What do you think?
Rate this book


256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
Twenty-six days without bread, weeds and raw coffee, coarse-ground coffee was all we had to eat. A couple of days before there was a grocer’s break-in, but all I could grab was some coffee. We had a handful each to eat every afternoon, then go outside to play. Ma didn’t like us playing because we fainted a lot: we weren’t hungry any more, but we walked really slowly.
Then a virtuous man with a flag in one hand climbed up on to the truck bed and he began cracking rotten eggs on the heads of each of the humiliated women and the crowd was applauding, they hadn’t seen a movie or a travelling theatre company for so long, the whole thing was more like some kind of entertainment. The virtuous man was bowing like a lecturer before his audience, or like a mayor, each time he cracked an egg on a shorn woman’s head.