The odor of cooked cabbage and burned fats dissolves into the stronger odors of the oiled high boots and the numerous Russian steam baths of the district. Ah, these steam baths! From the looks of them and the smell one comes to think of them more as sewers than baths. A hundred little "Cuchnias," restaurants with their vapored windows and sawdust floors proclaim the fact that most of the inhabitants of the district are here without their families and therefore thrown upon the ill-smelling and meanly-cooked foodstuffs of those eating places.
The whole week the streets and houses are very quiet; only the occasional quarrel between two restaurateurs and their wives disturbs the peace. The tired workers sleep. But on Saturday night the Russian temperament breaks loose. The windows of every front room are lit and from the street one sees plainly the decorations on the walls; red and blue serpentines cross the ceiling and are wrapped around the chandeliers; a few pictures in color, cut out from some illustrated paper or magazine; a few gayly colored hand embroidered towels are fixed with pins on the wall above the mantelpiece on which are a few pieces of cheap glassware in that milkish green held in so much affection by the Lithuanians. And inside the rooms, to the creaking sound of a concertina, the Russians dance and sing their national songs. Here and there some American song breaks loose, but this only happens early in the evening when things are yet on their surface. Later in the night when drink has sobered and deepened the children of the Volga they sing only dirges, linking one to another until the whole district is permeated in an undulating melancholy for which no God and no man could account.
In this district lived Stephan Ivanoff. Stephan came to New York with a reputation. People said he had escaped from Siberia by flight, and people also said that he was sent to Siberia because of the jealousy of a doctor. Stephan was not a doctor; he was a healer.
Stephan was a big, heavy dark bearded man with two shrewd little eyes in his head and a mouth which always looked as though it just finished eating some savory morsel. He kept to his Russian custom and went every Saturday night to the Russian bath. In the intimacy of the common bathroom he told stories and anecdotes which elicited broad laughter and made many friends to the newcomer from Siberia.
Incidentally Stephan Ivanoff gave some health hints to his friends. "First of all, don't eat eggs; don't eat any eggs," he said, "they are just poisoning your blood. If you have eaten even one egg in the last four, five years, it will come out some day in a swelling of the neck or in some other boil on the legs and arms."
And one day Vasilenko, the owner of one of the restaurants of the district, had such a swelling on the neck. His wife called a doctor, a regular M. D., who prescribed rest, hot water applications and other such truck. It did not help very much and Mrs. Vasilenko complained to a customer.
"A swelling on the neck?" the customer said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, "why, poor Vasilenko is poisoned!"
Several other customers approached Serzei's table and Serzei explained with even greater details all he knew, all he had heard from the mouth of Stephan Ivanoff, that mysterious man who had escaped from Siberia where he had had the great fortune to meet a holy man from Omsk who taught him all about diseases and foods and their poisons.