Growing up in Kaunas, Sergei was immersed in a household where the sounds of Lithuanian folk songs , Russian avant‑garde literature , and Western classical music blended seamlessly. The family’s modest apartment was lined with bookshelves that housed everything from Tolstoy to Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , the Lithuanian painter‑composer whose legacy would later become a cornerstone of Sergei’s own work.
Sergei, a man of few words and deep silences, simply nodded. He drove her to the cheap hostel by the train station, but something in her exhaustion—the way her fingers trembled as she held the satchel—made him give her his own mother’s old wool scarf from the back seat. Naomi looked at him then, not with gratitude, but with a strange, weary curiosity. As if she were cataloguing him for some future reference. sergei naomi kvetinas