Hey, Father! You are alive in my memory...

'Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi me! The present only toucheth thee ...'*
     I gaze at this poetry the way I would looking closely the crystal-ball, and suddenly I've seen the fate of my father there, four years later after his death. It was the beginning of 80th in a secretly closed provincial town of Russia, there stood two figures in a dark narrow corridor of a tiny flat in an old city, the young man and his little daughter.
     They were looking at the mouse in the middle of the obscuring neat room, who drank milk from a saucer. The handmade receiver spoke English, the young man spoke English too. This mouse was their secret, they fed it. The man filled up the saucer with milk every night and his daughter joined him at weekends. The man was divorced and this tiny flat was his the first shelter after a few homeless years. He knew the words of this poem by heart, in both Scots and Russian.
    The only interlocutors he could talk to in English was that tamed mouse and me.

*The first line of the poem "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns