The kitchen smelled of paprika and laundry soap.
The kitchen smelled of paprika and laundry soap, and the radio was always on, even when nobody was listening to it. My grandmother — she was Magda, but everyone called her Manci — would stand at the stove with her back to me, stirring something dark and slow, and she would talk to the pot the way other people talked to dogs. Sweetly, and without expecting an answer.
The window above the sink looked out on a courtyard with one tree in it. I don't know what kind. I remember it had small yellow fruit that nobody picked. She told me once, without turning around, that the tree had been there before the war. She said it like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
— pg. 41 —