Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

There were a lot of people in the big old-fashioned kitchen at the end of the hall; the air was filled with savory smells, the stove was covered with pots— big pots, too. One of the older women asked something in a foreign language; im me diately a younger man snapped, “Oh for Crise sake! Speak United States!” He had a dark and glowering face. His name, Fred learned, was Nick . And he was a relative.

“This is beef stomach stuffed with salami and hard-boiled eggs,” said a woman. “Watch out, I’ll pick away the string.”

“You gonna eat that stuff?” asked Nick. “ You don’t hafta eat that stuff; I’ll getcha a hamburger from Ma’s Lunch.”

Ma’s Lunch! And its french-fried grease! And Ma, with frowsy pores that tainted the ambient air. “Thanks, Nick, this is fine,” said Fred.

Nick shrugged. And the talk flowed on.

By and by a sudden silence fell and there was a tiny sound from forward in the house. “Aintcha gonna feed the baby , f’Crise sake?” cried Nick. His wife struggled to rise from a chair crowded behind the table, but “old Mrs. Brakk,” who was either Wes’s mother or Wes’s aunt, gestured her not to; “ I will do,” said she. And produced a baby bottle and a saucepan and filled the pan at the sink. There was a movement as though to take one of the heavy cook pots off the stove to make room to warm the bottle, but the dowager Mrs. Brakk said a word or two, and this was not done. Perhaps only Fred noticed that she moved toward a small pile of baby clothes and diapers in a niche, as though she wanted to bring them with her, but Fred noticed also that her hands were full. So he picked them up and indicated that he would follow.

“Thank you, gentleman,” she said. She gave him, next, an odd glance, almost as though she had a secret, of which she was very well aware and he was utterly ignorant. Odd, yes; what was it? Oh well.

In her room, “You never see a Slovo stove,” Mrs. Brakk said. It was not a question. It was a fact. Until that moment he had never heard of a Slovo stove. Now he gave it a glance, but it was not interesting, so he looked away; then he looked back down at it. Resting on a piece of wood, just an ordinary piece of wood, was a sort of rack cut from a large tin can, evidently not itself brought from Europe by whichever Slovo brought the stove. On top of the rack was something black, about the length and width of a book, but thinner. Stone? Tentatively he touched a finger to it. Stone…or some stonelike composition. It felt faintly greasy.

“You got to put the black one on first,” Mrs. Brakk said. However glossy black the old woman’s hair, wrinkled was her dark face. She put on the saucepan of water and put the baby’s nursing bottle in the pan. “Then the pot and water. Then you slide, underneath, the blue one.” This, “the blue one,” was about the size and thickness of a magazine, and a faint pale blue. Both blue and black pieces showed fracture marks. As she slid “the blue one” into the rack, Mrs. Brakk said, “Used to be bigger . Both. Oh yeah. Used to could cook a whole meal. Now, only room for a liddle sorcepan; sometimes I make a tea when too tired to go in kitchen.”

Fred had the impression that the black piece was faintly warm; moving his finger to the lower piece (a few empty inches were between the two), he found that definitely this was cool. And the old woman took up the awakening child and, beaming down, began a series of exotic endearments: “ Yes , my package; yes , my ruby stone; yes , my little honey bowl—” A slight vapor seemed to arise from the pan, and old Mrs. Brakk passed into her native language as she crooned on; absolutely, steam was coming from the pan. Suddenly Silberman was on his knees, peering at and into the “stove.” Moistening a fingertip as he had seen his mother and aunts do with hot irons a million times, he applied it to “the blue piece,” below. Mrs. Brakk gave a snort of laughter. The blue piece was still cool. Then he wet the fingertip again and, very gingerly, tested the upper “black piece.” It was merely warm. Barely warm. The pan? Very warm. But the steam continued to rise, and the air above pan and bottle was…well… hot . Why not?

She said, “You could put, between, some fingers,” and, coming over, baby pressed between one arm and bosom, placed the fingers of her free hand in between the upper and lower pieces. He followed her example. It was not hot at all in between; it was not even particularly warm.

Silberman peered here and there, saw nothing more, nothing (certainly) to account for…well… any thing… She, looking at his face, burst out laughing, removed the lower slab of stone (if it was stone), and set it down, seemingly, just anywhere. Then she took the bottle, shook a few drops onto her wrist and a few drops onto Fred Sil berman’s wrist — oh, it was warm all right. And as she fed the baby, calling the grandchild her necklace, her jewel ring, her lovely little sugar bump, he was suddenly aware of two things: one, the bedroom smelled rather like Tanta Pesha’s: airless, and echoing faintly with a cuisine owing nothing to either franchised foods or Fanny Farmer’s cookbook (even less to Ma’s Lunch!); two, that his heart was beating very, very fast. He began to speak, heard himself stutter.

“Buh-buh-but h-h-how does it wuh-work? work? How—” Old Grandmother Brakk smiled what he would come to think of as her usual faint smile; shrugged. “How do boy and girl love? How does bird fly? How water turn to snow and snow turn to water? How?”

Silberman stuttered, waved his arms and hands; was almost at once in the kitchen; so were two newcomers. He realized that he had long ago seen them a hundred times. And did not know their names, and never had.

“Mr. Grahdy and Mrs. Grahdy,” Wesley said. Wes seemed just a bit restless. Mrs. Grahdy had an air of, no other words would do, faded elegance. Mr. Grahdy had an upswept moustache and a grizzled Vandyke beard; he looked as though he had once been a dandy. Not precisely pointing his finger at Fred, but inclining it in Fred’s general direction, Mr. Grahdy said, “How I remember your grandfather well! [“Great-uncle.”] His horse and wagon! He bought scraps metal and old newspaper. Sometimes sold eggs.”

Fred remembered it well, eggs and all. Any other time he would have willingly enough discussed local history and the primeval Silbermans; not now. Gesturing the way he had come, he said, loudly, excitedly, “I never saw anything like it before! How does it work, how does it work? The — the”— what had the old one called it? — “ the Slovo stove? ”

What happened next was more than a surprise; it was an astonishment. The Grahdy couple burst out laughing, and so did the white-haired man in the far corner of the kitchen. He called out something in his own language, evidently a question, and even as he spoke he went on chuckling. Mr. and Mrs. Grahdy laughed even harder. One of the Brakk family women tittered. Two of them wore embarrassed smiles. Another let her mouth fall open and her face go blank, and she looked at the ceiling: originally of stamped tin, it had been painted and repainted so many times that the design was almost obscured. There was a hulking man sitting, stooped (had not Fred seen him , long ago, with his own horse and wagon — hired, likely, by the day, from the old livery stable — calling out Ice! Ice! in the summer, and Coal! Coal! in the winter?); he, the tip of his tongue protruding, lowered his head and rolled his eyes around from one person to another. Wesley looked at Silberman expressionlessly. And Nick, his dark face a-smolder, absolutely glared at him. In front of all this, totally unexpected, totally mysterious, Fred felt his excitement flicker and subside.