They really put on a show for us. They came dirty from the fields, and they bathed and put on their best clothes, and the women got out from the trunks headcloths that were clean and fresh. They washed their feet and put on boots, and they put on freshly laundered skirts and blouses. Little girls collected flowers and arranged them in bottles and brought them into the clean parlor. And delegations of children from other houses came in with water glasses, and plates, and spoons. One woman brought a jar of her special pickles, and the vodka bottles from all over the village were contributed. And a man brought a bottle of Georgian champagne, saved for heaven knows what great occasion.

In the kitchen the women put on a show too. The fire roared in the new white oven, and the flat cakes of good rye bread were baking, and the eggs were frying, and the borscht bubbling. Outside the rain poured down, so we didn’t feel bad, for we were not interfering with their work in harvest time, they couldn’t have been working with the grain anyway.

In one corner of the parlor, which is the communal room, there was an icon, a Mary and Jesus, framed and gilded, under a canopy of hand-made lace. They must have buried these things when the Germans came, for the icon was old. There was an enlarged tinted photograph of the great-grandparents. This family had lost two sons in the Army, and their pictures were on another wall, in their uniforms, looking very young, and very stern, and very countrified.

A number of men came into the parlor, and they were neatly dressed, and cleaned, and washed, and they had shaved and they had on their boots. In the fields they didn’t wear boots.

Little girls came running through the rain, carrying aprons full of small apples and little pears.

The host was about fifty, with high cheekbones, and blond hair, and wide-set blue eyes. His face was weather-beaten. And he wore the tunic and broad leather belt of the partisan fighter. His face was drawn as though somewhere he had received a terrible wound.

At last the meal was ready. Ukrainian borscht, which is a meal in itself, and hard fried eggs with bacon, fresh tomatoes and fresh cucumbers and sliced onions, and the hot flat cakes of sweet rye, and honey, and fruit, and sausages, were all put on the table at once. And then the host filled the glasses with pepper vodka, a vodka in which pepper grains have been soaked so that it has an aromatic taste. And then he called his wife and his two grown daughters-in-law, the widows of his dead sons, to the table. And he handed each of them a glass of vodka.

The mother of the family made the first toast. She said, “May God bring you every good.” And we all drank to her. We ate hugely, and it was very good.