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We rented a room and lived with a family. Unfortunately, we had to sleep together because we had one blanket, one pillow, and one bed. The blanket and pillow were ours.
Later they gave us a little single-room house, we made a partition with boards, and here you worked and there you slept. At the side stood an iron stove that during the winter you heated around the clock. With wood of course. We kept chopping and sawing wood.
The houses there were built with logs. A stove in front and a bread oven. Under the house there was a clearance, a meter and half tall. If there was a pig or a cow, it stood there, underneath.
The clearance had to be there because the stove not to stand on the ground because it would have collapsed. It would collapse during the spring thaw. There had to be some isolation between the oven and the living room.
That isolation was a pigsty or a cow shed. Moss was stuffed between the logs, and in the winter, when it was -50 degrees Celsius outside, those houses were very warm. Wood is a poor conductor.
The windows were tiny, just two vents, but they didn’t open them during the winter at all, couldn’t imagine you could air the house. The house is a semi. You enter from both sides up the stairs to a hallway where there stand barrels with sauerkraut, barrels with cranberry, because you store cranberry in spring water during the winter, and so you do with blueberries.
Dried mushrooms hanging from the ceiling. Salted mushrooms. Huge numbers of brooms. All kinds of things, everything you can store, stood in that hallway. The toilet is behind a partition wall, there’s a bench made with wood blocks, you sit on it, and there, in the bottom… hmm… it all drops there. There’s even no stink. In the summer you spill it over with something, in the winter it freezes.
From there you enter the room. The winter part has a large bread oven. Where I was were two rooms: one tiny one where we lived, and another one a little bit larger. The floor is clean, scrubbed so you can lie on it, no problem, and the oven is covered with bearskin coats. And there you can sleep. It’s snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug there. It’s the top part, up under the ceiling.
That’s the winter part. The summer one is similar, only there’s no oven. There are plenty of bugs, though, because it’s warm. So in the middle of the winter, during the worst cold, they move to the summer part for a couple of days and here it all freezes out. For a couple of years you have nothing to worry about, no bedbugs, no cockroaches. Nothing.
One more thing about those houses. Each had its own bathhouse. But the bathhouse was a hundred and fifty meters from the house. Also made with logs. You entered a hall where you drew water to barrels, because otherwise it would freeze.
Later they gave us a little single-room house, we made a partition with boards, and here you worked and there you slept. At the side stood an iron stove that during the winter you heated around the clock. With wood of course. We kept chopping and sawing wood.
The houses there were built with logs. A stove in front and a bread oven. Under the house there was a clearance, a meter and half tall. If there was a pig or a cow, it stood there, underneath.
The clearance had to be there because the stove not to stand on the ground because it would have collapsed. It would collapse during the spring thaw. There had to be some isolation between the oven and the living room.
That isolation was a pigsty or a cow shed. Moss was stuffed between the logs, and in the winter, when it was -50 degrees Celsius outside, those houses were very warm. Wood is a poor conductor.
The windows were tiny, just two vents, but they didn’t open them during the winter at all, couldn’t imagine you could air the house. The house is a semi. You enter from both sides up the stairs to a hallway where there stand barrels with sauerkraut, barrels with cranberry, because you store cranberry in spring water during the winter, and so you do with blueberries.
Dried mushrooms hanging from the ceiling. Salted mushrooms. Huge numbers of brooms. All kinds of things, everything you can store, stood in that hallway. The toilet is behind a partition wall, there’s a bench made with wood blocks, you sit on it, and there, in the bottom… hmm… it all drops there. There’s even no stink. In the summer you spill it over with something, in the winter it freezes.
From there you enter the room. The winter part has a large bread oven. Where I was were two rooms: one tiny one where we lived, and another one a little bit larger. The floor is clean, scrubbed so you can lie on it, no problem, and the oven is covered with bearskin coats. And there you can sleep. It’s snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug there. It’s the top part, up under the ceiling.
That’s the winter part. The summer one is similar, only there’s no oven. There are plenty of bugs, though, because it’s warm. So in the middle of the winter, during the worst cold, they move to the summer part for a couple of days and here it all freezes out. For a couple of years you have nothing to worry about, no bedbugs, no cockroaches. Nothing.
One more thing about those houses. Each had its own bathhouse. But the bathhouse was a hundred and fifty meters from the house. Also made with logs. You entered a hall where you drew water to barrels, because otherwise it would freeze.
Period
Interview
Anna Mass