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

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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.
In the Geamba§u family home, Mr (Comrade, at the time) Traian was carefully splitting open pumpkin seeds, moistening them a little with his tongue, so that they would not make too much of a cracking sound and disturb the girl. He carefully collected the husks in his palm, and when his palm was full, he emptied it onto a page of The Spark, the Communist Party newspaper. From time to time, he rinsed his mouth with some wine, tenaciously sloshing it throughout his entire buccal cavity, forcing it under pressure between his teeth and gums in order to extract the small fragments of seed or slivers of husk. He would identify the latter using his tongue, cautiously identifying them and pushing them towards his lips, from where he would gather them with the back of his hand, or rather with the coarse hairs thereon, so that it looked as though he was kissing his own hand. Mrs (Comrade, at the time) Geamba§u was knitting a pullover with a new pattern and, now and then, she would reach for one of the more roasted of the pumpkinseeds. Veronica was doing her homework for art class. The title of the work, as indicated by the teacher, was “26 January”, the birthday of the Most Beloved Son of the People. Veronica could not say that she was talented at drawing. On the contrary, she held her pencil like a screwdriver, but she was very ambitious. She liked music. And the song that roused her spirits the most was “Union is Inscribed on the Tricolour”, a song with which Mr (Comrade, at the time) Geamba§u was wholly in agreement. Veronica did not like drawing at all, but she needed a high mark in it so that she could obtain a prize-winning average. For First Prize, her parents had promised her a cassette player. No one of her age on the street had a cassette player, so she wanted one very much. On the table lay watercolours, coloured pencils and felt-tip pens. When it didn’t turn out well with one she would try the other. She used the felt-tips for eyes, noses and mouths in particular. For inspiration, she was using photographs from a Spark almanac, which, as luck would have it, Mister (Comrade, at the time) Geamba§u had been obliged to buy at work. She had just managed to write, in a slight curve along the upper part of the picture – “like a firmament” (mother), “like a rainbow over time” (father) – “26 JANUARY” in capital letters, and was looking at it in satisfaction. Underneath there were going to appear a pioneer, a lady comrade in folk costume, a man in a welding suit (the leather apron and the mask would spare her from faffing with details), a black child with curly hair from Mozambique, and a chubby blonde child from Romania. Each of them would be holding a bouquet of roses, as though they were going to a birthday party. None of these figures had any especial significance for her, but she had observed that they often cropped up in books and almanacs, in twos or all
Page 1 and 2: Chapter 1 In which Mrs Milica gains
Page 3 and 4: all those things in the house she h
Page 5 and 6: if you’re not, all kinds of other
Page 7 and 8: in the third place, when you are in
Page 9 and 10: one was taking any notice of her. T
Page 11 and 12: Chapter 2 In which Mitu tells the s
Page 13 and 14: potatoes as big as coconuts and soy
Page 15 and 16: slyly. “Wait here, I’ll go and
Page 17 and 18: you got milk for the children?” I
Page 19 and 20: an idiot. “That one, he’ll flay
Page 21 and 22: Chapter 3 In which most of the inha
Page 23 and 24: Just after the elections in ’92,
Page 25 and 26: making a show of their perspicacity
Page 27 and 28: ointment, the target was the advers
Page 29 and 30: Milica herself regretted giving the
Page 31 and 32: The news fell like a shower of fish
Page 33 and 34: At dawn, a wholly alien rumbling sh
Page 35: Then the dogs appeared. Dogs of all
Page 39 and 40: participant on the Danube-Black Sea
Page 41 and 42: “And hunger will be among you lik

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

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