Han Ong

Sometimes, if they were lucky, it was vodka.

In winter, bread wasn't delivered to the store in the larger settlement of Crucilino, which was six kilometers away from Gorky, so the old women took turns baking.

Boris Ivanovich quickly went through all the paper in Nikolai Mikhailovich's house.

Then he found ten rolls of wallpaper intended for the attic.

The redecorating had been put off for several years before being abandoned entirely.

At first he drew on the back of the paper and then he started drawing on the front, which provided his drawings with a stippled yellow background that made the old women's faces come alive.

They were the last people remaining in the village, worn out as their old clothes, humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

Drinking cheered them up.

They would sing, reminisce, and laugh, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers.

There were two teeth among the three of them.

toothaches were treated with sage and nettles leshka the village shepherd had been the only one who could extract teeth and after he died the remaining teeth had fallen out of their own accord

Boris Ivanovich drew his sitters in thin pencil lines with their amazing conversations flowing out of their mouths in ribbons.

What stories they told!

They talked about how before the war the party bosses had showed up to incorporate everyone into a kolkhoz

and the people protested and protested but finally signed up having nowhere else to turn nura's impish eldest son nikolai played a trick on the bosses with some spoiled eggs there had been a hen who was so clever at nesting that it was hard to take her eggs away

They would go bad and explode in her hiding spots, and you couldn't get rid of the stink for a month afterward.

Nikolai found some unexploded eggs to put into the newcomer's wagon so that they would sit on them with their fattened asses.

You wouldn't believe it, but the very first boss who sat down broke the rotten egg.

There was a quiet shooting sound and the stench spread through the whole town.

It was so funny.