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

the venom of her curses a hundred-fold, causing the flesh of any chance onlooker,
neighbour or passer-by to creep.
Sometimes, Hleanda and the dogs could be seen rummaging together in the bins
between the blocks, and the matted, unwashed hair of the woman was barely
distinguishable from the pelts of the quadrupeds. But even the garbage bunkers
provided meagre pickings, because, in those days, hunger and cold were laying the land
to waste. So, the raving woman and her troop of barkers went cruelly hungry. Not even
begging from door to door or at the kitchens of impoverished restaurants and not even
the rubbish bins managed to ease their hunger. In an iron pot recovered from the rubble,
Hleanda would boil corncobs gathered along the railway tracks, in front of the silo
where the cereal wagons were loaded and unloaded. She boiled them and fed them to
the dogs, scattering them over the floor. She fed them like chickens. In summer, with
kernels spattered with fuel oil from the railway sleepers; in winter with kernels gathered
from the snow. For not even the onset of winter had separated the barmy woman from
her pack of dogs. They assembled in a room, where she would light a fire in a stove so
ramshackle that the smoke escaped through the window more than up the chimney, and
there they would all eat boiled maize kernels.
One winter afternoon, when it was already dark by five o’clock, the peace of the street
was disturbed, from one end to the other, by the inhuman voice of Hleanda, which had
increasingly begun to resemble barking.
The houses were plunged in pitch darkness, but here and there, a gas lamp glimmered
timidly. Inherited from grandparents and recovered from sheds or attics, dusted off and
scrubbed free of rust, gas lamps came in very handy once the government had applied
its programme to economise on electricity, in order to pay off the foreign debts. Folk
would huddle together in the single heated room, gravitating around wood-burning
stoves. In the meagre, flickering light, which cast its ragged shadows on the walls,
parents would speak in whispers, as though the light diminished their voices without
them realising. The children would do their homework at a table upon which, for
additional light, a candle flickered.