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By Root 1070 0

come into the house through the front door or the chyorny khod, you could follow the path around the side of the house and reach the garden. Which was gigantic: at least as big as from here, from Wessely Street, to Dizengoff Street. Or even as far as Ben Yehudah Street. In the middle of the garden there was an avenue with a lot of fruit trees on either side, all sorts of plum trees and two cherry trees whose blossoms looked like a wedding dress, and they used to make vishniak and piroshki from the fruit. Reinette apples, popirovki, and grushi—huge juicy pears, pontovki pears, that the boys called by names that are not very nice to repeat. On the other side there were more fruit trees, succulent peaches, apples that resemble the ones we call Peerless, and little green pears that again the boys said something about that made us girls press our hands hard against our ears so we wouldn't hear. And long plums for making jam, and among the fruit trees there were raspberry canes and blackberries and black currant bushes. And we had special apples for winter, which we used to put under straw in the cherdak—the loft—to ripen slowly for the winter. They put pears there too, also wrapped in straw, to sleep for a few more weeks and only wake up in the winter, and that way we had good fruit right through the winter, when other people only had potatoes to eat, and not always potatoes even. Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.

He was almost a Communist, Papa, your grandfather. He always used to leave his father, Grandpa Ephraim, eating with a knife and fork and a white napkin at the desk in the mill office, while he sat with his workers down by the wood-burning stove and ate with them, using his hands, rye bread and pickled herring, a slice of onion with some salt, and a potato in its jacket. On a piece of newspaper on the floor they used to eat, and they washed their food down with a swig of vodka. Every festival, the day before every festival, Papa used to give each worker a sack of flour, a bottle of wine, and a few rubles. He would point to the mill and say—Nu, all this isn't mine, it's ours! He was like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, your grandfather, that socialist president who drank wine from the same goblet as the simplest soldiers.

That must surely be the reason that in 1919, when the Communists came into the town and immediately lined up all the capitalists and Fabrikanten—factory owners—against the wall, Papa's workers opened up the cover of the big engine, I can't remember what it was called, the main motor that gave power to the Walzen—the wheels—to grind the corn, and they hid him inside and locked him in, and they sent a delegation to the Red povodir and said to him, Listen to us real good, please, Comrade Governor, our Gerz Yefremovich Mussman, you're not to touch him, not even a hair on his head, right! Herz Mussman—on nash bachka (which is Ukrainian for "he's our father").

And the Soviet authorities in Rovno really did make your grandfather the upravlayushi—the boss—of the mill, they didn't interfere with his authority, on the contrary, they came and said to him something like this: Dear Comrade Mussman, listen please, from now on, if you have any trouble with a lazy worker or a sabotazhnik—just point him out to us and we'll put him up against the wall. To be sure, your grandfather did just the opposite: he was very crafty at protecting his workers from this workers' government. And at the same time he supplied flour to the entire Red Army in our district.

One time it so happened that the Soviet governor apparently took delivery of a huge consignment of totally moldy corn, and he was in a panic because for this they could put him up against the wall right away, What's this, why did you accept it without checking? So what did he do, the governor, to save his skin? Late at night he ordered the whole consignment to be unloaded near