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

all those things in the house she had traversed in haste or whether they were, in fact, the
fruit of her imagination. They may even have been images from some film or other,
which had made an impression on her so long ago that it was now lodged in the fustiest
nooks of her mind. However, those eyes gathered around her insistently, hopeful of
discovering anything new, a detail no matter how small or insignificant, as long as they
were the first to be told it. They surrounded her so pleadingly and at the same time so
penetratingly that she would feverishly rummage through her exhausted mind, just to
find something that she had not said up to then, so as not to disappoint them. Thus, the
ground-floor living room was large, much larger than any living room in the other
houses on their street. The walls were covered with paintings, some large, others
smaller, all very pretty, like those ones sold at the market, with flowers in vases and
winter landscapes, with bears leaning against a tree and horses rearing on their hind
legs. She had not counted them, but there were certainly more than seven or eight, of
which she best recalled one with a huge throng of folk, the same as at a fair, all
higgledy-piggledy, just like in those patriotic epics directed by Sergiu Nicolaescu.
Some were lying on the ground, probably having been shot by the enemy, except for
one, a kind of leader, who was on horseback, his arm raised, shouting: “Forward, bold
lads!” At this point in the account, Matilda, the seamstress, who lived on the other side
of the road from Milica, a few houses down the hill, and who had just invited the latter
round to taste one of her puddings, would have liked to ask her how it was she knew
what that leader on the horse was shouting. But she didn’t dare interrupt her, especially
given that – God forbid – Milica might have taken offence and left her out on a limb
with the story unfinished. Another painting, a wee one, showed trees in winter, and
each twig was covered with hoarfrost; in the background, there was a hill and a snowy
cottage with a light shining from inside. There were children with sledges on the slope
of the hill. Maybe their children were there too, but she couldn’t tell because their faces
weren’t visible. It was all extremely well painted. It was exactly like winter – it had
probably cost a fortune. When she looked at the painting more closely, she even started
to shiver and could see her breath steaming. Milica would tell the story and look at the
eyes of those around, one after the other. When she told them things they had already
heard the gleam in their eyes went out, like tip of a neglected cigarette. Sometimes the
eyes would become so imploring that she didn’t have the heart not to tell them about
things she had not seen very well, about things which were perhaps not at all as she
remembered them. To cut a long story short, she didn’t have the heart not to tell them