letters and fire

the cold has set in. yesterday we heated the stove. truth be told, it wasn’t the first time, so the book we’d been given for kindling had run out. had to take another one. a strange thing — burning the 8th-grade algebra textbook was morally much harder — because you felt sorry for the familiar equations and problems… the previous one, though — history — crackled away with even a certain joy, seeing on its pages about collective farms, the war, the victory of “the great russian people”, internationals and communisms.