![]() Not to mention that in school we never said “Minsk.” No, it was always “the hero-city of Minsk,” and the avenue was named after the Soviet newspaper “Pravda,” which, in English, means truth. Living on an avenue added pathos to my microregion citizenhood. I was always aware that I lived not on a street, but on an avenue. From the top of a bunkbed on the sixth floor, I’d sense human movement in the outside dark, in a DNA-like ribbon each human link was-a swollen mouth of pain. In winter, I’d wake up for school at 6 am and people would already be lined up. The clinic took no appointments-first come, first serve. ![]() Once, the cemetery plugged a village now the patch of old trees looked disproportionately small next to the densely-populated apartment buildings. Across the street from the clinic, there was a round cemetery, the size of a small garden. Our bedroom window faced away from the apartments and into a state dental clinic. Who is she? Isn’t she mad from that creaking? Does her swinging wind the clocks in every apartment? There is always a girl swinging on a creaking swing and cutting the air with her feet like a butcher’s knife. In their purses: lipstick, a loaf of bread, and a used public bus ticket. The air smells with mothers: their perfume, their hair spray. I would like to walk through it as through a carpet market moving the hanging carpets of apartment buildings with my hand. Is there anything more beautiful than night in a Soviet microregion? Thousands of windows light up transforming concrete panel blocks into the hanging laundry of light, mothers lean over the stoves, the night sky reflects the glow of electricity. The cleaner the school in the morning, the sicker my stomach would turn. The elevator smelled of urine the school corridors smelled of chlorine. The school hallways were brightly lit while the bulbs inside the apartment entrance were always out and the staircases stood in the dark like still water. ![]() The apartment building and the schools were separated by playground spaces that, from the height of our sixth floor and in memory, appear to look like a metal digestive tract between the reproductive system of the apartments and the three-sphered brain of the schools. The blocks were arranged in a paisley pattern three schools stood lined up in the kitchen window like three military divisions. Ours was the second entrance and I wasn’t allowed to walk past the third. A long sentence, yes, but so was my apartment building, stretching for two bus stops, twelve entrances long and eleven floors high. In recent years, women’s voices have thankfully come more to the fore, with both Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk winning the Nobel in recent years.I grew up in a microregion of apartment blocks on the south-western edge of the capital city in a provincial Soviet republic that gained its independence around the time when a few girls in my class claimed they got their first periods though it would take me a few more years to get there. Writers from Russia like Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin and Tolstoy are fundamental to any consideration of literary history and achievement. Writing from the Soviet Union – and the countries that preceded and succeeded it – has long been lauded. In my travels, I’ve visited Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Azerbaijan among others, and I am always struck by the sheer breadth and scope of the former bloc. The Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, spanning eleven time zones and covering most of both Asia and Europe from 1922 to 1991. You will never find her ironing, as she doesn't believe in it. When not slogging at a desk in the financial world, Aisling can be found attempting new yoga poses, running, pole dancing or eating large amounts of spicy food and chocolate. She's super clumsy and has accepted that her hair will never be tidy. Forever reading books in the bath and consequently wondering why her paperbacks are a bit wobbly, Aisling has been a writer for almost ten years. Aisling was born in Cork and lived in Dublin for a few years before quitting her old life in 2015 and starting a brand new one in London.
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