Short Stories - Collection

Family Dinner

When you want to make a good stew the essential thing is to cut the onion first. Viktoryia had learned this very well from her mother, and her mother from her mother, and so on for many generations before. The secret was that the flavor of the onion would stay into the knife and then when you cut the meat, it would also reach that exact point in the balance of flavors.

The Volkov family loved stew on every winter night, with the fireplace burning in the living room and the radiators at their maximum capacity. Living in the countryside gave you those habits, they lived in an old house that Artyom had inherited when he married Viktoryia. After more than so many remodelings the house was livable for them, and well, it had been for twenty years.

A family of five had been far from easy for Artyom to support, being the only one who worked every day with hardly any rest and in deplorable situations. He was a lumberjack and had a small crew of about four other men, mostly Russians who came from the north to earn some money in the winter and then return to Moscow. More than twenty years doing the same thing you no longer considered it a job, this was Artyom's routine.

Every morning at the same time, four o'clock in the morning. He would wake up to the crowing of the roosters they had in the corral and the noises of the two horses that were still alive. He dressed in his loose leather clothes. Artyom was an old-school man, bushy beard with gray splashed on his chin and mustache, bushy eyebrows that barely let his eyes show. He wore his hair thinning, though he always covered it with his snow cap. His eyes were blue and pale, contrasting with his white skin. Work had sculpted his body and he looked like a huge rock, about six feet tall.

Artyom had two axes, one for work and one he always kept under his bed that only he knew how to draw. His late father had taught him to always be safe rather than sorry and that axe was the best way to prevent anything. It might sound vulgar, but sometimes violence solves problems faster than —peace—.

The work axe lay by the front door, patiently waiting for him to pick it up and carefully sharpen it to begin a hard day's work.

Viktoryia was always awake before Artyom got up, with breakfast ready on the table and lunch put in a bag, ready to go. In the house, besides Viktoryia and Artyom lived Artyom, named just like his father, and Ivan, the youngest in the house, although he was already almost as tall as his father. Mikhail was the other son of the couple, but he already had a wife and lived with her in Spain, far away from home.

Artyom used to sit on a small cut log next to the entrance of the house to sharpen his axe. The stone he used was already damage by the time, but he refused to change it because it was a gift from his father, who had passed away about ten years ago. Age was beginning to take its toll on him little by little, what was thirty years old yesterday is now almost sixty and of course his strength is no longer the same. He was still like a strong tree, only now he had an incessant cough that would not go away even with Viktoryia's remedies.

Later in the evening they were expecting a visitor at the Volkovs' house. Their middle son Mikhail had left the nest four years ago to move in with his wife, a girl about his age, with wavy hair in curls and dark, very dark. Mikhail was always very independent and astute, he never quite empathized with Artyom. He respected him as his father but not beyond that.

They would be coming from Spain to visit them, together with the wife's parents. It was going to be a bit difficult since the Volkov family didn't speak much Spanish and the Riveras didn't even know how to say —Hello— in Russian. Still, Artyom insisted on arranging this meeting, he had not been sleeping well since Mikhail left home and needed to know what kind of environment he was living in now.

In Belarus it is tradition to have a dinner between the two families once the couple is married, this was not the case with Mikhail.

It was a few hours before the sun went down completely, at four o'clock in the afternoon the small village was dark, only illuminated by small street lamps at the entrance of the houses. It had not snowed since yesterday and the temperature was not so bad, but well, one thing was the cold of Belarus and another the heat of Barcelona.