A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [90]
From her stuffy, gloomy, clean and tidy, overfurnished, always shuttered two-room apartment on Wessely Street in Tel Aviv (while a damp, oppressive September day gradually gathers outside), Aunt Sonia takes me to visit the mansion in the Wolja quarter in northwest Rovno. Kazarmowa Street, formerly Dubinska, crossed the main street of Rovno, which used to be called Shossejna, but after the arrival of the Poles was renamed Trzecziego Maya, Third of May Street, in honor of the Polish national day.
When you approach the house from the road, Aunt Sonia describes to me, precisely and in detail, you first cross the small front garden, which is called a palisadnik, with its neat jasmine bushes ("and I can still remember a little shrub on the left that had a very strong and particularly pungent smell, which is why we called it 'love-struck'..."). And there were flowers called margaritki, that now you call daisies. And there were rose bushes, rozochki, we used to make a sort of konfitura from their petals, a jam that was so sweet and fragrant that you imagined it must lick itself when no one was looking. The roses grew in two circular beds surrounded by little stones or bricks that were laid diagonally and whitewashed, so that they looked like a row of snow white swans leaning on one another.
Behind these bushes, she says, we had a small green bench, and next to it you turned left to the main entrance: there were four or five wide steps, and a big brown door with all kinds of ornaments and carvings, left over from Mayor Lebedevski's baroque taste. The main entrance led to a hall with mahogany furniture and a large window with curtains that reached the floor. The first door on the right was the door of the Kabinett where Polkovnik Pan Jan Zakrzewski lived. His manservant or denshchik, a peasant boy with a broad red face like a beet, covered with the kind of acne you get from thinking not nice thoughts, slept in front of his door at night on a mattress that was folded away in the daytime. When this denshchik looked at us girls, his eyes popped out as though he were going to die of hunger. I'm not talking about hunger for bread, actually bread we used to bring him all the time from the kitchen, as much as he wanted. The polovnik used to beat his denshchik mercilessly, and then he used to regret it and give him pocket money.
You could enter the house through the wing on the right—there was a path paved with reddish stones that was very slippery in winter. Six trees grew along this path, in Russian they are called siren, I don't know what you call them, maybe they don't even exist here. These trees sometimes had little clusters of purple flowers with such an intoxicating scent, we used to stop there on purpose and breathe it in deeply until we sometimes felt light-headed, and we could see all kinds of bright dots in front of our eyes, in all kinds of colors that don't have names. In general, I think there are far more colors and smells than there are words. The path on this side of the house takes you to six steps that led up to a little open porch where there was a bench—the love bench, we all called it, because of something not very nice that they didn't want to tell us about but we knew it had to do with the servants. The servants' entrance opened off this porch; we called it chyorny khod, which means the black door.
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