The fluffy layers of black dust coated the landscape, cobweb festoons sagged copiously, criss-cross, to bring the picture to utmost perfection… So it was the only compartment to choose from.
(…poor Robinson Crusoe! How could you possibly come to this!…)
After two hours of concentrated efforts all of the sizable objects and things were copulated into each other and stacked up into one half of the room. At that point arrived the reinforcement – our landlord Armo together with his son Arthur, a boy in his late teens, and Romah, the adopted son of a single mother living next door to Armo's house. Normally, they all took refuge in the cellar under the floor in our one-but-spacious room, descending there by steep flight of stairs directly from the yard.
Sahtik rallied them by advertising the advantages of an underground basement shelter where the din of explosions is almost inaudible and where the ceiling is made of reinforced concrete slabs and not of inch-thick planks.
Armo took to shoveling the earth and litter into pails, the rest of us—the two boys and I—were taking it out. By our concentrated shock-work, we freed a place enough for half a dozen cots and a table. Then the women came and swept the concrete floor, hung some blankets and old rags to screen off the trash-store in the other half of the room and it acquired a look of a sufficient war-time shelter.
It's half past 10 pm, all of my family are over there now.
Armo, the landlord, ducked out of moving to the block's basement room because his wife, on her second thoughts, balked at the idea and lined him up into sticking to their accustomed place. Yes, a cellar under the floorboards is not as safe as a shelter in the basement, yet down here she queens over those of her neighbors who, having no cellars of their own, seek refuge in hers. Locking them out altogether is inconceivable in the present situation and equally unthinkable to leave the cellar with her jams and pickles entirely to the neighbors' mercy.
It is a still and starry night outdoors. The muffled chitchat of the shelterers preparing for their night repose is heard from under the scraped floorboards in our one-but-spacious room.
Good night, everybody.
December 11
The night turned out not too good for me, instead of sound sleep canceling all the troubles, I got stuck in oozy insomnia.