When people ask me what I remember first of all, I answer honestly: a round lamp.
I suppose I ought to remember the maternity ward, my first steps, my grandmother’s dacha or some other commonplace of the kind laid in for this question. Instead of all that I have a lamp. It hangs above me on a jointed arm let down from the ceiling, a round white dish with five headlights set into it behind greenish glass, and I look up at it from below, and it looks at me with five circles of light.
After that there is nothing: the lamp is there, but the faces, the voices, the walls and everything else that ought to surround it are missing altogether, and the frame exists in a single copy: however often I have gone back to it over thirty-odd years, nothing has ever been added to it.
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