have gladly changed places with anyone in the village.
âAt last the day of my departure would arrive. I would wake up to the mournful looks of the servants. For them, all separations were fatal. Our finest horses, all the same height and size, of a uniform grey colour, would be brought out and harnessed. Your grandfather, knowing how sad I felt, would drive me to the train himself. I was indifferent to it all. I watched the house disappear from view. I looked at the fields which we drove through, the farmers who bowed to us as we passed, and already I missed them as if I were a long way from home.
âOn the train I would eat the food that had been packed for me, feeling very sorry for myself, thinking of the others still in the house, probably having a great time, my presence among them already forgotten. During those first painful hours of separation I consoled myself with the promises I made about the future. Once I was grown up, nothing would keep me from living there whenever I wanted to. It was inconceivable to me then that anything could happen that would prevent me from keeping the promise I made to myself.
âHow foolish such faith in the future seems now. But at that time I wasnât the only one to feel that way. We all did. We thought that life would always go on as we knew it. Who could have foreseen what lay ahead of us? Such horrors were withoutâ precedent.â
My mother had given up searching my scalp. We were both listening to my aunt. My mother, growing into adolescence fifteen years later than my aunt, had had an entirely different youth. She had always been drawn to the socialist and revolutionary ideas of her time. As a result she had a more critical impression of her bourgeois childhood. As a young girl her activities had been very different from those that kept my aunt in the company of other women, delighting in the traditional tasks of a young lady. Yet the spell of my auntâs nostalgia was so powerful that she never interrupted. In any case, now that it was all gone, destroyed, there was no point in correcting my auntâs reminiscences.
Years later I remembered my motherâs silence and I wondered about it. What had it really been like to grow up in that house? However, at the time my aunt actually told these stories, the question of whether they were true or not did not even enter my mind. The distance between them and our room with its kerosene lamp was the measure of my enchantment.
These stories made me see my aunt and my mother as two people who were strange and quite different from me. Of course their physical presence was as I had always known it, and it continued to be familiar and dear to me. Beyond it, however, I could now visualize a whole realm of people and their settings, which were part of them but which I would never know.
Without knowing what I was feeling, I experienced at this time the sadness that comes with the awareness of the limited knowledge we have even of those with whom we are most intimate. Just as they would never know the world that I would inhabit one day as an adult, the early part of their lives would remain to me forever a mystery. The glimpse of the past that I caught through my auntâs stories continued to intrigue me with what it concealed as well as with what it revealed.
III
Another story, another time. A different setting. Itâs late afternoon and my aunt is sitting with me in the kitchen. A thick, savoury soup is simmering. My aunt lets me taste it for her. Once again I feel physically disoriented. I can smell the soup, hear the voices of our neighbours, feel my hunger before the food. Yet, I sense these are false clues. My senses are betraying me. When my aunt resumes her story my confusion fades.
We are back in the pre-war world. I have only to step through our door, run down the stairs into the street, and I will find Dobryd before its destruction. I will walk through it with a sense of familiarity, its plan
âAt last the day of my departure would arrive. I would wake up to the mournful looks of the servants. For them, all separations were fatal. Our finest horses, all the same height and size, of a uniform grey colour, would be brought out and harnessed. Your grandfather, knowing how sad I felt, would drive me to the train himself. I was indifferent to it all. I watched the house disappear from view. I looked at the fields which we drove through, the farmers who bowed to us as we passed, and already I missed them as if I were a long way from home.
âOn the train I would eat the food that had been packed for me, feeling very sorry for myself, thinking of the others still in the house, probably having a great time, my presence among them already forgotten. During those first painful hours of separation I consoled myself with the promises I made about the future. Once I was grown up, nothing would keep me from living there whenever I wanted to. It was inconceivable to me then that anything could happen that would prevent me from keeping the promise I made to myself.
âHow foolish such faith in the future seems now. But at that time I wasnât the only one to feel that way. We all did. We thought that life would always go on as we knew it. Who could have foreseen what lay ahead of us? Such horrors were withoutâ precedent.â
My mother had given up searching my scalp. We were both listening to my aunt. My mother, growing into adolescence fifteen years later than my aunt, had had an entirely different youth. She had always been drawn to the socialist and revolutionary ideas of her time. As a result she had a more critical impression of her bourgeois childhood. As a young girl her activities had been very different from those that kept my aunt in the company of other women, delighting in the traditional tasks of a young lady. Yet the spell of my auntâs nostalgia was so powerful that she never interrupted. In any case, now that it was all gone, destroyed, there was no point in correcting my auntâs reminiscences.
Years later I remembered my motherâs silence and I wondered about it. What had it really been like to grow up in that house? However, at the time my aunt actually told these stories, the question of whether they were true or not did not even enter my mind. The distance between them and our room with its kerosene lamp was the measure of my enchantment.
These stories made me see my aunt and my mother as two people who were strange and quite different from me. Of course their physical presence was as I had always known it, and it continued to be familiar and dear to me. Beyond it, however, I could now visualize a whole realm of people and their settings, which were part of them but which I would never know.
Without knowing what I was feeling, I experienced at this time the sadness that comes with the awareness of the limited knowledge we have even of those with whom we are most intimate. Just as they would never know the world that I would inhabit one day as an adult, the early part of their lives would remain to me forever a mystery. The glimpse of the past that I caught through my auntâs stories continued to intrigue me with what it concealed as well as with what it revealed.
III
Another story, another time. A different setting. Itâs late afternoon and my aunt is sitting with me in the kitchen. A thick, savoury soup is simmering. My aunt lets me taste it for her. Once again I feel physically disoriented. I can smell the soup, hear the voices of our neighbours, feel my hunger before the food. Yet, I sense these are false clues. My senses are betraying me. When my aunt resumes her story my confusion fades.
We are back in the pre-war world. I have only to step through our door, run down the stairs into the street, and I will find Dobryd before its destruction. I will walk through it with a sense of familiarity, its plan
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