The parlour stove

By Vahida Berberovic

Like so many children of my generation, my brother and I grew up with two working parents, and no one thought too much of leaving children alone at home. My parents had moved to Germany form the then-Yugoslavia, and my mother was keen to work and reap the benefits of earning her own income, feeling equal in the relationship, making decisions. This involved compromises and a lot of sacrifices on her part. My parents had brought a teenage nanny with them from Yugoslavia to take care of us, but they found out soon that she locked us up and left the house looking for adventures in this strange country where she did not even speak the language. My mother put her on a train back home and argued she could lock us up herself. This way, she’d only have to worry about her own children. 

In the mornings she lay out on the living-room table several options for breakfast, ready for us when we got up: bread, butter, several types of cold meat, jam, Nutella, milk. At lunchtime she rushed home from work to check on us, laying out more food on the table for lunch. Rarely did she have time to play with us. We had to be contended with a brush of the hair, a kiss on the forehead, and she had to run back to work. I don’t know if she herself ever had lunch. 

My brother and I thought nothing of it. Children don’t know that their situation is not necessarily the norm. They only know this one reality and they accept it as how things should be. So living in the hermetic world of our living room, my brother and I developed our own universe with the limited resources and space available to us. I credit my story telling skills to spending many days glued to the front window with my brother, patiently waiting for our mother to come home. My brother was often on the verge of tears missing his mother, so it was essential for me to divert his attention. When I saw his eyes welling up with tears, I pointed at the first person to walk down the street. 

‘Hey, do you know that man?’ I’d say.

‘No,’ my brother shook his head suspiciously but looked more closely.

‘Well, that is the man who used to be a spy with me.’

I loved telling stories about my days of being a spy for the Yugoslav Partisans against the German Nazi soldiers. My four-year old brother did not have the mathematical skills to work out that this was impossible as I was only two and half years older than him. Instead, his eyes lit up waiting to hear about another adventure when I had tricked the nasty Germans and helped win the war for the Partisans. 

But being left to our own devices for such long periods of time, we (Ok, me) came up with dangerous games with potentially fatal consequences. The worst one of all was the incident with the parlour stove. 

We lived in a very old house, made of white painted wooden slats, almost completely covered in vines. The living room came with a squat cast iron gas parlour stove. It was black, round, with four short paws sticking out at the four corners of the stove. There was a small grilled window at the front, and at the hemispherical top, out of the lid protruded an ornamental handle in the shape of an owl. Behind it there was a huge cylindrical stove pipe reaching into the ceiling, making it the focal point of the room. The parlour stove spoke its own language, murmuring a contented crackle on most winter days, howling on windy days, occasionally hissing and wheezing for no apparent reason. 

Winter days were short, gloomy; sometimes it felt like the sun didn’t come up at all. Our living room was always overheated, and my brother was easily irritated on gloomy winter days. There were days when no amount of spy stories  and lucky escapes would stop him whining.

It was on one of those days – I was desperate to cheer him up – that I remembered overhearing my older cousins talk about campfires and throwing spray cans into the fire to make fireworks. I could not remember the details but clearly remembered the word ‘fireworks.’ 

If there was one thing my little brother loved, it was fireworks. He was dazzled by the exploding colours, the whooshing and the staccato crackling followed by a big burst of sound and colour. In December last year, he was finally old enough to be allowed to go shopping with my father. But he refused and chose our older cousin as his shopping companion. He was careful not to tell our parents about his intentions. He waited for them to buy their usual amount of crackers, sparklers and rockets. Then he patiently waited for my father to divide the fireworks into two piles, before he brought out his own haul to add to his pile. New Year’s Eve was the only night in the year when he didn’t fall asleep at nine, and he didn’t allow even one firecracker to go off before the New Year arrived (my father, impatient, and after a glass or two or three of slivovitz, started using my pile to get some crackling and sizzling happening). At about 11.45, my brother and I went outside with my father, dug holes in our garden for the bottles used as launching pads for the rockets and he lined up all his crackers on the parapet of our garden fence, one match box on the parapet, another in his jacket pocket, just in case. Next to the match box was a big handkerchief ready to wipe his big glasses, fogging up with heavy breathing. 

Two minutes before midnight he lit his first cracker. Then he waited for everyone else to use up their ammunition. I fought with my tipsy father over my pile and hardly had time to watch the display above me. Once the sky above our street had gone back to black, my brother launched his colourful arsenal into the sky, making it light up with red and blue stars, sprays of green, red, gold and silver. His face lit up like never before and a little smile of self-satisfaction danced around his mouth all through the spectacle. No clapping, cheering or jumping with excitement, just a small half-moon of a smile, making a dent in his frosty red cheeks. 

So this is the picture I had in mind one January morning, greyer and deader than any other day so far. The view from the window was black and white, a cloud was hovering over the town, the road was a mushy grey covered in slush, and the few people hurrying down the street wore big monochrome coats and hats. It was hard to peel my brother off the windowpane, his little chin quavering on the verge of a full-blown howl, every time a woman in a checked coat on the street turned out not to be our mother. 

I pried him off the window ledge with a piece of bread smothered in Nutella. He ate absent-mindedly, keeping the window in his line of vision, convinced that vigilance was needed, that his mother may never come home if he didn’t look out for her. 

I looked at the clock. I didn’t know how to read the time, except that both hands needed to be in the top half of the clock face for noon, and I knew it was not even close to the time our mother would be home for lunch. My desperation to keep my brother away from the window and his quivering chin brought back the memory of the conversation about campfires and fireworks. I ran to my parents’ bedroom and took my mother’s hairspray from her bedside table. The ad on TV promised her hair would always look impeccable, come rain, hail or wind but it didn’t do the trick. Her hair was often wet and sticking to her face as she rushed around preparing our lunch before going back to work. My brother had followed me to the door but when he saw me pick up the hairspray, he turned around. He wasn’t interested in watching another solo performance of Mireille Mathieu songs in front of the three-winged mirror or another hairstyle experiment ending in tears, with him running for the scissors to save me from the evil comb stuck in my head. 

So he was even more surprised when I followed hot on his heels into the living room and walked on to the parlour stove, the hairspray can in front of me. I was like a high priestess walking towards the sacrificial podium, the can held with two hands high up in front of me. I walked to the side of the stove and turned around, aware of my audience’s need to see both me and the stove. 

‘Are you prepared for the biggest fireworks of your life?’

My brother’s eyebrows had been raised at my performance so far but after my theatrical introduction his shoulders dropped, his eyes rolled in his head, and he sat down at the table and opened the comic book in front of him. Probably another stupid trick by his older sister, like when she made him believe that making a paper plane, then eating it, would give him the power to fly. He was too old for that.

‘Suit yourself,’ I said but waited for him to look up before I transferred the can into one hand and put my other hand onto the owl handle on top of the stove. 

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you will witness the grandest fireworks of all time!’ I enunciated every word, loudly, slowly, seriously.

‘You know we’re not allowed to touch the fire.’ My brother stood up from the table and walked over to the stove. 

I smiled with satisfaction. He’d left the comic on the table.

‘I’m not touching it; I am simply lifting the lid.’

He gasped. ‘No.’

Just the reaction I wanted. 

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and watch a once in a lifetime event.’ I droned.

My brother obliged and sat down on the floor in front of the heater. His eyes had grown round, and his cheeks had a hint of red.

I unhinged the handle on the lid and grabbed the owl, but the lid did not budge. The smoothness of my performance was ruined but my audience was captivated, waiting patiently. I wedged the can under my armpit and used both hands to grab onto the owl and lifted the lid. The cast iron lid moved by a few centimetres, a gap big enough to push in a can. I was stuck holding onto the lid for dear life, with the can under my armpit. I had to call on the audience. My brother scrambled up quickly, took the can from under my armpit and squeezed it through the tight gap I had managed to prise open. We could hear the plop of the can in the fire. I dropped the lid and we both sat down in front of the grilled window at the front of the parlour stove. I crossed my legs, put my elbows on my thighs and cupped my chin with both hands. My brother copied my posture. 

The grilled window revealed the bottom part of the can. It was first singed and then licked by hungry flames. The shape of the can gave in to the heat of the fire and changed from cylindrical to an s-shape before it was just a blur in front of our eyes. The blur turned into a crackle, then sparkles, and then an enormous explosion, blinding us for a moment. The stove lifted off the ground and we thought it would take off into space like a rocket. I swear I saw the little claws at the bottom of the stove lift off the ground. The earth-shattering explosion and the take-off were followed by a gigantic thud, as if a giant had landed on planet Earth, putting down its enormous feet and shaking the whole house in the process. It was the sound of the parlour stove touching ground again. 

The boom of the explosion deafened us and for the next four days we heard muffled sounds only, as if under water. 

In shock, we sat in front of the stove, not moving, not looking at each other or around, just staring at the grilled window of the parlour stove, dark, with a few embers visible. Two little kids had had a near-death experience, and we knew it. When the explosion had deafened me and the grilled window had blinded me, I had seen our bodies fly in the air, our limbs ripped apart, mingling with the charred sofa and burst coffee table. A six-year-old and four-year-old knew what it was like to stare into the beast’s eyes, the lecherous tongue of the fire ready to suck us in whole, singed hair, burned clothes, reduce our bodies to cinders. This was our Vietnam. It was nothing short of a miracle that we were still in one piece. I am sure that it was German engineering that saved our lives, their penchant to use only the best materials and diligence in assembling parts to literally last forever.

The spell was broken when our mother turned the key in the keyhole. I dared look to my right. My brother was still there – motionless, but there; staring into the grilled window all limbs intact; glasses still on his head, not moving, rigid, but with this head on his shoulders and full shock of hair. Our mother chocked on her ‘hello’ seeing the two little figures in front of the fire, unmoving. She slowly closed the door trying to take in the situation. My brother usually ran to the door as soon as he’d observed her on the street and couldn’t wait for the key to turn. He wrapped his arms around her neck, then her waist, and didn’t let go until it was time for her to leave for work again; she usually had to prise his hands off her waist, one finger at a time. 

Today he didn’t even look up and kept staring at the grilled window of the parlour stove – solidly on the ground. Our mother scooped up her little boy and carried him onto the sofa. She straightened his stiff body into a lying position and put her hand on his forehead. She looked at me and asked: ‘What happened?’

I shrugged my shoulders. I was numb, mute and in shock, my ears still buzzing from the blast. I must have looked shell-shocked because my mother didn’t ask any more questions. She turned her worrying look back on the little boy on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, his glasses magnifying even more his wide-eyed expression.

My mother risked her job that day by not going back to work. Instead, she sponged my brother’s stunned face and massaged his stiff limbs, until colour had returned to his cheeks. She carried him to the doctor with me at their side. By then, I had recovered sufficiently to concoct a story of how we had been playing hide and seek, and how my brother had run into the stove and banged his head against the owl-headed lid of the stove. Now I know that my mother could not have believed such a story as there were no burn marks or bumps on my brother’s head. But at the time I was very proud of my story. My mother kept nodding at every piece of information I uttered, probably trying to work out what had really happened. She had to carry my limp brother all the way to the doctor so had no breath left to probe me with questions. 

The doctor could not find anything wrong with my brother; his bronchiolitis was better than usual, no temperature, no broken limbs, no bruises, no tender spots anywhere on his body. He concluded that my brother must have suffered a fright. Nothing to worry about. It happened all the time to little children. I couldn’t help burst into a sly smile at my brother when the doctor said ‘little children.’ By this stage my brother was no longer limp but sitting upright in my mother’s lap. The big jar with gummi bears on the doctor’s desk broke the spell. The doctor promised my brother one gummi bear for every question he answered. It was his turn to throw me sly looks as he picked the yellow gummi bears – my favourite – from the jar.

On our way home my brother was well enough to walk by himself, holding onto his mother’s hand and chattering away how he’d never had so many yellow gummi bears – another sly look – and how he felt so much better now. I only got one gummi bear as a reward for being the big sister taking care of her little brother, but there were no yellow gummi bears left. For once I was happy to put aside sibling rivalry and enjoyed the tone of his voice, let him be the winner. 

That night, before going to sleep, my mother took me to the kitchen, crouched to be on eye level with me and explained how dangerous it can be to scare little children. They could get so scared that they never talked again, ever. Did I want that for my brother? Now, she knew I was a big and reasonable girl. She knew that I knew that there were no such things as monsters and ghosts, but little children were easily impressed and can very easily get scared, very scared, and never recover from the scare. Did I understand? I nodded vigorously. Did I want my brother to be so scared that he never spoke again? I shook my head even more vigorously. Good. Then she would never find my brother in such a state again? I shook my head again. Good! She gave me a kiss on the forehead and a pat on the bottom to indicate that I was dismissed. 

That night I did not talk to my brother at all. I didn’t tell him about all the adventures I’d had with the Partisans before he was born. When he climbed into my bed for a snuggle, I even let him fall asleep rubbing my earlobe between his index finger and thumb and didn’t chase him back to his bed.  

Like all good war veterans, we never spoke of the event again, not even when we were alone. The only sign that something as big as an explosion in our living room had occurred is our over-protectiveness of our children, never allowing them to stay alone at home, ever. And a smirk and a glance at each other when people say that our generation of ‘helicopter parents’ doesn’t know what harm we are doing to our children by not allowing them to take risks. 

Vahida Berberovic is a storyteller who works full-time as a teacher of English and Communications at UTS College, Sydney. She is a refugee from Bosnia, and her writing investigates big themes in the small details of the lives of people like herself. She has written two novels, two novellas and several short stories. She has been awarded several writing residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center and the Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains. Her fiction and poetry have been published in literary magazines, most recently in Quail Bell and Ariel Chart.