I still have the mouth organ my brother gave me as a present when he came back from the virgin lands, and I remember word for word the few poems he'd had the time to write, including one about me as a first–grader at school.

And, of course, there was that tragic city of Tashkent, where he died.

I was taken to Tashkent twice, at the ages of eight and nine. I remember a journey on the train, which lasted a long time, when I was greatly puzzled as fields and forests gave way to sand and camels. I went to school there for the last two months of the school year and made friends with an Uzbek boy called Mamadzhan. He used to take me to one of the splendid bazaars of Tashkent, with all its luxurious fruits and vegetables. Mamadzhan's father had a stall there, where he sold melons. Initially, the Uzbek language did not appeal to me at all. In the first place, its alphabet was the familiar Cyrillic and therefore it didn't really seem like a foreign tongue—unlike Estonian, which was written in Latin characters. And second, its sounds could not compare for beauty with those of Estonian. But gradually I warmed to it and when, at the end of my stay in Tashkent, Mamadzhan's mother—who was a primary school teacher—recited verses of Alī Shīr Navā’ī in the Middle– Turkic proto–Uzbek Chagatai language, I was completely taken in and even learned a few lines by heart. I still remember them, from Layli va Majnun, one of the epic poems comprising his quintuple Khamsa. The sounds and the melody of the verses are very lyrical and breathtakingly beautiful.

I probably got this feeling for sound from my father, who was a great lover of music. My mother, on the other hand, was tone deaf. Once, when she was a schoolgirl, my mother attended an audition for her school choir. Afterward, every candidate was handed a piece of paper on which their degree of musical aptitude was noted in abbreviated form. The first choir rehearsal took place in the great hall immediately after the auditions.