The huge
brick oven in which the four housewives cooked dinner was
another prolific source of strife. Fights over pots were as frequent
and as truculent as those over the children
Of our room-mates I best recall a bookbinder and a retired old
soldier who mended old sheepskin coats for a living. My
memories of home are inseparable from the odors of sheepskin
and paste and the image of two upright wooden screws (the
bookbinder's "machine"). The soldier had finished his term of
military service years before, yet he still wore his uniform--a
dilapidated black coat with new brass buttons, and a similar
overcoat of a coarse gray material. Also, he still shaved his chin,
sporting a pair of formidable gray side-whiskers. Shaving is one of
the worst sins known to our faith, but, somehow, people
overlooked it in one who had once been compelled to practise it
in the army. Otherwise the furrier or sheepskin tailor was an
extremely pious man. He was very kind to me, so that his military
whiskers never awed me. Not so his lame, tall wife, who often hit
me with one of her crutches.
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