There were no cats in the colony, they couldn’t survive in there because there were no leftovers for them to eat, we would pick up every last crumb

I remember the aroma of a slice of melon that my mother had brought me. It was the size of a button, wrapped in a rag. And how one time, the boys called me over to play with a cat, but I didn’t know what a cat was. The cat had come from the outside, there were no cats in the colony, they couldn’t survive in there because there were no leftovers for them to eat, we would pick up every last crumb. We were always looking under our feet for something to eat. We ate grasses, roots, licked pebbles. We really wanted to give the cat some sort of treat, but we didn’t have anything, so we’d feed it our spit after dinner—and it would eat it! It would!

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 379