He painted the world for me. And the world aroused a pathological interest in me. It wasn’t the limited world of school, or Kostya’s clearly structured world, or my mother and Aleko’s world, plagued by day-to-day worries, or Daria’s rose-tinted world, or the raw and ethereal world of Stasia. It was a world I felt at home in. It was a large, unfathomable world, in which not every question had an answer. And, above all, a world in which nothing was normal.
