It was winter, and we were doing homework in the kitchen.
The oven door was cracked open, not to bake, but to warm the room. The air smelled faintly of boiled potatoes. My fingers were stiff inside the gloves my mother had cut the fingertips off.
The candle on the table was the only light. Its flame bent every time the wind found a gap in the window frame. My mother sat across from me, marking papers, her head bowed so the shadows deepened in the hollows of her face.
My little sister was hunched over her exercise book, her legs swinging under the chair.
“When is the hot water coming back?” she asked.
“Saturday,” my mother said, without looking up from her papers. “Will wash your hair then”
“And we have to go queue tomorrow morning. I heard they will bring chicken.”
I added.
“Not too early,” my mother said. “They won’t unload before nine. Take a book with you.”
She finally glanced up from her marking. “Speaking of books… have you finished reading Baltagul?”
“It’s boring,” I muttered. “I want to read Logodnica locotenentului francez.” The French’s Lieutenant’s Woman. “Why do I have to read Baltagul?”
She set down her pen. “Because Baltagul is ours. It’s in our language, our mountains, our way of telling a story. You can’t understand the rest of the world if you don’t understand first where you’re standing. Vitoria Lipan walks into the snow for the truth, not for romance. That’s rarer, and harder.”
The candle flared once, stretching our shadows long across the wall until they leaned toward each other, almost touching. My sister noticed, her pencil paused mid-word.
The flame steadied again.
The smell arrived. Not from the candle, not from the potatoes, but sharp and sudden, almost sweet.
The air smelled of oranges.
Bright. Impossible.
The kind of smell that didn’t belong to rationing winters, but to memory, to thought.
My mother went on marking. My sister bent over her exercise book.
Some nights the power would return, and the TV would hum back to life. Two hours a day, one channel, if we were lucky.
But not tonight. Tonight there was only the quiet scrape of my pencil and the slow turn of the pages.
We kept working until the candle burned low, until the pencil lines blurred and the page grew heavy under my hand.
And still the air smelled of oranges. Bright, impossible, like thought itself lingering when everything else was gone.
Excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves.