A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [88]
The eccentric mayor of Rovno in the second decade of the twentieth century, Lebedevski, never had any children; he lived in a large house surrounded by more than an acre of land, with a garden, a kitchen garden, and an orchard, at 14 Dubinska Street. He lived there with a single servant and her little daughter, who was rumored to be his own daughter. There was also a distant relation of his, Lyubov Nikitichna, a penniless Russian aristocrat who claimed also to be somehow distantly related to the ruling Romanov family. She lived in Lebedevski's house with her two daughters by two different husbands, Anastasia Sergeyevna, or Tasia, and Antonina Boleslavovna, or Nina. The three of them lived crowded into a tiny room that was actually the end of a corridor, curtained off. The three noblewomen shared this tiny space with a huge, magnificent eighteenth-century piece of furniture made of mahogany and carved with flowers and ornaments. Inside it and behind its glazed doors were crammed masses of antiques, silver, porcelain, and crystal. They also had a wide bed adorned with colorful embroidered cushions, where apparently the three of them slept together.
The house had a single, spacious story, but underneath it there was a vast cellar that served as workshop, larder, storage room, wine cellar, and repository of thick smells: a strange, slightly scary but also fascinating mixture of smells of dried fruit, butter, sausages, beer, cereals, honey, different kinds of jams, varinnye, povidlo, barrels of pickled cabbage and cucumbers and all sorts of spices, and strings of dried fruits hung across the cellar, and there were several kinds of dried pulses in sacks and wooden tubs, and smells of tar, paraffin, pitch, coal, and firewood, and also faint odors of mold and decay. A small opening close to the ceiling let in a slanting, dusty ray of light, which seemed to intensify rather than dispel the darkness. I came to know this cellar so well from my mother's stories that even now as I write this, when I close my eyes, I can go down there and inhale its dizzying blend of smells.
In 1920, shortly before Marshal Pilsudski's Polish troops captured Rovno and all of western Ukraine from the Russians, Mayor Lebedevski fell from grace and was expelled from office. His successor was a crass hoodlum and drunkard named Bojarski, who on top of everything else was a ferocious anti-Semite. Lebedevski's house in Dubinska Street was bought at a bargain price by my grandfather, the mill owner Naphtali Hertz Mussman. He moved in with his wife Itta and his three daughters, Haya, or Nyusya, the eldest, who had been born in 1911, Rivka-Feiga, or Fania, who was born two years later, and the daughter of his old age, Sarah, or Sonia, who was born in 1916. The house, I was told recently, is still standing.
On one side of Dubinska Street, whose name was changed by the Poles to Kazarmowa (Barracks) Street, stood the mansions of the wealthier inhabitants of the city, while the other side was occupied by the army barracks (the kazarmy). The fragrance of gardens and orchards filled the street in springtime, mingled sometimes with smells of washing or of baking, of fresh bread, cakes, biscuits, and pies, and scents of strongly seasoned dishes that wafted from the kitchens of the houses.
In that spacious house with its many rooms various lodgers whom the Mussmans had "inherited" from Lebedevski continued to dwell. Papa did not have the heart to turn them out. So the old servant, Xenia Demitrievna, Xenietchka, continued to live behind the kitchen, with her daughter Dora, who may or may not have been sired by Lebedevski himself; everyone called her simply Dora, with no patronymic. At the end of the corridor, behind the heavy curtain, the impoverished aristocrat Lyubov Nikitichna, Lyuba, still claiming to be somehow related to the imperial family, remained in undisturbed possession of her tiny space, together with her daughters Tasia and Nina; all three were very thin, erect, and proud, and always elaborately got up, "like