Han Ong

Listen, Lodger, that new Stalin they have today, they praise him so highly, he'll be even worse than the old one, she once said to Boris Ivanovich.

Why is that?

The old one took everything, and now this one is picking at the leftovers.

Oh, they liberated us from everything, those dearies.

First they freed me from my land, then from my husband, my children, my cow, and my chickens.

Now they'll liberate me from vodka, and I'll finally be completely free.

Nora's husband had perished in 1930 during collectivization.

Her three sons, who came of age toward the beginning of the war, had died in combat one after another, the eldest in forty-one, the middle in forty-two, and the youngest in forty-five.

"'And they liberated us from God,' she mumbled, peering toward the darkness of her altar.

"'Although perhaps he decided to cast us off himself.

Who can tell?'

Some evenings her neighbors would stop by, Marfa and Zinaida, both of them younger than Nura but just a spitter.

They drank Boris Ivanovich's tea and Nura bragged to them, "'God sent me a goodly lodger, he brings me vodka, puts the tea on.'"

It had been ages since Boris Ivanovich had thought about the Bologna drawings.

In the village, mass-produced meat products had completely lost their symbolism, like long-forgotten relics.

The old women here could not afford to take the train to Moscow just to buy bologna, and they wouldn't have seen an orange as long as they lived had it not been for Nikolai Mikhailovich bringing them such unheard-of curios from time to time.

Muratov started drawing the old women and their surroundings.

In the midst of this poverty and squalor, a treasure trove materialized before his eyes.

The crooked little potatoes cooked in their skins, the pickles disfigured in their barrels, and all the mushrooms from the little slippery jacks to the ugly milk caps.

The queen of the spread was a cloudy bottle of hooch, stopped with a homemade cork.