Han Ong

They reminisced about their husbands and fought over unsettled scores.

Marfa reminded Zinaida that she'd messed with her men in 1926.

Zinaida retorted that Leshka the shepherd stole milk from other people's cows.

Leshka happened to be Marfa's brother, and she didn't take kindly to the accusation.

Their argument escalated until Noora sang a dirty little ditty about who snuck into where and both of the women laughed.

Again, they cast their minds back to things that had happened long ago but were not forgotten.

About the communites who had starved the village and taken away its men.

Periodically, they would fall silent and knock back a thimbleful.

Then they'd laugh and drink some more.

snow fell and the poverty and dejection of the sodden and stormy autumn months were replaced by a white winter which stayed with boris ivanovitch as a bright patch a sunny idyll in his gray life he spent the few available daylight hours wandering around the village

The swamps had frozen over and you could go farther out on them than before.

There was so much snow that it reached over his felt boots.

One day upon returning home, he found all the old women making a fuss in the front yard.

They had decided to undertake a major cleaning on the occasion of the following day's holiday.

it's the feast of the presentation of mary they told boris ivanovitch presentation to what or whom they couldn't explain but they had decided to wash themselves it had been a long time the last time they had bathed was for the feast of the intercession when the first snow had fallen

Nikolai Mikhailovich had the only decent bathhouse.

The old women's bathhouses had all fallen apart long ago, but there was so much snow in Nikolai Mikhailovich's yard that it would have taken a day to clear it.

They decided to wash in Nora's house.

Boris Ivanovich wheeled in the tub, brought them water from the well, chopped enough firewood to fill the entire porch, and brought it inside.

In the morning they started heating the water.