radio my mom asking to tell her if anyone knows where her daughter Euphrosiniya Antonovna Kersnovskaya was. In 1954 she was in Romania. Good God! Is she still alive? She is 79 years old... All night a sat at the Smolinskys place writing letters to Romania. Smolinskaya did not remember the address and I wrote by guesswork.