That stove… every time I looked at it, I would remember the big, floor-to-ceiling stove at Grandpa Yoskhaim’s house, which was hot day and night in winter, and it was always warm in the rooms. The stove here was tiny, like a chubby child, even though it was called a “bourgeois.” Probably, to those who named it that during the civil war, even such a small stove seemed a luxury. It was made of metal, round and just a meter high. It rested on short legs. There was a small bulging door on one of its sides, and a long flue – on the other, its lower part was parallel to the floor, and then it shot up at a right angle and went outside through the fortochka (a small window cut into the upper part of the larger window). There was a removable cover on top of the stove. It was very convenient to put fuel into the stove through it and then replace the cover. A kettle could be set onto it to boil water for tea, and then one could just watch through the little door to see how it was doing and add small pieces of firewood. Grandma sometimes even cooked on the stove, but usually it was heated with coal.
That morning, a pail of coal brought from the storage room the evening before had been placed near the stove. Wooden chips and old newspapers were also there. I put newspapers and chips into the stove, with coal on top of them.
Shaking from cold – faster, faster! – I struck a match. The bright flame blazed up. It attacked the newspaper and began to gobble it up, then switched to the chips. Hold on, flame, we need time for the coal to become red-hot! But the coal was not in a hurry. Fiery flames enveloped it from all sides; they hugged and licked it, but the black pieces of coal looked cold.
At last, white or slightly blue-gray dots began to appear on its surface. They spread and widened, becoming shimmering spots. The flame around them grew smaller; it was dying down, but the coal wasn’t blazing with heat. I felt it getting warmer and warmer; the “bourgeois” emitted a steady heat.
That little stove had its merits, its thin metal walls got hot very quickly. They also got cold quickly, as soon as the coals burned down completely. But now, I was taking pleasure in it. First, my palms, held above the stove, warmed up. Then waves of hot air began to envelop me, getting under my clothes. My elbows, shoulders, knees and the sensitive spot on my back between my shoulder blades were the first to feel it.
What a delight it was!
When I grew too hot near the stove, I put a kettle of water on it – Grandma prepared it in the evening – and made myself comfortable at the window with Lermontov’s poem in my hands.
“…The Frenchmen learned a fair amount that
They didn’t know of Russian combat,
For we fought tooth and nail!
The earth, just like our chests, was quaking;
The horses howled, their manes were shaking;
A thousand shouts and shots were making
One never ending wail …”
At that moment, banging was heard behind my back, as if continuing the scene of the battle. It was not as loud, of course, but I started. That sound came from dishes in the kitchen. I had been so busy with the stove and Lermontov that I hadn’t noticed when Grandma came out of the bedroom.
The kettle responded to the banging of the pots. It began singing its song, and the water on the “bourgeois” instantly came to a boil. I grabbed the teapot and ran to the kitchen to rinse it.
In the kitchen, my face was greeted with cold air, and a wisp of steam appeared before my nose. The warmth from the “bourgeois” didn’t reach the kitchen, nor was it warmed by the gas stove. Cylinders placed in the metal booth outside conducted gas to the stove. They were delivered to the city irregularly, and there was often not enough gas, so one needed to conserve it. But even such a stove was a luxury in this house. Not so long ago, a very small kerosene stove would have been making noise in the kitchen.
Every time I visited my grandparents, I compared their poor, almost rural, abode with our Chirchik apartment with all modern conveniences – hot water, a bathroom, and gas that no one thought about conserving. Here, the house was small; it had a living room and one bedroom, where the daughters slept. Now that Grandpa Hanan was very ill, Grandma slept with them. There were two summer rooms in a separate house in the yard, but it was too expensive to heat them in winter.
“Valery, Valery,” Grandma smiled at me and nodded her head. “Get the tea dishes.”
Grandma came to the kitchen fully outfitted in a sheepskin vest, felt boots and a headscarf.
Grandma always wore a headscarf, replacing it with a lighter one at night. Grandma, by the way, adhered strictly to all Jewish customs, not just the ones regarding clothing.
But she applied those strict rules only to herself; she didn’t extend them to the whole family. She wasn’t angry if someone mixed the dishes or accidentally turned on the light or gas on Saturday. Grandma Lisa would screech furiously in similar instances. Grandma Abigai almost never raised her voice, well, sometimes at the children, but never at Grandpa Hanan.
Many children watch grown-ups’ relations closely. They compare them, denounce them or approve of them. I had serious reasons to do that. I lived under constant strain while awaiting the rows kicked up now and then by Father at our home. I heard squabbles between Grandma Lisa and my father or between her and Grandpa almost every day at Grandpa Yoskhaim’s house. In a word, I had seen enough family squabbles. I certainly felt that they weren’t good. Grandma Abigai, Grandpa Hanan and their children served as corroboration of this feeling. Theirs was the place where I never heard squabbles or rude and endless mutual nagging. Certainly, Hanan and Abigai had their differences, and she had occasions to be dissatisfied with her husband and children, but differences were cleared up in a normal way, not without stress but without malice and insults. In their house, one could feel that they loved each other, that they shared all the difficulties, and they had many…
When I grew up and learned more about them, I thought with bitter bewilderment – why had such a nice family had so many misfortunes? It wasn’t fair.
Let’s take Grandpa. He was a good, kind, fair person, and a loving husband and father, but fate inflicted blow after blow on him.
Grandpa grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family that dreamed about the homeland of their ancestors. In 1933, his mother, Bulor, escaped from the Soviet Union with her fourteen-year-old daughter. I don’t know why her son couldn’t have escaped with them, but I knew that he had tried to do it twice before getting married in 1934 and been caught both times. Thank God, the laws in the USSR were not yet that fierce, and his punishment was limited to imprisonment. My Great-Grandmother Bulor, after long ordeals in Afghanistan and Iran, made it to Israel in 1962, and she sent an invitation to her son. But Grandma Abigai didn’t want to go there, so they stayed in Tashkent. He returned home after the war with asthma. Then he contracted tuberculosis. He needed to feed his big family. But how? Hanan had a pension, or whatever it was called, as a discharged war veteran, but it was too little to live on. And he, like many men in those years, got involved in a not-very-honest trade. What they did was subject to criminal charges. Someone from Grandpa’s group would steal leather at a factory; then it would be resold. They had points of sale where they had “their own people.”
Seven people were involved in those operations. One of them was caught, and he reported them all. The whole group was arrested and prosecuted, and all but Grampa cracked during the trial. Grampa behaved with dignity, even though he knew he would be given a longer sentence.
Now, thinking about Grandpa Hanan’s life, I understand that such operations and dealings were not for him. He wasn’t greedy or cunning. He wasn’t adroit in a mundane way. He was definitely a decent person who felt indebted to the people he considered his comrades. That’s why he didn’t testify against them. Could this person who loved music more than anything in the world become a deft swindler? I could more easily imagine Grandpa dancing and singing in our yard, “E-este-er, I’m here!” than carrying rolls of stolen leather to a dealer.