Chapter 1 In which Mrs Milica gains ingress to the Colonel's house ...

Just after the elections in ’92, the house was finished, and the arguments between the
two dwindled. On the other hand, everybody remarked with visible discontent that the
Colonel’s villa was the tallest building on the street and that his wife didn’t even deign
to answer when you said hello. Mister Petric[, with his tainted gob, used to say of her
that she had a little corporal’s moustache and did drill with the Colonel every day, so
that she wouldn’t, God forbid, get out of hand. And he also used to say that Mrs
Colonel didn’t answer when you said hello because she had cotton wool in her ears,
because you catch the draught on the battlefield like nobody’s business. Moreover, she
wasn’t used to answering except when ordered, because she was in fact guarding, if the
hugeness and vulgarity of the house were anything to go by, the air raid shelter for
Willows Street. And when the joke really got going, he would claim that Mrs Colonel
was in fact called Ivan Lebed, which was plain to see from her profile or in the showers.
She was none other than the brother of General Lebed from Transnistria, here in
Romania on a secret, undercover mission. Mister Petric[ would speak calmly, seriously,
chuckling to himself every now and then. It would have been hard for any stranger to
tell whether he was joking or not.
Beyond the “compulsory service talk” (old man Hrib) of Mister Petric[, what is certain
is that, whenever they passed the “castle”, the men would rap out a military “good day”,
raising their hands, but only half way, towards an imaginary beret.
On no few occasions, the arrogant outline of the villa was looked up and down with a
degree of maliciousness by the street’s longer-standing residents. There was one secret
that united them, a secret which at the same time constituted their little revenge: the
land on which the building stood was as unstable as could be. But only those who had
been living there for a long time knew why, because nothing could be suspected at first
sight. Thus, they expected cracks to appear in the walls at any moment. Had the
Colonel consulted them in time, then he would have only stood to gain. But he had not,
and so he deserves it, they smiled, complicitly. The mouth that didn’t answer when you
said hello would one day be forced to exclaim: “Oh no, the wall has cracked!” They
looked at each other knowingly.