A Tale of Love and Darkness

THERE WERE three wicker stools around our kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth. The kitchen itself was small, low-ceilinged, and dark; its floor had sunk a little, its walls were sooty from the paraffin cooker and the Primus stove, and its one little window looked out on the basement yard surrounded by gray concrete walls. Sometimes, when my father had gone off to work, I used to sit on his stool so as to be opposite my mother, and she told me stories while she peeled and sliced vegetables or sorted lentils, picking out the black ones and putting them in a saucer. Later I would feed these to the birds.

My mother's stories were strange: they were nothing like the stories that were told in other homes at that time, or the stories I told my own children, but were veiled in a kind of mist, as though they did not begin at the beginning or end at the end but emerged from the undergrowth, appeared for a while, arousing alienation or pangs of fear, moved in front of me for a few moments like distorted shadows on the wall, amazed me, sometimes sent shivers up my spine, and slunk back to the forest they had come from before I knew what had happened. I can remember some of my mother's stories almost word for word to this day. For instance, there's the one about the very old man, Alleluyev: