My greataunt used to say that we had four different heating systems in that apartment. The only one who was working at the time of my childhood was the central radiator heating, where warm water from various industrial cooling systems was recycled for heating purposes. We didn’t control when the heating is turned on or off and what was the desired temperature.

The non-functioning heating systems were two masonry heaters; one of them looked almost exactly like the one on the picture, and another one rectangular-shaped and covered with tiles.

There was a huge fireplace in the largest room, and sometimes, when my cousin had a gathering with his friends, they would start the fire in the fireplace, and everything worked as expected:). Lastly, some heating system inside the walls was using hot water running through and heating the spaces. My greataunt called it the Amos heating, but I can’t find any references for this name anywhere.

We had only cold running water. In the bathroom, we used a small gas water heater. Each time you needed warm water, you had to lift the level, start the pilot with the match. Then, you would turn the water on, and this would turn on the heating.

There was another, even smaller gas water heater in the kitchen, but it was seldom used for some reason.
Bit overall, the kitchen was a fascinating place, with many objects to explore. I remember an iron nade of cast iron and brass mortar and pestle and a non-electrical coffee percolator.

And I remember the morning sun in the kitchen window and a thin water jet running from the small brass kitchen faucet, and me standing on the large rectangular wooden stool by the kitchen sink washing my hands in the morning.

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs, and what was before and after.

I didn’t have time to continue with my historical posts for the past two weeks, and now I hope to use my mini-semi-vacation to catch up with these writings. In my last post, I showed the pictures of the former Anglican Mission building where I lived as a child.

As I already mentioned, I do not have pictures of our apartment’s inside, but I will try my best to describe it (edits from Igor and Anna are welcomed :)).My grandaunt received the “order” for this apartment sometime in the 1920s when she worked as a reporter for Smena – Leningrad Young Communists newspaper. All the sources tell me that the building was abandoned since 1919, and I have no idea why it sat unoccupied or so long when there was such a shortage of real estate. But my grandaunt Fania told me that when she entered it for the first time, it looked like the occupants left in a hurry and that there was a lot of furniture left behind, and even the priest’s library.
I do not know where the books went. As for the furniture, most likely, it was gone during the Seige of Leningrad. I remember only two pieces of furniture that survived. One was a “lomber table” – a small table for the Ombre card game, which was used as a phone stand, and I didn’t even know what it was until my grandaunt told me. The second piece was an English redwood armchair, just slightly darker than the one on that image.

Update: I found online the exact image of how it looked like, only made of a different wood:

Two more armchairs could be potential survivors as well, but I am not that sure about them.

Here is a picture of the courtyard from the previous post, with our apartment being on the right side on the second floor.

You would enter a door on the right (you almost can’t see it, it’s right after that black car). There were wide stone stairs that led to the first-floor landing. The back entrance to the department of tourism was on the left, and only the people who worked there were allowed to enter. To the right, there was a door with a lock, which led to the two apartments. On the first floor, there was apartment #7, the former servants’ quarters, which the janitor’s family occupied. The second door on the first floor (also with the lock) led to our apartment #8. To be precise, it led to the stairs – two flights of stairs. These stairs would lead to the apartment itself. Imagine that you live in a two-story house, but you can’t enter the first floor. Instead, when you enter the house, you have a separate door to the stairs, and you live on the second floor only. That would be the closest to how our apartment looked.

After you climb these two flights of wooden (painted with a dark brown paint) stairs, you would find yourself in the huge hallway. It was twenty-five meters long and two meters wide, which gives you 50 square meters in total (almost 500 sq. feet). The ceiling was 4.75 meters (15.6 feet) high.

All the rooms were on the left side of the hallway (the right one was the wall adjoined to the next building).

The first room was the bathroom with the bathtub from the Anglican Mission times, made of cast iron and placed on the four brass lion paws.

The next one was the kitchen. My grandaunt told me that the first of the rooms was a “blue parlor,” which was later converted into a kitchen, but since there was an old tile-covered wood-burning stove in the corner, it seems to be an original kitchen. I do not remember this stove being ever used; most likely, it was never used after the war. We used its surface as a place to keep different kitchen utensils and devices. Next to the kitchen, there was a smaller room where my father lived, and where he and mom continued to live when they married, and where mom and I lived after my parents divorced. This room had a second door, which led to the next room, but this door was never used.

The next three rooms were occupied by my great-grandmother Baba Gitia, her daughter Baba Fania, Fania’s daughter Aunt Kima, and Kima’s son Dodik. Who of them lived in which room has changed several times.

The hallway ended with the door to the Church, but since we could not go there, a large dead-end led nowhere. A long time before I was born, a curtain was placed to separate this dead-end from the rest of the hallway, and it became a storage of everything-which-we-do-not-want-to-throw-away. It was called “The End Of The Hallway.”

Since I can go on for hours describing this old apartment, I think I will stop for now 🙂

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs, and what was before and after.

I pause after the last post about my early childhood because starting from that time, I remember my life as a sequence of events. I know that this is pretty unusual; that’s why I wanted to say it explicitly.

I remember all the episodes from the photos starting from January 1964, mostly because my mom showed me these pictures shortly after they were taken, and at that time, I remembered the actual episodes well. Later, each time I looked at these pictures, I could still keep these memories alive. So when I say “I remember,” I actually remember the white platok on the little girl’s head and a grey platok on her grandmother. I remember the snow close to my face when I fall, and mom took a picture of me. I remember another episode from spring 1964, which is not on the photos, which I referred to as “how I learned to walk,” although I most definitely walked before. I remember getting out of the stroller (I had a stroller for a very short period of time). I remember the sun getting into the courtyard and the shiny particles in the asphalt, once again close to my face :).
I remember this walk with my mom from the summer pictures.

But after I returned from Sosnovaya Polyana back to our home in the fall of 1964, I remember how my life was going, not just separate episodes. I remember life as everyday life. I remember washing my hands in the morning. For some reason, I was doing it in the kitchen, not in the washroom. I remember that I would get on the large kitchen stool to reach the small and sleek brass faucet, turn it on, and remember how the water was shiny in the morning sun peering through the giant window. Walking with my nanny on the Neva River embankment every day. Hearing my parents fighting late at night when for some reason, they thought I was asleep.

Last week, I tried to picture our huge apartment in my mind, and I realized that although we lived there for so many years, nobody ever bothered to take any pictures of the apartment itself, except for the pieces that accidentally ended up being in the pictures.

Describing it while I still remember will be the topic for my next post :).

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs, and what was before and after.