A Tale of Love and Darkness

AROUND THE garden, Aunt Sonia says, we had a picket fence that was painted white every spring. Every year too the trunks of the trees were whitewashed to keep off the insects. The fence had a little kalitka, a wicket gate, through which you could go out into the ploshchadka, a sort of square or open space. Every Monday the tsiganki, the Gypsy women, came. They used to park their painted caravan there, with its large wheels, and erect a big tent of tarpaulin on the side of the square. Beautiful Gypsy women went barefoot from door to door: they came to the kitchens to read the cards, to clean the toilets, to sing songs for a few kopeks, and if you weren't watchful, to pilfer. They came into our house by the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod I told you about, which was to one side, in the wing.

That back door opened straight into our kitchen, which was enormous, bigger than this whole apartment, with a table in the middle and chairs for sixteen people. There was a kitchen range with twelve hobs of different sizes, and cupboards with yellow doors, and quantities of porcelain and crystal. I remember that we had a huge long dish on which you could serve a whole fish wrapped in leaves on a bed of rice and carrots. What happened to that dish? Who knows? It may still be adorning the sideboard of some fat hohol. And there was a kind of podium in one corner with an upholstered rocking chair and a little table next to it where there was always a glass of sweet fruit tea. This was Mama's-your grandmother's-throne, where she would sit, or sometimes stand with her hands on the back of the chair, like a captain on the bridge, giving orders to the cook and the maid and anyone who came into the kitchen.