Word: mashinka
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...belonged to life once more." Dead Wrong. Ember, the passive tattered Everyman of both novels is dead wrong At first. Drohitz girls and Drohitz gilt shops make the troops royally wel come. City fathers entertain the officers at an orgiastic banquet that precedes a midnight trip to the Mashinka Drohitz' spectacular red-light district. There less than 24 hours after the army's arrival Embers commander and a prostitute called Black Narcissus die in agony from some unnamed disease...
...crisis changes the army from guest to Gestapo. The Mashinka is quarantined; a grimly comic campaign is organized to fight the disease. Drohitzers who might have been exposed are rounded up and lodged in the Silver Hall, the mirror-lined banquet room of the Mashinka's most fashionable bordello. Confinement quickly erases the difference between whore and housewife, who come to share each other's concerns: a prim matron tries a striptease, the prostitutes study cake recipes. Eventually quarantine proves ineffective. The infection rages through Drohitz and the surrounding countryside and Ember, promoted from subaltern to Commissioner...
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