The Next Chapter
Behind the house there were lilacs, acacias and bushes — the names of which I can’t recall. Gramma herself often forgot what they were called. These soft round white balls grew on them. I would sit with my back against the warm smokehouse, gazing at those balls. The smoke smelt of kielbasa and ham. I lost my own odour in the smoke. And I stank, Olanda, of human refuse. I worked at the time in a brigade that cleaned out sumps. The kind that couldn’t be cleaned with vacuum hoses. My friends — boys and girls — went out on dates, rolled around naked on the sand of the beach between the trees, and I was lowered down into sumps by a rope, just like a miner. I shovelled out human excrement, petrified by the passage of time. I’d fill buckets of it with a sand shovel, buckets that
