Areas Of Anarchy, Perm Rural Area
In Perm, the walls of a rural brick house on the side of the road are covered with cracks and stains. The lighting is dim and there is a constant dripping sound coming from one corner. The room is cold and damp, and the air smells musty. There was no natural light, and the only illumination came from a small lamp in the corner.
In the corner of the room, two figures huddled together in the dark, their faces gaunt and their eyes sunken from hunger and exhaustion. A small fire flickered in the fireplace, casting dancing shadows across the walls. Young palms wear worn Sarafan outstretched. Her hair is greasy and limp, her clothes stained and threadbare.
The harsh conditions of this Perm countryside are a far cry from the comfort and luxury of Soviet cities, but for these two women, they have no choice but to live here. "Mom, I'm hungry." The young palm holding a stomach. The smell of boiling soup drifted through the room, but the only food in the pot was water.
"We're almost out of money, there's no food, and soon I won't be able to buy coal." The middle-aged woman sighed wearily, "Katya stays at home, I'll go find the village secretary."
"Mom, when will Daddy be back?" Katya asked anxiously, "The days are getting colder, I'm afraid you have frostbite and catch a cold."
"He won't come back soon. Your father went to Germany, we must believe in him." She wiped away the tears from Katya's eyes.
The mother covered her daughter with the tattered fur coat. Wearing the last piece of her old, broken felt boot, her footsteps gradually disappeared into the cold wind. The broken door opens and closes, and the woman locks it to keep Katya out. Because, as soon as children go out alone or stay home alone, they disappear.
——
A few kilometers outside the village, the mother is walking on the frozen road. The snow and ice on the road are slippery, and the wind is freezing. The old fur coat she is wearing is too thin and not warm enough.
Not far away are abandoned houses. The place was hidden under the canopy of a huge, sprawling, snow-covered pine tree. The deep, dense branches of the tree were tangled and twisted, and the house was in ruins, with only a poster pinned to a broken wall. The poster was a recruitment poster for the Organization Todt, an organization that recruited foreign workers to work in Nazi Germany. The words "Come to Germany, earn money" were written on the poster.
It has old propaganda slogans painted underneath from the Soviet era, 'Eating your own child is a death sentence!' in Russian.
A German Volkswagen military jeep drove slowly by, two elderly men in tattered World War I-era clothing sitting in the front, and a man in his thirties in a black overcoat sitting in the back, the woman indistinguishable from anyone else due to hunger.
"Are you the village secretary?" she asked anxiously, hoping he could help her get food and coal.
"You've really come to the right place." The man in the back looked at her up and down and smiled mockingly, "Go away! Get out of the way!"
"I'm hungry. I don't have any money or food at home." The woman face full of desperation and despair.
"That's none of my business," the man replied coldly, his eyes devoid of emotion. "Get off!"
The jeep drove past, leaving the woman standing alone in the cold, her eyes filled with tears. Body shook as she cried, the sound of sobs echoing through the silent woods. A cold wind blew across the land, and suddenly, an explosion sounded behind!
The woman turned around in surprise, The jeep that just blew up in the distance. The man in the back seat of the car had his neck twisted and blood was dripping down his head. The two older men sitting in the front seats were crushed to death by the car. The scene was horrifying and terrifying.
The woman looked up to find an odd thing she hadn't seen before flying across the sky, The woman carefully plopped down in the dense forest by the side of the road, where for a time, only the sound of birdsong existed.
After making sure it was safe, the woman climbed to her feet and ran toward the wreckage of the exploded jeep, hoping to find something useful.
She picked through the charred remains of the jeep, she saw a small piece of paper sticking out of the man's pocket. She reached out and took a closer look at it. There was some German written that the woman couldn't read. At the bottom was a row of numbers.
A strange sense of foreboding swept over the woman. She didn't know what the numbers meant, but she felt that there was something important hidden in them. The woman folded the piece of paper and put it in her pocket, then opened the jeep's damaged trunk, which contained a pile of white paper with a black leather and gilded ID and a small bag of flour.
The bag of flour was scattered all over the place from the explosion. The woman carefully picked up a small amount of flour and stuffed it into her mouth. The taste of the flour spread through her body, making her feel warm and full. The woman felt that she could not stand still for a long time, and quickly packed the remaining flour into the Small bag, and the ID.
When the woman arrived at the village, she saw that the village was empty and quiet, as if everyone had disappeared. "It's strange," she muttered. The sound of her footsteps echoed in the empty village, the eerie silence weighing down on her.
The woman opened the door to the house she had come out of and saw that her daughter Katya was still there, still covered by the fur coat.
"I have money," she taking the flour out of the bag. The woman poured some flour into a wooden bowl, "Let's eat something first." The woman tried to sound calm, but her voice trembled slightly.
"How much money?" Katya asked curiously. "Is there enough money to buy meat? Can I buy a toy?"
"You'll know in the future." The woman took a wooden spoon. "Come help me with the noodles, Katya." The woman mixed the flour into a paste, added a little water, and kneaded it with her hands into a ball. The woman rolled it out until it became flat like a disk.
The woman then used a knife to cut it into long, thin pieces. "You're a hero, Mom." Katya watched the mother make noodles, "When we were hungry, you got money. Mom is really amazing."
The woman's tears welled up in her eyes. "Yes, Katya, Mom is really a hero. Your father went to Germany to earn money. We can only survive here by selling our labor." She bit her lip hard. "The Organization Todt will buy us into the army of workers who will build a road in Germania, a country where your father went to make money."
"Mom, will Daddy ever come back?" Katya asked softly, "I'm not sleepy. I'm afraid that as soon as I close my eyes, I will see Daddy's sad face. I miss Daddy very much."
"Don't think about it." The woman patted her daughter's head, "Let's go to sleep. You're not afraid to dream."
"I miss Daddy so much. Mom." Katya nodded. The two huddled together, using each other's warmth as a blanket. "I can still help you gather wood for the fire, Don't Eat Me." Katya murmured softly as she slowly drifted off to sleep.
The woman was wide awake. She pulled Katya's fur coat over the two of them and thought to herself. "Why do you think I'm gonna eat you?" She stared at the fire that had been burning for a while and watched the flickering light of the fire slowly turn from yellow to red.
As the light gradually faded, the woman thought of the paper in her pocket. Katya, for her part, replied in a daze. "The village Nadezhda was eaten by her mother, and Ivan died when his mother slapped him for spitting up a mouthful of bread." Katya's voice became smaller and smaller, "Mom, why do parents want to eat their children?"
"You're a good girl, I'm not gonna eat you." The mother said to her daughter, "It's too cruel."
(The above plots of Ivan and Nadezhda are derived from real-life event episodes; Ivan's plot is derived from my grandmother's famine memories, where a young boy in her village was beaten to death by his father for wasting a mouthful of rice during China's three-year famine from 1957 to 1960. And Nadezhda's plot is based on a case of cannibalism during that famine. Katya's words 'I can still help you gather wood for the fire, Don't Eat Me.' are the words of the neighbor in the case of cannibalism who heard the daughter pleading with her mother for forgiveness.
During the Soviet famine of 1932, the Soviet government printed Soviet propaganda posters warning parents of the death penalty for eating their children.)