IN THE CROSSFIRE.

CHAPTER TWO.

Finally, the door creaked open. It was not Clara that stepped out, but Granny. She held a flickering oil lamp that cast monstrous, dancing shadows against the stone wall. "Come inside, girl." Granny commanded. Tania peered past the old woman's bulky frame into the dimly lit hallway. "Where's my mother?" she asked,her voice trembling from both the cold and an incoming wave of panic. "She said she'd be back in a few minutes." Granny looked down at her, her expression completely unreadable, devoid of any pity. "Your mother left already," granny said flatly. "She took the evening bus back to Oakhaven. You live here now."

The words crashed over Tania like a tidal wave of ice water. She took a step back, her small hands clutching the porch railing. She wanted to scream, to run down the dark, muddy lane toward the bus station, to beg her mother not to leave her behind. But her legs felt like lead, and the sheer finality in her granny's voice pinned her to the spot. Guess what? Your guess is as good as mine, that was the last time Tania saw her mother in many years.

In the days that followed her mother's abandonment, Tania nursed a fragile desperate hope. She told herself that this was just a temporary arrangement that her mother would return once things became easier at home, or that her father would come to fetch her. Surely,they wouldn't leave her here forever. She clung to this hope like a life raft, anticipating that despite the hardness of her introduction,her situation might get better. After all, this was a new environment of a gentler life she harbored even more brutally by the reality of life under granny's roof.

The cottage was not just a home; it was a small, self-sustaining farmstead, and it ran on a strict, unyielding schedule. Tania quickly discovered that she was not the only child living there. Granny had taken in several other grandchildren from her estranged offspring. There were five other cousins in total, ranging seven to fourteen years old. Tania was by far the youngest child in the house, a fact that she hoped might earn her some measure of leniency or protection. She was wrong. In granny's eyes,youth was not an excuse for weakness; it was simply a temporary liability that needed to be trained out of a person as quickly as possible.

From the very first morning, when granny woke them up at dawn by banging a heavy iron spoon against a frying pan, Tania was treated no different from the other children. Chores were distributed evenly, completely irrespective of age or gender. "Everyone works,or no one eats," granny would declare each morning, standing at the head of the long, scarred wooden kitchen table. Tania's daily tasks were monumental for a five year old child. While her older cousins were sent to chop wood or to tend to the livestock, Tania was tasked with hauling water from the well at the bottom of the sloping hill. The wooden bucket, even when half-full weighed enough to pull her small frame askew causing the freezing water to splash her bare legs. Her fingers grew raw and chapped from the rough rope, and her back ached with muscular fatigue that never truly left her.

In addition to the water hauling, she was expected to w**d the vast vegetable patch, scrub the heavy iron pots until they shone, and help knead the dense, heavy loaves of rye bread that formed the staple of their diet. Tania quickly learned that Granny possessed a short fuse, a temper so volatile and sudden that the entire household lived in a state of constant walking-on-eggshells anxiety. A little delay in executing whatever you were told to do would set her off instantly. If Tania was a minute late returning from the well because she had slipped in the mud, Granny would be waiting at the door, her face contorted in anger, her voice raised in a harsh, biting scold that echoed off the stone walls. Of course, it is right that you could not object to anything she told you to do. The concept of talking back or questioning an order did not exist in the cottage. To do so would invite immediate and severe consequences, ranging from being deprived of dinner to being sent to sleep in the cold, damp woodshed. Yet, despite the danger, the chances of objecting were very huge, simply because the tasks assigned were often impossible for children to complete in unrealistic timeframes Granny demanded.

The old woman would put all of them to work simultaneously, pacing behind them like a prison warden. She would scold them unmercifully if they didn't finish their stuff in the given time, her words cutting deep into their self esteem. "You're lazy, the lot of you! Just like your useless parents!" she would shout, her finger pointing accusingly at their bowed heads. " I won't harbor parasites in my house!" Under this relentless pressure, the cousins did not form a bond of shared suffering. Instead,the environment bred competitiveness. The older children desperate to deflect granny's wrath away from themselves, would often sabotage Tania's work or blame her for the chores left incomplete. Tania found herself completely isolated, a tiny island of vulnerability in a sea of hostility.