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

wasn’t for the new regime had been in the Iron Guard. The only thing that was certain
was that, as he had supported the Lord’s Host movement, he had been excommunicated
by the Church and, after that, he had been imprisoned for anticommunist agitation. He
had probably died in prison. Hleanda had gone away and become a schoolteacher in a
village. Thence she returned having lost her mind, and her mother died a short time
after her return, in the house at the end of the street. She had been subdued for a time,
except that she used to talk to herself and collect plastic bags and bits of wire off the
street. It was not until recent years that she had begun to accost passers-by and talk to
them. Whether they liked it or not.
Her end was tragic. Less than two months after the nocturnal procession, Hleanda was
found mangled in the yard of her house, disfigured, in a pool of frozen blood. They had
especially attacked her face. The red paw prints of the dogs stained the snow as far as
the street. The body was taken away by the militia, and the dogs were rounded up by
the dogcatchers. Investigations were summary. No one could establish what had
occurred between her and the dogs she had protected. Spring found the house deserted,
ready to crash down upon the iron pot of boiled maize kernels.
The bulldozers never reached Willows Street, and upon the rubble pit nettles, burdock
and pigweed sprouted. From time to time, someone from the street would rummage
after a brick or bit of iron to patch up something around the house. The children played
hide-and-seek there. That was until after the Revolution, when the land was bought
from the council under rather murky circumstances. It was thus that the Colonel’s
house appeared.
Except that he knew nothing about the history of that plot of land, and from one day to
the next the longer-standing residents of the street, smiling complicitly among
themselves, waited for the first cracks to appear in the walls of the “castle”.
That was their little revenge.
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© 2004 by Ed. Polirom, Iaşi