“I don’t think I’ll go today – it’s dark already. There’s plenty of time until Sunday.”
The stove is black, and huge. There’s a little iron door on the front to stick the logs into. The little door has a wrought-iron bar. They stuff the stove full of logs and bar it up. The fire roars and groans inside. If you peep inside through a slit, you see spurts of flame winding up, breathing heat out. It’s too scary to come any closer: Baba-yaga will sneak up on you and shove you into the stove alive….
They make the nails red-hot and take them out with a pair of tongs. The nails are all crooked and red: they put them into flour jars so that the flour doesn’t go bad.
I drain the potatoes – and we sit down to supper. We have the potatoes with vegetable oil, and Suzanna has some cottage cheese. The
