The Saviour of Lasnamäe

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Natalya Filippovna had little reason not to be content with her life: she earned the average wage in Estonia, sometimes a shade more. No small thing for a woman on the wrong side of forty-five who couldn’t speak the official language. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true – she could understand it and even say a few simple things; it was just that she couldn’t shake off her thick accent, and the writing was so foreign-looking… and after all there’d been no need for it before: the Estonians all used to speak Russian, but now – well, the younger ones couldn’t… and the older ones wouldn’t…

Natalya Filippovna’s life had, broadly speaking, settled down nicely: she had a handsome two-room flat in Lasnamäe that had been allocated to her thanks to the birth of her daughter. Well actually, thanks to her job in the building industry and the birth of her daughter: she had been one of the last people to be allocated a flat by a workplace and her daughter’s birth had pushed her ahead of the competition – ahead of unmarried women who had not produced a child. Women like that had had to stay in the hostel and there was no dishing out flats to people after that. Mind you, she’d have had no flat at all if she’d stayed on at the kindergarten – there were never any flats for kindergartens to allocate. She’d have been happier at the kindergarten though…

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