Cousins

It was dinner time at the Dubnyarskys. Roza was stirring two shriveled potatoes, belly up inside the murky water. She watched them attentively so as not to overcook them. Her husband Samuil, ten years her senior, slumped in his chair under the weight of his blanket. His hair was mostly white and his eyebrows hung low like rainclouds before a storm. He poked a stick in the burzhuika stove, turning the wood to make the fire last. A metal pipe was fastened to the side of the burzhuika like a crooked arm turned upward. Occasionally, rattled by the heat, it crackled with tiny explosions. The sound would startle Sasha who shuddered slightly but did not move his eyes from the pot.

Sasha, their twelve-year-old, was Roza’s only child, a gift from God bestowed in the twilight of her childbearing years. As a young girl she had wanted many children, but circumstances got in the way: the Great War and the Revolution and her plain features deterring even the least desirable suitors. Her own family was large – three brothers, four sisters and numerous cousins who had spent their childhoods in and out of each others’ homes. That life was long gone. They had scattered to all corners of the earth, some went as far as America. Fate brought her here, to Leningrad, to become a wife and a mother.

Their room, the smallest in the two-room communal apartment, seemed to grow larger as it emptied of furniture. The table had been burned weeks ago, at the start of...