…I was a cleaning woman in the Metro, I scrubbed toilets. I dragged bricks and sacks of concrete at a construction site. Right now, I clean at a restaurant. Abulfaz renovates apartments for rich people. Nice people pay him, bad people cheat him. “Get the hell out of here, churka!*2 Or we’ll call the police.” We’re not legally registered to live here…we have no rights…There are as many of us here as there are grains of sand in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes: Tajiks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens…They escaped to Moscow, the capital of the USSR, only
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